The tension between low and high culture has been a part of the movies for a century, since the first seers and poets introduced artistic elements to a populist medium. But most distinctions eroded pretty completely by the \u201890s, when a serial-killer movie won the Best Picture Oscar (The Silence of the Lambs, 1991) and a stylized crime yarn (Pulp Fiction, 1994) won the top prize at Cannes and grossed $100 million at the U.S. box office.<\/p>\n
The upshot is there\u2019s no such thing as a guilty pleasure anymore. We can freely enjoy the base pleasures of genre films, and revel in Academy Award-winners playing superheroes in comic-book movies. Even our hallowed havens of cin-e-mah, such as the Pacific Film Archive, long ago embraced the \u201clower depths,\u201d from \u201880s Hong Kong action flicks to William Castle\u2019s cheesy chillers of the \u201850s and \u201860s to Seijun Suzuki\u2019s baroque \u201860s gangster movies.<\/p>\n
The film program at Yerba Buena Center For the Arts typically edges even further out on the fringes, showcasing internationally celebrated but non-commercial auteurs such as Apichatpong \u201cJoe\u201d Weerasethakul alongside sexploitation pioneers like Doris Wishman. Now comes A Tribute Retrospective to the Exploitation of William Lustig, the weekend-long centerpiece of Bay Area Now 7: Invasion of the Cinemaniacs!, an eclectic survey of the outr\u00e9 tastes of a host of devoted Bay Area film buffs and programmers. The man responsible for bringing Lustig to town is Jesse Hawthorne Ficks, the ardent force of nature behind the Midnites for Maniacs shows at the Castro and a teacher at Academy of Art College (where he inculcates impressionable minds in the sociological value of disposable genre movies).<\/p>\n
William Lustig flat-out loves movies, watching \u2018em and making \u2018em, and seems to savor the problem-solving aspect of low-budget, independent movie-making as much as the creative challenge. The Bronx native scored his first grindhouse hit with Maniac (1980), the grisly tale of a serial murderer who terrorizes the pretty women of on-the-skids New York that opens the no-frills series Fri., Aug. 15 at 7pm in an unrated director\u2019s cut.<\/p>\n
His follow-up, Vigilante (1983), a more nuanced revenge trip than Death Wish, its more famous antecedent, imagines an integrated group of working-class buddies (including Fred \u201cThe Hammer\u201d Williamson and Robert Forster, whose performance here and elsewhere led Tarantino to cast him in Jackie Brown 15 years later) exacting payback from the equally integrated band of lowlife scum who carved up Forster\u2019s wife and blew away his young son.<\/p>\n
Lustig\u2019s film school was the set \u2014 he learned on the job, like Dennis Hopper, Jonathan Demme, John Carpenter and many other filmmakers \u2014 and it\u2019s fun to spot the scenes and camera set-ups inspired by the films of his favorite directors, notably Italian horror-meister Dario Argento and spaghetti-western maestro Sergio Leone.<\/p>\n
Another unpretentious honest-man-fighting-back saga, Hit List (1989), caps the Friday triple bill, followed by Saturday\u2019s marathon dive into the deranged Maniac Cop trilogy (1988-93). In the great tradition of giving the people what they want \u2014 especially if the people were slouched in the Strand and similarly dilapidated and borderline dangerous downtown theaters during the Reagan-Bush years \u2014 Lustig and screenwriter Larry Cohen serve up a steady stream of stabbings, strippers, chase scenes, beatings and flame-filled explosions with a minimum of social commentary.<\/p>\n
While Lustig\u2019s characters are one-dimensional and the dialogue isn\u2019t exactly quotable, the plots treat an absurd premise with fidelity to street-level realism. I\u2019m not going to make any hyperbolic claims for his status as an artist, and I doubt he will, either, in what are sure to be amusing and insightful Q-and-As. But Lustig was anything but a lazy hack, which cannot be said of every Hollywood director, and he compensated for minimal budgets and tight production schedules with an imaginative use of sound, lighting and shadow.<\/p>\n
Lustig\u2019s films are distinguished, if I can use such a fancy word, by a blend of earnestness (he and his actors take the audience, and the mandate of entertaining them, very seriously) and unpretentiousness that\u2019s disarming and even endearing. The tongue-in-cheek \u201cManiac Cop Rap,\u201d that plays under the end credits of Maniac Cop 2 is a particularly nice touch.<\/p>\n
His movies have a personality and an eccentricity that elevates them above most of the anonymous, interchangeable product cranked through the grindhouses and drive-ins back in the day. Bill Lustig was never cynical about the fundamental allure of movies: excitement, entertainment and escapism. If you aren\u2019t jaded, or even if you are, you\u2019re bound to get a jolt of energy hanging out with him at YBCA.<\/p>\n
A Tribute Retrospective to the Exploitation of William Lustig screens Friday and Saturday, August 15-16, 2014 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. For tickets and information, visit ybca.org.