The Grindhouse Era, Part 14: Getting Harder (continued)

As legal restrictions on complete nudity in movies decreased and pressure to reveal anything and everything increased, grindhouse directors pushed the enveloped of what they would film.  Five movies in the short period of 1969 to 1972 do a nice job of showing just how far these movies would go.


None of these movies started with the best production values and all have suffered some damage with time, but the worst-off, by far, is The Adventures of Flash Beaver (1972).

Linda York is in this one, too,



but the star is Alice Friedland (sometimes spelled Friedlund).

She plays a super-heroine named Flash Beaver, yes indeed, whose super-powers include the ability to move from place to place at the speed of light, disrobe instantly and educate a couple in the ways of love.  The result is pretty much what you would expect.  I am a fan of both women, but this movie is really poor in every way that can be measured.

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Five Loose Women (1974) is an escaped women-in-prison movie, which I suppose makes it a women out of prison movie.  There is this and that and the other thing that goes on, but the highlight of the whole shebang is when escapees meet hippies.

Eve Orlon,



Maria Arnold



and Janet Newell

play the hippie gals whereas four of the five escapees - on the loose and therefore Loose Women (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) - are played by

Donna Young,



Margie Lanier,



Rene Bond



and Tallie Cochrane.

 

Eve, Maria and Janet do what hippies do by running around and dancing, all the while topless.  When the loose women find the hippie encampment, they borrow clothes from the residents and change out of prison garb. The result, in glorious broad daylight, is Donna (ever so briefly) and the other women topless. That's about it for exposure, despite the fact two of the women playing hippies (Eve and Maria) and one of them playing an escapee (Rene) spent considerable time doing hardcore movies.

Five Loose Women has the look and feel, not of a grindhouse movie that was intended for a rundown theater in the low-rent district but of a drive-in theater that catered to couples busy with other pursuits. As Scoopy said in his comments about grindhouse cinema, drive-in theaters were places for sexploitation fare, but they showed hicksploitation movies and costume comedies rather than the porn-without-penetration films that kept grind houses busy for a while in the 70's.  Five Loose Women fits into that drive-in genre.

The drive-ins would outlast the grind houses.  You could still go a drive-in theater and see some impressive nudity in the mid-70's and even into the early 80's - I remember seeing Lifeforce at a drive-in when it first came out in 1985.  But video killed the grindhouse star and it also finished off the drive-ins by the end of the 80's.

The replacement for grind houses and drive-ins would be the kind of direct-to-video movies that made Shannon Tweed famous, or at least respectably rich in 90's, and it was followed by all sorts of cable series in the first decade of this century.  But all of that has come to an end and it is impossible to imagine what could bring any of it back.