Continuing our series of White Hot ‘N’ Warped cinema, Dead Channels brings us the mind-bogglingly awful B-grade (D-grade?) sexploitation shocker She Freak. This 1967 “update” of Tod Browning’s 1932 classic Freaks was directed by Byron Mabe and written by David F. Friedman (best known as the producer Herschell Gordon Lewis’ seminal gore films 2000 Maniacs and Blood Feast).

Claire Brennen stars as Jade Cochran, a waitress who leaves the greasy-spoon diner business for the glamour and excitement of the carnival (?!), but soon discovers that she despises the freaks and human oddities of the sideshow. As the poster screams, “Behind the tents and tinsel of the monster midway, something barbaric occurs on the Alley of Nightmares” and Jade learns a lesson we know all too well… never cross a circus freak.

The screening starts at 7:30pm on Wednesday, July 9th at the Hypnodrome, 575 10th Street, San Francisco – Map. Tickets are only $5 and can be purchased online at Brown Paper Tickets or at the door on the night of the show.

…”Brand Upon the Brain!” is set in a lighthouse that doubles as a “mom and pop orphanage” where the senior Maddins engage in the vampiric harvesting of “orphan nectar.” While a prepubescent Guy and his older sister become infatuated with a pair of androgynous sibling teenage detectives, their scientist father toils away on sinister experiments, and their fearsome mother surveys the island with a lighthouse beam, cracking down on unseemly behavior.

“I didn’t grow up in a lighthouse,” Mr. Maddin said, “but a lot of the Grand Guignol stuff actually happened: My mother was on the alert to everything. She could see into your underwear with her searchlight.”

Read the full article.

Vampiric harvesting of orphan nectar? Now that’s entertainment!

I stayed away from reading any reviews or press coverage before seeing the film(s), but now that I’ve dug through a pile of them, this one from Ain’t It Cool News sums up the experience pretty well:

Remember, when George W. Bush was elected, and he said that thing about how, by 2008, we’d have “movies that would explode in our balls like a shotgun filled with handjobs”?

Well, that promise came true two days ago when I saw GRINDHOUSE in Hollywood. Except not only was it a shotgun full of handjobs exploding in my balls, but also my balls suddenly knew how to make fire using karate. All from seeing GRINDHOUSE, a movie that’s made of screaming car crash zombie boobs.

There’s also a slightly less hyperbolic review from Harry at Ain’t It Cool that’s also worth a read.

Seems like everybody has an opinion about which of the two features is the better one, with many people coming down in favor of Rodriguez’s dead-fest Planet Terror. It’s certainly the wilder, showier, funnier, and bloodier of the two, but A.O. Scott puts his finger on the real difference between it and Tarantino’s car-chase co-feature Death Proof:

At a certain point in “Death Proof” the scratches and bad splices disappear, and you find yourself watching not an arch, clever pastiche of old movies and movie theaters but an actual movie. You are not laughing at deliberately clumsy camera work but rather admiring the grace and artistry of the shots — in particular a long take in which the camera circles around a group of women talking in a diner. At his best — in parts of “Pulp Fiction,” in “Jackie Brown,” in sections of “Kill Bill, Vol. 2” — Mr. Tarantino strips away the quotation marks and finds a route through his formal virtuosity and his encyclopedic knowledge of film history back to the basics of character, action and story.

Both films are fun and satisfying in their own way, and I think both compliment each other perfectly. I’ll be going back to see GRINDHOUSE again before it’s gone from the theaters.

One last note: As if I didn’t enjoy GRINDHOUSE enough, the cherry on the top was the inclusion of April March’s recording of Chick Habit on the soundtrack. Chick Habit has been one of Thrillpeddler’s favorite songs for years, and we’ve even named our currently running homage to Jack T. Chick after it. Here’s hoping it becomes as popular as the Woo Hoo song from Kill Bill.

For all you fans of Chick Habit, the original French version, Laisse Tomber Les Filles, was written by Serge Gainsbourg and sung by France Gall: