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Geraldine Viswanathan and Margaret Qualley in ‘Drive-Away Dolls’ (Photo Credit: Wilson Webb / Working Title / Focus Features)

Spouses Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s Drive-Away Dolls is a crazy and twisted mix of blackmail, murder, and sexually adventurous lesbians, with a healthy sprinkling of “Wtf is going on” humor. There’s literally nothing out of bounds in Coen and Cooke’s screwball comedy/buddy road trip adventure that wears its R-rating like a lusty badge of honor.

The year’s 1999 and lesbian BFFs are ready for a change of scenery. Jamie, who prefers sampling multiple sexual partners even while in a committed relationship, is coming off a bad breakup with her police officer girlfriend (Beanie Feldstein). Which is as good an excuse as any to embark on a road trip. And the sexually repressed, introverted Marian wants to make the trip from Philadelphia to Tallahassee for a little birdwatching.

What could...

Director Ethan Coen – collaborating with wife Tricia Cooke instead of brother Joel – delivers a disposable but not entirely unentertaining lesbian-centered crime caper comedy in Drive-Away Dolls. With its raunchy sex and vivid violence, the film is more an affectionate tribute to hard R drive-in B movies that more resembles something from the mind of Russ Meyer than anything resembling smart, Oscar-y movies like the Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men, Big Lebowski, Barton Fink, Fargo, Blood Simple etc.

Drive-Away Dolls definitely retains the quirkiness of the Coen brand, but key inspirations this time were Meyers’ Motorpsycho, Bad Girls Go To Hell and even something really good like ’50s noir Kiss Me Deadly, with which it shares some plot details.

But “plot” doesn’t really matter much here. Coen and Cooke throw everything against the wall to see what sticks. If it makes narrative sense, it likely is an accident.

In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week we look at To Live and Shave in L.A's The Plot That Failed, directed by Doris Wishman. Noise rock musician Tom Smith was buying a sex toy for his girlfriend when he recognized the woman who sold him the erotic device: none other than Doris Wishman. The infamous director of sexploitation fare like Double Agent 73, Let Me Die a Woman, Bad Girls Go To Hell and Nude on the Moon had fallen on hard times and was now living in Miami and working at 'The Pink Pussycat', a sex shop. The first thing she asked Tom Smith was if he could loan her some money...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Jared Masters has teamed up with Allied Vaughn to reintroduce some rare B-movie gems from a bygone era. See all ten. DVDs can be purchased at major online stores like Best Buy and Target.

The Frolic Grindhouse Series includes:

RatMan (1988)

A maniac butchers a fashion model on a Caribbean island and leaves the body to be eaten by rats. The model's sister suspects something isn't quite right with the police investigation and decides to go snooping on her own. With her friend, Fred, their investigations lead them to an unknown part of the island where they discover a monstrosity of a rat like man. The creature is killed by Fred, but the true horror of it's nature is just beginning...

Centipede Horror (1982)

A crazed evil wizard uses his powers to take revenge on beautiful women by making them vomit up live centipedes, which then proceed to eat their victims.

Calamity...

Although this article doesn’t explicitly contain any significant spoilers, it is always advisable to watch a film before reading about it too deeply.

In his own words, the intended audience for Russ Meyer’s films was “some guy…in the theatre with semen seeping out of his dick.” His work in the sexploitation subgenre is credited with bringing nudity and sleaze into the American cinematic mainstream and his gravestone declares him ‘King of the Nudies.’ And yet his magnum opus has been reclaimed as a work of female empowerment, a subversive text that has inspired music videos by the Spice Girls and Janet Jackson, lent its name to a New York women’s bar and even been referenced in Xena and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Despite dismissing it after a first viewing in the mid-1970s as “retrograde male-objectification of women’s bodies and desires further embellished by a...

Sneak Peek a new trailer from the sexy, comedy thriller "Bad Kids Go to Hell", based on the best selling graphic novel of the same name directed by Matthew Spradlin:

"..six prep school kids from 'Crestview Academy', home to the spoiled offspring of society's elite, find themselves stuck in detention on a frightfully dark and stormy Saturday afternoon. 

"During their 8-hour incarceration, each of the six kids falls victim to an accident until only one of them remains.

"Have the ghosts of prestigious Crestview finally come to punish the school's worst brats? One thing is for sure...Daddy's money can't save them now..."

Cast includes Ben Browder, Judd Nelson, Chanel Ryan, Cameron Deane Stewart, Augie Duke, Ali Faulkner, Marc Donato, Roger Edwards, Amanda Alch, Jeffrey Schmidt, Chanel Ryan, Eloise DeJoria and Priscilla Iden.

Click the images to enlarge and Sneak Peek "Bad Girls Go To Hell"...

This Week’s Must Read is Wired4Film’s interview with an ol’ Bad Lit fave: Chris Hansen, who has just wrapped up his 3rd feature film, Where We Started. The chat gets into detail on the challenges of filming a heavy dialogue indie film with just two actors that takes place mostly at night using a mostly student crew. Plus, there’s talk of the Christian themes that run through Hansen’s films, but don’t bonk you over the head, even considering he made a film with the word “Messiah” in the title.Another interview that’s not really film related, but I dig donna k.’s chats with artists, is her talk with sculptor Karyn Olivier. The photos of Olivier are also really worth clicking over for.This image from 1934′s The Black Cat starring Jacqueline Wells and Boris Karloff is also stunning to look at.Now...

I’m seeing two dates listed online for Doris Wishman’s birthday. Both are in 1912, but some sources — e.g. IMDb and Wikipedia — give today, June 1, as her birthday, while others — e.g. Senses of Cinema — give it as July 23.

Does anybody know definitively or can back up with some more info which of these dates is correct? I’d like to give her a proper Bad Lit birthday shout out.

If she were born today, she’d be 99. Otherwise, she’d still be 98 until July. Sources agree she died on Aug. 10, 2002.

In honor of Doris’ maybe birthday today, here’s the trailer for her most infamous film, Bad Girls Go To Hell, which is seriously skirting the Nsfw line:

Read More:nyuff & Cuff: Class Of 2000-02Underground Yearbook: 1975Underground Yearbook: 1974Underground Yearbook: 1972...

We at Mubi think that celebrating the films of 2010 should be a celebration of film viewing in 2010. Since all film and video is "old" one way or another, we present Out of a Past, a small (re-) collection of some of our favorite of 2010's retrospective viewings.

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This is a list of older movies I saw for the first time in 2010—not necessarily the best, but the ones that gave me the greatest sense of discovery. It’s a sad commentary on contemporary film culture that only five of the twelve films I mention are available on Netflix.

Routine Pleasures (Jean-Pierre Gorin, USA, 1986)

An essay film from the Godard’s former collaborator during his leftist Dziga Vertov Group days. The movie begins as a documentary about a group of model train enthusiasts in San Diego who have constructed an elaborate imaginary world with enormous and minutely detailed landscapes and a...

This July and August, the UCLA Film & Television Archive in Los Angeles, California is screening a series of horror and thriller films directed by women called No She Didn't!: Women Exploitation Auteurs. From July 24th through August 8th, films like Terminal Island (directed by Stephanie Rothman), Bad Girls Go To Hell and Another Day, Another Man (directed by Doris Wishman), Gaitor Bait (directed by Beverly Sebastian), Bury Me an Angel (directed by Barbra Peters), and Slumber Party Massacre (directed by Amy Holden-Jones) will be screened in their full exploitation glory.

July 24th, Stephanie Rothman will make a rare appearance to introduce Terminal Island, her feminist exploitation flick...

In the 1970s and ‘80s, something funny happened on the way to the grindhouse. With women still sorely under-represented in the directorial ranks of the "New Hollywood," a number of women began working as writer-directors in the low-budget world of exploitation films.