Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: 42nd Street, and Beyond
Austin Fisher and Johnny Walker
Chapter 1
Grinding out the Grindhouse: Exploitation, Myth and Memory
Glenn Ward
Chapter 2
Where Did We Come In?: The Economics of Unruly Audiences, Their Cinemas and Tastes, From Serial Houses to Grind Houses.
Phyll Smith
Chapter 3
Temporary Fleapits and Scabs’ Alley:The Theatrical Dissemination of Italian Cannibal Films in Melbourne, Australia
Dean Brandum
Chapter 4
Run, Angel, Run: Serial Production and the Biker Movie, 1966-72
Peter Stanfield
Chapter 5
“The Smashing, Crashing, Pileup of the Century”: The Carsploitation Film
Robert J Read
Chapter 6
Cars and Girls (and Burgers and Weed): Branding, Mainstreaming, and Crown International Pictures’ SoCal Drive-in Movies
Richard Nowell
Chapter 7
From “Sex Entertainment for the Whole Family” to Mature Pictures: I Jomfruens Tegn and Transnational Erotic Cinema
Kevin Heffernan
Chapter 8
‘Bigger Than A Payphone, Smaller Than A Cadillac’: Porn Stardom in Exhausted: John C Holmes The Real Story
Neil Jackson
Chapter 9
From Opera House to Grindhouse (And Back Again): Ozploitation In and Beyond Australia
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
Chapter 10
Go West, Brother: the Politics of Landscape in the Blaxploitation Western
Austin Fisher
Chapter 11
Red Power, White Movies: Billy Jack, Johnny Firecloud, and the Cultural Politics of the “Indiansploitation” Cycle
David Church
Chapter 12
Sleazy Strip-Joints and Perverse Porn Circuses: The Remediation of Grindhouse in the Porn Productions of Jack the Zipper
Clarissa Smith
Select Bibliography
Contributors

Promotional Information

Examines, with historically informed nuance, the myriad routes of cultural influence that converged in the American ‘grindhouse’ phenomenon and its aftermath.

About the Author

Austin Fisher is Associate Professor of Popular Culture 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 Associate Professor in the Department of Arts 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).

Reviews

The Grindhouse is a fascinating phenomenon but it is too often seen as a wild and eclectic one, something that is praised for being chaotic and anarchic. The current collection goes beyond this celebratory rhetoric to examine the multiple forms and histories that converge in the Grindhouse. It unpicks and unpacks the phenomenon in ways that demonstrate its richness and variety, but also make sense of that richness and variety. Most significantly, it does so without destroying the pleasures of the Grindhouse. On the contrary it manages to question the experience while preserving its sense of fascination. And that is a very rare thing.
*Mark Jancovich, Professor of Film and Television Studies, University of East Anglia, United Kingdom*

Grindhouse sets a new standard for the study of exploitation cinema history. In a time when grindhouse aesthetics have become retro chic, this book moves us beyond the seedy, cult mythologies of grindhouse. Examining grindhouse cinema beyond myth and morality, beyond genre conventions or industrial norms, and even beyond the U.S. context, this collection takes a nuanced look at this complex body—no cadaver—of film history. The book demands that we interrogate how the turbulent racial, national and sexual politics of the 1960s to 1980s gave birth to a movement in cinema whose significance to the popular and film cultures of today cannot be underestimated. A tour de force and a must read for anyone interested in film on the (not so) perverse margins of cinema history.
*Mireille Miller-Young, Associate Professor of Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA*