The UCLA Film & Television Archive series "No She Didn't!: Women Exploitation Auteurs" looks at the unlikely intersection of female filmmakers and the grubby titillation of prison flicks, biker pictures and slasher movies. It kicks off tonight at UCLA's Billy Wilder Theater with a screening of the 1973 film "Terminal Island" with director Stephanie Rothman scheduled to introduce the movie.
Finding the sweet spot where egghead academicism and thrill-seeking movie-fandom meet, the series, which ends Aug. 8, also includes Doris Wishman's "Bad Girls Go to Hell" (1965) and "Another Day, Another Man" (1966), Beverly Sebastian's "Gator Bait" (1973), Barbara Peters' "Bury Me an Angel" (1972) and Amy Holden-Jones' "The Slumber Party Massacre" (1982). These films are hard to find on home video, being either out of print, only on VHS or never issued.
"The films are really flat-out fun genre films, but there's something else at work," said Paul Malcolm, programmer of the series, of what brought these particular films together under the unlikely aegis of the normally more high-minded classical Hollywood and international programming of the film and TV archive.
"Our job here is either bringing in new stuff audiences haven't seen before," Malcolm said, "or recontextualizing old films so they can be seen in a new and different way. There's a way to be smart about good, dumb, fun programming. And these films have a lot of smarts to them."
"Terminal Island" takes a story of a brutal island penal colony -- male and female prisoners are sent there to fend for themselves without guards -- and manages to transform itself into a gripping tale of power, sexism and social upheaval. Critic Dave Kehr wrote, "Terminal Island" can be seen as a "lurid exploitation subject turned into a crafty feminist allegory . . . It's difficult now to believe there was a time when such progressive politics could be expressed in a drive-in movie."
Films such as "Gator Bait" and "Bury Me an Angel" locate female-centered story lines within the confines of a seemingly conventional swamp-set "hicksploitation" or biker revenge movie, adding layers that were recognized as something different even as they were initially being released.
