Double Your Pleasure!
Sometimes, one classic movie just isn’t enough…
Yes, when one great film isn’t enough, it’s time for a double bill! Let’s go back to a simpler time, when most movies were shown in theaters as “double bills”…a main film and a co-feature…that’s right, two great movies for one low admission price!
Kudos To The Rio!
Look at that classic movie poster tagline:
“No car or man was too hot to handle!”
I was inspired to tell this story because of the terrific Rio Theatre social media sites, where they are trying to keep cult cinema alive by sharing classic grindhouse posters for our enjoyment!
“No Man Could Satisfy Her!”
As you can see from this poster for “Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me!”, the film is:
“Bolder, franker, more intimate than anything ever seen before on the screen!”
Thanks to The Rio, classic sexploitation movie posters live forever! As they say on their twitter account:
“Original movie posters from Toronto’s last grind house!”
And are they ever!
“Zolton” Commands You!
If you never knew that Dracula had a “hound”, then this movie is for you, and thanks to The Rio, you can enjoy these classic cult movie posters forever!
You can enjoy these great postings of posters by going to The Rio’s twitter account:
@TheRioTheatre
These cult posters would be lost forever except for the hard work of this couple, Mark Ulster and Caroline Kubela. Their whole collection comes from his grandfather’s theatre, which was in downtown Toronto on the Yonge Street Strip – what the Rio folks call Toronto’s version of 42nd street!
Toronto Runs “Amuck!”
Yes, it’s an “explosion of sexual frenzy!”
The Rio theatre was in business from 1915-1991, and this married couple has an incredible collection of original movie posters, which they are willing to share with us!
Check out their Facebook page to see great stuff like this:
Check it out here:
https://www.facebook.com/RioMoviePosters
They also have classic movie posters like this for “Part Time Wife”:
I love the stuff they share on their social media, and as I said, it inspired me to check out double features like this one:
“To Rip Out My Guts Indeed!”
Sometimes films like this were combined to help their box office draw, and they were pretty awful films, but at least you got two of them! And in many cases, while the first movie on the bill was brand new, the second one was a year or two older – and usually they had a similar theme, like these two classic B-movies:
The End Of The Double Feature!
With the release of “Jaws” in 1975, all major Hollywood films started being released as a single feature, and double features moved over to the domain of the drive-in:
Carmen, Baby!
Many of these double bills were low-budget sexploitation shockers like “Carmen, Baby!” Whether in drive-in theaters or America’s seedy grind houses, campy sex shockers like this made tons of money!
Of course, these movies were also playing in legendary grindhouse theaters in New York’s Times Square as well, rows of seedy dives “grinding” out sexploitation movies 24 hours a day like these:
Just like the classic Rio Theatre in Toronto, these New York 42nd street movie houses were the home to many of the classic 70’s sexploitation movies, like Christina Lindberg’s “They Call Her One Eye!”
“Thriller” AKA “One Eye” AKA “Hooker!”
This film was also called “Thriller: A Cruel Picture”, and Lindberg was of course the most famous “artsploitaiton” movie queen of all time…and because this was an era where there were NO rules, a greedy distributor released the same film AGAIN and AGAIN – not only called “They Call Her One Eye” and then “Thriller”, but this time they called it “Hookers Revenge!”
It was, of course, on a double bill!
I have posted about Christina Lindberg before – read all about this amazing “Queen Of Artsploitation” by clicking here:
And of course, grind house lives forever!
To read all about the classic era of grindhouse movies, click on my story here:
Several years ago Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez paid homage to this era in film by creating two separate movies, and releasing them on one grindhouse double bill!
Thanks to great home video companies like Vinegar Syndrome and Something Weird Video, you can find lots of great double bills to watch at home….and thanks to The Rio Theatre for sharing their bounty of exploitation posters…so it’s always time for some classic sexploitation double bills!
