Modern Pulp

October 15 2022

PHILIPPINE STORIES

Machete Maidens Unleashed! is a mandatory look at grindhouse moviemaking during the untamed 1970s.

Machete Maidens Unleashed! is a film we’ve watched a few times, and whenever a movie racks up multiple viewings we think it needs to be highlighted. It’s a fast paced documentary about the wave of low budget exploitation flicks made in the Philippines from the late ’60s through the ’70s. We weren’t old enough to see any of them during the actual grindhouse era, but caught them in later years, and one reason we came up with this website was for the opportunity to riff on these types of flicks. Over the last decade-plus we’ve had the pleasure of writing about entertaining dreck like Savage Sisters, The Big Doll House, Night of the Cobra Woman, and Cleopatra Wong.

Built around interviews with stars such as Pam Grier, Sid Haig, Margaret Markov, Gloria Hendry, and directors/producers like Eddie Romero, Jack Hill, Joe Dante, and Roger Corman, Machete Maidens Unleashed! is an insider’s look at a unique era in cinema history. It compellingly juxtaposes snippets of cinematic insanity against clips of the performers involved laughing over the craziness of it all. While the movies

discussed often fall into the category of sexploitation, at the time they were also considered an adjunct of the women’s liberation movement—a point made by a couple of the actresses interviewed. Coming out of the sexually repressive decades of the fifties and early sixties, nudity was seen as a rebuke to patriarchal control.

Covering productions ranging from 1964’s The Walls of Hell to 1979’s big budget war flick Apocalypse Now, this is a wide ranging documentary, and by far the most entertaining one on the subject matter we’ve seen. What with our website’s Philippine provenance, and with PSGP having spent a couple of years in Guatemala, another country where life was cheap but fun was unparalleled, this also hit us directly in the nostalgia gland (PSGP feels like the only reason these films weren’t made in Guatemala is because everyone actually would have been murdered, instead of just thinking they would).

All the interviewees seem to understand that they’re from an extinct breed of very brave film performers, making entertainment for audiences ready to see absolutely anything happen. It sometimes seems that modern audiences have forgotten that the filmmaker is not the material, and the actor is not his or her character. The message comes through strongly here that movies are simply make believe. The creators may

want to outrage, or teach, or push censorship envelopes, or illuminate themes that leave audiences enriched in some way, but it’s still just a job they perform before going home to their real lives. We wouldn’t be surprised if some of the interviewees now feel they’d been traumatized, but during this movie, at least, they shrug off the difficulties of filming—ranging from extreme weather to graphic nudity to military revolt—as obstacles true professionals must navigate.

The title cards of some of these films should be enough by themselves to intrigue you. We have a set below. We’ve also mixed in some screenshots. We’d love to have uploaded actual production photos, but the films are so low budget those are close to impossible to find. But why look at photos when you can watch the movies? Give it a shot. Quarts of booze are optional. Machete Maidens Unleashed! had its world premiere in Australia in the summer of 2010, and first hit U.S. shores today the same year at the Philadelphia International Film Festival. We’ve pointed you toward a few Philippine grindhouse flicks above, and you can read about more—there are so many, so please excuse the avalanche of links—here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Philippines, Australia, Manila, Philadelphia, Philadelphia International Film Festival, Machete Maidens Unleashed!, poster art, cinema, sexploitation, blaxploitation, women in prison, movie review

Vintage Pulp

August 1 2022

FISHWATER BLONDE

Whatever floats your corpse.

Art by Paul Rader fronts this copy of Samuel A. Krasney’s A Mania for Blondes, a police proceedural dealing with two women drowned in Philadelphia’s Delaware River, and the investigation to bring a killer to justice. The protagonist here is vice detective Ben Krahmer, who learns that both victims appeared in nudie reels. The clues lead down the rabbit hole of illicit porn and toward a mysterious suspect witnesses think looks like Zorro—but who Krahmer soon realizes may be a member of Pennsylvania’s traditionally garbed Dutch community. Procedurals sometimes—as is the case here—fail to provide deep characterizations, but the mechanics of the investigation are interesting. Krasney constantly refers to his protagonist as “the Morals man”—capital M—which we found weird, but we thought this outing was solid overall and we liked the Zorro imagery. Even so, we probably won’t go looking for more from Krasney unless we run across him cheap. There are, after all, so many paperbacks, and so little time.

Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Ace Books, Samuel A. Krasney, Paul Rader, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

September 2 2016

FROM BAD TO WORSE

My life has gone horribly wrong, but at least I still have my digni— Oh, great. My fly was open this whole time, wasn't it?

In David Goodis’ 1954 thriller Street of No Return, a down-on-his luck nobody named Whitey, who had been a great singer years ago only to lose his voice, career, and sobriety—thanks to a dame, of course—finds that even for a man at rock bottom things can get worse. And it involves something more serious than discovering his fly is open, though that would be funny. What happens is an impulsive act of compassion drags him into a pit of murder and corruption, set against the backdrop of Puerto Ricans-vs-cops race riots in Philadelphia. There are plenty of reviews of this online, so for details just look around. This one caught our eye because of the intricate and gritty cover art, yet another top effort from Barye Phillips.

Philadelphia, Fawcett Publications, Gold Medal Books, David Goodis, Barye Phillips, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

July 21 2016

CORNER STORY

What's in the box? Uh, you know, lipstick, gum, cigarettes, the souls of men I consume. The usual.

Above: really nice front and rear cover art for The Blonde on the Street Corner by David Goodis, which was published by Lion Books as a paperback original in 1954. Set in Philadelphia during 1936, the book examines a bunch of guys who have big dreams but no money, no motivation, and no ideas how to escape dead-end Philly. The narrative is basically plotless, like the characters’ lives. Talk about a great depression. The cover art, by Robert Maguire, is beautiful but the blonde depicted is nothing like the blonde Goodis writes about. Goodis’s blonde is overweight, married, and in her mid-thirties. She does have a sexual aura, though, and certainly fits the mold of a femme fatale. This is considered lesser Goodis, but it’s still good enough.

Philadelphia, Lion Books, David Goodis, Robert Maguire, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

April 4 2016

GETTING YOUR PHILLY

What do they expect? It's called the City of Brotherly Love.

Above is a cover of the early tabloid Philadelphia Briefs published today in 1934, which caught our eye because it has a nice drawing of actress Anita Page, along with an Easter Bunny that seems to looking up her skirt. Bad, bad bunny. But it was added to the original shot, as you see below. Briefs was one of the purest early examples of the American tabloid form, with its reporting focused mainly on big city dangers faced by upstanding young white women, among those perils the predations of darker races—often referred to in the parlance of the Depression years as “sepias” or “ebonys.” To quote: “White, sepia, and ebony wrapped in erotic embrace. White girls in their teens abandoning their ivory bodies to ebony clutches as boy and girl friends cheer drunkenly.” Interesting, no?

This style of reporting served a specific purpose. As James H. Adams put it in his book Urban Reform and Sexual Vice in Progressive Era Philadelphia, the goal was to, “demystify the city through the use of cultural archetypes and narratives that defined why the city was evil, the threat that the city posed to orderly society, and the measures that reformers needed to take to clean up the urban space.” In other words, Briefs created negative, often transparently ridiculous stories that had the effect of convincing readers that barriers maintaining the structure of contemporary society were under siege. These tales of white girls and brotherly love would distress many people even today, so you can imagine the outrage in 1934. See more Briefs here.

Philadelphia, Philadelphia Briefs, Anita Page, James H. Adams, tabloid

Mondo Bizarro

August 3 2015

A HITCH IN THE PLAN

San Francisco or bust? Looks like it was bust big time.

The odd photo you see above shows hitchBOT, a hitchhiking robot created by Canadian professors David Harris Smith and Frauke Zeller. It can’t move on its own. It’s programmed to respond to human voices, have rudimentary conversations, ask for rides, and post updates to the internet. Good samaritans take hitchBOT as far as they want, then leave it where it can catch another ride. In this way the bot successfully made three separate cross country journeys the breadth of Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands. But here’s the thing—“cross country” has a whole different meaning in the U.S., where there may be more cross people per capita than anywhere else on Earth. Is it any surprise that when sent to traverse America hitchBOT was murdered almost before its journey began?

It had been tasked with traveling from Boston to San Francisco, but made it only to Philadelphia before being decapitated and gutted. It was a sad end for the well-traveled and kind-hearted hitchBOT. More of a sociological experiment than a science undertaking, it essentially relied on human kindness to get around, and found it sorely lacking in America. Maybe you’re surprised how hitchBOT’s travels

concluded, but in our opinion ending up shattered on a Philly roadside was entirely predictable. Hell, we’ve ended up shattered on a roadside a few times, and we have every possible human advantage. Poor hitchBOT hadn’t a prayer.

But before you jump to the conclusion that Canadian college professors are hopelessly naive, note that hitchBOT was programmed for the possibility his travels would be cut short. His final update was, “Oh dear, my body was damaged, but I live on back home and with all my friends. I guess sometimes bad things happen to good robots! My trip must come to an end for now, but my love for humans will never fade. Thank you to all my friends.” So it’s clear that Smith and Zeller anticipated their bot dying. We’re not sure if they anticipated the sheer viciousness of its demise, but it’s okay because like hitchBOT said, all its data is safe back in Canada, which means it can be downloaded into another robotic shell.

But why bother? Subsequent trips to the U.S. would surely end with it being obliterated in increasingly baroque ways. Wrapped in chains and dumped in a river comes to mind as a possibility. Doused in gasoline and set afire in a Walmart parking lot is also likely. Deliberately flattened on the freeway shoulder by someone driving a shitbox they don’t mind damaging a bit also could easily happen. Or possibly just riddled with .45 bullets until there’s nothing left but unrecognizable debris and a hitchin’ thumb. Well, we’ll see if hitchBOT has more journeys, but if we had to guess, we’d say Smith and Zeller learned everything they need to know—that their neighbors to the south are monsters.

Canada, Germany, Netherlands, Philadelphia, San Francisco

The Naked City

November 25 2014

A LITTLE TO THE RIGHT

Good aim is helpful for committing murders, and absolutely crucial for solving them.

Front Page Detective shows on this November 1971 cover how to attract eyeballs with lurid art and titillating text. Eisenhower’s social secretary murdered? That sounds intriguingly political, but it turns out Eisenhower’s only connection is that his White House had more than a decade earlier employed the murder victim in a secretarial position. Though no political angle exists, the crime itself is still very interesting. Laura Carpi, scion of a prominent Philadelphia family, disappeared in February 1971. In June the decomposed body of a woman was found in New York City’s East River, labeled an accidental drowning victim, and twenty days later interred on Hart Island as a Jane Doe in the potter’s field there.

After the body was identified as Carpi’s, the New York Times published a sensational story claiming that her head had been removed before burial for study by junior pathologists, or, according to some sources in the pathologist’s office, simply to be used as a desk ornament. The Times claimed that a technician had been cleaning out whatever grisly remnants of flesh were still attached to the skull and happened to find a bullet lodged in its neck tissue. Dealing now with a suspected homicide, police focused on missing persons, and eventually summoned Carpi’s dentist. Recognizing his own work, he made the positive identification.

The ME’s office became the center of a storm, with Chief Medical Examiner Milton Helpern blasting the Times story for insinuating that “the doctors in this office are cutting off people’s heads to make ashtrays.” He pronounced the entire article “grossly distorted.” Perhaps it was, but uncovering a murder by chance never looks good, and he didn’t help his cause when he responded to a question about why his staff had failed to discover the bullet by saying that he ran a mortuary, not a graveyard, and was extremely busy.

Though his answer was callous, it was also correct. His office had a constant flow of bodies coming through—that year more than 1,800 alone that had been victims of murder—and his staff was overworked. Add to this the facts that Laura Carpi had thick hair that concealed the small caliber entry wound at the base of her skull, the slug had left no exit wound, and the head had been four months in the water, and it’s possible to see how mistakes could be made. As to why the head was kept, the unconvincing official reason was that it was because the dentalwork would allow for possible future identification—which only made sense if all the Jane and John Does on Hart Island were also headless.

In any case, the finger of suspicion for the murder immediately pointed toward Carpi’s estranged husband Colin, at right, who was battling for custody of their four children. Not only would the loss of this battle and subsequent divorce settlement wipe him out financially, but he was also well aware that his wife had been seeing another man.

For various reasons—jurisdictional issues and general reluctance to pursue the crime—Colin Carpi didn’t go to trial for two more years. A mountain of circumstantial evidence pointed at him, but his acquittal was deemed by most legal experts to be the right decision. The prosecution simply bungled its presentation to the jury, and even if the courtroom aspect had been perfect, much of Colin Carpi’s suspicious behavior could be chalked up to the circumstances around the custody battle and his wife’s affair. Perhaps a not-guilty verdict was an anti-climax after the high drama associated with the identification of Laura Carpi’s body, but not finding the perp is the way it often goes in true crime, and real life.

New York City, Philadelphia, Hart Island, East River, New York Times, Front Page Detective, Laura Carpi, Colin Carpi, Milton Helpern, true crime magazine, trial, murder

Intl. Notebook

May 8 2014

CARMEN MOANS

Yeah, but you should see the other guy.

This is American boxer Carmen Basilio, and bad as he looks on the outside, he feels even worse inside because he’s just learned he lost his welterweight title to challenger Johnny Saxton. That wasn’t what Basilio, the crowd of thousands, and the television audience of millions thought when the final bell rang, but the judges somehow saw a different fight than everyone else and awarded Saxton the decision. Did it have anything to do with the fact that Saxton was mafia-connected, and his “manager, friend, and adviser” was Philly mobster and notorious fight fixer Frank “Blinky” Palermo? Very possible. Basilio later said of the decision, which occurred in March 1956, “It was like being robbed in a dark alley.” Well, he certainly looks like a guy who was robbed. See more on Basilio here.

Philadelphia, Carmen Basilio, Johnny Saxton, Blinky Palermo, boxing

Intl. Notebook

August 27 2013

GABY CHIC

There's only one way to tan—the Gaby way.

Gaby Suntan Lotion was a popular sunscreen manufactured during the 1940s by Gaby, Inc. of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and above is a stand-up cardboard counter display touting its famed greaseless composition. Other versions of the ad informed consumers that the lotion was also alcohol free. Of course, what drew us to this is the pin-up style art painted by an unknown, not its SPF qualities. But it does it inspire us work on our tans a bit. After all, summer’s almost over.

Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Gaby Suntan Lotion

Vintage Pulp

March 30 2013

IN THE CLICK OF TIME

Sometimes everything just Clicks.

Below are scans from a March 1939 issue of Click, a humor and photo monthly published out of Philadelphia. Information is scarce on this one, but it appears to have been published approximately between 1938 and 1944. We got the images off the website Darwination, at which there hasn’t been much activity of late. Hopefully they’ll get going again over there sometime soon. In the meantime enjoy the scans.

Philadelphia, Click, Loretta Young, Henri Regnault, Carole Lombard, Clark Gable, Earl Carroll, Pat Lee, cinema, magazine art

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

January 17

1950—The Great Brinks Robbery Occurs

In the U.S., eleven thieves steal more than $2 million from an armored car company’s offices in Boston, Massachusetts. The skillful execution of the crime, with only a bare minimum of clues left at the scene, results in the robbery being billed as “the crime of the century.” Despite this, all the members of the gang are later arrested.

January 17

1977—Gary Gilmore Is Executed

Convicted murderer Gary Gilmore is executed by a firing squad in Utah, ending a ten-year moratorium on Capital punishment in the United States. Gilmore’s story is later turned into a 1979 novel entitled The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer, and the book wins the Pulitzer Prize for literature.

January 16

1942—Carole Lombard Dies in Plane Crash

American actress Carole Lombard, who was the highest paid star in Hollywood during the late 1930s, dies in the crash of TWA Flight 3, on which she was flying from Las Vegas to Los Angeles after headlining a war bond rally in support of America’s military efforts. She was thirty-three years old.

January 15

1919—Luxemburg and Liebknecht Are Killed

Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, two of the most prominent socialists in Germany, are tortured and murdered by the Freikorps. Freikorps was a term applied to various paramilitary organizations that sprang up around Germany as soldiers returned in defeat from World War I. Members of these groups would later become prominent members of the SS.

January 14

1967—Summer of Love Begins

The Human Be-In takes place in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park with between 20,000 to 30,000 people in attendance, their purpose being to promote their ideals of personal empowerment, cultural and political decentralization, communal living, ecological preservation, and higher consciousness. The event is considered the beginning of the famed counterculture Summer of Love.