Jack Hill turns 93 today. He was born on 28 January 1933.
He was an incredibly successful exploitation filmmaker from the late 1960s into the early 1980s. Also, he worked on the side as a screenwriter for films like City on Fire and Death Ship.
Today, he is probably best known for writing and directing Spider Baby: or, the Maddest Story Ever Told. But I don’t want to talk about it. It’s a favorite of mine. But I’ve watched it dozens of times. And I wrote an article about star Jill Banner, which is the most popular page on this site.
Hill directed almost a dozen films — most well worth watching. And as I think about it now, I should probably do a complete article on all of them, as I have for Bert I Gordon, Christopher R Mihm, and JR Bookwalter. It would be a good time! And since he hasn’t made any films since 1982, it would be complete.
One very interesting Jack Hill film is Blood Bath. It’s a pretty strange film that owes a lot to Mystery of the Wax Museum and A Bucket of Blood. But even stranger is the film’s production history. It all started with a Yugoslavian spy thriller, Portrait in Terror. Roger Corman hired Hill to use the footage to create a new, more commercial film. So Hill turned it into a horror film. Corman didn’t like it either. So he hired Stephanie Rothman to use Hill’s footage. Thus a film was born after only 3 years with as many directors!
In the early 1970s, he wrote and directed two blaxploitation films, Coffy and Foxy Brown. Pam Grier starred in both. Hill cast her in his previous two “women in cages” films. I think Coffy is the better of these. But you really can’t miss with any of Jack Hill’s films.
Image cropped from Jack Hill in 1968 by The Los Angeles Times via UCLA Archive under CC BY 4.0.