42nd Street Pete’s Sleazy Grindhouse Picture Show 2

Vintage Erotica

After Hours Cinema

R1

Pete has done it again. His library of sleazy films must be incredible and his knowledge of the 42nd Street area is encyclopaedic. This set is a homage to the Harum Theatre on 42nd Street, the only cinema to show Grindhouse films 24 hours a day in the seventies. It managed to survive Mayor Giuliani’s cleanup of the 42nd Street theatres and finally closed, according to Pete, around 2000. It showed a set of four films constantly and changed films about twice a week. Pete describes the theatre and its patrons in his excellent introduction and “sleaze” seems to be a mild description. The Harum was probably the last dying gasp of the 42nd Street cinemas as home video started to make serious inroads into their market.

The technical quality of the films is reduced by their constant sessions through the theatre’s worn-out projectors. In the comprehensive sleeve notes Pete points out that they could restore the colour and sound, but the films themselves were so full of scratches that there wasn’t much that could be done to improve the picture. As he so eloquently puts it, “it just comes down to the fact that you can’t shine shit”.

In this set Pete offers us four films from the Harum’s typical range. By now erotica was changing more towards the porn we know today and the quality had improved dramatically over the early short films. They were longer, in colour and had sound. As we see from these examples the public now expected genital and penetration shots, more attractive actors and actresses, and even lesbian scenes. The “money shot” was coming in but was not yet the obsession that it is with porn filmmakers today.

The films are:

Tattooed Lady 1977: centres around tattoos and their effect on peoples’ love life. Are they erotic or not? This is a good example of the cheap films turned out by using short story link segments to join together separate short clips. This style is still widely used today.

Hawaii Sex-O: 1971 : made in Hawaii, which makes it a big-budget film by the standards of the time. They saved money to pay for the Hawaiian production by cutting back on non-essentials like plot and acting skills. Sex in the surf, kidnapping, lesbian sex, drugs, sex on the sand, murder and an unbelievable plot. What more could you want?

Love Lies Waiting 1974: “Rick Lutze is a crossdresser in this film, something that appealed to the older trannies in the first four rows of this ….theatre”. It deals with the prostitutes in a high-class Beverley Hills brothel. This film is in remarkably good condition and the women are all quite attractive but apart from that it is fairly conventional.

Up at J.J.’s Place: 197? : Black men screwing white women. The films were known as “mixed combos”. This was becoming a popular fetish. Maybe the women just got turned on by the Afro hairstyles. The dialogue, as usual, is pathetic but that’s not why people went to see these films. The music track is even worse. After the first few minutes of stilted dialogue they get into it and just keep going until the end of the film.

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