As part of a new feature here at SE&L, we will be looking at the classic exploitation films of the ’40s – ’70s. Many film fans don’t recognize the importance of the genre, and often miss the connection between the post-modern movements like French New Wave and Italian Neo-Realism and the nudist/roughie/softcore efforts of the era. Without the work of directors like Herschell Gordon Lewis, Joe Sarno and Doris Wishman, along with producers such as David F. Friedman and Harry Novak, many of the subjects that set the benchmark for cinema’s startling transformation in the Me Decade would have been impossible to broach. Sure, there are a few dull, derivative drive-in labors to be waded through, movies that barely deserve to stand alongside the mangled masterworks by the format’s addled artists. But they too represent an important element in the overall development of the medium. So grab your trusty raincoat, pull up a chair, and discover what the grindhouse was really all about as we introduce The Beginner’s Guide to Exploitation.
Olga’s House of Shame/ White Slaves of Chinatown/ Olga’s Dance Hall Girls
In an abandoned coalmine somewhere between the urban sprawl of New York City and the black lung of Butcher Holler, is Olga’s House of Shame. Really nothing more than the Teamster’s former lunch shack converted into a den of inequity and sin, it houses the white babes in bondage of the mob’s favorite dominatrix, Olga. This high cheekboned badass relishes and relies on the torture and torment of women, all in preparation for their eventual use and abuse by paying members of paternalistic society. With the help of her haberdasher turned henchman brother Nick, she finds parolees, the disenchanted, and the heavily impressionable, and before you can say Somerset Maugham, she’s got them manacled, bound with leather, strapped into homemade electric chairs, and prancing like my little pity pony around her Love Canal style estate. True, there is always an ungrateful gal or two wanting to escape the life of degradation for a slight sip of the milk of human kindness. But Olga has some inventive means of quenching the thirst for personal dignity.
Meanwhile, Peking duck and the Eastern/Oriental mindset are given a big kick in the diversity as our Olga sets up shot in the Chop Suey district and, with the help of opium and a lack of political correctness, begins her career as a provider of dope fiend hookers. That’s right, whenever you or your buddies are wondering just where to find the finest and freshest flesh feasts, you need look no further than the gone to seed supermodel Madame O and her White Slaves of Chinatown. Offering a wide assortment of society’s dregs for all manner of mistreatment, you can really get your Marquis De Sade started at this BYOBI (bring your own branding iron) establishment. Everything is offered here, from blowtorches to combs. But it’s not all electrodes and evisceration. Even Olga herself occasionally finds time for a little employer/employee interaction. Picking out one of her more unconscious chanteuses, she moves in and performs the art of seduction the only way she’s ever known how: by beating someone until they pass out.
Finally, what’s an upper class Manhattan housewife to do when she’s grown bored of the cosmopolitan highlife? Well, she can read the want ads, meet up with the slimy sleazeball Nick, and apply for a lifetime contractual position as one of Olga’s Dance Hall Girls. Helping to redefine the term “hostess” so that it requires more horizontal than vertical attention, our decidedly different looking headmistress spends a great deal of down time motivating her indentured bop queens into giving up their goodies for the sake of a sick thrill. And for the most part it works, since even a bored Suzie Housewife is more than happy to throw down the gauntlet of acceptable social behavior and expose her Bill Blass to the paying clientele. But they best be wary of making Miss O angry. She will get Greenwich Village on their hinder and beat them to a bloody pulp. Either that, or endlessly discuss the ramifications of violating contractually agreed upon terms over and over again with the ladies until their brains melt.
Get ready to be incredibly disappointed by this set of Olga films. Those who have long dreamed of seeing these urban grit girl fests in the privacy of their home, hoping they were warped and weird counterpoints to the non-metropolitan masochism of the later Ilsa series, may want a ribald recount. Bereft of even the slightest titillation factor (unless you are deep into S&M—more on this later) and poorly shot, filmed, and acted, the Olga movies offered on this Something Weird triple feature could best be described as monotonous in the most completely literal interpretation of that word. These are movies made for a sole audience, with only one main goal in mind and created from a singular premise. In some ways, the SCTV spoofing of similarly seedy concepts, with such comically precise titles as “Dr. Tongue’s 3-D House of Slave Chicks,” accurately captures the ludicrous laziness of these movies.
Not films, actually, since they tell no cohesive story and are filled with images and archetypes instead of characters. In fact, these cinematic explorations of sleaze function as lurid litmus test, a good gauge to your sexual proclivity. If you find any of the elaborate and carefully staged bondage material the least bit enticing, if your cabbage is tossed when you witness Olga beating a wounded wanton wench back to the stone age, or if you salivate at the sight of long, static tableaus featuring women in various stages of servitude, then you may be the perfect candidate for this trilogy of trauma. But most other exploitation audience members will, once the novelty has worn off, wonder just what the whipping post the big deal is here.
The Olga films are blueprint formations all the way. Each is exactly the same in tone and timbre. We are introduced to Olga and her occupation: white slaver to the world, provider of female pulchritude, and occasional dealer in illegal drugs. She is always associated with a “mob” or “syndicate” who bankrolls her brainwashing and bondage. She always has a less than masculine “assistant” who aids her in the finding of new flesh. And the storylines always center on locating new gals, discovering the traitors, and meting out punishment for crimes, be they actual or thought. There is a minimum of dialogue (Dance Hall Girls has more spoken words than the other two films combined times 20) and a voice-over narrator gives us the Joe Friday style set of facts for everything that is happening on the screen (our storyteller always seems to know even more than what is being shown, or could be inferred from being shown).
We then cut to scenes of women oppressed, filmed matter of factly to provide the raincoat crowd the requisite amount of raunch per second of screening. There is always some fake violence involving electricity, knives, or bizarre implements of defilement. Everything is forced and invariable, offering very little drama or filth. In reality, these films are nothing more than B&D books come to ersatz “life.” Olga’s House of Shame is probably the most entertaining (if one can find these flat visions of vice enjoyable), since it provides the most amusing voice-over story structure, plus the pear shaped asexuality of Olga’s Barry Humphries in training brother Nick. His chase of Elaine through the woods, wobbly male “pouch” in full undulation, is worth the price of admission alone.
But as for the rest of these night terror tortures, Chinatown is too prosaic to make much sense. We do learn a lot about why Asians have had such a hard time, socially, within the United States since the crass, racist comments made about life and crime in the Oriental areas of urban society are downright slanderous. For a film to try and excuse what is basically an exercise in perverted sexuality as some sort of unwanted “yellow plague” seems horribly unfair. Dance Hall Girls is decidedly different, as it offers pages and pages of dialogue. That’s right, Olga and her minions talk…and talk and talk and talk. Seems there’s not a meaningless topic that these miscast actors can’t mangle and moon about for untold moments of monotony. If you ever wondered why House of Shame and Chinatown have ix-nayed on the alking-tay the verbal Valium of Dance Hall will lull you into a sense of silence.
Even worse, all of the Olgas are slim on the skin side. While the nudity level seems to increase as the titles moves along, there is very little revelry in the reveal. It seems that nakedness is treated as an offhanded indirect result of having to persecute and mistreat women. Even when our Olgas decide to get their pre-soft core freak on and rub their prisoners for a little same sex leisure, the newsreel manner of the sequencing makes for limp biscuits all around. It’s easy to understand why these films were such a scandal in the early ’60s; people used to seeing the nudie cutie booties of various sun worshipers scurry across the screen must have purged their petticoats upon seeing these scenes of pseudo sick sordidness and sadism. But in the light of today’s anything-for-a-jolly social mentality, it all plays out like a very special episode of Fear Factor.
Any fan of exploitation worth their heft in hedonism will definitely want to check out this mad mistress and her love of pain. But the casual fan that has only heard about the outrageous nature of these movies will be disarmed at how devoid of violence they truly are. Olga may be “possessed of a mind so warped that she made sadism a full-time business,” but the movies capturing her mental malady are quite sobering.