Saturday, October 24 at 9:30pm | $8 |
Co-presented by the American Genre Film Archive and Something Weird! Proceeds go towards helping AGFA preserve 35mm film prints from the Something Weird collection!
Beneath the dumpsters of 1970s America, an unexplored netherworld of no-fi genre movies lurked in the gutters. They were mysterious, enticing, and sometimes featured Satan wearing KISS make-up while engaging in the dirtiest of dirty deeds with two vampires in a basement. This was the grunge-soaked landscape of hardcore genre filmmaking. But what if these movies were less about the sex and more about the stuff that happens in between? SMUT WITHOUT SMUT presents undiscovered hardcore genre movies with the sex removed. In other words, the parameters of reality will never be the same again.
THE HAUNTED P***Y (1976): Doris Wishman was an unstoppable spitfire, an overlord of bad taste, and the most prolific female director of all time. History says that the trash-horror benchmark known as A NIGHT TO DISMEMBER was Wishman’s only assault on the horror genre. History is wrong. THE HAUNTED P****Y is AMITYVILLE HORROR by way of Kenneth Anger by way of Wishman’s patented blend of disconnected dubbing, overlapping library music, and major roles by inanimate objects. Plus lots of sex. As legend has it, Wishman left the room while the hardcore scenes were being filmed. In a later interview, she said, “It’s beyond me why any person would want to see such filth on a screen.”
THE MAD LOVE LIFE OF A HOT VAMPIRE (1971): By the late 1970s, exploitation wildman Ray Dennis Steckler had left the hills of Hollywood for the gutters of Las Vegas. And like most D.I.Y. heroes who cut their teeth in the early 1960s, Steckler started directing hardcore to pay the bills. THE MAD LOVE LIFE OF A HOT VAMPIRE plays out like an X-rated version of Tod Browning’s DRACULA as envisioned by the staff of MAD magazine. That is to say, Steckler’s wit, energy, and inventiveness were still in full force. How couldn’t they be? As Steckler’s then-wife—and leading lady—Carolyn Brandt says in this movie, “Dracula is grooooovy!”