Grindhouse Theater: Through the Looking Glass (1976)

Through The Looking Glass (released in France as Femme Ou Demon) is a vintage hardcore film with avant-garde elements directed by Jonas Middleton. The film stars Catherine Erhardt (billed as Catharine Burgess) as a bored socialite that finds herself drawn to a mirror that ignites her sexual desires. Through the Looking Glass has themes of incest and the traumatic effects it has on those who have experienced it. It also holds scenes of violence and sexual violence, as well as presenting the sexual content in an artistic as opposed to erotic manner.

While filming Through the Looking Glass, Middleton shot three different versions of the film (two softcore, one hardcore) in order to market the film to different audiences. The film played in American and European art houses, and in its original run at New York's infamous World Theater, the theater screened a Warner Bros. cartoon before the feature film. It achieved some small notoriety in the New York papers at the time because it featured an underage soap opera actress (Laura Nicholson) in a small, non-sex role, as the original poster named her as a "14 year old starlet". The line was removed from all future posters.

A novelization of the film's script, written by Eileen Lottman under pseudomyn of Molly Flute, was published through Dell Publishing.

grind

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 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.