Grindhouse Cultural Exchange on 42nd Street, and Beyond

The pervasive image of New York's 42nd Street as a hub of sensational thrills, vice and excess, is from where “grindhouse cinema,” the focus of this volume, stemmed. It is, arguably, an image that has remained unchanged in the mind's eye of many exploitation film fans and academics alike. Whether in the pages of fanzines or scholarly works, it is often recounted how, should one have walked down this street between the 1960s and the 1980s, one would have undergone a kaleidoscopic encounter with an array of disparate “exploitation” films from all over the world that were being offered cheaply to urbanites by a swathe of vibrant movie theatres.

The contributors to Grindhouse: Cultural Exchange on 42nd Street, and Beyond consider “grindhouse cinema” from a variety of cultural and methodological positions. Some seek to deconstruct the etymology of “grindhouse” itself, add flesh to the bones of its cadaverous history, or examine the term's contemporary relevance in the context of both media production and consumerism. Others offer new inroads into hitherto unexamined examples of exploitation film history, presenting snapshots of cultural moments that many of us thought we already knew.

Austin Fisher is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at Bournemouth University, author of Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western (2011), founding co-editor of the "Global Exploitation Cinemas" book series and editor of Spaghetti Westerns at the Crossroads (2015). He serves on the Editorial Board of the Transnational Cinemas journal, is Co-Chair of the SCMS "Transnational Cinemas" Scholarly Interest Group, and founder of the "Spaghetti Cinema" festival.

Johnny Walker is a Lecturer in Media at Northumbria University, UK. His writing on horror and exploitation cinema can be read in journals such as Horror Studies, the Journal of British Cinema and Television, and in his forthcoming books Contemporary British Horror Cinema: Industry, Genre and Society (2015) and Snuff: Real Death and Screen Media (Bloomsbury, 2015).

Part I: Locating "Grindhouse Historiographies
1. Introduction: Defining “Grindhouse Cinema”
Austin Fisher (University of Bedfordshire, UK) and Johnny Walker (Northumbria University, UK)

2. Inventing Exploitation: Grindhouse Mystique and the Politics of Nostalgia
Glenn Ward (University of Brighton, UK)

Part II: “Transnational" Routes of Distribution
3. “What film is your film like?”: Retitling and Distributing the Zombie Film in the 1970s and 1980s
Mark McKenna (University of Sunderland, UK)

4. Italian Exploitation Cinema in the New York Grindhouse
Keith H. Brown (University of Edinburgh, UK)

5. “The King of the Deuce Eurosex Movie”: The Vagaries of Jess Franco Films in the Grindhouse Circle
Antonio Lázaro-Reboll (University of Kent, UK)

6. The Influence of Wuxia Films on American Culture
Randall Clark (Clayton State University, USA)

7. Ozploitation In and Beyond Australia
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas (Swinburne University of Technology, Australia)

Part III: Ethnic Subcultures
8. Red Power, White Movies: Billy Jack, Johnny Firecloud, and the Cultural Politics of the “Indiansploitation” Cycle
David Church (Indiana University, USA)

9. Go West, Brother: the Politics of Landscape in the Blaxploitation Western
Austin Fisher (University of Bedfordshire, UK)

10. The Original Latino Gangsta or How Hollywood Created the Urban Latin Jungle
Jason Ramírez (State University of New York, USA)

Part VI: Grindhouse Sexualities
11. Sleazy Strip-Joints and Perverse Porn Circuses: The Remediation of Grindhouse Aesthetics in the Porn Productions of Jack the Zipper
Clarissa Smith (University of Sunderland, UK)

12. “Bigger Than a Payphone, Smaller Than a Cadillac”: John Holmes and Porn Stardom in Exhausted (1981)
Neil Jackson (University of Lincoln, UK)

13. Ticked off Trannies With Knives: A History of Transploitation films in Grindhouse Cinema
Victoria McCollum (University of Ulster, UK) and Matthew O'Neill (Queen's University of Belfast, UK)

Part V: Grindhouse Afterlives and Legacies
14. The Day the Grindhouse Died: The Shift from Public Viewing to Private Pleasure
Danny Shipka (Oklahoma State University, USA)

15. Navajas, Razors and Machetes…oh my! Neo-Grindhouse and the Cult Stardom of Danny Trejo
Thomas Joseph Watson (Northumbria University, UK)

16. Grindhome: DVD as Neo-Grindhouse Ghetto
Steve Jones (Northumbria University, UK)

Index

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