SEX! VIOLENCE! TRASH!

By RICHARD CORLISS

They were the original movies your mother didn't want you to see. For half a century exploitation films--a robust compromise between stag loops and major-studio product--would grind away in Main Street fleabags and drive-ins, inflicting their lurid, no-budget fantasies on generations of bored salesmen and horny teens. Hollywood put sweet dreams on screen; exploitation directors filmed the raging id. See brutal men sweat over balky virgins! Thrill as mousy guys find sluts whose sexual appetites are insatiable! Or, as Rene Bond says it in Edward D. Wood Jr.'s 1971 Necromania, "insashable."

Grindhouse movies were bad as in dirty and bad as in awful. But in the '90s bad has been raised to an aesthetic, almost a theology, certainly an industry; and these long-neglected movies are cult artifacts, promoted in revival houses, "special edition" videos and learned books (like Michael J. Weldon's cogent, peerless The Psychotronic Video Guide). Russ Meyer's bosomacious melodramas are taught in colleges. Oscar Micheaux's primeval black parables play in museums. And Ed Wood, who couldn't get arrested when he was alive--all right, as an alcoholic transvestite, he could get arrested, but nobody in Hollywood paid attention to his goofily inept sci-fi and sex films--was in 1994 the honored subject of Tim Burton's major motion picture.

The auteur kudos would give giggle fits to veteran sleazemasters, who saw films as just part of the con of peddling the promise of smut to suckers. If there was an art to grindhouse movies, it was the art of the spiel. As ace exploitation entrepreneur David F. Friedman (She Freak, Trader Hornee) boasts in Eddie Muller and Daniel Faris' breezy, authoritative, gaudily illustrated Grindhouse: The Forbidden World of "Adults Only" Cinema (St. Martin's Griffin; 160 pages; $19.95), "I've got a high school education in making movies but a Ph.D. in selling them."

As Prohibition created the bootleg-booze industry, Hollywood moralizing gave birth to exploitation films. With the adoption of a Production Code in 1922, the major studios ostensibly promised to renounce the ribald. Into that vacuum crept sideshowmen like Dwain Esper, who directed (ludicrously) and promoted (brilliantly) the first grindhouse classics. The 1934 Maniac, about a mad scientist's even daffier assistant whose ailurophobia leads him to rip out a cat's eye and eat it ("Why, it's not unlike an oyster"), pretended to be a serious study of dementia praecox. Esper used the old carny come-on--it's so sinful you have to pay to see it--in Tell Your Children, a silly antidrug screed produced by a Los Angeles church group. After he added some skin, Esper retitled the film Reefer Madness and made a bundle.

Good, bad or worse, exploitation directors were the independent filmmakers in an era dominated by Hollywood. No one made black films for black audiences, so Micheaux did, beginning in 1918; and if his films often showed an actor waiting for him to bark out a stage direction, they satisfied their constituency. Edgar G. Ulmer, the vagabond king of grade-Z films, directed the black musical Moon over Harlem--as well as pictures in Yiddish and Ukrainian--all in the same year (1939). These guys were tireless: from 1935 to 1945, hack-of-hacks Sam Newfield directed an impossible 150 quickie movies, including the grindhouse curio The Terror of Tiny Town, the only all-midget singing western.

Exploitation films come in all genres, but the staple was sex. Kroger Babb, who billed himself as "Mr. Pihsnamwohs" (showmanship spelled backward), ballyhooed his 1944 birth-of-a-baby film, Mom and Dad, so successfully that it ran for decades and, according to the Grindhouse authors, earned $100 million. And in the late '50s, as bold European films lured the art-house crowds, a new breed of grind gurus revived sexploitation.

Francis Ford Coppola made nudie films; Martin Scorsese's first feature went out on the grind circuit. Meyer (with his giddy editing style), Radley Metzger (who made elegant variations on Euro-smut) and R.L. Frost (a versatile imagist, heavy on the rough stuff) could have played in the majors. But most exploiteurs were amateurs--like Doris Wishman, with her mesmerizingly absurd tales of good women gone bad. The husband-and-wife team of Michael and Roberta Findlay, who, Weldon says admiringly, "made the most twisted softcore adult movies of them all," later concocted the fake snuff film, Snuff. They specialized in bizarre ways of killing off sexy women (crossbow, electrified earrings, dildo switchblades). Exploitation? Or prophecy? Michael was decapitated in 1977 by the blade of a helicopter crashing atop Manhattan's Pan Am Building.

Today grindhouse films have a nostalgic savor--old naughtiness that looks naive--but it's certain nobody was thinking masterpiece. The films were often shot in a weekend with untested actors who had to get it right the first time; to producers, the only truly obscene phrase was "Take Two." The running times were as short as a starlet's skirt. A plot-heavy thriller might last 51 minutes (Maniac) or 63 (Herschell Gordon Lewis' gore-gantuan Blood Feast). Then again, the numbing incompetence of some adults-only films made that one hour seem endless. The tone of even the best of them was not so much sexy as seedy. And still the patrons sat there hoping for an epidermal epiphany. "That's who was paying my way," Friedman says in Grindhouse, "a lot of very lonely men."

As they were born in prudishness, sexploitation movies died in licentiousness. Porno films, which became chic in 1972, delivered the goods, up close and impersonal, without the showman's expert tease. And when home video arrived, gentlemen could take their vicarious pleasures in private. The community of sexploitation producers and audiences--suckers--was sundered forever.

Now it's deja blue all over again. On video, and with Grindhouse, bad-movie lovers can be taken once more. It's good clean fun, really--for we are taken back to an age when moviegoers were innocent enough to be shocked, and producers were canny enough to do the shucking.