East Coast Grindhouse: Part 1

I have created a big collection of clips and caps that are centered on New York grindhouse of the mid-60's.  I'll try to make some sense of it all in the narrative.  You will see the central characters of this post are Doris Wishman, as director, and Gigi Darlene as actress. 

Where to start?  Something Weird Video has released many of Doris Wishman’s movies on Blu Ray, so I grabbed the ones that cover most of her mid-career because they are the essence of East Coast grindhouse cinema.  They have all the grit of life in New York and all the barely-clothed girls who do bad things.  Perfect for the Funhouse, I figure.
 
At the heart of Wishman’s movies - and their appeal to us - is a group of actresses she hired to play in several movies.  Somewhere near the front of the line in this group are Darlene Bennett and June Roberts.  Then you have Sharon Kent and Jackie Richards plus a few others to add flavor to the eye candy.  But the queen of them all – the empress of East Coast grindhouse – was Gigi Darlene, the size of a garden gnome if it were in Russ Meyer’s front yard.  The gal was an absolute doll with a form like mortal sin.

So, let’s start there, with Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965). 

Bad Girls Go To Hell

1965

All 1080hd film clips

Gigi stars as some guy’s wife who wanders around in a black lace nightie for half the movie, both at its beginning and then at its end.  She fends off a rape attempt by bashing in the fella’s skull and makes the logical move from Boston to NYC, where she falls in with all sorts of folk that includes a blond-wigged Darlene Bennett with lesbian tendencies.  Everyone she meets is a monster.  Fine.  Sure.  Why not?  But it’s all a dream, which gives her a chance to repeat the same play in the morning. The End.

The movie is the definition of frustration because Wishman had Gigi on camera for 9/10ths of the movie’s running time and shot her scenes beautifully, but she had Gigi unclothed for no more 5 seconds, maybe 10.   You gotta understand, this is a director who made money shooting nudist camp movies with an actress who made money starring in nudist camp movies.  And in HD, Gigi never looked better.  The word, yummy, comes to mind.  Wishman could have asked Gigi to waltz around in the buff for a solid 90 minutes and it would have been the Godfather of grindhouse.  Sad to say, mon cheri, it was not to be.

But we can’t go postal on this one because it was the only time in Gigi’s career that she played a leading role, not a dancer or a stripper or a model or a nudist.  And she did a great job.  Honestly, the gal could act even though her heavy German accent kept her from speaking roles.  But she never got another chance to act or display any gifts other than her body.  Even after this movie, for the rest of 1965 and into 1966, Gigi’s appearances in movies were as a nudist, a stripper and a nymphomaniac.  Then, if we are to accept what we read on the internet, she met her husband while working in a strip club and gave up that life and her career on the big screen.  Meanwhile Wishman moved back to making nudie exploitation films, a couple with the obscenely endowed Chesty Morgan, and she even directed a hardcore movie or two.  Fair to say that Bad Girls was an outlier for both of them, either an oasis or a desert, depending on your point of view.

Darlene Bennett



Gigi Darlene