I’ll blame the Something Weird Video product line for introducing me to “roughies.”

What are roughies?

Roughies are defined very simply in the book, Sleazoid Express: A Mind-twisting Tour Through the Grindhouse Cinema of Times Square, as “extreme, sexually motivated movies.”

That book hold ups the Flesh Trilogy by Mike and Roberta Findley, as a shining example.

In Schlock! The Secret History of American Movies, the film The Defilers (by Lee Frost and David F. Friedman) was held up as the model.

That documentary on exploitation films defined roughies as “a category of movie that wallowed in degradation,” elsewhere describing the subgenre as “dark, downbeat, almost masochistically bleak.”

These smutty, often “ugly” black and white films followed the innocent nudist films or “nudie cuties” that marked the earliest era of sexploitation, as invented by Russ Meyer.

Schlock! further defines the subgenre: “What the brooding films of Orson Welles, Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock were to the MGM musicals of the previous era, roughies were to the nudie cuties—the monster in the closet, the shadows cast by all that artificial light.”

So the roughies are like the “film noir” of sexploitation: twisted, shadowy movies that wallowed in the idea that humanity is essentially corrupt. And this dark view extends to both men AND women.

In Scum Of The Earth, a film made earlier by David F. Friedman (and Herschell Gordon Lewis), the central piggish blowhard erupts in a speech used as part of the SWV sleazoid promotional loop: “You act like little Miss Muffet and down inside you’re dirty. Do you hear me? Dirty!”

What these films offer, I think, is an acknowledgement of our deeper, darker, (and sometimes) nastier impulses.

And, what's suggested is that sometimes what brings our downfall is not that we are born sinners, but that we’re unaware or unwilling to acknowledge who we really are and the darker impulses that drive us.

As Dolores says somewhere in Permanent Obscurity,

   “We all need to acknowledge that, okay? Acknowledge our inner bitch.

   We need to acknowledge our own selfishness, too, and get it over with.

   Repeat after me: I am selfish, I am cruel. Let's be real.”

The late Karen Lancaume .... as Nadine (“Baise-Moi”)