Ladies Of Grindhouse: Shocking Bitches And Bad Girls

A tipster sent us a link to Wrong Side Of The Art, an extensive gallery of B-movie posters. Sex, drugs, and rock & roll are represented here in spades, but we’re most interested in the bitches (some images NSFW).

Our tipster wrote, “you could write a PhD thesis on any single one of these,” and we’re inclined to agree. While not every movie here is strictly speaking “grindhouse,” they all show variations of the black-sploitation genre and include just about every -ism you can imagine. Unsurprisingly, some are hilarious, while others are just downright disgusting. Exploitation films are designed to be titillating – and not much else. That is their entire reason for existing. However, what we are titillated by is always worth examining. By now you should know: this is not going to be pretty.

“Bitches” is probably the term that best summarizes how these filmmakers feel about women. They are, with the exception of rape-revenge films, either portrayed as totally useless (i.e. victims/sex toys) or ruthlessly evil. This poster, for a French film from 1973, features some of the prettier art but one of the worst messages. Women are, quite literally, dogs. They are wild she-wolves, held in check by a powerful man.

Maybe I should have started with the woman-as-victim trope, since it is so incredibly common, but who could resist the allure of bitches? Furthermore, this category needs virtually no explanation. Horror films have a long history of killing off women in creative and gory ways. Even films that are not specifically about women often include a main female character dying in a mess of screams and tears. Or many, as The Incredible Torture Show most likely includes. At least, that is what we assume they mean by “orgy of the screaming virgins.”

This poster is for the original version of Black Christmas, which was recently remade as a horrible, boring teen slasher film. The 1974 movie is actually pretty great. It centers around a group of college girls being murdered one by one in a big empty house while receiving creepy-ass phone calls and occasionally getting wasted. There is not much else to it, but who doesn’t love doing away with sorority chicks?

Another important sub-category of women-as-victim: Rapesploitation. While the most famous rape-flick is probably I Spit On Your Grave, there are many others that capitalize on similar fears (or desires, depending on the viewer).

As many crappy screenwriters know, one of the best ways to bring together sex and violence is in the rape revenge film. However much you may secretly enjoy seeing women mutilated and tortured, this allows you to follow up that feeling with a righteous satisfaction in watching the women tear apart their abusers. It’s the best of both worlds, really. It also bridges the gap between women-as-victim and women-as-abuser quite nicely.

And despite being endlessly fascinated by this poster, I can’t help but think a vigilante could have come up with a better name than “The Rape Squad.”

Quite frequently, women are the perpetrators of horrible violence. In order to make this more palatable to male viewers, you get a whole slew of girl-on-girl violence. Or, in this case, woman-on-girl. Interestingly, “women in prison” is an entire genre of film. Like the chained dogs in Chiennes, this makes the desire to capture and chain the femme fatale a-okay because they have already committed some transgression. Some of the W.I.P. films feature women being raped in prison, which allows sexual violence to act as punishment for their prior sins in a reversal of the rape-revenge fantasy.

This may be just a product of the bad art, but this poster seriously skeeves me out. The largest naughty girl looks not so much wicked or searching for a good time as dazed and drugged out of her mind. Which actually brings me to one of my problems with sexy face: when done wrong, it just looks like incredibly drunk and confused face. And it’s disturbing that the two things are so closely related. If this is someone’s idea of sexyface, they need to see a therapist, STAT.

Another recipe for success? Teens gone bad. Everyone likes watching cheerleaders, but we love watching bitchy cheerleaders do things like put urine in someone’s drink or beat their friends. There has been a lot said about the increasing popularity of “girl fight” videos on YouTube, but it’s really nothing new. We love a bad girl, and when that seemingly-harmless sugar-and-spice teen is made readily available (with, again, the side helping of righteous anger) media outlets are all over it.

But I won’t lie: I would be pretty excited to see Little J (and the rest of the scheming cast of Gossip Girl) sent off to this reform school.

One of the most fascinating things I noticed while going through these posters was the many, many names for women. We’ve already seen the chiennes, but there are also dolls, girls, broads, vixens, ladies, schoolgirls, hussies, and so on and so forth. Unlike men, who are frequently given a name, which also doubles as the movie title (check out the martial arts section if you need examples), women are generally shown in crowds, and named with various derogatory terms. There are a few ladies like Wanda, but most of the women on these posters are unnamed.

We’d be amiss if we didn’t mention one of the classic categories of Grindhouse: blaxploitation. After weeding through dozens of films with names like The Black Dragon and Shaft’s Big Score, I came to my favorite: Sugar Hill, with her army of all-black male zombies. Why? The world may never know.

This woman is about to become the victim of Black Frankenstein! Terrifying, no?

At long last: interracial harmony is a reality. Or not so much.

However, this does illustrate another merging of genres. Many of the blaxploitation films feature caged women. A few actually have women hanging in bird cages. The racism here is obvious, but is interesting how it merges with the other categories. All women are licentious beasts (even the French) – but black women are portrayed as especially animalistic…

…or they’re demonic. Like Sugar Hill with her army, Abby is a hell-bitch bent on destruction.

On a lighter note, “Nunsploitation” has it’s own category on The Wrong Side Of Art. We’re not sure what is going on here – is the naked nun praying? Giving the other nun head through her clothes? – but the movie looks hilarious.

The thing that all these posters have in common is their ability to produce reactions that range from a head shake to pure what the fuck?-face. But the art direction for this 1986 Japanese film (translated as “Hell in a Bottle”) takes the cake when it comes to surreal and disturbing images of the female form. At least her butt sparkles.