There's nothing quite like the lurid pull of a movie poster that screams out to your basest desires, as Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn proves with Nicolas Winding Refn: The Act of Seeing, a new cult-art book showcasing stunningly salacious exploitation cinema one-sheets from the 1960s and '70s. Presented in vivid color, the posters hand-picked and curated by Refn (and contextualized in glorious detail by film scholar Alan Jones) run the gamut from every kind of exploitation cinema known to man: Blaxploitation, nunsploitation, Nazisploitation, nudies, mondo, you name it. Read Jones' commentary below.
“…It was shot around the time burlesque headliner Misty Ayres was stripping through the documentaries A Night in Hollywood (1953) and Tijuana After Midnite (1954). So it wasn’t too much of a stretch to have Misty play stripteaser Sally Down, who heads to the bright lights of Hollywood hoping to hit the modelling big time. Before you can say ‘Meet me at Schwab’s drug store on Sunset,’ Sally has been knocked out, shot full of heroin and taken to a brothel to become the plaything of the rich and famous. It’s up to one of Sally’s regular clients to try and extricate her from this hellhole of fornication.”
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“Producer/director Tony Martinez ran out of money before he could finish this Florida-based sex murder mystery told from differing and quite unusual points of view, Rashomon style… Someone has killed exotic model Min Lee (Joyanna, who played Poontang Plenty in the 1966 spy sex saga The Girl from S.I.N.) Lt. Parker (George French) interrogates all the roommates in their swinging pad in a sleazy apartment complex and comes up with different variations of events leading to her nasty slashing. Naturally, each reminiscence involves topless parties featuring debauched orgies (hence the avant-garde archaeological slanted poster referring to Romans), pool table sex, pot smoking, games of strip spin-the-bottle, erotic dancing, hot shower action and secret lesbianism.”
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“Mike Simms plays a young black soldier serving in Vietnam, abruptly summoned back to his Watts neighborhood where his brother has been killed by two racist cops. While the local police chief is sympathetic, he’s forced by protocol to back up his officers’ story. Trying to quell the highly volatile situation, Simms starts investigating the death but finds himself in the unenviable position of being the voice of moderation between the black militants preparing to riot and make his brother a martyr to their cause and the white extremists poised to take retaliatory action. Acclaimed for being provocative, compelling and commendable, outlining the evils of racism from both ends of the social spectrum, preaching is kept in check in a rare example of grindhouse savoir faire.”
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“Three years before Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Decameron (1971), director Byron Mabe (She Freak, 1967) beat him to it with this explicit fleshcapade combining two Giovanni Boccaccio authored bawdy tales of carnal deception. At a 17th century school for virgins the old gardener retires and horny stud Mario (Victor Brandt, at the beginning of a long supporting actor career playing detectives and army personnel) gets hired by pretending to be mute and stupid. Soon he’s bedding all the schoolgirls, who seem to be constantly nude…”
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“What was RKO Studio’s biggest grossing movie of all time? Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers’ Top Hat (1935)? King Kong (1933)? No, it was this Second World War propaganda drama exposing the evils of Nazi tyranny that, depending on your point of view, was either earnest education or outright exploitation….Now, Voyager (1942) star Bonita Granville plays Anna Miller, an American girl with German blood, who unfortunately falls for Karl Bruner (Tim Holt, star of The Monster That Challenged the World, 1957), a Hitler Youth celebrity and Gestapo lieutenant. Because she refuses to bear babies for the Third Reich, Anna is persecuted, suffering sterilization and public flogging, something her Nazi boyfriend tries to stop happening.”
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“Originally released in August 1972 as Dirty Dan, the film concerns a rich white girl in New Orleans who becomes pregnant by her black lover, something her supportive brother Vance (ex-Monkee Mickey Dolenz) seems not to mind, while her other racist brother Dan (future Tina Turner musician James Ralston) demands she has an abortion. Then the interbreeding couple are brutally killed, setting off a chain of slaughter as a cop and black priest try to fathom out the mystery.”
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“Prior to his legendary telephone call to Orson Welles, asking if they could work together – they did on The Other Side of the Wind (1969-76) – Gary Graver was also employed alongside other notable names in Hollywood including Roger Corman, John Cassavetes and Ron Howard, while making himself available to the Z movie market end with Fred Olen Ray and Dennis Sanders. Gary Graver also worked in the adult film industry under the nom de porn Robert McCallum. It was under this name that he was inducted into the AVN Hall of Fame, having made in excess of 100 hardcore films including the AVN Award-winner Unthinkable (1983)… His first directorial effort was The Embracers (1966), followed by this violent thriller about a private detective hired to find a person missing in the seamy drug-smuggling world.”
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“‘There are 100,000 transsexuals like Anne in the United States today,’ proclaims Doctor Leo Wollman who keeps stating the obvious by pointing at the genitals of a pre-op with a metal pointer in this mockumentary that does indeed deliver the shock goods. ‘Anne’ is one of the “monstrous biological jokes” paraded out alongside low-rent Zsa Zsa Gabor styled drag queens, dramatised cruising for a trannie bruising scenes and unrelated stock footage from porno loops starring Harry Reems in this frightfully serious and portentously narrated Mondo with a Message.”
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“It starts with a guided tour of post-atomic bomb Hiroshima. From here the scattershot delights include polygamous Pacific Island prisoners, a leering look at the Danish propensity for naturism, the funeral arrangements of indigenous Mexicans, promiscuity at the Free School of Devonshire, Filipino gay men showing off their dress sense, Latin Americans taking a dip in waters with supposed impotence healing powers, the final kamikaze pilot in Japan and a tribal childbirth rite in Africa. Not released stateside until 1968, One Naked Night (1963) director Al Viola added a New York hippie happening sequence to bring it slam-bang up to date.”
Courtesy of Nicolas Winding Refn
