The Sizzlin’ Something Weird Summer Challenge 2024: White Slaves of Chinatown (1964)

Frank Henenlotter’s Sexy Shockers (September 1 – 7) We all know Frank Hennenlotter as the director of the Basket Case films, Bad Biology, Brain Damage, and Frankenhooker, but he’s also a cinematic curator of the crass! An academic of the pathetic! A steward of sleaze! A sexton of the sexual and the Sexy Shocker series is his curio cabinet of crudity. Skin and sin are mixed together in these homegrown oddities, South American rediscoveries, and Eurohorror almost-classics. Your mind may recoil with erotic revulsion at the sights contained within these films, so choose wisely!

Olga (Audrey Campbell) is the meanest and the best at her job, which is turning out women like Frenchie (Gigi Darlene), plying them with marijuana and if that doesn’t work, just beating them into submission, all so that they turn tricks for her and the syndicate. The syndicate! You will hear their names so many times.

A film made with all voiceovers, White Slaves of Chinatown was directed and written by Joseph P. Mawra, who directed Fireball Jungle and may or may not have directed Shanty Tramp and Savages from Hell. Probably not.

There’s opium everywhere and this feels like those black and white detective magazines you used to see on the newstand that seem way more perverted than any porn magazine, always with women being threatened on the cover and in every story.

Olga would return for four more movies: Olga’s House of Shame and Olga’s Girls with Campbell and Mme. Olga’s Massage Parlor with no Olga showing up and Olga’s Dance Hall Girls with Lucy Eldredge as Olga.

In 1964, this movie was probably as offensive as can be. Today, it’s still pretty scuzzy but you can’t help but find it adorable.

You can watch this on YouTube.