Word: sideshowmen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Prohibition created the bootleg-booze industry, Hollywood moralizing gave birth to exploitation films. With the adoption of a Production Code in 1922, the major studios ostensibly promised to renounce the ribald. Into that vacuum crept sideshowmen like Dwain Esper, who directed (ludicrously) and promoted (brilliantly) the first grindhouse classics. The 1934 Maniac, about a mad scientist's even daffier assistant whose ailurophobia leads him to rip out a cat's eye and eat it ("Why, it's not unlike an oyster"), pretended to be a serious study of dementia praecox. Esper used the old carny come...
| 1 |