Grindhouse Theater: Massacre Mafia Style (1974)

Mimi Miceli Jr. (the son of a vanquished mafia chieftain) returns to America with the dream of reviving his father’s past criminal glory. Teaming up with old friend Jolly Rizzo, he kidnaps Los Angeles mob chieftain Chucky Tripoli and ransoms him to get back into the California mob. The scheme results in Miceli winning his own piece of the Los Angeles territory, but the tensions he creates in the crime family soon results in a bloody war between Miceli and the rest of the mob.

Massacre Mafia Style (aka The Executioner - Like Father, Like Son) was written, directed, produced and stars Italian American singer/actor Duke Mitchell. The film was distributed by Moonshine Entertainment. Grindhouse Releasing would later go on to re-release a digitally restored version on Blu-ray and DVD in 2015.

The film quietly began building a cult audience when it was released on VHS by Video Gems in the 1980s. Nathanial Thompson of TCM (Turner Classic Movies) Underground called the film “mind-bending” adding that “with Duke Mitchell's cult following steadily building on what seems to be a daily basis, one can only wonder how far and wide the legacy of this entertainment jack of all trades will go". Josh Hurtado of Twitchfilm commented that it’s “the rare film that is BETTER than its trailer...a great forgotten gem". The reviewers at the Las Vegas Sun noted that Massacre Mafia Style is “a virtual torrent of bloodshed” and that it “makes the Godfather movies look like Sunday school picnic outings!"

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.