Back to School: An Alternate Hyperreal Calendar

September brought a break in the heat and another unbeatable lineup at Hyperreal Hotel. In this month’s alternate calendar, the Hyperreal Film Club community offers pairings of acid Westerns spanning continents, subversive exploitation films, and more.

Down With Love—Pillow Talk

Oh, the romantic comedy! While poor Down With Love had this misfortune of being released in a year of subversive takes on the genre like How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, the films it takes inspiration from were heralded as instant classics in their time. Take, for example, literal entrant into the National Film Registry Pillow Talk. The first-ever collab between rom-com icons Doris Day and Rock Hudson, the film follows interior designer Jan Morrow (Day), whose independent girlie lifestyle is hampered by the party line she shares with bachelor/composer Brad Allen (Hudson). (Brief aside if you’ve only ever tapped a smart phone screen: A party line was a looped telephone circuit, shared by multiple telephone customers in the same area. Think the old dial-up versus landline issue, but if you had to share with your neighbor as well as your mom.) 

These two feuding beauties share a friend in Jan’s client/Brad’s friend Jonathan Forbes, who has waxed rhapsodic about his crush on Jan to Brad many times. When he happens upon Jan at a nightclub, Brad finds her utterly charming and, knowing it’d be hate at first sight should she recognize his voice, he fakes a Texas accent under the moniker Rex Stetson. What follows is a classic deception to desire plot, where the truth coming out only gives the lovers an obstacle to overcome. The film also marks Hudson’s first foray into the more hee-hee haw-haw side of Hollywood. Previously a stock hunk of Westerns and war movies, Hudson was hired by producer Ross Hunter on account of him seeming to “[belong] in a drawing room, not a cornfield.” To ease his trepidation, member of the House Un-American Activities Committee blacklist and Pillow Talk’s director Michael Gordon issued this advice: Take the damn film seriously. “No matter how absurd the situations may appear to the viewer, to the people involved, it’s a matter of life and death,” Gordon said. “Comedy is no laughing matter.”

Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion—School of the Holy Beast

For those craving a chaser to Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion’s exact blend of artful exploitation and feminine revenge, I give my heartiest recommendation to its two immediate sequels: Jailhouse 41 and Beast Stable. But for discerning connoisseurs seeking nectar of a different flavor, this sommelier offers School of the Holy Beast, another anti-fascist screed of pop-perversion.

Here the women’s prison is swapped for a corrupt convent of no-good nuns, infiltrated by a girl seeking retribution for her mother’s mysterious death. What she finds behind cloistered doors is the stuff of lecherous legend: a degenerate priest, a (gasp!) lesbian mother superior, and all manner of twisted tortures. Like Female Prisoner #701, School of the Holy Beast uses the exploitation framework to smuggle critiques of religious hypocrisy and authoritarian institutions at large. And much like #701, Holy Beast transcends its roots through truly accomplished filmmaking. Consider the unforgettable, even beautiful sequence of our lead girl Maya whipped and lacerated by rose thorns… and though it may not be for the faint of heart (or good of taste), there's few mission statements more explicit than full-bladder torture ending with a shot of piss raining down on a crucifix. Who said subtlety was dead?

Zachariah—Sholay

George Englund’s Zachariah was an experiment. Its creators believe it to be the first of its genre: an electric western. An acidic stew with a broth of western, the meat and potatoes consisting of rock n’ roll and spiced with South Asian influences, Zachariah was viewed at the time as something closer to parody. Film critic Roger Greenspun went so far as to publish in the New York Times, “It is, at least in my experience, the first movie to parody the Western with the apparent intention of propagandizing homosexual love.” As a radical affront to the western genre, Zachariah sadly did not hit its mark. Though the film now appears in a BFI top 10 of all time great Acid Westerns with the likes of Jodorowsky’s El Topo and Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter, it’s a struggle to find any accurate box office performance. While Englund’s experiment would only find success with time, the Bollywood Machine would find its greatest success yet trying to tackle a similar story just a few years later.

Sholay starts as a story about two bandits setting off on a western adventure. Like Zachariah, there are gunfights and musical numbers. However, it has so much more. Sholay switches from western, to prison comedy, to romance and back again. The film was one of a growing number of movies dubbed masala films brewing in the Dacoit region of India. This area of India had become known for Curry Westerns, but Sholay was to become so much more. It earned the rank of the highest grossing film in India’s history at the time. It’s not hard to imagine the American response to a film like Sholay. Its masala structure means the film’s tone fluctuates wildly and if Mr. Greenspun was at all offended by the male friendship in Zachariah, Jai and Veeru’s verges even closer to outright camp. Both westerns sway between genre and style, but while Zachariah believes it can stay in the western genre, Sholay bursts free into a grand and maximalist story.

The Slumber Party Massacre—Body Double

When the Criterion Channel description begins with “Scripted by lesbian feminist author Rita Mae Brown,” you know you’re not in for a run-of-the-mill 1980s slasher. Although clearly intended by its producers as a standard coed hack-em-up, The Slumber Party Massacre began as a genre parody Brown wrote titled Sleepless Nights. Directed by Amy Holden Jones, who cut her teeth working on films by Martin Scorsese and Hal Ashby, Massacre exhibits a cheerful subversion of genre cliches while still delivering the exploitation goods via a bevy of starlets and a mouth-breathing psycho wielding an industrial-size power drill.

For all we know, Brian DePalma stole the killer’s weapon of choice for his lurid showbiz fever dream Body Double. The story of a down-on-his-luck actor who witnesses a murder while house sitting for a successful acquaintance, Body Double was denounced upon its release as a misogynistic rehash of Hitchcock tropes. Indeed, DePalma uses his well-worn erotic thriller template to deliver pure style over substance, emptying out his usual bag of movie-brat tricks – endless tracking shots, tilted angles and deadpan sight gags. Yet the film is an effective launchpad for the filmmaker’s recurring themes of image and artifice, most notably in a meta-musical number set to Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s “Relax.”

The Slumber Party Massacre may lack Body Double’s big-budget technical ecstasy, but both films subvert the voyeuristic gaze of exploitation cinema with a knowing wink while still delivering the required sex and gore—we know you want it, here it is, thanks and come back soon. The amusingly self-referential post-credit sequence of Body Double says it all in one image: bloody boobs.