Slaughter Blog

The greatest movie theater on earth stood on a half block patch of urine and blood-stained concrete on San Francisco’s upper Market street. Pawn shops and skid row flops clustered around it like a post-apocalyptic movie set, real life sirens and screams vying with the horrors on screen. The marquee up above looked like a giant squashed cigarette pack, S-T-R-A-N-D spelled out in exhaust-caked neon letters. Not The Strand…. More like someone tried to spell out “S-T-R-A-N-D-E-D”, but then gave up three quarters through.

Down on the street, an endless parade of dealers, hookers and addicts haunted the front entrance round the clock. Babbling, cursing drifters- casualties of Reagan’s deregulation of the mental health industry- roamed the lobby tirelessly, becoming such a regular nuisance that the theatre staff finally tacked up signs around the front entrance and snack bar:

Groping for your seat in the darkness was always a nerve-racking safari through broken bottles, dozing vagrants and raspy whisperers (“Hey mannn? Hey! Mannn! Mannnnn??“). It helped to bring an old coat with you when you sat down, adding an extra layer of protection over the crusty relief map covering nearly every cushion.Settling down in the dark, surrounded by jerking shadows and moans and sobs and chemical burning smells like a Hubert Selby-themed dark ride, the movie would knife through the shadows and splatter the screen up above. Usually something terrible, out of focus, damaged, and unforgettable.

For almost two years, I happily immersed myself in the Strand’s cave of wretched wonders. The dirt cheap ticket prices sucked me in and kept me coming back week after week. Mismatched ransom note letters on the marquee called out “3 MOVIES/ 5 BU KS“: a price point that nicely cleared my entertainment budget. I was working for minimum wage at a puppet shop on Pier 39 at the time and living in the kind of rented room that came with a hot plate and sofa bed, so every non-rent/ramen/Bugler-tobacco-dollar came at a premium.

Stepping through the lobby doors, the other selling points were subtle but insistent. For starters, the snack bar had long since banished overpriced, megaplex-style concessions in favor of a sloppy jumble of discount candies from surrounding liquor stores. Laffy Taffy, Zagnut, Blue Mountain– all for a buck, maybe a buck and a half: catering to the majority of clientele who used the Strand to offload panhandled change and catch a few hours of sleep during the day.

The relaxed, mi casa es su casa vibe in the auditorium held a certain charm as well. The Strand was the only theater I’ve ever been to where they didn’t care whether you smoked. Or what you smoked. And judging by the bizarre artifacts you’d sometimes find wedged under your seat– baggies, old clothing, syringes– the only real restriction seemed to be, “Don’t scream too loud… Unless you really need to.”

And the movies. Dear god Jesus. A second-run theater scraping by on razor-thin margins and probably paying more in insurance premiums than rent could be forgiven for not really giving a shit about film selection. But to its credit, week after week, the Strand offered not just cheap triple features, but a point of view. A kind of hardcore film mission statement which spoke directly and eloquently to even the most chemically imbalanced patron. If you had to take the Strand’s catalog of films and cram them all into one video rental section, the end-cap sign would have to say something like: SEXMONSTERSVIOLENCEMADNESS.

Shotgun Psychopaths. Vigilante hookers. Rampaging mutant gangs. Genetic mutations. Kill-crazy veterans. Stewardesses. Secret Nazi sex torture labs. Whatever the bill of fare, you always got you your money’s worth and then some: six solid hours of blood, bullets and boobs to rain sparkles over your brain like Tinkerbell’s wand.  But the movies themselves only totaled part of The Strand’s enchantment. As any Disneyland travel guide will tell you, it’s not the rides but the cast members that turn the park into a magical experience…


“…squeeze it… ohgodohgodohgod…squeeze the triggerrrrr… do it… noooo…. don’t wait! Do it NOW!”

“Sniper” starring Tom Berenger (Luis Llosa,1993) is easily one of the most starkly terrifying films I’ve ever seen. The action set pieces crackled with authenticity. Dragged me headlong into the gut-churning world of rival snipers Berenger and Billy Zane as they stalked each other through the Panamanian jungle in a deadly game of cat-and-mouse, belly-crawling through the shadows in search of the perfect kill-shot…

“… he’s in your cross-hairs NOW… do him..! dooooo him..!“

Years later, I rented “Sniper” on VHS, babbling to my room-mate that he was about to witness was one of the greatest action movies ever… “Just trust me, man—this is an underrated work of genius!”

Then something strange and disappointing happened… “Sniper” happened.

It felt like I’d set out to rent the ‘special edition director’s cut’ of a favorite film, but somehow wound up with the ‘gaffer’s cut’ instead. I felt deeply cheated. Wronged. Like a trusting kid being told it wasn’t the real Santa Clause killing all of those people in “Silent Night, Deadly Night”, just a psycho pretending to be Santa. Disappointed doesn’t begin.

Then I remembered my first viewing of “Sniper” all those years ago. Which also happened to be my first visit to the faceless, whispering shadowscape of The Strand:

“OH GOD! SQUEEEEEZE IT! SQUEEZEATRIGGER!“

I never saw the guy’s face. All I know, he was sitting right behind me, so close I could smell the sour blend of Boone’s Rhine Wine and Jujyfruits rolling off of his tongue. One thing was clear: “Sniper” scratched a serious itch for him. Resurrected some dark and painful (or maybe dark and happy?) memories so intense they never stopped boiling out of him until the final credits rolled.

“Sniper’s” central  gimmick is a rapid-dolly “you are the bullet” camera shot that pops up again and again as Berenger and Zane stalk their various targets and each other. Much like the CGI-heavy “let’s jump into the dead guy’s brain tissues” shot used so much on CSI and House, director Llosa’s Bullet-cam takes the workaday tedium out of sniper assassinations and puts you inside the missile speeding two hundred miles an hour towards the victim’s horrified face.

Whether this had the desired impact on multiplex audiences remains to be seen (just like the three direct-to-video sequels remain to be seen, buh-dum-bum psssh) but to Mr. Boones Jujyfruits, it was the stuff that dreams are made of. Whenever the camera turned into a bullet, I heard his breath catch in his throat… just before belting out a high pitched, orgiastic squeal like he was launching down a candy-cane water slide into a pool full of naked women. His whole body trembled, knees battering my seat, larynx straining against rupture as volcanic pleasure gushed forth:

“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!”


Then, at the moment of impact, he’d cough out a gratified: “Oh! OHHHH!!” in a voice at once Mojave-dry and slick with sub-glottal lubricants.


I left the theater badly shaken and hyper-aware. Glancing over my shoulder, every shadow seemed to stare and mutter at me on the long walk home. But along with the sour, ‘new inmate’ nausea steeping in my throat, I also felt a strange thrill of optimism. Something similar to what the first movie-goers must have felt when that black and white locomotive charged at them on screen and they dove away in fear of being crushed to death. Or maybe when early 3D audiences watched the Creature from the Black Lagoon grope into their real world darkness for the first time. And I remembered my own first experience seeing Star Wars as a little kid and fully realizing what it meant to be transported to another time and place along with eighty total strangers who shrieked and gasped and jumped in their sets at the exact same instant I did.

I knew: this truth hits you without any preparation. From the first moment the big hands of mom and dad lead you into the dark and lift you up onto the folded seat between them, you get what this is about. A movie jumps into your world and takes you someplace else. If it doesn’t, it’s not really a movie. You feel that charge for the first time and you get hooked, so you keep going back, returning to that cool, sweet and salty darkness your whole life. Then, when the weekly trips to the theater aren’t enough, you rent videos, devour them every chance you get. You rent stacks and stacks, buy bigger TV’s, upgrade your home a/v experience to streaming and hard-wire your home network straight into the back of the receiver so the movie box gets the tastiest broadband juice. You watch movies on your laptop and phone at fast food restaurants and on the toilet; inwardly wondering why the hell they haven’t figured out a way to put movies in your shower yet. Then, when your teeth are still grinding, fingernails shredding the couch cushions long after you should have gotten your movie fix, you plug into your game console and mainline explosions and monster attacks and screams until the wee hours of the morning, when your dry eyes scrape shut and your caffeine-pumped mind lists into a shallow, dreamless sleep…

You always want to get back to that Real Movie Place. Always searching for it when reality and all of those countless reality proxies fall short. You know it’s there, because all those years ago, you saw it. It jumped off the screen and dragged you away from Mom and Dad and took you someplace cooler. 

From that first moment, The Strand had me. I went back once a week, happily cutting into my ramen and bus fare budget for another six hour fix of dark magic. I returned over and over in the hopes that Boones Jujyfruits wasn’t just a passing fluke, that there might be other Strand cast members camped out there in the shadows, waiting to heighten and enrich my viewing experience like William Castle gimmicks brought to life by the Blue Fairy. I scouted my seats carefully, seeking out shadowy figures already spewing an inspired stream of babble before the movie even started… Then sat down far enough away to stay out of range of any flailing outbursts, but close enough to catch every wonderful word.

All I could do was hope for the best. Hope for another fix. Hope to catch another magic carpet ride back to the Real Movie Place.

I was never disappointed.  

Now, in all the time I haunted The Strand, I’d never even heard the word, “grindhouse”, much less understood what it meant. Only years later, after all of the rented rooms and puppets and syringes under the seats were a safe distance in the past, the word came back to find me.

I was lucky enough to come across Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford’s excellent “Sleazoid Express”,  a comprehensive history of grindhouse culture, from the barely legal road shows of the 1930’s to the rise and decline… and further decline… and double-tap Giuliani execution of the Times Square adult movie house strip known as The Deuce. In Sleazoid, I found not only one of the best books on exploitation film I’d ever read, but probably one of the most gripping and personal movie books of all time. 

 

Down the road came “Nightmare U.S.A.” by Stephen Thrower, redefining exhaustive with a massive, coffee-table format study of the ‘exploitation independents’: an unsung tribe of zero-budget film guerrillas who shot quick and dirty and made their living on drive-in and grindhouse audiences well after Hollywood had co-opted the Roger Corman brand.

Then there was Corman’s own memoir, “How I Made A Hundred Movies In Hollywood And Never Lost a Dime”, and John Waters’s seminal autobiography, “Shock Value” and “Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: The History of Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Film”, and “The Psychotronic Video Guide” and “Step Right Up! I’m Gonna Scare the Pants off of America!” by the great William Castle. And the list runs on and on like an “Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS” sex torture scene. I devoured every printed word I could find on the subject, seduced and roofied by this hidden world I’d been lucky enough to get a glimpse of in the short time it lasted.

The more I read about them, the more I craved these wonderful movies.

Perverse fairy tales shining from above, luring you past dark aisles and strange smells, dragging you down the threadbare carpet until, at some point you realize that you’ve passed through some C.S. Lewis gateway into unmarked territory, where smooth-paved story avenues and coherent plot points and the implied existence of a moral center are rules of the daylight world you left behind.

And the more you watch, the truth becomes clear: damaged movies are like damaged people. They have better stories to tell, and they tell them extremely well.

The rules of the grindhouse are simple carnival rules. Get ’em in the tent. Once they’re inside, whatever happens, happens. Your brain screams at you to leave, don’t look back, just get the fuck out… but a raspy voice jets over your shoulder, assuring you- in case you didn’t already know- that it’s already too late. Your fate was locked in the instant you bought your ticket. Then the screen up above flickers and warbles to life, and dark shapes spill into your world, promising to take you someplace else, someplace cooler… and for the first time in a long time you feel that familiar ‘plummeting elevator’ sensation deep in your stomach…

Then the truth hits you without preparation. The lights and music take over. And you’re ready to take the ride.