42nd Street Pete’s Sleazy Grindhouse Picture Show (2009)

After Hours Cinema

R1 DVD

Pete, known as 42P, has one major love in his life – the sleazy films of the 70s. These films were churned out by the hundreds. They were generally short and featured minimal acting or dialogue (it’s hard to speak with your mouth full). The bulk of the film was shot indoors with occasional stock footage street scenes to set the location. Plot was largely irrelevant and the action in each film was fairly conventional once they got down to it. The early “loops”, short porn films on a single Super 8 reel, were intended for home use. The Grindhouse films were meant for the backstreet theatres of places like New York’s Times Square so they were longer and better filmed..

Although their artistic value is unquestioned (there isn’t any) their place in film history is important. Grindhouse took film erotica into the cinema mainstream by the back door and led to the production of better quality films like The Devil In Miss Jones and Debbie Does Dallas. Many foreign imports exposed viewers to film from countries where there appeared to be no sexual hang-ups about this sort of thing. The viewing public no longer accepted being told what they could watch. Eventually the better films were issued on videotape and by the 90s Grindhouse all but disappeared. Or did it?

42nd Street Pete has rescued some of these films from obscurity and reissued them on DVD. This set contains four typical films on two DVDs and gives an excellent idea of the genre. These days they would at best be regarded as quaint, but you can still see what the attraction would have been for the dirty raincoat brigade back in the 70s. The actors and actresses are completely natural about what they are doing and there is a notable lack of silicone. There is an abundance of pubic hair and a lack of that superficial plastic-looking gloss prevalent in current porn actresses.

Grindhouse reflects the changing attitudes to sex during this period. These attitudes led to the inclusion of more erotica in mainstream film as it came to more closely mirror real life. It also split off in another direction to lead to the multi-million dollar adult industry of today.

A characteristic of the Grindhouse cinemas was that they just kept on rolling film after film throughout the day. Peter has included “Grind It !”, a function that keeps repeating the films just as the theatres did.

We should be grateful to Pete for his selfless sacrifice in bringing these films to us. It can’t be easy having to watch porn day after day but that’s what Pete has done for us. Well done.

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This review will appear in Volume 3 No.2 of the digital and print edition of Synergy Magazine.

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