Turning Times Square over to Disney is like neutering a wolf. Some may remember that giddy surge borne on the belief that anything could happen here, in this little stretch of Midtown - though now it no longer can. There's a Hard Rock Cafe around the corner and a Walgreen's at the other end of the block on the corner of 7th, but there's no longer anything approximating the sense of adventure that used to accompany an adrenaline rush on a walk along the Deuce. A Madame Tussaud's wax museum stands on the south side of 42nd between 7th and 8th, and a BB King blues club welcomes tourists across the street. The Deuce has long since been cleaned up, polished and sanitized. It's an enjoyable but tawdry reference work on scuzzy, no-budget movies and the sticky theaters that screened them two generations ago, when Times Square was wall-to-wall with lost souls and hustlers peddling fantasies in glorious old movie palaces gone to seed on 42nd St. Watching HBO's new series The Deuce led me to discover this book, which I bought immediately. This is the milieu of Taxi Driver, of Midnight Cowboy and The French Connection and The Taking of Pelham, 1, 2, 3, when NYC was a genuinely dangerous place, the Theater District in particular.

Incredible journey to the sordid heart of sleazy exploitation cinema once shown round the clock at the crossroads of the world. With wit, intelligence, and an unflinching eye, Landis and Clifford offer the definitive document of cinema's most intense and shocking moments as they came to life at a legendary place. Both a travelogue of the infamous grindhouses of yore and a comprehensive overview of the sleaze canon, Sleazoid Express offers detailed reviews of landmark exploitation classics and paints intimate portraits of directors whose notorious creations played the back end of triple bills for years on end. In Sleazoid Express, Landis and Clifford reproduce what no home video can - the experience of watching an exploitation film in its original fight-for-your-life Deuce setting.

For dedicated lovers of extreme cinema, buying a movie ticket on the Deuce meant putting your life on the line.Īuthors Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford came to know those grindhouses better than anyone else, and although the theaters were gone by the mid-1980s, the films remained.

If the gore epics, women-in-prison films, and shockumentaries showcased within their mildewed walls didn't live up to their outrageous billing, the audience shouted, threw food, and even vandalized the theaters. In a bygone era, when Times Square was crammed with porn shops, gun stores, and drug pushers, disenfranchised moviegoers flocked to the grindhouses along 42nd Street. Warning: Watch your wallets and stay out of the bathroom!

Sleazoid Express by Bill Landis