Jack Hill : the exploitation and blaxploitation master, film by film

224 Pages·2009·2.579 MB·English

by  Calum Waddell

Jack Hill
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Jack Hill
The Exploitation and
Blaxploitation Master,
Film by Film
CALUM WADDELL
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina, and London
Photographs are courtesy Jack Hill unless noted.
LIBRARYOFCONGRESSCATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATIONDATA
Waddell, Calum.
Jack Hill : the exploitation and blaxploitation master, film by
film / Calum Waddell.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7864-3609-5
softcover : 50# alkaline paper
1. Hill, Jack, 1933 Jan. 28– I. Title.
PN1998.3.H535W33 2009
791.4302'33092—dc22 2008048260
British Library cataloguing data are available
©2009 Calum Waddell. All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying
or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
On the cover (top to bottom): The cast of Spider Baby (1968);
director Jack Hill on set; Pam Grier in Foxy Brown (1974)
(AIP/Photofest)
Manufactured in the United States of America
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com
In memory of Chevy,
my pet cat who died
during the production of this book
Acknowledgments
Many thanks go out to the following great people
for their help in the production of this book (and just
their general all-round enthusiasm as well): Mark
Atkins, Judith Brown, Roger Corman, Michael David-
son, Sid Haig, David Kidd, Joanne Nail, Francis O’Toole,
John Prizer, Jane Schaffer, Karl Schanzer, and, of
course, Jack and Elke Hill themselves for making this
labor of love possible. And a special thanks to Elijah
Drenner, a brother in grindhouse grime, Joe Venegas
(for outstanding services in LA).
vi
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vi
Introduction 1
1. Beginnings 7
2. The First Films
Spider Baby (1964) 14
Track of the Vampire (1966) 27
Mondo Keyhole (1966) 33
Pit Stop (1967) 41
3. The Boris Karloff Films
Dance of Death(1968) 52
Isle of the Snake People(1968) 55
Incredible Invasion (1968) 59
Fear Chamber (1968) 63
4. Return to Corman
Ich, ein Groupie(1969) 76
The Big Doll House(1971) 87
The Big Bird Cage(1972) 104
5. The Blaxploitation Years
Coffy(1973) 114
Foxy Brown(1974) 132
6. From Cheerleaders to Sci-Fi
The Swinging Cheerleaders (1974) 144
Switchblade Sisters(1975) 156
The Scripts of Jack Hill 176
Sorceress (1982) 186
vii
viii Table of Contents
Appendix: The DVDs of Jack Hill 199
Chapter Notes 205
Bibliography 207
Index 209
Introduction
If you weren’t there, then it is difficult to imagine what it was like. A world
before VHS, DVD and multiplex cinemas seems unthinkable to many of us—
myself included. A child of the eighties, I grew up with numerous video shops
in my small, but modern, Scottish town and discovered many B-movie gems
as a young boy—ripe with imagination and willing to sit down in front of prac-
tically any kind of film. The accessibility of a movie was never an issue for
me—I could just as easily rent The Evil Dead as Song of the Southor The God-
fatherfrom my local video store and I never had to wait for the theatrical re-
release of a classic to see it again. Of course, this was not always the case—and
in so many ways, video killed the art of the B-movie.
You see, as I grew into my teens I learned about the drive-in cinemas that
were once hugely popular in North America and I also found out about 42nd
Street in New York—which sounded like an exploitation film connoisseur’s
heaven. It was a result of such discoveries that I first came into contact with
the work of Jack Hill, one of the most proficient and talented low-budget
filmmakers of the sixties and seventies. After seeing Coffy for the first time, I
knew I had stumbled upon somebody special. When one looks at Hill’s movies
today it is easy to be transported back to a time before six major studios effec-
tively controlled what was shown at your nearest cinema. A time when quirky,
strange and unpredictable low-budget movies were projected for audiences
who, without Internet access or DVD special features, knew little about what
they were about to see other than what they learned from the film’s trailer or
marketing campaign.
As a result, the advertising that accompanied many of the great B pictures
from the sixties and seventies has become as legendary as the movies them-
selves—from the “To Avoid Fainting, Just Keep Repeating ‘It’s Only a Movie’”
blurb that accompanied Wes Craven’s Last House on the Leftto Hill’s own “So
Easy to Love. So Hard to Kill” that was used for Switchblade Sisters. Consider-
ing that Hill spent a huge chunk of his career working for the legendary Roger
Corman, it should come as no surprise that he was responsible for most of the
tag lines that complemented his own directorial efforts—and indeed the work
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