"How can it be that the act that socially and historically has defined masculinity and to which, to a significant extent, male self-esteem is ultimately linked is not reliably rewarding to women?" – Rachel P. Maines

"The issues surrounding The Child Molester have become only more ambiguous: despite its cheesy retro aesthetics, it allows no room for nostalgic reflection at how far attitudes have progressed or how much things have changed."

"Any director who shoots a grindhouse film without exquisite, triumphant, dangerous, and naked women is doing a disservice to the genre and should move into a different field."

"It is a protean film, and changes radically depending on how you approach it."

Take your seats for a "dark-hearted, midnight fantasia of ecstatic sadism, voyeurism and psychosis"!

"The pain is my only reminder that he [Edward] was real." – Bella (Kristen Stewart)

"Superheroes live best in their own world – a preadolescent world. While an interesting experiment, it's probably not a good idea to shoehorn too much 'reality' into the fantasy realm of the superhero. Ever since Stan Lee introduced anxiety into superheroes – no, earlier, since Harvey Kurtzman first trained a satiric eye on them in Mad – the question, 'What would superheroes be like in the real world?' has bedeviled succeeding generations of comics creators . . . Once a depiction veers toward realism, each new detail releases a torrent of questions that exposes the absurdity at the heart of genre. The more 'realistic' superheroes become, the less believable they are. ~ David Mazzucchelli, comic book artist and illustrator of Batman: Year One

"Peer pressure is either a boon or a bitch with the power to destroy the world, or save it.

"Tease was out, honesty was in."

"Nude on the Moon's exploitation is as innocent as the Good Christo-Nudist's reclaiming of a pre-figleafed (albeit non-recreational) Eden."

"Nobody wants to pay to be castrated anymore."

"How you gonna keep um' down on the farm after they seen all this?" — voiceover from the trailer for the 1972 sexploitation film Sassy Sue"

Linda Lovelace meets the Forty Thieves

"Lazarus doesn't pathologize the locked-in gaze, he lets us feel it."

It came from San Francisco

Give us another naked nurse and some more explosions!

"The more a man dreams, the less he believes." — H. L. Mencken

"The whole world wears a jockstrap!"

Rescuing feminism from rape — and queer theory

Not that you could

After forty years, now serving porn as intentional camp for erotic consideration

Where is the love?

A gay-porn pioneer speaks

Normalizing "deviant" bodies and genders is just one of many tropes in Wood's complex camp classic

"No top. No bottom. Just two men discovering each other."

Wooden bottom boyz, teensy teens, and a Satanic blackface Charley McCarthy — these are just a few of the offerings from le cinema puppet

If you thought his films were bad, wait till you see his life

Who is that comely, vicious gal plotting mayhem from the shadows? Why, the dyke of 1960s pop culture, of course

These "dolls" paved the way for the riot grrls of the '80s — but were too busy kicking ass to notice

Girlflesh 'n boyflesh 'n apocalypse

Sean, meet Johnny Rebel’s cock. Johnny Rebel’s cock, meet Sean.

An interview with the man who created one of cinema's most enduring genres

Livin' large with the Hung One

"No actual fucking!" as the author says, but there are plenty of other pleasures in this lurid '60s rarity whose authorship remains contested

These seminal sleazefests — and a couple of arty classics — will make you twist and shout

Russ Meyer talks about The Supervixens in this 1974 interview from the Bright Lights archives

Liberated porn queen or psychological wreck? You be the judge

The two-dollar auteur who never made a dime from his films is now one of cinema's most treasured outlaws, and rightly so

Softcore gals with hard claws

The godfather of "New Hollywood" speaks

A mini-tour of Roger Corman's legendary 1970s exploitation company

Radley Metzger's first film and his veiled biopic of saintly slut Evita now on DVD

Will Metzger mania never end?

Stylish softcore from one of the pioneers

A few of porn's pioneering directors took the sexual revolution seriously and brought more authentic gay and bi imagery into their "straight" films. Radley Metzger, whose work spans the early 'sixties through the mid-'eighties, is by far the best of this meager lot

Can one man's brain contain Written on the Wind, The Incredible Shrinking Man, LSD, I Hate You!, and Confessions of an Opium Eater? If the man is Albert Zugsmith it could

These films trumpet their topicality, with an outrageous gallery of hunky pimps and pushers, knockout whores, and corrupt cops snorting, shooting, and screwing everything in sight

"In the future, everybody will be so sexually satisfied, there'll be an end to violence, rape and war. We will establish contact with extra-terrestrials and they will be very sexy." — Annie Sprinkle

Behind that mountain of oversized tits-and-ass that make up Russ Meyer's 'body' of work is an extremely intelligent, charming, and funny man, well-versed in cinema history and pop culture

Stand back when ballooned-up, masacara-drenched go-go girls leave the confines of their cages for a murderous desert rampage!

The "world's worst director" never apologized for wearing women's clothes, though many have questioned his taste in sweaters