Landis: The Story of a Real Man on 42nd Street

by Preston Fassel

At the dawn of the 1980s, there was one serious name in horror and exploitation film criticism: Bill Landis. While other magazines were concerned with behind-the-scenes information, tributes, and SFX tutorials, Landis' Sleazoid Express was one part film journal and one part anthropological study, seriously critiquing the grindhouse movies that played the theaters of 42nd Street while also documenting the dying subculture that had grown up around them. Profiled in Film Comment and Rolling Stone for his pioneering work, Landis' over-the-top "Mr. Sleazoid" persona and double-life as an adult film star masked the pain behind the excess: a child genius whose intellect alienated him from his peers; a sexual abuse survivor who numbed his trauma with drugs; a consummate outcast who only felt at home among other outcasts. After settling into life as a husband, father, and author in the 90s, it seemed that Landis had turned a corner-but the ghosts of Times Square were never far behind him.



Dead at the age of 49 on the eve of what should have been a successful comeback, his legacy has nominally been forgotten, most of his work lost, and his memory relegated to a footnote in journalism history. Now, award-winning author and journalist Preston Fassel (Our Lady of the Inferno; Fangoria magazine; The Daily Grindhouse) pieces together the full story of his life for the first time, from his turbulent childhood, to his meteoric rise in the New York vice scene, to his tragic demise on the streets of Chicago.



Featuring exclusive interviews with Kurt Loder (MTV; Rolling Stone), Michael J. Weldon (Psychotronic Video), Art Ettinger (Ultra Violent Magazine), Carl Abrahamsson, Mike McPadden (Heavy Metal Movies; Teen Movie Hell), and others, plus excerpts from Landis' unpublished autobiographical novella Last Exit in Manattan and a reprint of Landis' seminal Fangoria interview with Andy Milligan, Landis at last pulls back the curtain on one of genre writing's most influential-yet unknown-figures.



In that lost, damned, golden age called the 80s, there was a movie star named Bobby Spector and a writer named Mr. Sleazoid. Most importantly, there was a man named Bill Landis. This is his story.

Genres: Film, Biography, Nonfiction

148 pages, Paperback

First published December 7, 2021

About the author

Preston Fassel is an award-winning novelist and journalist whose work has appeared in Fangoria, Rue Morgue, and Screem Magazine. He is a two-time winner of the Independent Publisher's Gold Medal for Horror, for Our Lady of the Inferno (which was also named one of the ten best books of 2018 by Bloody Disgusting) and The Despicable Fantasies of Quentin Sergenov. His debut nonfiction book, Landis: The Story of a Real Man on 42nd Street, the first published biography of film critic and magazine founder Bill Landis, was nominated for the 2022 Rondo Hatton Award for Book of the Year. He graduated Cum Laude from Sam Houston State University in 2011 with a BS in psychology. He held the Tetris world record for like five months in 2009.

Reviews

[Dave Fitzgerald · Rating 5 out of 5]

Y’all will have to bear with me on this one – I’ve never reviewed a nonfiction book before – but after tripping gleefully through Landis, author Preston Fassel’s delirious new biography of Bill Landis, in a single, all-too-brief sitting, I decided to go ahead and give it a whirl. A renaissance man with a Roman orgy sensibility, Landis is best known for founding Sleazoid Express, an intermittent, underground zine dedicated to bringing attention, and perhaps more than that even, respect, to the now well-codified genre of Grindhouse cinema. At a time when New York’s 42nd street movie palaces were often written off as seedy, unserious establishments frequented by degenerates and ne’re-do-wells, Landis took the reins in not only covering them, but lionizing them as bastions of outsider art, unconsidered and overlooked by the mainstream critical elite. His contributions to the counterculture were, quite frankly, enormous, and Fassel’s loving and meticulous account of his circuitous path to notoriety is more compelling than a number of novels I read this year (it helps when your real-life subject is as batshit bananas as Bill Landis). As an on-again/off-again movie critic myself, with a decade of experience and a degree in Film Studies, perhaps the biggest surprise of all in this book full of delightful and bizarre surprises was that I’d never heard of the guy before now.

Bill Landis lived more lives in his allotted time on Earth than most people would dare attempt. He was a neglected, itinerant military brat as a kid. A proto-finance-bro and sex club hedonist during his teens and twenties. A junkie. A porn star. An honorary gang member. A publisher. A producer. A husband. A friend. But the Bill Landis that strung all these strung out personae together – the Bill Landis whose legacy lives on to this day – is the one who repped the Deuce; the elusive, but omnipresent Grand Marshal of Manhattan’s last hurrah of unseemly, ungentrified weird. The anecdotes Fassel pulls together here (in particular the ones about Landis’s amateur porn sets, and his late-in-life adoption by a Dominican drug cartel) are indicative of a man perpetually tightroping the razor’s edge – an obsessive seeker who somehow both died too young, and also far outkicked his coverage with regards to surviving his own wild proclivities. As his story winds its way from Europe to New York to Florida to Chicago and back around again, a clear picture of Bill Landis emerges as the kind of hard-bitten, single-minded genius who is as difficult to work with as he is impossible to deny. Frenzied, but disciplined. Voracious, but tender. Cantankerous, but principled. Impossible, but true.

Frequently compared to the late, great Hunter S. Thompson throughout the book, Landis’s style evolved over the course of his career from one that applied a traditional critical eye to low-budget horror and exploitation cinema – shining a flattering blacklight on unheralded filmmakers like Andy Milligan and Joel Reed – to one that drew on his own lived experience in and around 42nd street, as well as that of the pimps, hustlers, dealers, and addicts he came to know and love so well. His writing spawned idolaters and imitators, but none of the many fans, acquaintances, and collaborators Fassel interviewed for this book recall any of Bill’s contemporaries with anywhere near the same reverence as they do Sleazoid Express. Original issues are hard to come by to this day, and we undoubtedly have it to thank for any number of would-be-forgotten midnight movies of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, as well as the subsequent success of modern auteurs like Robert Rodriguez, Rob Zombie, Quentin Tarantino, S. Craig Zahler, and Jeremy Saulnier. And however you may feel about those names, I for one am grateful to know the fascinating story behind the man that made them household, grateful for all of the weirdass movies he helped them find, and grateful for all the intermediaries he inspired in between, up to and including Fassel himself, and his own heartfelt contributions to the Grindgeist. Landis was a true iconoclast – a man who saw something no one else saw, and come Hell or high water, found a way to share it with the world – and Landis is a worthy tribute.

[Danger]

I thought this was really great, both as a fascinating portrait of a bygone era, and as a piece of biographical journalism. As much as I love exploitation cinema and those old scuzzy New York vibes, I'm kinda glad my window into it is of a vicarious nature - through stories like this, and through the art itself. They really did seem like the bad ol' days, and as such, this book is written with both realness, rawness, and reverence. Good stuff.

[Rob Saucedo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Breezy, informative and deeply sympathetic biography.

[Kevin Hoover · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic read for anyone hoping to expand their horizons and learn more about exploitation cinema and the man whose life’s work it was to celebrate the perfect imperfections of 42nd Street.

[Adrienne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review coming soon to Phantastiqa.com

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Preston Fassel's biography "Landis: The Story of a Real Man on 42nd Street" is a compulsive page turner, so much so that I had to put it down and take a little break every now and then so I wouldn't start skimming through it. I wanted to savor it - it was that good. Fassel's subject, Bill "Mr Sleazoid" Landis ,was a New York-based film critic best known for his groundbreaking work on grindhouse cinema.

I've always enjoyed reading about the New York publishing scene in the 70s and early 80s, and this book is a very welcome addition to the body of literature documenting that era. I don't know if it was entirely by design, but Fassel hit the sweet spot in terms of book length. It is a great portrait of Landis, but not so detailed that it would overwhelm a reader (such as myself) who is unfamiliar with his work.

[Preston · Rating 5 out of 5]

Obligatory glowing self review here

[Gavcrimson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The fact that few people getting into exploitation and grindhouse movies these days have ever heard the name Bill Landis is nothing short of a travesty. One that the book ‘Landis: The Story of a Real Man on 42nd Street’ seeks to rectify.

If Bill Landis is remembered by the average cineaste today, it is for his 2002 book ‘Sleazoid Express: A Mind Twisting Tour through the Grindhouse Cinema of Times Square’, but Landis’ writing and the Sleazoid name (a concatenation of ‘sleaze’ and ‘celluloid’) dates back to June 1980. It was then, in NYC, that Landis began Sleazoid Express as a newsletter, initially documenting his viewing activities on 42nd Street, before expanding it into a zine that went on to include his misadventures in drug use and porn acting. Time hasn’t been kind to many of those early grindhouse zines. These days when whole books, audio commentaries and documentaries are dedicated to once obscure horror and exploitation films, those tiny, capsule reviews in no-frill zines, written at a time when information on such movies was still in its infancy, are hardly going to pass muster with a 21st century audience. Sleazoid Express, on the other hand, has grown into a vital, warts and all, historic document of the heaven and hell of 42nd Street, a window into a world that no longer exists, and now can only be experienced through the rented eyes of those who were around back then. When it came to giving you the lowdown on what it was like to take your life in your own hands by entering those movie theatres, befriending the area’s most extreme characters or embarking on a porn career in the dying embers of the porno chic era, those early Sleazoids leave you in no doubt that the rented eyes of Bill Landis were the best in town. The original run of Sleazoid Express went out with a bang in 1985, with the incredible “Ecco: The Story of a Fake Man on 42nd Street” issue (from which this book gets its name). Entirely about Landis’ descent into drug use and porn acting, with Landis referred to throughout as ‘Joe Monday’ or ‘The Quiet Man’, Ecco also proved eerily prophetic of Landis’ own death, from a heart attack at the age of 49. “The Quiet Man died at the movies Sunday night of an apparent heart attack. Witnesses claim it happened during a revival house showing of The Magic Christian, a 70s sex comedy with Racquel Welch and Ringo Starr. The scene in particular was one in which Ringo is lording over a slave ship comprised of semi-naked women clad in fetishistic outfits. It was around this time the quiet man gasped ‘Its better...better than the stills...’ and, clutching his chest, fell from his seat dead”.

Its impossible to be exposed to Landis’ work and not end up a little bit obsessed by the man himself and the times he inhabited. Preston Fassel, the author of Landis: The Story of a Real Man on 42nd Street, is a man who has been bitten by the Landis bug more than most. Spending several years chasing Landis’ ghost and putting together as comprehensive a document of Landis’ life as is humanly possible. A complex character with an often combative personality (to put it mildly) Landis left a legacy of broken relationships, bad memories and ill feelings, and as such those who knew him haven’t exactly been falling over themselves to talk Landis and Sleazoid in the years since his death. As Fassel notes, the Covid-19 pandemic and the death of Landis’ arch-nemesis Joel M Reed (director of Bloodsucking Freaks) proved the catalyst that shook the old guard into contemplating their own mortality and opening up about the past “the other survivors were suddenly eager to make sure their stories of that time got to live on”.

Talking Bill here are fellow early 1980s zine publishers Michael J Weldon (Psychotronic), Jim Morton (Trashola), film collector Ron Roccia (of ‘Mad Ron’s Prevues from Hell’ trailer compilation fame) as well as journalist Kurt Loder, whose Rolling Stone article helped publicise the zines of Landis and Weldon. Representing the second wave of exploitation film zines are Art Ettinger (Ultra Violent), Keith Crocker (The Exploitation Journal) and Mike McPadden (Happyland). Curiously, Landis is remembered as competitive and critical of the rival zines that were around during Sleazoid’s first run- particularly Rick Sullivan’s Gore Gazette- “they couldn’t stand each other” recalls Weldon of Landis and Sullivan, yet encouraging and supportive of the ones that followed Sleazoid’s initial demise.

Covid-19 and the death of Joel Reed (once described to me in an email from Landis as “a venal, non-human”) may have prized open the jaws of many, but there are still a few notable no-shows in this book. Attempts to involve Landis’ widow and latter day co-writer Michelle Clifford clearly met with radio silence. Likewise Fassel got no dice from Landis and Clifford’s daughter, Victoria ‘Baby Sleazoid’ Landis, while Jimmy McDonough –Landis’ main collaborator during the original 1980-85 Sleazoid run- also pled the fifth. The absence of Clifford is perhaps to be expected, given that she totally dropped out of the public eye several years ago, but the lack of input from McDonough –who has hardly been tight lipped about Landis and Sleazoid in recent interviews- is more surprising. As such, Landis: The Story of a Real Man on 42nd Street, does contain several empty spaces in the Landis story, that leaves both the reader and Fassel himself wanting to know more, but coming up against a brick wall. That isn’t to say there aren’t many new revelations that Fassel brings to the table here. The rise and fall of the original incarnation of Sleazoid Express may be a well told tale, but Fassel breaks new ground when it comes to charting the Landis story following the 2002 Sleazoid book. A heartbreaking, but eye opening, final act that Fassel manages to piece together thanks to the acquisition of Landis’ final, unpublished work. A semi-autobiographical novella called ‘Last Exit in Manhattan’ that finds Landis embracing Catholicism, suffering a relapse into drug addiction, being separated from his wife and daughter, a stint in psychiatric care and embarking on a new career as a lookout for a Dominican drug gang. A fate that even Landis’ worst enemy (and there sure were enough competitors for that title) may have thought twice about wishing upon him. Against considerable odds, Landis: The Story of a Real Man on 42nd Street, therefore represents Fassel’s attempt to write something of a happy ending for Landis, by bringing the man and his writing back into the public conscious. In Fassel’s eyes Landis was a great American writer, whose work has for too long been the subject of neglect and scorn. Fassel has nothing but praise for Landis’ writing, describing the Sleazoid book as “the apotheosis of all of Bill’s writing on the deuce and exploitation cinema”. He also paints Landis as a man who was ahead of his time, especially when it came to LGBT issues, and was crucified because of it. Landis was championing gay filmmaker Andy Milligan, and singing the praises of gay pornographer Toby Ross in the pages of Sleazoid, at a time when the majority of horror/exploitation focused publications either refused to touch gay themed material, or regarded it with homophobic contempt. It’s a stance that, Fassel claims, led to Landis’ quick fall from grace within the early pages of Fangoria magazine. While an interview with Andy Milligan made it into the magazine (and is re-printed at the end of this book for the first time since 1982) a proposed piece about the films of Toby Ross went down like a lead balloon with ‘Uncle’ Bob Martin, the then editor of Fangoria. Martin becomes quite the villain of the piece in Landis: The Story of a Real Man on 42nd Street, where it is suggested Martin was so incensed by the Ross article that he not only forever blacklisted Landis from the pages of Fangoria, but pestered other magazines into following suit. Thus, depriving Landis of any chance of a mainstream writing career. While this goes unmentioned in the book, it is worth noting that Martin’s vendetta against Landis also spread to the film Geek Maggot Bingo (1983) in which Martin briefly appears as a character based on Landis, a fact explicitly acknowledged in the end credits of that film “Bill Landis imitation courteousy (sic) of Bob Martin”.

Landis: The Story of a Real Man on 42nd Street emerges as a far more compassionate portrayal of the man than has come across in recent books which have touched on the subject, such as Xerox Ferox (about the 1980s fanzine scene) and Bloodsucking Freak: The Life and Films of the Incredible Joel M Reed, which finally saw Reed break his silence and give his side on his legendary feud with Landis. Perhaps mindful of selling Landis to a modern, politically correct audience, Landis: The Story of a Real Man on 42nd Street, side steps some of the more outrageous Landis stories that are out there. Those of the type that risk turning him into an object of ridicule, or that may prove counterproductive in a book that sets out to praise rather than bury him. So, no mention of the perversely amusing story about Landis’ cross-dressing impersonation of Jimmy McDonough’s girlfriend (hilariously recounted by McDonough himself in Xerox Ferox) and the perverse but not so amusing story about Landis’ online harassment of late 00’s internet personality Nekromistress (alluded to in Mike McPadden’s 2008 obit of Landis, and which I can still vividly recall seeing played out all over the internet).

If there is a downside to Landis: The Story of a Real Man on 42nd Street, and it isn’t at all the fault of the book or Fassel himself, it is that it creates a hunger for Landis’ original writing that a Sleazoid newbie will find hard to satisfy. While the Sleazoid book remains readily available, ‘Anger’ Landis’ 1995 biography of underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger has slipped out of print, and issues of Sleazoid Express itself have become rare as hen’s teeth, even in reproduced form. As this book hints, attempts to have them officially re-printed in book form are currently being stonewalled by certain parties. Leaving the bulk of Landis’ writing in limbo “for reasons that have as much to do with the legal as they do with the esoteric”.

Bringing Sleazoid back from the brink might be beyond everyone’s reach at the moment, but Fassel isn’t prepared to let Landis be forgotten without a fight. As an exercise in raising Landis’ profile, and attempting to restore his status as an important, if not THE most important commentator on exploitation cinema, Landis: The Story of a Real Man on 42nd Street, is a commendable piece of investigative journalism, delivered with a massive amount of heart and love for the man. All these years on from Ecco: The Story of a Fake Man on 42nd Street, everybody’s (still) talking about ‘Joe Monday’.

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Take a walk on the wild side with Bill Landis as your guide through the haunts of 42nd St. Part exploration of a life cut short and the pains of feeling like an outsider, part celebration of film writing on underbelly film genres and dives into a dying subculture, Fassel's Landis will have you tracking down scanned  copies of Sleazoid Express and other horror fanzines as soon as you flip through the last page. It finally made me track down a copy of Xerox Ferox at least.


Love the included Andy Milligan deep dive Fangoria interview as well on the works of another almost forgotten  gutter artist.

[Gabriel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have to talk about Bill Landis before I talk about LANDIS by Preston Fassel. I first discovered Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford through their book SLEAZOID EXPRESS, a chronicle of the films that played in the last decade or so of the theaters in New York's Times Square neighborhood, or the Deuce as it was known by locals. The writing was fun, easy to read, irreverent, and insightful. It described a time and place that had been wiped out by political deals, then by bulldozers and finally by ubiquitous corporate sponsorship. In the pages of SLEAZOID EXPRESS, the Deuce lived. The book wasn't a misty nostalgic indulgence, but a memorial and honest remembrance. To read it, is to know the Deuce, and a little of its authors- or at least as much as they allowed to be known.
About a year after I read SLEAZOID EXPRESS, Bill Landis died in Chicago. I was shocked and heartbroken. He felt like a kindred soul, the kind of person I could have talked with for a few minutes at the Grand Illusion or the Ken before watching a revival of some cinematic curiosity that rarely gets screened and probably won't for another ten years. While I was running a blog (on MuSpace in its last moments before we all went to fucking FaceBook) about San Diego movie theaters- inspired partly by SLEAZOID EXPRESS- I wrote a few words about Landis when I heard he died. His widow, Michelle Clifford, sent me a message thanking me. I couldn't continue the blog after that. How could I? I was shocked. The blog and the message are long gone, but I think of them often. And of course, I think of Bill Landis.
Bill Landis has not been forgotten. Author Preston Fassel spent three years researching and interviewing people that knew Landis through the good years, and the bad years. He manages to bring a narrative to the life of a man which had eluded such attempts. We learn of his awful childhood of emotional torment and sexual abuse, and then his time drawn to the Deuce and the original years of SLEAZOID EXPRESS when it was just a 'zine (thankful Fassel gives the internet generation a quick lesson on what 'zines were). You'd think this would lead to fame and fortune… and it leads to something, but there are things that happen along the way.
There's a drug problem and a brief career in porn as a "stunt cock." Fassel recounts these in unflinching detail, and the effects they would have on Landis. It's heartbreaking to read as you're given firsthand accounts by people (a couple of which passed on before the book was published) who knew Landis in these bleak moments.
Fassell also recounts Landis' relationship with wife and muse, Michelle Clifford. It is this part of the book that stumbles, but then, it has to. Despite attempts by Fassel to reach Clifford she chose not to participate, nor did her and Landis' daughter Victoria Landis choose to participate (Clifford has a Twitter account, but it's been dormant since 2017 https://twitter.com/SleazoidExpress). Their input would have been invaluable and made this careful book longer and more impressive than its compact 120 pages already is.
The price is a mere ten US dollars, and unfortunately with such a cost some things are left out.
I would have loved to see some pictures of Clifford and Landis around the Deuce, some pictures of the theaters of the area, and maybe even a map of the environ Landis inhabited.
Now, knowing what I know now, would I have still written about Landis as I did so many years ago? Yes. Anyone that manages to overcome the demons Landis had deserves praise. He turned his torment into writing that I and many others will never forget and gave life to a time and place that no longer exist. Wherever you are sir, I hope the prints are good and the audience is roaring.

[Katelyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Every year I try to think of reading goals. Usually, they boil down to simply reading more of something. More in number, more by diverse authors, more distinct genres. This year I’ve decided to get serious about tackling my imposter syndrome by reading at least one book a month about a subject I have always had an interest in but been too shy to approach for fear that I “don’t know enough about it” to merit reading it, as if foreknowledge was some kind of requirement. A little bit like the idea of being discouraged when starting a new hobby and not immediately being good at it. When I was younger, I read everything voraciously. It didn’t matter if I knew anything about it or if I was even technically old enough to understand it; if it was words on a page, I would be there to puzzle through it. Naturally, I developed favorites, but if you don’t break from what you know you can never grow, and there’s plenty to be learned from grappling with the unfamiliar.

In the spirit of that, I have started my journey into the great literary unknown with Preston Fassel’s newest work, Landis, a biography of one of exploitation film’s most legendary and tragic critics, Bill Landis. One of the greatest plot twists of my life is my budding career into horror analysis and criticism, but I am on the babiest of first steps when it comes to knowing anything about what is generally considered “exploitation” film. As such, I had no idea whatever about who Bill Landis was before this book. I’d never even really heard the name before. My niche interest area in horror tiptoes right to the edge of exploitation cinema, but I have only just started breaking down the door. As a result, Landis was a kind of ultimate intimidation: a seminal look at a man I’ve never heard of who made an impact on an area of genre film that seemed, if not over my head, at least over the line of my sensibilities. But nearly all monsters-of-impossible-size are created in our minds, and behind them is just a person looking to be understood. So it is with Landis.

The picture of Bill Landis painted in Fassel’s biography is kaleidoscopic and complicated. Turn this way to see punk-style film criticism. Flip around to see passionately knowledgeable film fan. Turn that way to see adult film star. Look deep enough into the center and find the tragic, hungry soul underneath it all. At any given point in time, you can’t have one piece without all the others. Perhaps to Bill Landis’s own credit, however, each facet of himself was nestled under a different pseudonym. But they were all, at their heart, just Bill trying to find connection through what he loved the most, even if the connection he sought was just one with himself. In a way, Fassel’s biography opens up a whole new avenue of possibility there. While certainly the intended audience is more likely people familiar with Bill and his work, the larger scope and approachable style of the book lends itself to people like me — who’ve never heard of him before or who are maybe less familiar with his impact on genre criticism — discovering the man behind the layers of myth he built around himself.

Reading Landis was an act of near-constant confrontation with my own ideas and biases about both exploitation and adult film. If there were an area of film about which I would claim total ignorance, adult film would be it. While I have grown out of most of my preconceived notions from younger years, the expectations that result from consuming it (usually, in my experience, on the part of boys/men) has had enough of an impact on my life to make me set it aside. I am by no means necessarily anti-porn. I am only of the belief that we should remember even it is only make believe. Landis’s exploration into that area of Bill’s life was a moment of confronting myself in part because it was shown to be both something he passionately pursued for himself and something that would ultimately have a hand in his destruction. Not an unexpected combination, perhaps, for an industry interested primarily in the payoff rather than development, but tragic nonetheless. More than that, though, Bill Landis found merit in it in a way I hadn’t ever considered.

While I have a bit more experience now with exploitation films, I am still only just beginning to familiarize myself with the genre and its amorphous qualifications. I have, on the whole, stumbled into my exploration at the right time in my life. Had I been any younger I would probably not have been as open-minded or willing to suspend my disbelief on the screen in favor of trying to understand the story. We all have our limits, after all. But as I go along my journey as a film fan and analyst — such as I am — I find myself more able, the further I go, to see past what would have scared me away and into the depths of what’s really going on. Sometimes “what’s really going on” is nothing. Sometimes the curtains really are just blue. But sometimes the only way to get your point out into the world is to paint it an attractively grimy color and shove it in people’s faces. The right people will understand, and everyone else will come along in time.

What Bill taught me through Landis (and what, in fairness, I am constantly learning from Preston) is that exploitation cinema might be one of the genre’s more grotesque looking creatures, but that’s only because it isn’t shy about itself. To watch exploitation films is to be confronted by them. It seems to me that’s part of why what makes something “exploitation” is so ambiguous. If it feels like exploitation film, it probably is. But being confronted with a truth is never a bad thing. Just because it may be uncomfortable to see doesn’t make it necessarily wrong to show. Exploitation cinema is an unapologetic art form, but it is an art form, and not one we should dismiss or ignore for its appearance. Bill made sure the world of genre criticism knew that, and through Landis he continues to espouse its value today.

The thing about being a horror fan — or even just a film fan with no genre allegiance — in a minority group of any kind is that sometimes the only places you can find yourself onscreen are in the deep, dark corners no one else wants to look, and if you want to make people understand them you have to probe not just why those areas and characters exist, but what makes them important. What value they bring to the piece of art you’re consuming. That value will be different for every new audience member, but what matters is that you acknowledge it. Even before or alongside reckoning with his own amorphously queer, ambiguously-heritaged identity, Bill Landis seems to have understood that, and understood the value in finding the audience who would go into the crevices with you and come out the other side hugging the monster.

To read Landis is to encounter a man decades ahead of his time in terms of analysis. Bill Landis seems to have been approaching social justice and identity issues in film way before it became the slightly more common practice it is now. Perhaps more than that, he seems to have been unafraid to approach criticism and analysis from a personal lens. When everyone else was looking at the practical elements that went into making film (and didn’t require a lot of in-depth confrontation with self), he was presenting his opinions and exploring the value of the things and people no one wanted to look at head-on.

As messy, and tragic, and unapologetically contradictory as Bill Landis’s life was, he was paving the way for the kind of analysis I can’t even help but do long before any of us thought it was possible. He was making it not only possible, but legitimate. And for that, if anything, I suppose I should thank him, wherever he is. Passion makes progress. Passion paves paths. Now if you’ll excuse me, I guess I have to go board the Sleazoid Express and see what else he’s got to say…

[Jacob Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jesus Christ that was an absolute roller-coaster ride. Early childhood sexual abuse. BDSM relationships and sex clubs of New York regular. Infiltrated the New York underground art scene. Trailblazing film criticism in the style of Hunter S under the moniker Mr Sleazoid. Gender and sexual identity discussed before there were even words to describe what he was talking about. Championing disregarded directors. A brief stint in the porn industry and even comes a well respected stunt cock. Insane drug addiction. Almost OD's. Finds fellow writing wife. Has kid. Achieves some mainstream success. Relapses. Becomes drug dealers scout. Turns to religion as final saviour. Dies. My kind of fella is Mr Sleazoid. Sad he was such a tortured soul. I hope he's found peace in the big grindhouse in the sky. RIP Bill Landis. They don't make em like that any more.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short and sweet bio of a man most people don't know about anymore. Bill Landis was walking the streets of The Deuce and treating grindhouse films as art when Tarantino was still dreaming of working at a video store. Fassel is obviously a huge admirer of Landis, but this is a "warts and all" biography. The man did a lot of keep the idea of of the 42nd Street grindhouses and the crazy films they showed alive, but he was a mess. So much so that it took COVID for people to start to want to talk about him. His wife and daughter wouldn't answer requests for interviews. The last couple of years of his life are sort of a mystery.

But Fassel filled in the blanks as well as he could and managed to write a pretty complete portrait of Landis and his many demons. Not bad for a book that's not even 150 pages long.

[Christopher Owens · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://www.thepensivequill.com/2022/...

[Blair Hoyle]

I wasn't overly familiar with Bill Landis' work before reading this biography. Now I'm gonna need to track down some issues of Sleazoid.

[Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I started this book I was like wow this guy reminds me of a grimier version of a friend of mine named Art.. Then the uncanny happened. The enigma of Ettinger maybe Preston needs to write a book on him next. I had this to be read for quite some time as the subject matter is close to my heart with my love of exploitation cinema and the seedier side of life but had been reading more fiction recently. I will be reading more from this Author definitely

[Justin Decloux · Rating 5 out of 5]

An essential book about one of the kings of treating exploitation cinema with respect and thoughtfulness, as he struggled with his own personal demons. When I heard that someone was writing a book about Bill Landis, I couldn't but wonder "A whole book?", but I was proven wrong, and I'm all the happier for it.

[Tomasz · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely, tender, but incisive, but also restrained tribute to an interesting person of NY alternative culture scene at the end of the 20th century. Could use some editing, but, hey, the occasional clumsy wording works in the context of Landis' own publications.

[Blake Monahan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A well written homage to Bill Landis and the Sleazoid history.

[Michaelpaulhermann · Rating 1 out of 5]

any books that uses the phrase "toxic masculinity" can not be taken seriously.

[Rob Sevier · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of extremely niche interest and more a supplement to the Sleazoid Express book written by Landis and Michelle Clifford, but lovingly and thoroughly researched.