Sleazoid Express: A Mind-Twisting Tour Through the Grindhouse Cinema of Times Square

The late Bill Landis and his co-author Michelle Clifford offer a portal into dingy Times Square and varied genres of “grind house” films. B films and lower covered everything from exploitation to the bizarre to martial arts. We still see the themes carried in current film, though often diluted in our NC-17 age. Weak modern entries like Tarantino’s and Rodriguez’s “Grindhouse” attempted to carry the torch. Eli Roth pokes around with horror fare.More importantly, modern action cinema, horror, even documentaries owe something to the innovative, violent, bizarre, and downright trashy fare that played out in dingy Times Square theaters.Landis was fully immersed in the culture and personalities and is worth exploring separately. He offers insight and color that make this excursion more entertaining than a far-removed professor’s exploration. I’ve found it a great gift for friends with film tastes on the margins as well as those tired of the endless children’s fare of superhero films and reboots made by lazy studios.In addition, the cinema depicted in this book was some of the first to touch on “fringe” cultural issues and spurned countercultures neglected by the mainstream.

This book is fantastic for anyone who is into exploitation, eurosleaze, blood horror, and mondo movies. I had recently become more interested in such movies before reading the book, and now I'm certainly glad I have it handy for my explorations into the bizarre. The short biographies of the actors and directors give an additional layer of insight into how, and why, these movies were made. There are extensive descriptions of movies peppered with factoids of the directors and actors that really make the movies come alive when you see them before or after reading the passage.My only criticism of the book is that there is not as much emphasis on the "story" of the author seeing these movies and the grindhouses he frequented. Although there, this book does not read like a nonfictional narrative of the author's explorations, which I was expecting from some of the book's descriptions. It is very much a guidebook, with the chapters organized by genre, director, series, and/or time period rather than according to the author's experiences or a novel-like structure.Although the book wasn't written or structured in the way I expected, I still thoroughly enjoyed it and am loaning it to some of my friends who are also interested in these movies. And I know I will continue to refer to it whenever I have an urge to search out a whacky and uniquely offensive movie gem.

This book is a treasure. I used to hang out on the deuce with my buddies when I was a teen. I'm so glad I got to do that. I took it for granted at the time, not realizing it would one day be destroyed and replaced by a fake turismo dystopia. God I miss the sleaze horror schlock triple features we used to watch while guzzling Olde E and openly smoking joints in the Harris or the Cameo. Every page of this book is a testament to the good times I had in this once authentic New York holy land of sleaze..

I was out to find a book on the "where" of where the great B and sleaze films were shown. As a diehard fan, I knew alot already about synopses and had heard enough in audio commentaries to know as much about that... but I wanted to know what the 'viewing experiences' of these films would be like, especially with a historical perspective throughout. Well, along comes a DVD of "Cannibal Holocaust" aka "Dr. Butcher MD" and inside are some of the most erudite descriptions of a typical day at a "grindhouse" looked like. I'm hooked. So between that and the liner notes from "Cannibal Ferox" I could tell this was a must read. The formula is to take each theatre and describe the genre it best typifies along with a history of the behind the scenes of the theatre along with a couple plot synopses that best typify the genre. Along, the way you will find yourself racing to the imdb to see more about some of the more hideous films described therein. Also, it will allow you to develop a new respect for these films when you hear what they were limited by and then their budgetary restraints. And hey, anything that makes you wind up having a new respect for the cinema of Andy Milligan (yep, ya heard me right) is nothing short of miraculous. Here's to praying that Sinister Cinema's Oct. release of "The Ghastly Ones" will have an extra of "Vapors" in it IhopeIhopeIhope!! The writing style of Clifford and Landis shows that they are longtime grindhouse denizens themselves, especially in the number of instances they cite that audiences could relate to some of the more lurid onscreen happenings and be affected by it. For picaresque, this book is in a class by itself, especially in the descriptions of the Apollo after the video age. Unless someone's already done it, let's hope that someone out there does something like this for drive-ins (For the European perspective check out "Immoral Tales". Me, I'm off to go read parts of this book again. P.S.-With all the retitlings going on, it also showed me why Weldon hated giallo so much in "The Psychotronic Encyclopedia"!

I give this book 5 stars. Ever since I saw the Tarantino/Rodriguez flick of Grindhouse, and it's trailers, I've been a huge fan of the exploitation genre. For those who have never been born during the 42nd street heyday of grindhouse cinema, or just weren't old enough, this book is definitely for you. Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford have written an excellent book detailing how it was to be in those types of theaters in NYC. They also go over in detail of many, many exploitation movies that were being shown during the 60's-80's. I am constantly referring to this book, almost like an encyclopedia, to search for movies that were being shown. There are not many books on this subject. If you are a fan of 60's-80's exploitation/euro-sleaze type of movies you should really get this book.