Underground U.S.A.

Filmmaking Beyond the Hollywood Canon

Edited by Xavier Mendik and Steven Jay Schneider

Wallflower Press 2002

Web: http://www.wallflowerpress.co.uk

Xavier Mendik is the director of the Cult Film Archive at University College Northampton, UK, and the general editor of the AlterImage series published by Wallflower Press. He is co-editor of Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945, and has published widely on the topic of cult and underground cinema.

Steven Jay Schneider has published widely on the horror film and related genres. Together they create a superb overview of underground and transgressive cinema, Underground U.S.A. is a fascinating mixture of the academic and the alternative, the high brow and the trashy, we explore everything from film theory and symbolic motifs within specific films (American Beauty seems to be a favorite) to the sexual abandon of Doris Wishman and Radley Metzger. Many chapters chart the development and stages of a given film-maker, so, for example, we get a fascinating overview of the career of Doris Wishman through Nudie Cuties through Roughies to unique exploitation classics such as Let Me Die a Woman.

There is a great chapter on Herschell Gordon Lewis who single handedly moved the underground from “roughies” to splatter with his ground breaking gore film Blood Feast which remains a classic of gore exploitation today, we also get insight into how Troma, the pinnacle of cult filmmaking, works.

Underground U.S.A.: Filmmaking Beyond the Hollywood Canon is a well balanced presentation of a wide range of essays, while some will appeal more to the academic and others more to the interested devotee of cult films; it does offer something for everyone.