Sleazoid Express will be an exploitation film fan's nirvana, while covering the essential works of the sleaze canon for a mainstream audience. Each chapter of Sleazoid Express will focus on a uniquely 42nd Street exploitation genre and supply a close, intimate portrait of its makers, stars and showcases. It will reproduce for the reader what no home video can provide - the experience of watching an exploitation movie within the Deuce grindhouse setting, followed by behind-the-scenes talk about the movie's production.

The book will span the halcyon era of the early-1960s through the mid-1980s, when American grindhouses began closing and the various exploitation movie genres moved to home video and DVD. Sleazoid Express: A Mind-Twisting Tour through the Grindhouse Cinema of Times Square will be an odyssey through the gritty venues of the old 42nd Street and into the world of the vintage exploitation movies in which they specialized. Exploitation movie lovers now enjoy their entertainment in the safety of their bedrooms, watching a favorite film five times or more, gleefully programming their own double and triple features. Wildly successful video companies like Something Weird and Grindhouse Releasing sell millions of vintage horror and sexploitation films that once haunted the Deuce. They've spread to millions across the globe through video and DVD. Those theaters are gone, but the films remain. For exploitation movie lovers, going to a Deuce grindhouse was like taking your life in your hands for a cinematic thrill - which, of course, added to the fun and increased the shock status of the experience.

If the movies let them down, the audience would react by shouting, tossing food containers, and physically damaging the theaters.

Their disenfranchised audience were film's harshest critics, demanding that the exploitation movies the theaters screened lived up to the promises made by their graphic, outrageous ad campaigns and shocking trailers.

The main venues were grindhouses, down-at-the heels creations left over from the Minsky's Burlesque days-and showcases for the wildest and most extreme films in cinematic history. The Deuce was the most intense block on which one could ever hope to see a movie. The street was wall-to-wall movie theaters, punctuated by high frequency shoebox-sized adult bookstores, male street hustling, weapons shops, phony drug salesmen, bootleg electronics stores, tourist junk shops, and guys offering couples to take their quickie Polaroid portraits while they sat in wicker chairs. Its main artery was the Deuce, a tiny strip of neon and concrete coldly fleshing out 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues. Times Square was once America's most notorious red light and theater district.

Sleazoid Express by Bill Landis