Craig D. Lindsey
Welcome to Harvey’s Hellhole, a monthly column devoted to spotlighting the movies that were poorly marketed, mishandled, reshaped, neglected or just straight-up destroyed by Harvey Weinstein during his reign as one of the most powerful studio chiefs in Hollywood. The recent release of Quentin Tarantino’s new book took our columnist back to when the filmmaker briefly created a venture where films from his youth were brought back to theaters. This is that story:
In Quentin Tarantino’s movie memoir Cinema Speculation, the Oscar-winning filmmaker basically solidified what most of us who’ve followed him over the years already know: the man loves exploitation flicks. (Let’s be real here: All his films have been ambitiously-made, highly self-referential exploitation flicks.) Oh sure, he has been inspired by everything from Howard Hawks comedies to Sergio Leone spaghetti Westerns to anything French New Wave-related. But, as he lays out in the book, he spent his formative years watching double features all over LA, many of them consisting of tawdry, twisted B-movies that you wouldn’t think would inspire a young boy to become one of the most influential filmmakers of all time.
After the mammoth success of Pulp Fiction made Tarantino a movie-making rock star, he let people know how much he adores those sleazy, shoddy, just-plain-wrong films from back in the day by creating a re-release distribution company, bankrolled by Miramax. Along with graphic designer Jerry Martinez (who has worked on Pulp and other Tarantino productions), they formed Rolling Thunder Pictures, named after one of Tarantino’s all-time faves. He devotes a whole chapter to it in Speculation, declaring Thunder “a much deeper depiction of the casualties of war than the contrite Coming Home, with its paraplegic hippie Jesus figure telling it like it is.”
The Paul Schrader-penned, 1977 revenge flick stars William Devane as a Vietnam POW who returns home only to go on the hunt for the outlaws who killed his family and jammed his hand in a garbage disposal, forcing him to wear a prosthetic hook for the rest of the film. (He nails the bastards with help from a fellow traumatized vet, played by a young Tommy Lee Jones.) Tarantino would give the film — and the hook — an intense shout-out at the beginning of every Rolling Thunder release.
The creation of Rolling Thunder almost seemed like Tarantino’s bratty, tongue-in-cheek response to the trend of iconic movies getting restored and re-released during that decade. At a time when Martin Scorsese was working with Miramax to revive cool, French classics like Belle du Jour and Purple Noon for its Miramax Zoe wing, Tarantino launched Thunder to revive less-respectable cinema. “I grew up watching exploitation films and I want to bring them back and give us a chance to have a theatrical experience with them,” Tarantino said during a 1996 press conference. “Martin Scorsese restores El Cid. I want to do Revenge of the Cheerleaders.”
Rolling Thunder was more than a vanity project for Tarantino. He also described it as “a philanthropic enterprise we might make money on,” with 25 percent of profits going toward film preservation and restoration. As he said during that press conference, “I want the money to go to exploitation films, because they’re at the bottom of the list in terms of being restored.”
Rolling Thunder’s run began on a sophisticated note, with the company releasing Chungking Express, Wong Kar-wai’s urban romance dramedy from 1994. Since both Wong and Tarantino were being lumped by critics as new, young arbiters of stylish, pop culture-enhanced film noir, Tarantino (who discovered Chungking at the 1994 Stockholm International Film Festival) felt it was only right to bring Wong’s fourth film to U.S. theaters.
Looking back, Chungking was more like a Trojan horse for Rolling Thunder. Once they got into art-house theaters with that flick, they followed it up a few months later with their first exploitation re-release, 1975’s Switchblade Sisters. Directed by Jack Hill, who directed the famed Pam Grier vehicles Coffy and Foxy Brown, this low-down actioner about a teenage all-girl gang is some depraved, disreputable stuff. (One character gets a cigarette put out in her navel.) And Tarantino proudly gave it his stamp of approval.
Thunder stayed dormant in 1997, as Tarantino mainly concentrated on making Jackie Brown. But it came back with a vengeance the following year with another movie from the East: Sonatine, a 1993 yakuza thriller written, directed and starring Japanese comedian-turned-crime yarn spinner Takeshi “Beat” Kitano. Later that year, Thunder dropped another flick from the ‘70s, the 1973 Blaxploitation detective story Detroit 9000, which is briefly shown in Brown.
Art houses began to get hip to Tarantino’s game, with some theaters only booking Detroit for midnight screenings. Of course, Tarantino welcomed this programming. In 1999, Thunder got together with Grindhouse Releasing (co-founded by Sylvester Stallone’s late son Sage) to bring The Beyond, Lucio Fulci’s heavily incomprehensible 1981 Gothic thriller, to the midnight-movie circuit. Thunder’s other release that year, the Shaw Brothers-produced 1977 King Kong knockoff Mighty Peking Man, was also relegated to late-night showings.
During its run in theaters, Thunder branched out into other forms of media. When these movies hit videocassette, they had segments before and after with Tarantino giving his thoughts on the film. (Here’s him on Chungking and Sisters.) Thunder also dropped films on video they didn’t initially release in theaters, such as Curdled, a 1996 black comedy — executive-produced by Tarantino — about a death-obsessed, Colombian crime-scene cleaner (Angela Jones, who played the death-obsessed taxi driver in Pulp) and the 1996 Canadian punk-band mockumentary Hard Core Logo. And Martinez got Miramax Books to release What It Is… What It Was!; The Black Film Explosion of the ’70s in Words and Pictures, a now-out-of-print salute to the Blaxploitation era.
As the 20th century came to a close, so did Thunder. The company ceased operations in 1999, too niche for its own good. Even though Rolling Thunder Pictures failed to make those down-and-dirty flicks from Tarantino’s youth essential viewing for contemporary audiences, it did make it OK for future cult-movie cinephiles to show off their exploitation faves. When I was living in North Carolina years ago, a couple of movie collectors began a monthly film series at a Raleigh art house where they played much of the cinematic rotgut Tarantino grew up loving. They even screened Revenge of the Cheerleaders, commissioning an artist to do a poster and everything.
I’m sure QT would be proud of that.
