Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers (1988)

Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers (1988) Directed by Fred Olen Ray

Lurid in the most offbeat and outrageous fashion. B-movie sleaze specialist Fred Olen Ray crafts one of the most bafflingly funny experiences you can have at the movies. Obscenity as entertainment methodology and parody as discursive exploitation are employed with profane audacity in this farcical pseudo-noir comedy about the chronicle of Jack Chandler (John Henry Richardson), a risible L.A. private eye, who stumbles upon a deranged Egyptian cult that performs human sacrifices with a chainsaw as an offering to their gods. This unfolds as Jack investigates a young girl’s runaway from her home. Gunnar Hansen, secretive but intimidating, plays the leader of this murderous polytheistic cult made up of hysterical, lewd prostitutes who lure their male victims with their coaxing bosoms. Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers’ economical paraphernalia is camp art, or perhaps tasteless phony art, but its hilariously amoral commentary on the public’s glee at violence and debauchery in cinema palpably stands as a brilliant, if not the most genuine, caricature of American exploitation cinema. Every element, from the performances to the pulpy aesthetics, is there to serve as a travesty of Los Angeles film culture; John Henry Richardson is in a nutshell a satirical hyperbole of Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity but with the tough mannerisms of Bogie’s Sam Spade. And the unorthodox style is so scuzzy and ludicrous that the city Where the Stars Live is more a depiction of the La La Land we see in the movies than the L.A. of reality. Fun and unrestrained. Phenomenal exploitative stuff that delivers what its title promises.