Grindhouse Theater: The Last House on Dead End Street (1977)

After being released from prison, a dejected criminal and low level pornographer named Terry Hawkins sets out to document the wretched world around him. He gets together a gang of low-life psychopaths and decides to punish society by making snuff films.

"Last House on Dead End Street" is an experience. “Experience” is the key word to remember if you are to fully appreciate this disturbing and truly unique piece of underground low-budget filmmaking as this is what the movie simply is - a cold experience in atmospheric dread. It is a trippy migraine-inducing mind fuck in its avant-garde displays of inhumane cruelty that is at times utterly repugnant and at others immensely nauseating. The production values are amateurish, there is little in the way of traditional cinematic narrative structure, there is no underlying message for you to decipher and it is not made to entertain. All this actually works to the film’s advantage though as it exists as a visually grainy experimental art-house work striving purely to bombard your senses with shockingly raw imagery of sadistic murder. (Excerpt from the Cinematic Shocks review)

Roger Watkins (star and creator of the film) said that only $800 was spent on production while the rest of the money he acquired for the budget he blew on his then crystal meth habit. At the time of the film’s release in 1977, Watkins didn't even know it was showing.

The original title of the movie was "The Cuckoo Clocks of Hell". It was also released under the titles "The Fun House" and "At the Hour of Our Death".

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.