Grindhouse Theater: Empire of Ash (1988)

Monday, October 20, 2014

Empire of Ash (1988)

In a post-apocalyptic future, cities have been destroyed so the survivors roam the remaining forests. An aggressive, traveling gang of "maniac warriors", named LARD, which stands for, what else, Leukocytes Acquisitors for Remission of Disease, go around terrorizing and killing people. Who they don't kill, they kidnap and steal their blood so they can continue to survive. Naturally they are led by an insane, shroud-wearing preacher, and when they kidnap the wrong girl, her sister and a defector from LARD who is now a good guy team up to try and rescue her.

This film was re-released as Empire of Ash 2.

♆ The Wonderful World of Grindhouse ♆

A grindhouse is an American term for a theater that mainly shows exploitation films. It is named after the defunct burlesque theaters located on 42nd Street in New York City, where 'bump n' grind' dancing and striptease were featured.

In the film Lady of Burlesque (1943) one of the characters refers to the burlesque theatre on 42nd Street, where they are performing stripteases and bump and grind dances, as a "grindhouse".

The introduction of television greatly eroded the audience for local and single-screen movie theatres, many of which were built during the cinema boom of the 1930s. In combination with urban decay after white flight out of older city areas in the mid to late 1960s, changing economics forced these theatres to either close or offer something that TV could not. In the 1970s these theatres were put to new use as venues for exploitation films, either adult pornography and sleaze, or slasher, horror and dubbed martial arts films from Hong Kong.

Grindhouse films characteristically contain large amounts of sex, violence or bizarre subject matter. One genre of film featured were "roughies" or sexploitation, a mix of sex, violence and sadism. Quality varied, but low budget production values and poor print quality were common. Critical opinions varied regarding typical grindhouse fare, but many films acquired cult following and critical praise. Double, triple, and "all night" bills on a single admission charge often encouraged patrons to spend long periods of time in the theaters. The milieu was largely and faithfully captured at the time by the magazine Sleazoid Express.

By the 1980s, home video and cable movie channels threatened to render the grindhouse obsolete. By the end of the decade, these theaters had vanished from Los Angeles's Broadway and Hollywood Boulevard, New York City's Times Square and San Francisco's Market Street. By the mid-1990s, these particular theaters had all but disappeared from the US. Very few exist today.