Detroit Ad Mat Massacre

When you live in Detroit and love exploitation movies, this is where the action's at.

Caught this dubious double at the NORTHGATE, my Saturday afternoon hangout in the years I spent in the Motor City. I couldn't get enough of the NORTHGATE's sticky floors, shitty projection, and unbeatable double bills. 

The first saw I saw an uncut XXX-rated flick at a theater was in Detroit. The venue was the KRIM (Woodward and 6 Mile), a sleazy dive in a sleazy part of town. That place was a trip, and I patronized it at least twice a month.  Manhattan Mistress was a solid sex flick shot on film.

Melbourne, my home town, had many adult theaters, but in my heady teen years when I was 'forced' to sneak into these churches of ill repute, all the movies had their hardcore scenes scissored. 

Great cast, pretty decent film. Caught this at the ADAMS in Downtown Detroit. 

Not sure why I didn't see it at the NORTHGATE, which was closer to where I was living at the time, but that's life.

The good stuff also played at the famous BEL AIR DRIVE-IN, another preferred haunt of mine at the time.

More KRIM excellence. It was always tricky parking in a safe place in this area. I never did get broken into,  but I often worried about it while enjoying these feasts of flesh.

Eventually, I began attending the CAPRI on Gratiot for my XXX-rated needs.

NORTHGATE for this one. Not a bad waste of time. I never liked Leon Isaac Kennedy much. Found him kind of wimpy. Still, Penitentiary II was good stuff, and I remember getting into a conversation with some black dude about what I, an Australian, was doing watching this movie at the NORTHGATE in Detroit. It was a long story.

Dallas School Girls: not so hot. Centerfold Fever: fantastic. Another fine Saturday afternoon at the KRIM.

The ONLY place to see this was the ADAMS. Saw it on its opening Friday night and loved every trashy minute. A couple weeks later, I saw it again at the NORTHGATE.  

Super hot flick starring the beautiful Kandi Barbour. According to my diary, caught this on a Wednesday night at the KRIM. Not sure what I was doing in that part of town on a Wednesday night. Looking for a pimp job? 

NORTHGATE again. How I loved that place! I remember Satan's Mistress being  plodding, but I didn't leave disappointed because The Slumber Party Massacre was decent stuff. 

Caught at the ADAMS. Tried convincing wife of the moment to join me, but she'd have none of it. Not a damn morsel. So, off I went to spend the evening with the lovely Jayne Kennedy and her husband Leon Isaac.  This Cirio D. Santiago flick is a fun actioner with Leon as a bad guy. Very good stuff.

I don't know why I still have a soft spot for John Russo's Midnight; it's a bit of mess, really, but it boasts a sleazy, nihilistic tone that always rubs me the right way. It has Larry Tierney, too. Catching it at the NORTHGATE made it ten times better, I suppose. That joint had atmosphere to spare. The audience was mostly black and they loved it. Heaps of really young kids in the audience, too. 

Naturally, I stayed for William Fruet's Funeral Home, which was OK, and licked up a second screening of Midnight. I got so much into Midnight, I even bought the LP, which was fuckin horrible "...you're all alone, you're on your own, and midnight's at your door..."  

I worked for Orion Pictures in Detroit in the '81-'83 period, and once met the guy who programmed the NORTHGATE and a basket of other hardtops . His name was Bill Brown. I struck up a pleasant conversation with Bill, and he expressed some shock that I wanted to see ANYTHING at the NORTHGATE when there were much better theaters around. I had to point out to him that it was the movies I cared about , not the theaters. Bill, a pretty conservative guy, didn't quite understand that. 

Come to think of it, the THEATERS were a consideration, especially when they were fleapits. 

Even though this rotten pile of shit played at the ADAMS and NORTHGATE, I saw it at the SHOWCASE STERLING HEIGHTS for some goddamn reason. Looking now at the venues it played at, I'm shocked, and  must conclude that somebody behind this had some major influence with the local bookers. Unbelievable that this played so many quality theaters; it even played the ABBEY, which was only a mile or two from the SHOWCASE. Today, a flick like this would be lucky to get a DVD release.

The late Gary Graver (aka Robert MacCallum) directed and produced. His porn flicks were much more interesting.

It was a toss-up between the ADAMS and the BEL AIR for this one. Like a good boy, I went with the ADAMS. 

It turned out to be a slice of badly choreographed Godfrey Ho nonsense. I drove home in a depressed state through sleet and snow and questioned the direction my life was taking.

That lasted for about six hours; I was back at the NORTHGATE for another putrid outrage a day later.

Refn Gives Good Cinematic Fuck

 
Nicholas Winding Refn's Drive is a synthesis of gold. Its influences are things of beauty. Heat. Goodbye,Uncle Tom (the stunning song 'Oh My Love'). Le Samourai. Thief. Walter Hill's The Driver. Takeshi's Hanna-Bi. Lynch's Lost Highway. Blue Velvet, too.

There's a love story there about a caring man who wants to do right for someone who deserves it, someone who's revealed no hidden, shabby agenda. His motives don't seem selfish. They seem pure. Ryan Gosling plays him with a quietly incandescent serenity. Carey Mulligan, harboring a beautiful spirit, plays the girl. She exudes a tone that many men seek, but few can avoid adjusting.

The use of light and shade will recall Bullitt and Heat for cinephiles. For those less exposed to cinema's treasures, it will feel fresh. For mine, the influences are like velvety collisions in the dark. The styles mesh and form a truly hypnotic whole. As in a Takeshi Kitano film, the brutal emerges organically from the beautiful and serenity is briefly interrupted by violence before it dominates again. Refn's style IS the film's protagonist.

 The plot is as simple as it needs to be for the tenor the film wants to achieve. There are no contrived detours. The threads knit comfortably together, forging a taut structure.

Albert Brooks plays a bad guy who was probably once good. He lost his focus. Took a path of least resistance.  Ron Perlman, looking stunningly grotesque, plays a badder guy who never struggled with good. He exudes the exact opposite of Mulligan. He is metal distortion driven so far into your ears your eyes bleed.

Few directors resist the urge to shoot car chases as jigsaws of chaos. Refn does. One car chase, not particularly lengthy, rears up at us like an angry animal and feels like two panthers in pursuit of one another. It is staged in glorious wide shots, and we never lose track of what's where and what's being done to whom. The use of sound in this sequence is the smartest since Cobra. It blew me away.


It's a film you feel and surrender to. The elements -- music, cinematography, lighting, silence -- marry and masturbate our senses. We're being fucked beautifully. Rising and falling. Nothing else exists. As it should be.

First Houses of Joy

I lived in Detroit for several years and loved it; I've never been able to understand the negativity about the town. For a horror fan, it was a paradise.

It snows like hell in Detroit, especially in January. It was the first time I heard the expression "windchill factor". When you pump gas, you experience it firsthand.

As a new arrival, I was warned to steer clear of the drive-ins in Winter because of the snow and sleet. "It's best to wait until March or April," they'd say.

Did these people know who they were talking to?

I hadn't seen either film at the time. I was eighteen. When this ad mat appeared in the "Detroit News", I was shaking with excitement.

Last House on the Left had been banned in Australia for years. It was still banned three or four years ago. It had a rep. A great rep. That was all I needed.

I knew nothing about The House By The Lake because it didn't occur to me -- at the time -- that the film was called Death Weekend in the UK and Australia. I had read a review of Death Weekend in an issue of "Films and Filming", an excellent British periodical from the publishers of "Books and Bookmen". There had been a dynamite still of a cop being dragged behind a moving car. It was an image that never left me. Six years later, I'd take it for inspiration, and expand it into a modest feature of my own... Enough said.

The snow didn't stop falling all Friday. It had dug itself in for the weekend. My partner at the time warned me that driving on the slippery roads, in falling snow, was a recipe for disaster, especially for an Australian who'd only had his license for under a year and whose experience with snow was limited to writing on Xmas cards. So I nodded, acknowledging her concern, kissed her goodbye, and made a bee-line for the front door.

I was living in Mount Clemens, a suburb of Detroit that was approximately ten miles from the Gratiot Drive-In (it took its name from its street address).

I took my time, drove slowly, and ran the car heater at full bore. I was one of a chosen few who'd taken to the roads that snowy Friday night. The wipers were deflecting the falling flakes reasaonbly efficiently, but the hot air was drying out my eyes something fierce. I squinted to peer through the smudged windscreen. Every now and then, sets of bright, yellow eyes would sweep past me.

The Gratiot Drive-In emerged from a flurry. Its neon sign beckoned me in the right direction. I lowered the heat and lurched towards the ticket box. The driveway was a shagpile of mud. It was 730, but there were no other cars. I definitely had the right drive-in, though. Next to the ticket seller was a small, enticing poster for Last House. No amount of snow could dampen my enthusiasm.

When I paid my five bucks, I was handed a little square box that turned out to be a portable, in-car heater; they certainly didn't need those back in Australia. A portable air conditioner might have been nice now and then, though. I took this odd, unnecessary contraption off the ticket seller and drove on through the floating muck.

I parked dead center between the screen and the projection booth. I had my pick of spots. I wound down the window and reached out into the freezer to grab the speaker. Jesus, it was Arctic out there! I hung the metal speaker from the window and wound it up tight -- as tight as I could, anyway. That's when I noticed the gap. That gap had always been there, of course, but now it much more obvious and much more troubling. There was an insistent, chilly breeze blowing through that gap onto the side of my face. Suddenly I was very grateful for my unnecessary, in-car heater.

I watched Last House for the first time through falling snow, blunt wipers that left snail trails, and frequent blooms of condensation. Despite all that, and despite the buzz of the in-car, complimentary people warmer, I loved it. Experiencing Wes Craven's rough-edged cult classic for the first time left an indelible impression on my young mind. David Hess's "Krug" was just the sort of villain I warmed to and I couldn't take my eyes off him. When he commanded one of the kidnapped girls to "Piss your pants!", I felt like a very free man in America. I couldn't watch stuff like this back in Australia. Nobody could at the time. I felt lucky to be able to see this mighty movie at a drive-in. One of Detroit's finest drive-ins.

When I began work for Orion Pictures several months later, I would learn that the Gratiot and the Bel Air, an impressive multi-screen "ozoner", were the local industry's biggest outdoor earners.

The House By The Lake, which is a far more lyrical title than Death Weekend, became one of my all-time favorite movies that night, and it still is.

William Fruet's beautifully made revenge shocker, cut from the same cloth as Peckinpah's Straw Dogs and Boorman's Deliverance (remade almost literally by Fruet later on as Trapped aka Baker County USA), and sewn together with fabric borrowed from Wes, was a revelation. In addition to the brutal action and great location photography of rural Canada, the film had a literate, take-no-prisoners screenplay that had the magnificent Don Stroud spouting vicious obscenities (to Brenda Vaccaro) like: "You goddamned fucking cunt. You'll get yours, baby!"

Chuck Shamata, who plays an unbelievably sleazy dentist, almost steals the show as "Harry"; his attempts to get into Vaccaro's pants make up a major portion of the movie. Naturally, the deviant tooth puller gets his comeuppance at the hands of Stroud and his gang of psychopaths.

Unfortunately, the film has never been released on DVD anywhere in the world. Could it be that Ivan Reitman, one of the film's producers (yes, the Ghostbusters guy) is holding up the release because he's embarrassed by it? I sure hope not. This is the best goddamned film that prick has ever been involved with. The last I heard, MGM were holding the film's rights because of a deal that enabled them to acquire AIP product. If you're reading this, MGM (which I'm sure you're not), get off your fat,corporate be-hinds and start gathering the elements. Come on, get cracking!

During the House... screening, a second car joined the show. When the film finished, Last House started all over again; this was a common practise at US drive-ins.

The snow had gotten much heavier and thicker by that time and it was piling up on the bonnet so high that I needed to get out on several occasions and sweep it off.

So, knowing I'd be doing a lot more sweeping before the night was out, did I stay for a second viewing of Last House...?

What do you fuckin think?