Grindhouse Theater: Water Power (1976)

A disturbed loner (a pornographic parody of Travis Bickle from Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver") attempts to clean up the city of whorish women by raping them and then delivering a soul cleansing enema to purge them of their unclean ways.

Water Power is a vintage porno flick directed by Shaun Costello and stars AVN Hall of Famer Jamie Gillis. The film is loosely based on on the real-life exploits of Michael H. Kenyon - aka "The Enema Bandit". Kenyon would go on to plead guilty to a decade long series of armed robberies of female victims, some of which involved sexual assaults in which he would give them enemas. In preparing for his role, Gillis reportedly asked to be flown to Illinois to interview the inmate, but his request was denied.

The majority of porn films made in the 70s were under the control of the mafia, and this one is no exception. The film was bankrolled by the Gambino crime family and they hand picked Costello to direct it. It's also because of the mob that the film is under director Gerard Damiano's name because they thought it would sell it better. Damiano is the director of "Deep Throat" which is the highest grossing porn film of all time.

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.