Johnny Deadline: White Slaves of Chinatown

 by JB

I became aware of the YouTube channel White Slaves of Chinatown because it somehow kept coming up in my feed on the Twitter Machine. This week, I vowed to check it out.

... and to think I used to pay good money to purchase DVDs and Blu-ray discs of similar quality to the bill o’fare presented weekly on White Slaves of Chinatown. (Free, but I believe you have to somehow verify your age. Some of these cinema classics contain barenaked ladies.) The Channel describes itself as “Out-of-print, rare & hard to find para-media from around the world!” and seems to feature about 75 full-length exploitation films every week. It’s an embarrassment of riches. I clicked around and sampled some of the wares here; I have a few of them on very old Something Weird discs.

Hip Hot & 21 (1966)
A proto-typical hicksploitation roughie, seemingly made by filmmakers who actually hate women. If misogyny were 90 minutes long, it would be this film. Diane (Diane Darcel) is sold by her father to Big Rick for fifty bucks. That’s bad news for backwoods Diane because Rick is a card-carrying jerk who quickly abandons her. What other troubles will young Diane encounter?

Fuego (1969)
I wrote about this one eight long years ago.
The Plot in Brief: Poor Laura (Isabel Sarli) cannot find sexual satisfaction, no matter how or with whom she tries. At one point, she is so overcome with lust that she rubs snow all over herself to cool down. That’s about it. Fuego owes a lot to Russ Meyer. Producer/director/writer/star/one-man band Armando Bo must have been a besotted Meyer fan because, just over a year after Meyer’s groundbreaking film Vixen! was released and broke box-office records, Armando Bo made his own version down in Argentina. The “similarities” between Vixen! and Fuego are almost too numerous to list. (I said almost.)

Vixen! features a sexually insatiable female lead, who spends the film seeking satisfaction in all the wrong places. Fuego also features a sexually insatiable female lead, who spends the film seeking satisfaction in all the wrong places. Both films open with a bikini-clad protagonist emerging from a lake; in Vixen!, Meyer has Erica Gavin playing with a fish, kissing it, putting it into her mouth (insert “felate-o-fish” joke here) and slipping the scaly thing down her top in a most provocative manner. In Fuego, there are no fish. You know a movie has problems when you think “more fish-kissing” would be an improvement.

The Projectionist (1970)
I first saw this low-budget rarity at the dawn of the VHS era. (Era.) It stars Chuck McCann as the titular projectionist who dreams of being a superhero. Watch for Rodney Dangerfield’s cameo as the theater manager about 22 minutes in. This is a truly strange and unique movie.

Mama’s Dirty Girls (1974)
Hey! Let’s make a movie in our backyard. We’ll convince all of Yolanda’s friends to take off their clothes. We don’t need a script; we’ll just make it up as we go along. The posters will promise a big bank robbery, but... I don’t know. That seems really EXPENSIVE to film. Nudity is cheaper. It really is.

Red-Blooded American Girl (1990)
Here’s a true rarity, a direct-to-cable Canadian production featuring Christopher Plummer, Andrew Prine, and Heather Thomas. Remember cable? I don’t. A vampire girl and a vampire doctor fall in love. I bet this premiered on Cinemax. Directed by Allan Moyle (Pump Up the Volume, Empire Records, and Times Square)

This was a fun and nostalgic journey this week. In the future, I’m going to keep my eyes on White Slaves of Chinatown, and I’m sure the Federal Authorities will too.