In a 1993 interview with RE/Search magazine, Cramps guitarist and trash film connoisseur Poison Ivy Rorschach spoke about her band’s fascination with obscure exploitation films. “A low budget movie is the only way you’ll know how people really talked or dressed,” Rorschach explained, “You had people wearing clothes out of their closets, talking like they really talked, and behaving like they really behaved– there it is, right on film.” Indeed, so-called b-movies are often anthropological treasure troves, showcasing the detritus of day-to-day life which never would have made it into a product of the Hollywood system. It doesn’t stop at fashion and decor, either: by giving a voice to raw filmmakers on the fringes of the industry, exploitation cinema frequently tells stories and present viewpoints far too unseemly to ever come from a mainstream studio. Such is the case with 1973’s Hollywood 90028, which fills the after-midnight slot at the Coolidge this weekend in a brand new restoration courtesy of Grindhouse Releasing. At first blush, Hollywood appears to be just another shock-and-sleazefest. Scratch the surface, however, and it reveals itself to be something far thornier, more complex, and altogether unique.
Mark is your worst-case-scenario lost soul in the city of angels. By day, he works as cameraman and editor for a fly-by-night company making porno loops and stag reels. By night, he’s a Hollywood strangler, taking unsuspecting hippie chicks home and murdering them in the act of love. His world is complicated even further when he meets Michelle, one of the models in his films, and begins to develop feelings for her. Can Mark suppress his dark urges and find happiness with Michelle, or will she meet the same fate as his last several dates?
Hollywood 90028 is unmistakably a product of the Porno Chic era, that brief period, unimaginable from today’s vantage, in which hardcore adult films attained something close to mainstream social acceptability (Deep Throat was the fifth highest grossing film of 1972, beating out Jeremiah Johnson and Cabaret). What we see here of the porno industry, however, is anything but chic. In one of the earliest scenes– presumably a prerequisite for the film’s production– Mark films a young woman as she undresses and caresses her body. Rather than being erotic, however, the scene is entirely discomfiting. There is no music; instead, we hear only the clatter of Mark’s camera and the barked orders of the director. As the scene continues, we push closer and closer into the director’s sweaty face, his heavy breathing getting louder and louder on the soundtrack (the director, incidentally, is a heavy-set white guy with an enormous afro and an indeterminate accent– a perfect real-person example of Rorschach’s truism). If Hollywood 90028 really was made for the dirty raincoat crowd, it certainly doesn’t hesitate to interrogate its own audience.
Credit here, one would imagine, is due to director Christina Hornisher. Female directors weren’t entirely unheard of in the world of sexploitation– Doris Wishman is perhaps the most famous example, along with the truly warped films of Roberta Findlay– but they are unusual enough that, when they do appear, it’s difficult not to take notice. Indeed, while nominally a work of skin cinema, Hollywood is in fact a barely-disguised critique of the then-burgeoning adult film industry. Nothing about the filmmaking operation portrayed in the film is anywhere near glamorous, and Michelle’s monologue about how she fell into the business is truly heartbreaking. For a genre associated with cheap thrills, Hollywood isn’t afraid to go dark.
In fact, if you strip away the genre trappings and the obligatory scuzz, and Hollywood 90028 begins to look less like a work of grindhouse horror and more like a lost artifact of the ‘70s New Hollywood. It dabbles in the light experimentalism that characterized much of that decade’s independent cinema; take, for example, a scene in which the voice of Mark’s mother on the telephone unspools in two not-quite-synced takes. The film is also unafraid to digress from its main plot entirely, as when Mark takes Michelle on a tour of various decaying Hollywood mansions and delivers a heartfelt (and depressingly still timely) monologue about the blight of gentrification and urban renewal (“Soon, nothing here will be more than thirty years old”). Then there’s Mark himself, a moody, conflicted antihero who anticipates, if not quite Travis Bickle or Bobby Dupea, then at least the psychologically complicated killers of Maniac or Don’t Go in the House (filmed in 1970, the film even technically predates Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left).
But lest this sound a bit heavy for midnight-movie thrills, rest assured that Hollywood 90028 is every bit as gonzo and perverse as you’d expect from the Grindhouse imprint. Hornisher slips in frequent psychedelic flourishes, which, alongside the improbably lush score by Basil Poledouris, throws the unremitting griminess into peculiar relief. The violence straddles a fine line between the ridiculous and the disturbing (though, as with pretty much any film of this genre and period, the content warning should go without saying). And it all builds up to a truly jaw-dropping final shot, shocking first for how unexpected it is, and then even more so once you contemplate how it must have been accomplished. It’s the sort of moment that fans of cult film live for: outrageous, unnerving, and the sort of thing you’d never see in a “normal” movie.
Which, again, goes back to Poison Ivy’s point. Hollywood 90028 is the sort of film which could have only been made at the exact time and place, and under the exact circumstances, that it was. True to its title, it serves as a travelogue of a Los Angeles gone by, and it’s a safe bet that some of its locations, such as a seedy, wood-paneled adult bookstore with a deli counter full of dildoes, had never been photographed before or since. And it represents our only glimpse at what was clearly a unique voice in cinema; Hornisher, who passed in 2003, sadly never made another film. Hollywood has clearly picked up a small sect of fans over the years (one can easily imagine Ti West furiously scribbling notes as he planned his X trilogy), but it well deserves the recognition that this rerelease will undoubtedly bring– and it makes one excited for future rediscoveries lying in wait.
Hollywood 90028
1973
dir. Christina Hornisher
90 min.
New digital restoration!
Screens Friday, 5/10 & Saturday, 5/11, 11:59pm @ Coolidge Corner Theatre
Opens at Alamo Drafthouse Boston Friday, 6/14
