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Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style and Politics
Bad Girls Go to Hell. Cannibal Holocaust. Eve & the Handyman. Examining film culture’s ongoing fascination with the low, bad & sleazy faces of cinema, Sleaze Artists brings together film scholars with a shared interest in the questions posed by disreputable movies & suspect cinema. They explore the ineffable quality of “sleaze” in relation to a range of issues, including the production realities of low-budget exploitation pictures & the ever-shifting terrain of reception & taste. Writing about horror, exploitation & sexploitation films, contributors delve into topics ranging from the place of the “Aztec horror film” in debates about Mexican national identity to a cycle of 60s films exploring homosexual desire in the military. One contributor charts the distribution saga of Mario Bava’s 1972 film Lisa & the Devil thru the highs & lows of art cinema, fringe tv, grindhouse circuits & connoisseur DVD markets. Another offers a perspective on the work of Doris Wishman, the NY housewife turned sexploitation director of the 60s who's become a cult figure in bad-cinema circles over the past decade. Others analyze the relation between image & sound in sexploitation films & Italian horror movies, the ad strategies adopted by sexploitation producers during the early 60s, the relationship between art & trash in Todd Haynes’s oeuvre, & the ways that the Friday the 13th series complicates the distinction between trash & legitimate cinema. The volume closes with an essay on why cinephiles love to hate the movies.
Contributors: Harry M. Benshoff, Kay Dickinson, Chris Fujiwara, Colin Gunckel, Joan Hawkins, Kevin Heffernan, Matt Hills, Chuck Kleinhans, Tania Modleski, Eric Schaefer, Jeffrey Sconce, Greg Taylor
Contributors: Harry M. Benshoff, Kay Dickinson, Chris Fujiwara, Colin Gunckel, Joan Hawkins, Kevin Heffernan, Matt Hills, Chuck Kleinhans, Tania Modleski, Eric Schaefer, Jeffrey Sconce, Greg Taylor
352 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2007
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
August 17, 2009
I had picked this up with the intention of reading "The Sleazy Pedigree of Todd Haynes," but, as happens with a strong collection, I ended up getting sucked in and reading Tania Modleski's take on Doris Wishman, Chuck Kleinhans on pornography and documentary, an excellent look at "homo-military" films, and a stirring call for discernment even in the throes of cultish geekery.
As the volume's title declares, these are explorations of the margins (of cinema, of taste, etc.), but all of the contributors (at least the ones I read) express a nuanced understanding of how these "margins" are constructed and of the various interrelated registers of culture (high/low/art/mass/camp/trash/etc.). I appreciated the emphasis on hybridity, especially in the article about Haynes: it's too often that cinema is viewed as points along a (wholly arbitrarily constructed) spectrum, with, say, Russ Meyer at one end, one of my beloved mid-20th-century Europeans at the other, and Hitchcock or Welles squarely in the middle.
(Actually, this is something that I felt pretty strongly when reading Greg Taylor's "Pure Quidditas or Geek Chic? Cultism as Discernment." If cinematic geekdom has two extremes [using the spectrum above as the model:], my interests are located at the Artsy end...and yet I feel an incredible affinity for my fellow geeks at the Sleazy end. We're basically in the same boat: waiting for obscure treasures to show up in theaters or on DVD, endlessly picking apart scenes and fragments and trivia, obsessively educating ourselves and defending our predilections even when those around us--who just watch movies the way Normal People watch movies--think we're unhinged or perverse.)
Anyway, it's a fascinating collection--all over the place in terms of genres and directors and arguments--and there's a lot to ponder. Modleski's piece in particular gets into some reconsidering of traditional feminist film theory (and feminist theory more broadly), which is exciting (and very appropriately ends with the demand for bad girls to unite). Good, interesting stuff.
As the volume's title declares, these are explorations of the margins (of cinema, of taste, etc.), but all of the contributors (at least the ones I read) express a nuanced understanding of how these "margins" are constructed and of the various interrelated registers of culture (high/low/art/mass/camp/trash/etc.). I appreciated the emphasis on hybridity, especially in the article about Haynes: it's too often that cinema is viewed as points along a (wholly arbitrarily constructed) spectrum, with, say, Russ Meyer at one end, one of my beloved mid-20th-century Europeans at the other, and Hitchcock or Welles squarely in the middle.
(Actually, this is something that I felt pretty strongly when reading Greg Taylor's "Pure Quidditas or Geek Chic? Cultism as Discernment." If cinematic geekdom has two extremes [using the spectrum above as the model:], my interests are located at the Artsy end...and yet I feel an incredible affinity for my fellow geeks at the Sleazy end. We're basically in the same boat: waiting for obscure treasures to show up in theaters or on DVD, endlessly picking apart scenes and fragments and trivia, obsessively educating ourselves and defending our predilections even when those around us--who just watch movies the way Normal People watch movies--think we're unhinged or perverse.)
Anyway, it's a fascinating collection--all over the place in terms of genres and directors and arguments--and there's a lot to ponder. Modleski's piece in particular gets into some reconsidering of traditional feminist film theory (and feminist theory more broadly), which is exciting (and very appropriately ends with the demand for bad girls to unite). Good, interesting stuff.
February 20, 2026
This was the type of thing I've been wanting to read for ages but didn't know really existed. It's a collection of academic essays on "trash" cinema. As a trashophile myself it was fascinating to read such thoughtful breakdowns of such "bad" movies. Really covered a lot things I've always thought about but never really knew anyone in academia was even considering. For sure never thought I'd read an academic/philosophical essay about the Friday the 13th series!
December 27, 2024
neat book that my best friend slash roommate gifted me for christmas, my first time reading anything about film and i enjoyed it a lot.
January 29, 2025
Great series of essays on cinema marginal and exploitation film. Worth seeking out for the piece of Doris Wishman alone.
September 8, 2025
last chapter was starting to drag a bit
November 2, 2007
This is really a three and a halfer. I liked many of the essay, but thought that a number of them were underwritten or could have been better framed. The essay about synthesizer music in 80s horror films is fantastic, if a bit jargony at the outset.
May 1, 2010
Excellent collection of essays on various cult cinema topics, including a chapter on Doris Wishman, an argument for "Friday the 13th" as para-paracinema, and a really funny and fascinating examination of boredom in the giallo (specifically Umberto Lenzi's "Spasmo"). Highly recommended.
February 3, 2013
Sconce verbalizes in this book an idea I have called "The esthetic of Half-assery." Sconce calls it "Genius of poverty." My pal Jake Stroh calls it "low tech, high touch."
A few nice essays. Over-all, however, not my cup of tea.
A few nice essays. Over-all, however, not my cup of tea.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews