Friday, April 19, 2013

White Slaves of Chinatown (1964)

The Olga movies have a place in exploitation cinema history as being some of the first successful 'roughie' films and they gave us one of the first demented female icons of the grindhouse era. I decided to start out with this flick as it is the first of the series and I have to say that I was underwhelmed. Maybe it is because I have already seen the Ilsa flicks (which were obviously inspired by the Olga series) as they were way more offensive and explicit thereby making White Slaves of Chinatown quite tame in comparison. This resulted in a tedious movie that consisted of narration over various scenes of women becoming addicted to drugs and being tortured for not submitting to Olga's demands. I'm sure that these scenes were offensive back in 1964 and would probably still offend many today (especially in an abortion scene) but I guess I have become quite desensitized to this kind of material. There is an extremely annoying score that consists of an endless loop of Chinese music, some hero-like jazz, and rendition of "Night on Bald Mountain" that kept making me think of Fantasia and took me right out of the picture. This movie hasn't aged well and reminded me more of Reefer Madness than the sexploitation classic it claims to be.

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