Bad Girls Go to Hell. Cannibal Holocaust. Eve & the Handyman. Examining film culture’s ongoing fascination with the low, bad & sleazy faces of cinema, Sleaze Artists brings together film scholars with a shared interest in the questions posed by disreputable movies & suspect cinema. They explore the ineffable quality of “sleaze” in relation to a range of issues, including the production realities of low-budget exploitation pictures & the ever-shifting terrain of reception & taste. Writing about horror, exploitation & sexploitation films, contributors delve into topics ranging from the place of the “Aztec horror film” in debates about Mexican national identity to a cycle of 60s films exploring homosexual desire in the military. One contributor charts the distribution saga of Mario Bava’s 1972 film Lisa & the Devil thru the highs & lows of art cinema, fringe tv, grindhouse circuits & connoisseur DVD markets. Another offers a perspective on the work of Doris Wishman, the NY housewife turned sexploitation director of the 60s who's become a cult figure in bad-cinema circles over the past decade. Others analyze the relation between image & sound in sexploitation films & Italian horror movies, the ad strategies adopted by sexploitation producers during the early 60s, the relationship between art & trash in Todd Haynes’s oeuvre, & the ways that the Friday the 13th series complicates the distinction between trash & legitimate cinema. The volume closes with an essay on why cinephiles love to hate the movies.
Contributors: Harry M. Benshoff, Kay Dickinson, Chris Fujiwara, Colin Gunckel, Joan Hawkins, Kevin Heffernan, Matt Hills, Chuck Kleinhans, Tania Modleski, Eric Schaefer, Jeffrey Sconce, Greg Taylor