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| Images courtesy of Something Weird Video |
The name Jerry Gross is synonymous with all things
grindhouse exploitation related. A
successful film producer and distributor who brought to the US everything from I
Drink Your Blood to Zombie, I Spit on Your Grave and The Boogey
Man, Gross was an entrepreneurial force not wholly unlike Roger Corman or
Lloyd Kaufman for ushering in the edgier, more transgressive and daring works
of independent if not international filmmakers.
But what many aren’t aware of is that well before that transition into
exhibiting exploitation films in theatrical release, Jerry Gross himself once
sat in the director’s chair.
With the help of The Film Detective in conjunction with longstanding
regional exploitation cult label Something Weird Video, the outfit has
unearthed and restored to the best of their ability the debut film of Jerry
Gross: the hicksploitation racist Southern cops thriller Girl on a Chain Gang,
a film which posits itself as a socially conscious drama but in actuality is a
crass “roughie” or sexploitation film involving sexual violence of some
kind. Not necessarily good but certainly
a staple of the drive-in trashterpiece shockfest of the mid-1960s.
Three unnamed, college educated civil rights activists
comprised of a white man, a black man and a white woman are driving through the
deep American Southern countryside when they are pulled over by two hick racist
redneck cops who don’t take a liking to ‘Northern folk’ in their turf and
proceed to further harass and eventually imprison the trio. Under the racist, sexist, dominant, abusive,
ever watchful eye of Sheriff Sonney Lew Wymer (William Watson’s screen debut in
a role he’d later replay in In the Heat of the Night), the three are
locked up, terrorized and brutalized before the men are both murdered, leaving
the woman defenseless against the Sheriff’s unwanted sexual advances. Soon a mock trial is in place and the woman
finds herself tied up to chain gang of black slaves through whom she
desperately tries to escape with her life.
While prescient in its time for addressing many
still-present issues regarding race relations, police brutality, civil rights,
integration and segregation with many number of Hollywood films including but
not limited to To Kill a Mockingbird, A Raisin in the Sun or the
aforementioned In the Heat of the Night, Jerry Gross’ precursor to
George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead is most certainly
trashy. From its wallowing in deep
Southern racism to its frank eroticizing of its female victim no matter how powerful
her rebuttal speech in the “courtroom” is, Girl on a Chain Gang like its
title is tawdry. Loosely based on a true
crime story of three civil rights workers who were murdered in Mississippi, the
film is less interested in vying for law and order than it is in glorifying the
spectacle of lawlessness.
Written and directed by Jerry Gross with, get ready for this
(I shit you not), cinematography by George Zimmermann (not THE guy but all the
more troubling to hear when associated with this particular project) and percussive
rumblings by Steve Karmen which also sexes up the proceedings, Girl on a
Chain Gang though set in the South was actually shot in Long Island, New
York near the director’s home town.
Watching the film is less of a narrative piece of storytelling than it
is a horror film looking to the events later dramatized in far better films as Mississippi
Burning or Ghosts of Mississippi for shock value.
The cast does a mostly okay job with the material with three
of its key cast members William Watson, Arlene Farber and Julie Ange making
their respective screen debuts though one can’t help but feel for the girl in
the film who is stripped down and made to run through the swamps and woods with
a chain clipped to her ankle. Later
scenes of her chained up by the wrists as a hulking hairy shirtless heavy looms
and lusts over her with the threat of physical torture further signify Gross’
film as not socially conscious but that of a sideshow geek eager to raise
eyebrows for a dollar.
Yes the efforts of Something Weird Video and The Film
Detective are commendable and the film does get mean when it needs to be, but
filmgoers shouldn’t take this for more than what it is: exploitation
trash. Reportedly the tamest in Jerry Gross’
short lived grindhouse trilogy, the film is an important historical footnote
for fans curious about the early career of one of the greatest exploitation
cinema distributors who ever lived but on its own terms this dose of regional
do-it-yourself hicksploitation just isn’t very good. Stick to Herschell Gordon Lewis or William Grefe for this sort of thing.
--Andrew Kotwicki
