CHAINED GIRLS (1965) + BAD GIRLS GO TO HELL (1965)

Two titles, one decade.... get ready for a night of 60s sexploitation cinema exploring the moral panic around lesbian desire.

CHAINED GIRLS by Joseph P. Mawra

A sensational psuedo-documentary purporting to capture the secret lesbian underound in Greenwich villiage. Complete with a moralising voice-over insisting that the life of homosexual is bound to tragedy - this film falls in the tradition of Mondo movies that were ultimatly opportunities to cash in on the scandal of depitcting taboo subjects, made especially for the Grindhouse.

BAD GIRLS GO TO HELL by Doris Wishman

Ellen is a Boston housewife, waiting for her hubby to come home from the office. Whilst taking out the trash, a janitor sexually assults her and so she flees her domestic life to the Big City, where a string of strange encounters follows her..

CW: Sexual Assult.

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This is our first screening in our season called:

Betty Friedman called lesbians in the womens movement ‘lavender menaces', as if to suggest their lack of attraction to men was threatening enough to derail second wave feminism. The optics of including lesbians in the movement was unappealing for Friedman, who wanted to maintain a certain middle class respectablility.

A year later, lesbian feminists reclaimed the phrase, printing it on t shirts and badges, transforming the insult into a bold declaration of political solidarity. This season traces a similar transformation in western cinema across the latter half of the 20th century—from moral panic, where lesbian desire is as predatory and monsterous, to the filmmakers reclaiming that image as a source of solidairty and strength in resistance to patriarchal hegemony.

This season is for all the queer folk who refuse to assimilate, finding power in being menaces to a deeply corrupt society <3