Sleazoid Express remembered

 

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 42^nd 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 42^nd 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 42^nd 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 42^nd 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 42^nd 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 42^nd 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 42^nd 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 42^nd 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 42^nd 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 42^nd 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 42^nd 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 42^nd 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 42^nd 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 42^nd 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 42^nd 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 42^nd 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 42^nd 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 42^nd 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. 

the mark of Clifford

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.

What I think might surprise the grindhouse novice about the Sleazoid book is what it doesn’t cover.  There’s no mention here of films that have become synonymous with that era like The Evil Dead, Basket Case, Ms. 45 or Maniac.  The reason being, is that if you go back to the original zine, Bill hated all those movies.  Sleazoid always had that punk mindset of wanting to spit in the face of the status quo...it wasn’t a zine that wanted to be loved...and there can be little doubt that Bill liked to offend and provoke.  If horror nerds hated Andy Milligan, Bill would go off and write about Andy Milligan, if horror nerds were uncomfortable with homosexuality, Bill would write about gay porn, and all the darlings of the horror nerds –Stephen King, Forrest J Ackerman, Paul Naschy- would be insulted and made fun of in Sleazoid Express.  It’s an attitude that only grew when Bill had a falling out with Fangoria magazine, which he’d been around in its early days before becoming persona non grata.  His interview with Andy Milligan had caused them some problems when Lew Mishkin threatened to sue the magazine for comments Milligan had made about him in the interview.  What seems to have caused Bill to get the final elbow there though, was that he had pitched the idea of doing a feature on Toby Ross, a gay pornographer whose niche was making his male performers look younger than they actually were.  An idea that apparently outraged Fangoria editor Bob Martin to the extent that the magazine cut all ties with Bill.  Landis’ more ardent supporters simplistically portray this as Bill being woke before woke was a thing, and championing queer voices, only to come up against this wall of intolerance in the form of Bob Martin.  As Mr Martin isn’t around to defend himself however, we should contemplate whether he just read the room correctly and realised that Fangoria wasn’t quite ready for gay hardcore yet, or whether the Ross piece lead him to suspect Bill was into underage material.  What has me questioning the narrative of Bob Martin being a homophobe is his own subsequent career.  Martin went on to make a cameo in ‘Geek Maggot Bingo’, a fairly transgressive movie for someone of that mentality to be involved in.  He was also a frequent collaborator of filmmaker Frank Henenlotter, who is gay (a fact that Rick Sullivan never tired of reminding people of in The Gore Gazette).  An unlikely association for someone who elsewhere would apparently try to destroy another man’s career for promoting homosexuality. Be in no doubt though that there was bad blood there, Martin is not only meant to have blackballed Landis from Fangoria, but also attempted to get him barred from other major publications.  In the aforementioned ‘Geek Maggot Bingo’, Martin briefly shows up as a character whose mannerisms and speaking voice have been modelled on Bill, a fact openly acknowledged in the end credits ‘Bill Landis impersonation courteousy (sic) of Bob Martin’.  Many had gotten into feuds with Landis over the years, but Bob Martin is unique when it came to taking his grievances with Bill to the movies. 

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. 

Ideally, the original run of Sleazoid Express would get reprinted in hardback, coffee table book format, and people would be able to experience the entire, unedited history of Sleazoid Express.  Something you sadly don’t always get from the Sleazoid book, which can’t bring itself to acknowledge that the Sleazoid zine was a two man operation towards the end.  Bill had a co-author, Jimmy McDonough, who he’d fallen out with by the time this book came along, and as a result Jimmy has been totally airbrushed out of the history of Sleazoid in the book.  Very unfairly, some have even gone as far as saying that Sleazoid only achieved greatness after Jimmy came onboard.  I would say that Jimmy encouraging Bill to move the zine from just a collection of film reviews into a more gonzo direction of being about Bill, the theatres he flocked to, and the characters he associated with, is what made Sleazoid special, and why its remembered.

From my understanding, Jimmy McDonough is entirely behind the idea of the Sleazoid zine being reprinted as a book, and there is a UK publisher who would be willing to pull the trigger on that in a heartbeat.  The problem is that they’d need the okay from either Michelle, or Bill and Michelle’s daughter Victoria, both of whom have met any attempt to contact them about Sleazoid with dead silence.  Apparently Fangoria have also shown an interest in doing something Sleazoid related, have an address for Michelle and Victoria, and sent them a care package along with an offer of business.  This package was signed for, so they got it, and know there is an interest in re-printing Bill’s work, but Fangoria never got a response.  Given the history between Fangoria and Sleazoid Express, I suspect Michelle got more of a kick out of giving them the brush off than she would have from taking the money.  So, the Sleazoid zine is currently in limbo, which is a great loss to film criticism.  While the book put the Sleazoid name back on the map in 2002, that was 21 years ago, and Sleazoid and Bill have since lapsed back into obscurity.  People know about Jimmy McDonough, who has gone on to write biographies of Andy Milligan, Russ Meyer and more recently the Ormond family, people know about Joe Bob Briggs –who has recently made a comeback on streaming- but Bill has become the forgotten man of exploitation film writing.

The Sleazoid book then, seems destined to be his lasting legacy. It’s far from the final world on the subject, but it’s a good enough introduction as you’re likely to find.  Watch your wallets, stay out of the bathroom, and don’t believe everything you read.  So many of the Sleazoid icons celebrated in this book have since passed away... Dyanne Thorne, Audrey Campbell, HG Lewis, Don Schain, Sonny Chiba, Candice Rialson...but their lives and stories live on in this book, as does Bill’s own.  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 42^nd 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 42^nd street, the 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 42^nd 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 42^nd Street “a half brilliant, genuinely alienated relic of its time and its maker”.  That’s what needs to go on the Sleazoid headstone.