Sleazoid Express: A Mind-Twisting Tour Through the Grindhouse Cinema of Times Square

by Bill Landis, Michelle Clifford

Warning: Watch your wallets and stay out of the bathroom!
In a bygone era, when Times Square was crammed with porn shops, gun stores, and drug pushers, disenfranchised moviegoers flocked to the grindhouses along 42nd Street. If the gore epics, women-in-prison films, and shockumentaries showcased within their mildewed walls didn't live up to their outrageous billing, the audience shouted, threw food, and even vandalized the theaters. For dedicated lovers of extreme cinema, buying a movie ticket on the Deuce meant putting your life on the line.
Authors Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford came to know those grindhouses better than anyone else, and although the theaters were gone by the mid-1980s, the films remained. In Sleazoid Express, Landis and Clifford reproduce what no home video can -- the experience of watching an exploitation film in its original fight-for-your-life Deuce setting. Both a travelogue of the infamous grindhouses of yore and a comprehensive overview of the sleaze canon, Sleazoid Express offers detailed reviews of landmark exploitation classics and paints intimate portraits of directors whose notorious creations played the back end of triple bills for years on end. With wit, intelligence, and an unflinching eye, Landis and Clifford offer the definitive document of cinema's most intense and shocking moments as they came to life at a legendary place.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction, Media Tie In, History, Horror, Art

336 pages, Paperback

First published November 19, 2002

Reviews

[Jordan West · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book succeeds at providing a fascinating, warts and all examination of the old-school grindhouse theaters, but unfortunately typos and errors are fairly plentiful, and the individual films and genres covered have been the subject of more thorough, superiorly written studies such as RE/Search's Incredibly Strange Films, The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, Stephen Thrower's Nightmare USA, and the Andy Milligan biography. Also, despite the authors' undeniable enthusiasm for their subject, their critical judgments leaves a lot to be desired; I mean, declaring Umberto Lenzi (of Ghosthouse and Nightmare City infamy) "king of the giallos" ? Still, its entertaining, if far from required, reading for fans of classic horror/grindhouse/extreme cinema.

[Willy Boy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing. Anyone can write about Grindhouse, very few actually live it - and survive to tell the tale. As much a chronicle of the seedy theaters, 'colorful' filmmakers and distributors, and the denizens of Times Square in the 1980s as it is of the films themselves. Sleazoid Express had hardcore commitment, went beyond fandom and film criticism into a furious embedded journalism, eventually disappearing into the screen itself. I recommend this book to everyone, it is the definitive word on Grindhouse. Accept no substitute!

[Cinematic Cteve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredible journey to the sordid heart of sleazy exploitation cinema once shown round the clock at the crossroads of the world. This is the milieu of Taxi Driver, of Midnight Cowboy and The French Connection and The Taking of Pelham, 1, 2, 3, when NYC was a genuinely dangerous place, the Theater District in particular. Watching HBO's new series The Deuce led me to discover this book, which I bought immediately. It's an enjoyable but tawdry reference work on scuzzy, no-budget movies and the sticky theaters that screened them two generations ago, when Times Square was wall-to-wall with lost souls and hustlers peddling fantasies in glorious old movie palaces gone to seed on 42nd St.

The Deuce has long since been cleaned up, polished and sanitized. A Madame Tussaud's wax museum stands on the south side of 42nd between 7th and 8th, and a BB King blues club welcomes tourists across the street. There's a Hard Rock Cafe around the corner and a Walgreen's at the other end of the block on the corner of 7th, but there's no longer anything approximating the sense of adventure that used to accompany an adrenaline rush on a walk along the Deuce. Some may remember that giddy surge borne on the belief that anything could happen here, in this little stretch of Midtown -- though now it no longer can. Turning Times Square over to Disney is like neutering a wolf. The thrill is gone.

A minor lament: the book delivers mainly capsule reviews of mostly forgotten films; I would have liked more detailed you-are-there accounts of what it was really like to roam those two blocks of 42nd St. between 6th and 8th Avenues, say, around 1975. Old photographs of the era show individuals who appear by turns either so depraved or smacked out of their minds on heroin that there appears to be no hope for any of them. Focus on the backgrounds and you might catch a glimpse of out-of-town rubes maybe 30 seconds away from getting their pockets picked, or worse.

So. Just to illustrate my complaint with one query, I want to know: what was it like to venture after a movie into the Terminal Bar a block away on 41st and 8th for a shot of rye? Gone some 35 years, the Terminal was reputed to be one of the most violent bars on earth. Who went in there? Why did some people not come out alive? Surely there must be yellowing police records containing information that could put flesh on these skeletons. My crazy uncle took me on a walking tour of Times Square in broad daylight when I was 10 years old and it blew my mind. To his credit, Uncle Joe never let me out of his sight.

Anthropological questions about old New York, New York get short shrift in this otherwise fine book about some of the weirdest motion pictures ever made and the equally strange venues for their exhibition. Maybe I'm asking too much of a movie reference book, although the title promises a travelogue into the surrealistic bowels of urban hell.

By the late 1970s the Deuce was overrun with porn theaters and massage parlors, and theaters showing strange grindhouse films of grisly horror, eurotrash erotica and kung fu foolishness were on the decline. These films live now only in my memories and in the handful of itchy & scratchy DVDs I've managed to acquire. Jess Franco remains a perennial favorite, as well as select examples of Italian Giallo, oozing with R-rated sex and X-rated gore, but the gold standard for insane violence has got to be the Lone Wolf and Cub series, a grindhouse staple at disreputable cinemas that today is part of the Criterion Collection, a boutique home-media entertainment company devoted to important, classic and arthouse cinema. Criterion headquarters is far from the Deuce; it's over on Park Avenue, on the lower east side near Union Square. which has become no less gentrified than SoHo and Greenwich on the western end of lower Manhattan. Oh, how times have changed.

One thing hasn't: I confess to a dangerous and evidently incurable addiction to B-movies, the trashier the better. This book is like catnip to a voracious cineaste like me. Because we cannot feast on Bergman, Fellini and Godard alone. Recommended.

Right now I could really go for a triple feature of Venus in Furs, Kung Fu Zombie and Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS. And a large RC Cola for to slake my thirst.

[Grindhouse Mattie · Rating 3 out of 5]

What a great idea! A trip down the dangerous, mind numbing 42nd st. Deuce during it's heyday, the 60's and 70's. Sadly, it spends little time recreating Times Square in the days of the grind house and too much time with long winded synopses on the movies that played there, a great number of which I have seen and don't need to know what their about, and a few facts, I might add, were a bit off. Trust me, I know, but it's still a decent read.

[Gavcrimson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wasn’t of the generation that experienced the original Sleazoid Express zine firsthand, instead it was something you’d hear about in the fanzines and pro-zines that came after it, and were influenced by it. Beginning life as a newsletter, before a page increase transformed it into one of the earliest exploitation film zines on the block, Sleazoid Express would be name checked in the likes of Shock Xpress, Deep Red and a book called Killing for Culture. All of whom would speak of it in revered terms, building up this reputation of Sleazoid being the ultimate zine to have covered and documented 42nd Street and the sleaze movies that played there. As well as creating this mythology about the man behind the zine, Bill Landis, a fanatical devotee of exploitation cinema with a fearless dedication for seeking these movies out in the most dangerous places imaginable. In 1985, Landis added to his myth by largely disappearing from public view, following one last, legendary issue of Sleazoid called ‘Ecco- The Story of a Fake Man on 42nd Street’, which was all about his worsening drug habit and career in porn acting. After that, no one quite knew if Bill was alive or dead, whether he still walked the beat of his beloved 42nd Street, or whether he’d settled down to a respectable, 9 to 5 life. The only evidence people had that Bill was still around was the fact that they’d send cheques to his old PO BOX, in the hope that he’d mail out back issues of Sleazoid...and Bill being Bill would cash the cheques and send them nothing.

At the time though, finding anything other than anecdotal evidence of Sleazoid’s existence was nigh on impossible. I didn’t lay eyes on Bill’s writing until 1997, appropriately enough during my first and only trip to New York. I picked up a copy of his recently published Kenneth Anger biography, Bill’s big comeback as a writer, at the huge Virgin Megastore which was then in Times Square. While the focus of that book was on Anger’s life and work, there were so many references to exploitation movies that Bill sneaked into that book....Blood Feast, The Killing of America, Confessions of a Male Groupie, the softcore movie version of Anger’s Hollywood Babylon. You could just tell that Bill was still carrying a torch for those movies, one that had failed to be extinguished by the decade plus that had gone by since Sleazoid had expired. I did, but of course, use that New York trip to check out 42nd Street itself, which by then was just a ghost block of closed up grindhouses and porno cinemas. It was like going round the ruins of Pompeii, you’d navigate around the dusty remnants of what had once been a hedonistic, sexually decadent society. There were small, still active, pockets of the Sleazoid Empire around in 1997. Show World was still there, I think one or two gay porn theatres were still open. As well as a few cheap video shops, where the films that had once entertained Bill on 42nd Street had migrated to VHS. It was there you’d pick up the pinnacles of Sleazoid cinema like The Love Thrill Murders, Cry Uncle, Preacherman, plus mondo movies like Mondo Cane and Slave Trade in the World Today...all living on through the medium of crappy quality, EP recorded tape. As for 42nd Street itself though, it was dead and buried by 1997. This was the period where local poets were allowed to put their gibberish on the marquees of these closed down theatres. It was like walking into a scene from John Carpenter’s They Live, you’d look up at these marquees and see messages like ‘openess is dangerousness’, ‘Americans for disciplined behaviour will protect you’ and ‘never trust a man, or a beer, from Amsterdam’. So, I can make no claim to have experienced 42nd street in its heyday, but I was around to take a couple of photos of the funeral.

Then, much to everyone’s surprise, Bill brought Sleazoid Express back as a magazine in 1999, as a collaboration with his wife Michelle Clifford. Having missed out on Sleazoid first time around, and having missed out on 42nd street when it still had a pulse, there was no way I was going to lose my seat on the second incarnation of Sleazoid Express, even if it was $15 a ticket. As Michelle has herself said, Bill’s writing really does speak to you, while others just wrote about movies, he ripped the screen open. After Sleazoid Express, I never looked back, and everything else that I’d previously read about exploitation cinema and 42nd street suddenly felt very superficial and inauthentic in comparison. Then, after decades of banging the drum for the grindhouse era, the mainstream took notice and Bill and Michelle got a deal to do a book version of Sleazoid Express for Simon and Schuster. The book is the acumination of the cinematic obsessions that Bill had been writing about since the early 1980s- the Ilsa series, race hate movies, gendertwist movies, Andy Milligan- and by the time the book came about in 2002, he had acquired enough knowledge and material to do a chapter on each. As well as access to the likes of the Olga series and the Amero-Findlay movies, which had been largely inaccessible and impossible to see during the original run of the Sleazoid Express zine. The original zine had been a pioneering effort, as Bill says in the book, one of his motivations for starting the zine was that exploitation cinema was being ignored or reviled by mainstream film critics. So, Bill became one of a number of important early voices that would champion those films, all of whom came to prominence around roughly the same time. Sleazoid started in June 1980, Michael Weldon started Psychotronic not long after, and Joe Bob Briggs began his newspaper column in early 1982. To his credit when Joe Bob Briggs talks about those early days, he always shares the credit with Bill when it comes to being one of the first people to sing the praises of exploitation cinema, and see value in it. Joe Bob did tell me that he never actually met Bill, but there was some correspondence between the two of them for a while. He was aware of Bill’s reputation for falling out with people, although I don’t get the impression that those two fell out, because...well, people who got on the wrong side of Bill tend not to voluntarily name check him in public.

In a way, this is a book that I wish Bill had written back in the 1980s, around the same time as the Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film and the Re:Search: Incredibly Strange films books. Both of whom were seen as groundbreaking works that guided an entire generation in the direction of cult movies, and even helped define that term. Whereas by the time Bill got his act together and his book came out in 2002, Sleazoid Express was a little late to the party. Some of its subject matter, like the Ilsa series, Italian cannibal movies and Andy Milligan, having been a well trodden path by that point. Saying that, the Sleazoid Express book does often lead you, way off the beaten path, and I’d be amazed if anyone didn’t discover new movies thanks to this book. There are films here given loving coverage that are otherwise outright ignored or have little importance attached to them elsewhere. Where else would you see attention paid to The Love Butcher, Pets, Boarding House, Man Friday, The Psychopath or The Black Room. Sleazoid was always about ignoring popular trends, and instead seeking out such offbeat, and little known gems. The book does represent the crème de la crème that Bill discovered during his days on 42nd street, and spares you the cinematic garbage that he had to wade through in order to get to it. The original zine probably gives a more accurate idea of the gamble you took on 42nd street, and recorded all the good and bad experiences he had when it came to movie going. The timeline of the original Sleazoid Express corresponding with the appearance of lots of generic slasher movies and Porky’s imitations on 42nd street, where the entertainment value of Sleazoid tended to lie in Landis’ vitriolic put downs of those. There was none better than Bill Landis when it came to transferring feelings of intense hatred into print. In the book however, Bill wastes little space on what he didn’t like on 42nd street- I think the only notable movies to get savaged in it are The Grim Reaper and Lucio Fulci’s Zombie- instead the book seeks to capture the good times, the good films and the good memories. Landis tended to be difficult and misanthropic by nature, he made lots of enemies during his relatively short life, and fell out of love with many people along the way, but he never fell out of love with 42nd street or the movies that played there. The Sleazoid book might well be the most passionate, uncynical book about exploitation cinema ever written. Bill writes about movies like Blood Feast, The Corpse Grinders and Ilsa- She Wolf of the SS with the type of affection and unconditional love that your average person would only reserve for a significant other or a cherished family member. I think the sincerity of the Sleazoid book holds up well in that respect, compared to what would come along a few years down the line. When the 2007 movie called Grindhouse, inspired the hacks, the plagiarists and the disingenuous element to jump on the bandwagon and give their useless two cents worth on the subject. Don’t get me wrong I’m sure there are still many genuine and well meaning exploitation movie experts out there, but there are also lots of people who have no idea what they are talking about. People who are –in the words of Curtis Mayfield- ‘educated fools from uneducated schools’. When you see Youtube videos referring to films that never played grindhouses as ‘grindhouse classics’, faking firsthand knowledge of 42nd street theatres or bizarrely classifying the De Palma film ‘Casualties of War’ as an all time great exploitation movie, you have to worry about how clueless and ill-informed the next generation are going to be if these are the people they are learning from. Bill Landis –for all his many faults- was there and knew what did or what didn’t play well to the 42nd street crowd. His was an authentic voice, with the life qualifications to tell you what those theatres were like, what the clientele was like, what films provoked insults and wisecracks from the audience, and what was going on in the Men’s room. Warts n’ all details that, were it not for him, would now be lost to time. I think 42nd street was just one of those places where you really had to be there to write about it with any creditability. Bill remembered it all, and captured it all in his writing as well.

I will concede however that while the Sleazoid book does embody all that was great about Bill Landis, it does also embody all that was infuriating about him too. In his writing, Landis created an alter-ego for himself as ‘Mr Sleazoid’ a Ratso Rizzo type character, who was streetwise, had dirt on everyone and knew New York like the back of his hand. Unfortunately like Ratso Rizzo he wasn’t always the most trustworthy or reliable of person. This book has left an often headache inducing legacy for people who study this period, for whom Bill leaves the task of sorting the facts from the fiction in the book. There is allot of untrue material in the Sleazoid book, some no doubt the innocent result of Bill passing on bad info in good faith, other untruths and lies may have been more malicious in intent. There may even be an entire movie in this book that Landis made up. This brings us to the 64 thousand dollar Sleazoid question ‘does the movie ‘The Big Man’ actually exist?’ According to Landis this was a shocking, inter-racial hardcore film made in 1974 by Robert L. Roberts, the director of ‘Sweet Savior’, and yet even with the most obscure of the obscure exploitation movies there is usually some evidence of their existence. Whereas with The Big Man, I’ve never met anyone who has seen it, I’ve never seen a poster, a print ad, a review...there is nothing on this movie. I’m very, very happy to be proven wrong, but as the years have gone by, the more and more suspicious I’ve grown that The Big Man never had a life outside of Landis’ imagination. There are other instances where Bill might have been on the right track, but his detective work was a little off. For instance, he makes reference to David Durston, the director of I Drink Your Blood, having made a 3-D gay hardcore movie called Manhold. This film was, if you believe Bill, never released due to the fact that an actor in it got a mainstream gig in the Clint Eastwood film Escape from Alcatraz. Now, since this book has come out, newspaper ads and a contemporary review of Manhold have surfaced, and debunk the idea that this film was never released. Several online sources also claim that the film stars Deveren Bookwalter, best remembered as the main villain in The Enforcer, the third Dirty Harry movie. So, possibly Bill got the wrong Clint Eastwood movie, and looks to have been mistaken about Manhold being an unreleased film.

I suspect Bill’s big writing influence was Kenneth Anger, and the Sleazoid book should be approached as the 42nd street version of Hollywood Babylon. It’s a wonderfully lurid book to dip your brain into, but make sure you double-check everything you read before repeating it. The book is borderline libellous at times, and wonderfully so, especially when it comes to the Mondo Cane people. That’s not to say the Sleazoid book didn’t manage a few scoops that turned out to be accurate. The book marked the first time that Wes Craven had been linked to directing the hardcore movie ‘The Fireworks Woman’. A major revelation of Bill’s at the time, that has since begrudgingly become recognised as part of Craven’s filmography (there was even an easter egg reference to it in the latest Scream movie). Still, I’m sure many of the subjects of the Sleazoid book were not happy with the way they are depicted in its pages. Roger Watkins- the director of Last House on Dead End Street- is said to have taken offense to the suggestion that he had once filmed mental patients without their consent, but evidentially didn’t pursue this further, as the book was never been hit with legal action. Despite Bill and Michelle’s best efforts the Sleazoid book didn’t stir up the same level of trouble for them as the Kenneth Anger biography. Which Anger repeatedly tried to shut down, then when it did come out is meant to have resulted in Anger throwing a hex in Bill’s direction and placing a death curse on Bill. If Bill is to be believed, the Anger bio also resulted in him receiving cease and desist orders from the O.T.O (Ordo Templi Orientis), an occult organisation, whose attorney Chandler Warren had been, according to Bill, one of the producers of ‘The Headless Eyes’.

Both Bill and Michelle had this ‘you’re either with us or against us’ mentality when it came to old exploitation film people. They could either be their biggest supporter or their worst enemy. If filmmakers were nice to them, and would give them the time of day, they’d be looked on favourably in Sleazoid Express. If they gave them the cold shoulder, or caused them problems, as was the case with Lew Mishkin and the Troma people, Bill and Michelle would go after them in print. Then there were the extreme cases like Kenneth Anger and Joel M Reed, both of whom I believe, ended up regarding Bill as a out and out stalker. There is evidence of this ‘with us or against us’ attitude in the Sleazoid book’s chapter about the Amero-Findlay films, where they clearly think the world of John Amero, who had made himself available, and had been kind to them. On the other hand that chapter is deeply hostile to Roberta Findlay, who clearly wouldn’t give them the time of day, and as a result has her entire filmography outside of the Amero-Findlay films trashed as ‘boring’, ‘neurotic’, ‘beyond distasteful’. I do think Bill and Michelle were often guilty of letting their personal relationships with filmmakers, cloud their judgement when it came to their opinions on movies.

It should be said that Michelle Clifford –Mrs Sleazoid- was a phenomenal writer herself, I can never tell where Bill’s writing ends in the book and Michelle’s begins. In her own way, Michelle was also a pioneer, when she began to co-write the second incarnation of Sleazoid in 1999, there were few women writing about exploitation films and pornography. Unfortunately, while she shared Bill’s writing talent, she also shared his self-destructive ability to make enemies and burn bridges. She went after Bill Lustig, David Gregory, the UK publisher Headpress, those two Rialto Report people...all were on the receiving end of the black sperm of her vengeance. As a result Michelle is someone who has pretty much been erased from the history of female genre writers. She fought the law, and the law won.

Where I think the Sleazoid book excels, and is still vital, is coverage of movies that were around in the 2000s, but have since began to fall through the cracks. The Amero-Findlay films, the Olga series, the Ginger series and to an extent the Ilsa movies. All of which made it to DVD, but have yet to make the jump to Blu-Ray and streaming. As a result these aren’t films you tend to see people writing about these days, and it is debatable whether anyone could write about these films like Bill. You don’t have to be around the Sleazoid book for long to realise that Bill’s thing was S&M, making him the perfect audience for the Olga and Ginger movies, as well as being receptive to the more subtle S&M bent of movies like Spider Baby and the Brides of Blood, an aspect that would have gone over the head of your more vanilla movie goer.

A common complaint about the Sleazoid book is that it doesn’t really have an ending, and abruptly cuts off with a cryptic comment from Michelle “I miss getting lost while looking for what I came for”. Maybe when push came to shove, Bill and Michelle just couldn’t bring the curtains down on 42nd street, their love for that era and that place had no ending, therefore their book has no ending. As much as the Sleazoid book puts on a happy face, by claiming that the films that played 42nd street, lifeblood that ran through the veins of those theatres, survive and live on through VHS and DVD, I suspect a little bit of Bill died with 42nd street, long before the rest of him died in Chicago. Perhaps the finest eulogy for Sleazoid can be found in Bill’s own take on Andy Milligan’s Fleshpot on 42nd Street “a half brilliant, genuinely alienated relic of its time and its maker”. That’s what needs to go on the Sleazoid headstone.

[BEATS AND BLOOD · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fantastic book. The reviewer complaining about grammatical errors obviously doesn't get it.

What separates SLEAZOID EXPRESS from the other Exploitation Films books, is that it was written by Bill Landis, who lived and worked on 42nd Street as a projectionist.

Landis was actually there, watching these films on the big screen.

He was in the trenches.

With the junkies, the homeless , the johns, the chickenhawks, the weirdos, and the uptight squares, physically spooling 35mm prints of classic Exploitation films and projecting them on to the big screen.

He smelled the urine and witnessed true degrenerecy and lived to tell about it in this amazing book.

Easily one of my favorite books written on Exploitation film.

[Leftjab · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m interested in exploitation movies from the 60/70s – though I have to be honest, when sitting down to actually watch one, making it through a full 90 minute movie can be tough. Not because the content offends me or anything like that – the riper the better, in most cases – but typically they are boring. The lack of production values and ineptitude of the filmmaking turns them into a stiflingly boring 90 minutes, punctuated with clumsy gore and nudity. That said, the panning for gold aspect of exploitation films can lead to the odd diamond in the rough – I Drink Your Blood comes to mind. And full confession – the allure of some of the 70s exploitation leading ladies – Lynn Lowry, Candice Rialson, Claudia Jennings – can lift an otherwise dismal production. The Euro leaders of horror exploitation – Lucio Fulci, Jesus Franco, Jean Rollin – I like stills from their movies but sitting down and watching one from start to finish? That’s tough, unless some consciousness-altering substances are involved.

The writers of Sleazoid Express – who refer to themselves in the text and Mr. and Mrs. Sleazoid – have taken it on so you don’t have to. This is an extremely thorough recapitulation of hundreds of grindhouse exploitation movies from the 50s-80s. Home video was strike one for the phenomenon of grindhouse cinemas, strike two was the cleaning up of Times Square (though I don’t know the history of the grindhouse world in LA), and maybe strike three is the phenomenon of streaming. I really enjoyed the descriptions of the theaters and the owners/distributors – you can tell the authors know and love this world. They even get some nice digs at some other NYC film luminaries – Pauline Kael (a “snob”) and Lloyd Kaufman – I guess as the traditional grindhouse offerings were on the wane, Kaufman stepped it up with Street Trash and The Toxic Avenger – though there seems to be a wink-wink nudge-nudge aspect to Troma that doesn’t exist in the grindhouse “classics” of the 60s and 70s. (The authors sum up Toxic Avenger as “abysmal” and this is coming from people who spent 4 full pages on Blood Feast – which I have had the pleasure of seeing and would consider 4 pages to be an extremely detailed chronicle of the contents of Blood Feast.)

There’s something about these films – which are out to shock and exploit bad taste and do little else – which I find extremely humane. Yes, I’m talking about Faces of Death and Cannibal Holocaust – which are awful, horrible, offensive movies that are quite literally bottom of the barrel in terms of intent and execution. There could quite easily be an argument that the creators and viewers of these types of films are mentally ill in some way. But I’m glad they exist. I can’t go into the psychology or sociological affect of these, but in societies where these pieces cannot be created (and where the want for these movies does not or cannot exist), would be repressive to the point of inhumanity. Though some of the films in Sleazoid were created by abusing their cast members – that is not acceptable, but would be needed to explored on a case by case basis. This of course carries over into the controversies of hardcore pornography where if the actors in the films have the choice to be exploited or filmed, then it is up to the actor. If the actor is being forced to perform against their will, that pushes the film into criminal realms. (Though an argument could be made against child actors in a similar context.) Anyway, I digress, but the want for exploitation and “sick” films is explored (within a horror/exploitation context no less!) excellently in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome. Sleazoid Express, and the similar but much more lavish Nightmare USA by Stephen Thrower present the id of America through these films. It’s dirty work, but someone has to do it.

[Jacob Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

The sleazeball's Bible. All aboard. A first person ride through The Deuce. Some chose to forget. Others had the lights turn on mid way through a Falling Down screening and were politely asked to leave before gay actor Michael Douglas finished his rampage through the streets of LA. These people have spent life post '93 yearning for a home that was taken from them. Crack, aids and Guilani's Disneyfication ended what was so much more than a street of cinemas.

Many of these peoples beloved films of the era have bow become unfortunately lost. Yes some of your favourite low budget independent exploitationers were making more films than what you see on their letterboxd. A few were pumping films out consistently on a 3 month basis. Video may have saved a few but some remain lost forever. We can only hope they will randomly turn up next in some street side skip like pirates treasure. If not they're gone. Preserving old Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin is great but this side to cinema should not be neglected either. Its been erased from history enough.

This book captures the ghosts of the past and remains the official authority on what life was like during this crazy period of true creativity. Due to the nature of the films and the people making them it was one of Rapid rebirth. A never ending dangerous destruction fuelling the creation like a feedback loop. Studios needing millions. These guys needing thousands. Studios wanting sets. These guys taking to the streets. Studios wanting family approved content. These guys going to limits and even over what could be deemed morally acceptable. Some for the money. A couple for the art. Going out their minds on god knows what drugs to get there in this insane underground scene. One which was so destructive it simply couldn't sustain itself. The lifestyle took its toll on its people. A world of pimps, pushers and prostitutes seated just next to you. A film fan went in to the cinema with their life and hoped they'd come out with it. For some it was a place to engage with the strangest films out there, for others it was a hideout from the police following criminal activity. Landis takes you through the no go toilet areas and the cum filled seats. This is cinema on the edge both in production and the way its received.

That's kind of the brilliance of this book. Sure, the films are discussed from the period. All the gore, splatter, softcore, hardcore, blaxploitation, Kung fu classics and plenty you haven't heard of. More importantly though, Bill Landis does something that's not been done before. Something he did back in his reviews and continues to do so in this book. His Hunter S. Thompson inspired gonzo writing goes beyond the movies and into building a profile of the people that attended these places. Each grindhouse holding its own identity too and particular followers. A site for the traumatised and the troubled, the junkies, the hornies and the thrill seekers. From Joe Buck to Travis Bickle. From Linda Locelace to John Holmes. In fact, you could actually catch the stars of x rated porn on the screens outside in the streets. A community or culture in a sense. If you ask me that's what it's all about. That's where the art comes in to all this rejected trash. Witnesses and sufferers of the inevitable collapse can now read this book and reminisce over a place they once called home. Immortalised and recorded as much as it can be through literature. People like myself who know of Times Squares as nothing other than some Blade Runneresque Disneyfied spot showcasing musicals for families can only read this book and imagine a chaotic other world.

[Aji Uo · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's interesting looking back on this book in 2025.

Originally published in 2002, its almost 25 years old, about the same age as the nostalgia it pined for.

It's dated as hell. Offensive terms are bandied about more than you really would be comfortable with. The bias drips from the page. Trying to find any of the movies can also be a Herculean effort, namely cause they often choose the lesser known variations of titles.

Still, the description of the theaters are wonderful, the love of the cinema is still there.

We are past the age of cheap dvds and now in the boutique blu ray section. Many of these films are hardly forgotten, and now fetch a $50 price tag, chock loaded full of features.

[Evan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book I absolutely love and have read it several times. While it does contain some inaccuracies (CANNIBAL FEROX came out *after* CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST), the book is a fun and wild ride through the grindhouses of lore.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

An amusingly lurid account of the grindhouse years around Times Square. While the descriptions of the legendary theaters on The Deuce are fascinating, long stretches of the book are devoted to laboriously recounting the plot of a variety of movies.

[Sean · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of the language used hasn't aged well, to put it mildly. And what's with the dumping on Fulci?

[Vance Osteen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential.

[Sillyhuron · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great book is a love letter... to characters, a story, a location... and this one's all three. Landis & Clifford's tribute to the exploitation films of the 60s-80's and the scuzzy NYC theatre/porn district where they lurked is one of the funniest AND most depraved books I've ever read. The pokerfaced descriptions of ridiculous movies("The Dirty Dolls so thoroughly defies any normal standards of filmmaking that it's a bewilderment of riches"), the fleapits that showed them ("you didn't even stand near the theatre unless you wanted a drug addict streetwaker propositioning you as her pimp/live show partner hung over your shoulder") and their mad fans (when the audience found out one slasher flick was cut they tore out a fridge & threw it over the balcony!)is at heart a sweet fan letter to a specific age and time - the years after censors allowed sex & violence onscreen, and before VHS changed the film watching experience forever by letting you watch it in the safety of your own home. Consider yourself warned - don't use the bathroom & watch your wallet!

(Oh and PS - I've seen a lot of these films since reading the book & most I don't like. But that's the point - it's THEIR worldview I'm reading, not a how-to guide for film fans).

[Ray · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was a NJ teenager in the 70's. A bunch of us would take a bus to Port Authority to run around Manhattan. We caught a few of these flicks in the Deuce even though we were underage. One time we missed the last bus back and tried to sleep in the balcony of one of these theaters. Way too crazy there to sleep. I thought i appreciated most z-movie fare until I read this book. I see there were a lot more flicks that went further down the road of transgression than I knew about. I'm glad the author summarizes what I missed.
The funniest sections of the book are when the author validates a film by the reaction of the "regulars" at these dives. Half of them were nodding out!

[Doug Brunell · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I thoroughly enjoyed this book and found that it went into more depth than a lot of film books of similar ilk, I was left wishing there was more.

Besides spending more time with each film, the way it flowed felt somewhat choppy and rushed. Sometimes feeling as if it raced from one point to another. It made for a quick read, and while not unsatisfying, it did end up feeling somewhat empty.

Don't misunderstand me: this is an essential book for grindhouse fans. Just don't go into thinking it will satisfy all your needs. It's a great reference, an excellent snapshot in time, and a fine ode to the kinds of films that are no longer made.

[Elguapo · Rating 4 out of 5]

as a lover of trash cinema and low budget flicks, i really liked what this guy has put together in this book, part film review time capsule, but also a bit of what it was like in those seedy gross and disgusting late night theatres of new york back before disney put the stranglehold on any thing that had to do with culture and creativity. this is a good book and anybody who loves film should give this a try. and some of the flicks represents here are finally making to dvd, and boy howdy are the some whoppers!

[Matthew Corey · Rating 5 out of 5]

The unmistakable Bill Landis along with his incredible writing partner Michelle Clifford lead us on a colorful tour of Times Square at the height of its 1980s grindhouse glory. Based on their erstwhile zine of the same name, Bill and Michelle are the ideal hosts for this celebration of all that was seedy and outright dubious, yet somehow irresistible about The Deuce. And there's no denying that Landis had a way with words - especially when it came to describing the films he loved watching along with the host of maniacs who used to flock to them back in the bad old days.

[Ghym · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sad to find out author Bill Landis recently died of a heart attack. Thankfully he gave us this, a masterpiece reference on old Times Square, before he went. Each chapter is devoted to a different Times Square theater and the kind of movies shown there. Serves as a great film criticism book and a nuts and bolts description of the atmosphere of Times Square in the old drugs-and-hooker days. Almost as good as Sam Delaney's memoir on Times Square and that is indeed high praise.

[Kathryne · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a great book. But don't read it if you don't care about grindhouse cinema of the 60s and 70s because it will bore the crap out of you. It's all about those jacked up "D" list (almost porn but not) movies folks used to make and run in Times Square back when it was good and seedy (or, depending on your perspective, before it got cleaned up and Disney-fied). And trust me, they do NOT make them like they used to. I loved this book.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely one of my favorite books of all time. If you've spent your life yearning for the glory days of Times Square-with all of its prostitutes, drug dealers, porn theaters, and gigantic movie palaces gone to seed showing films like LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, LET ME DIE A WOMAN, and MANDINGO--then this book will do everything but actually take you back to 1978-1986.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book in a couple of weeks up in NYC and had a lot of fun with it. It's obviously a rush job (LOTS of typos and strange grammar), but the info is good and it's really cool to see how much Times Square and The Deuce have changed. Almost sad, really.
After reading it, I wanted to watch every movie that they mentioned in it. Even the terrible ones.

[Jason Coffman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've never been certain to feel cheated or relieved that I never got the chance to visit the legendary grindhouse circuit of "The Deuce," and this book didn't help resolve that uncertainty! A vivid oral history of the storied grindhouses and the bizarre films that played them, "Sleazoid Express" is highly entertaining and essential as a historical document of the heyday of 42nd Street culture.

[David Melito · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the joys of being a purveyor of sub-par cinema is that no matter how many messed up genre's you think there are, there is always some (new to you) old movie to get obsessed about.

Sleazoid Express is a fantastic Whitman Sampler of Grindhouse and Exploitation films from the 60's, 70's and 80's.

[Daddy Bookworm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not a book of movie reviews; rather it offer hilarious true stories of one man's experiences working in the 42nd street theaters (back when Times Square was Times Square and not the Disneyland it is today).

[Hater Shepard]

makes Pink Flamingos look like Cecil B DeMille!

[Johnny · Rating 5 out of 5]

You can almost feel the floor of the theater sticking to your shoes.

[Kym]

Where porn, horror, exploitation all cut their teeth! I think the sub-title says it all "A mind-twisting tour through the grindhouse cinema of times square"

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Automatically transport one into the 42nd street of old(when times square didn't have a Toys R Us). The detail is mind-numbing.

[Deathmetalroze · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book is what it claims to be and delivers! It introduced some new-to-me films/directors and made seeing the Tarantino/Rodriguez Grindhouse film in the theatre even better!