‘Trash’ movies, the refuse of mainstream cinema

What is ‘trash cinema’? Ask a dozen people and you’ll get a dozen answers, but here’s my take on the subject.

To be truly worthy of the adjective, trash movies should live up (or rather, down) to their adjective by embodying the very refuse of mainstream cinema. To wit, they should concern themselves with only those areas of human experience that mainstream cinema denies us. It should sink its teeth into only the most unwelcome, gooey, taboo subjects, and it should envelop us in a dank, homely feeling, as simultaneously comforting and acridly repelling as a freshly wet bed. It should be photographed without skill, preferably on short ends. It should cross the line more often than a professional scab. Its ineptitude should make murder hilarious, eroticism repugnant, ugliness appealing; it should feature dialogue so abysmal that it has a perfection equal to a Cole Porter lyric.

Likewise, such films should star actors unlikely to be found anywhere else, least of all in respectable movies – people like Boris Lugosi, Thomas Sweetwood and Uta Erickson. John Waters knows this: he has extended this ‘untouchables’ tradition by casting his own flamboyantly trashy films with the publicly and/or professionally notorious (eg, Patty Hearst, Traci Lords). That said, Waters’s later films are less authentically trashy than in ‘trash drag’ – for the simple reason that, by appearing in his movies, some of his outcasts and discoveries succeeded in building or resurrecting their careers.

A trash director may do what he – and it is nearly always a he – does in order to pay the rent, because he’s a sociopath and otherwise unemployable, or because it’s the only way he could ever lay hands on Pat Barrington, June Roberts or Uschi Digart. Nine times out of ten, the presence of real technical skill, for me, disqualifies from consideration certain filmmakers who may be crossing your mind – people like Roger Corman, Russ Meyer, Sam Fuller, even Jesús Franco. Those guys are, or were, mavericks. There is also a difference between being interested in the sordid – as David Lynch or Paul Bartel have been – and being sordid.

John Ford films teach us how to walk upright, Gene Kelly films teach us how to dance, but sometimes the spirit wants to remember what it means to crawl, to grovel, to blow off everything that the best of cinema and common courtesy have inculcated in us, to make ourselves available to the very worst in ourselves. Misogyny, for example, is a common element of the trashiest cinema, which may explain why this category didn’t attract many women directors. Sometimes, in order to better appreciate the Sistine Chapel ceiling, we need to revisit the gutter – and trash cinema, with its boundless propensities for excess, may help us to laugh at what we find there. Unlike po-faced exploitation cinema, trash cinema never loses its sense of humour about how far beyond the pale it goes. It’s unrelenting grunge with a twinkle.

Much like some philosophers have claimed there was no Devil till after the first Church had been built, trash cinema seems to have been brought into being by the introduction of the Motion Picture Production Code in 1930. While it is not exclusive to America, America does seem to be its most natural habitat. Reflecting the audience appetite for, and commercial potential of, salacious material, in the 1950s and 60s America imported respectable films from Europe and gave them trash appeal by retitling them Monika, The Story of a Bad Girl!, Spoiled Rotten and The Naked and the Wicked. Antecedents of trash cinema would include American paperback culture and the phenomenon of the carnival sideshow. Writer-director Tod Browning, whose Louisville, Kentucky childhood inculcated in him a taste for the sensational and forbidden, was the earliest major studio director to explore a fascination with tabloid subjects in studio films. His career-immolating Freaks (1932) was briefly released by MGM before being sold off to Dwain Esper, whose exploitation fare titillated under the cover of educating the general public (Reefer Madness, How to Undress in Front of Your Husband). 

So what, you may ask, are the most essential titles?

In assembling a list, why not begin with Dwain Esper, whose Maniac (1934) is perhaps the earliest film to assemble all the essentials of trash? The story, written with a very short attention span, concerns a vaudevillian, moonlighting as an assistant for a mad scientist, who murders and inters his associate in order to stage his “greatest impersonation”. Produced for a chain of downmarket theatres run by carnival showman Louis Sonney, Maniac shows the influence of sideshow spectacle and also the Spicy pulp magazines, which first appeared that same year – encompassing scenes of female nudity and rape, as well as a faked but still distressing scene of a cat’s eye being plucked from its socket and eaten. “Why, not unlike an oyster or a grape,” we’re told. Recklessly photographed by William C. Thompson, who would preside over Edward D. Wood, Jr’s trash in the 1950s.

Speaking of Wood, his Glen or Glenda (1953) is more competently made than most trash, but everything about it feels discarded. It’s about transvestism, one of the most marginalised subjects of its day, and its only star is Bela Lugosi, an actor whose post-Dracula career can be viewed as a gruelling lesson in humility. In a touch that would become somewhat common to trash cinema, the writer-director himself poses as his own leading man (‘Daniel Davis’) to give a remarkably confessional performance. How can Glen tell his fiancée that what he really loves is her angora sweater? Leavened with scratchy, second-hand stock footage (“Would you be surprised to know that this rough, tough individual is wearing pink satin undies under his rough exterior clothing? He is.”), some prints include an extended dream sequence of Irving Klaw-like bondage vignettes, making it even trashier. 

A similar sleaziness permeates Joseph Green’s The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (1962), about a scientist (Jason Evers) who preserves the head of his decapitated fiancée (Virginia Leith, the star of Kubrick’s 1952 debut feature Fear and Desire) and sniffs around strip joints for a body more suitable to his desires. Filmed in 1959 in a manner so salacious and grisly as to gratify both the sex and horror markets, it wasn’t released until 1962 – but it has become a WTF classic, and is a memorable topic of conversation between Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep in Mike Nichols’s Nora Ephron-scripted Heartburn (1986). 

In the early to mid 1960s, K. Gordon Murray became famous as the presenter of imported fairytale features – Rumpelstiltskin (1955), Santa Claus (1959) and Little Red Riding Hood (1960) – a bargain basement Walt Disney. As the decade wound down, he added Mexican horror films such as The Brainiac (1961) to his roster, but the biggest surprise of his producing career was Shanty Tramp (1967). Bible belt drive-ins had been receptive to southern sizzlers since the days of Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll (1956) and Russ Meyer’s Lorna (1964), but Shanty Tramp – about a town trollop who excites uncontrollable desire in, variously, a motorcycle gang leader, a black teenager destined for lynching, a Bible-thumping evangelist and her own drunken father – was the ultimate throw-down to any drive-in fodder suggesting the distant paternity of Tennessee Williams. Directed by trashmeister Joseph P. Mawra, who gave the world the Olga S&M serials (White Slaves of Chinatown, Olga’s Girls, Olga’s House of Shame), the film starred ‘Lee Holland’ – who ends the tale by murdering the drunken father who would have assaulted her, rising bare-breasted and bloody. It was later discovered that ‘Lee Holland’ was moonlighting Florida schoolteacher Eleanor Vaill. We can only imagine the riot that would have ensued had her students caught her big screen debut.

As trash specialists go, Michael Findlay – who directed many of his trash films as ‘Julian Marsh’ and starred in them as ‘Robert West’ or ‘Robert Wester’ – had a certain artistic consciousness. His Take Me Naked (1966) quotes the poetry of Pierre Louÿs; the third film of his notorious ‘Flesh’ trilogy (1968’s The Kiss of Her Flesh) references Dr Mabuse. The rooms his characters inhabit – likely his own – are often handsomely furnished with books. For all this, his filmography is an extended, helplessly fascinating wallow in exhibitionism and misogynistic depravity. A prime example is A Thousand Pleasures (1968), in which Findlay – credited, as a wink to those few then paying attention, as ‘Robert Wuesterwurst’ – plays a henpecked husband who, while out disposing of the corpse of his wife, is abducted by two deranged lesbian adventuresses. Taken to a secluded house in the woods, where the women keep another grown woman (named Baby) infantilised in a crib, our hero finds himself the centrepiece of an orgiastic party – increasingly unsure of whether he wants to escape or succumb.

The nature of trash cinema gave it a gravitational pull for gay filmmakers who delighted in its potential for flamboyant camp and, alternately, direct confrontation. The nadir of both was Andy Milligan, a New York-based director and playwright whose 1965 featurette Vapors was the first explicitly gay film released in America. Milligan tried his clumsy hand at art films – his unfinished Compass Rose (1967) is the only surviving visual record of New York’s Caffe Cino scene (the birthplace of ‘Off-Off-Broadway’) – and almost none of his 1960s ‘adults only’ work survives. In 1968, he tried his hand at lurid horror with The Ghastly Ones and never turned back. Joe Dante, reviewing for the New York trade magazine Film Bulletin, memorably wrote that it looked “like a home movie from Bedlam and gives evidence of having been processed in a dirty bathtub”. Shooting with a single noisy 16mm Auricon camera, spun chaotically at the end of each shot, Milligan racked up an amazing list of films about the loathsome and the self-loathing. His work might best be described as weird and woozy amalgams of Tod Slaughter, Dark Shadows and Jean Genet.

Much as Milligan’s talent was nurtured by Joe Cino, who ran Caffe Cino, Paul Morrissey’s talent enjoyed the sponsorship of Andy Warhol, whose gallery connections gave the pair’s two-screen-experience Chelsea Girls (1966) overnight notoriety. Morrissey’s fascination with personality-driven cinema derived generous fuel from the various characters (‘superstars’) who frequented Warhol’s Factory. His breakthrough commercial film Trash (1970), which gives this category its name, shares with the other films in this survey a taste for high drama, a sense of the outrageous, and meandering camerawork that drifts in and out of focus. 

Trash documents the domestic trials and miseries of a garbage-picking common-law couple, Joe (Joe Dallesandro) and Holly (drag queen Holly Woodlawn) – Joe’s an impotent junkie burglar and Holly has a plan to adopt her pregnant sister’s unwanted child so they can “get back on welfare and become respectable”. The relentless scheming, screaming and squalor occasionally stumbles from perverse hilarity into moments of temporary beauty, as when a domestic argument over Joe’s lack of sexual response culminates in Holly getting herself off with a Miller High Life bottle, as he nods out on the floor – climaxing in a loving afterglow not unlike a Renaissance painting in its composition.

At the beginning of the 1970s, former theatre manager Don Schain conceived the character of Ginger McAllister, a well-heeled, long-legged, political science major and former cheerleader (nice curriculum vitae for a woman in her early 30s!) whose readiness for action of all sorts made her the ideal recruit for, ahem, undercover work. Schain cast his wife Cheri Caffaro to star, and Ginger (1971) was the result. Working opposite leading men recruited from the gay porn pool (including Boys in the Sand’s Casey Donovan), the film drools over Ginger’s Oldsmobile like it’s an Aston Martin and presents a series of New Jersey dives like they’re the choicest night spots on the Cap d’Antibes. It also arranges several opportunities for the naked Ginger to be tied up, licked and manhandled at length – as happened to Caffaro in literally every film Schain made with her, prior to their divorce. Made so cheaply it couldn’t help but make money, this seedy abysm of action trash led to The Abductors (1972) and Girls Are for Loving (1973).

If we accept that America is the motherland of trash cinema, its capital may well reside in the state of Florida. It was there that two of the category’s biggest names – Herschell Gordon Lewis and Doris Wishman – got their start in the ‘nudie-cutie’ industry, the former working as ‘Lewis H. Gordon’, the latter as ‘Louis Silverman.’ In 1963, tired of filming around swimming pools and volleyball courts, Lewis innovated the colour ‘gore’ film with Blood Feast, the story of an Egyptian caterer aspiring to resurrect the goddess Ishtar, who is finally ground up in the back of a trash collection truck “like the human garbage he was”. 

A decade later, Lewis climaxed a profitable run of increasingly bloodthirsty films with The Gore Gore Girls (1972) – in many ways, the most appalling film in this survey. There’s a serial killer on the loose; the victims are all female, slutty and obnoxious. Predictably, Lewis subjects these women to all manner of loathsome torments, from plucked eyeballs to cannibalised flesh, presenting each new horrifying encounter with the kind of relish in violence normally reserved for a Tom and Jerry cartoon. But when we meet the film’s investigating detective Abraham Gentry, played by the unforgettable Frank Kress, the film trumps its own misogyny with misanthropy. Gentry is utterly hateful, the kind of preening, condescending, contemptuous, contemptible detective that could only be conceived by a mind that looks at Sherlock Holmes and proclaims him a “faggot” for his refined eccentricities. The Gore Gore Girls is at once this subgenre’s incendiary climax and its most toxic satire. 

Doris Wishman, a native New Yorker, started directing in Florida but – after five years of helming ‘fun in the sun’ frolics – returned to New York, where she made a series of black-and-white potboilers. The first of these was the distinctly trashy Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965), in which Gigi Darlene is attacked while taking out the rubbish, kills the perpetrator in self-defence, then flees inevitable punishment into the clutches of still-worse abuse. Indecent Desires (1968) is another story pivoting on garbage and trash as a psychopath discovers a doll in a dustbin and notices its resemblance to Babs, an unsuspecting neighbourhood woman whom he then abducts. 

Even trashier than Wishman’s subject matter was her visual technique, in which no woman could cross a room without the camera dropping to show off her shoes – it would be decades before the cinema produced another foot fetishist equal to Wishman. In the early 1970s, Wishman (then in her 60s) relocated to Florida, where her work became more outrageously exploitative. The Amazing Transplant (1970) chronicled the consequences when the penis of a serial rapist was grafted to the body of a normal man, but she scored her biggest successes with Double Agent 73 (1973) and Deadly Weapons (1972). These turgid spy pictures starred the overly ample charms of Chesty Morgan (73-32-36), who used her mammoth breasts either to smother the murderers of her beloved, or to take (somehow) surreptitious photos with a photographic implant. There were a few other female directors who specialised in exploitation films in the 1960s (Stephanie Rothman), 1970s (Roberta Findlay) and 1980s (Barbara Peeters), but Wishman was arguably the only female avatar of trash cinema – as I have defined it – until Canadian sisters Jen and Sylvia Soska made their debut with the credit-card-funded Dead Hooker in a Trunk in 2009.

Florida was also the home of Brad F. Grinter, whose greatest claim to our incredulity is Blood Freak (1972). Narrated by a greasily suave, chain-smoking Grinter, it’s the tragic story of a Vietnam vet who eats some tainted meat while high on pot and turns into a preposterously turkey-headed vampire. The hilarious ‘gobble-gobbles’ on the soundtrack prior to his attacks are at odds with the grim violence, and when Grinter’s closing narration becomes overrun with uncontrollable coughing, we realise that he intended a serious film about addiction, God help him.

In some ways, the aforementioned films were disconnected and without genus until John Waters arrived with his 1972 midnight movie Pink Flamingos, the film that somehow unified the loose detritus of trash into some kind of proud, willfully perverse aesthetic. While not really new – you can see a similar aesthetic at work on The Addams Family and Paul Morrissey’s films, and there’s a similar premise to be found in Michael Findlay’s The Ultimate Degenerate (1969) – the sheer extremity of Pink Flamingos was new and strangely defining. Here the boomerang-browed Divine – called ‘The Filthiest Person Alive’ in the press – is challenged for this title by drug-dealing kidnappers Connie Marble (Mink Stole) and Raymond Marble (David Lochary). But the real message of the film – expressed as various cast members indulge in shoplifting, lunchmeat-fondling, chicken fucking, cock wagging and triumphal shit-eating – is that everyone is obscene in their own way. Ich bin ein Divine.