Jack Hill

PROFILE

Legendary cult-film director, grunge auteur, notorious -- these are some of the epithets used recently to describe writer-director Jack Hill. He has also been referred to as the man who initiated the women-in-prison genre of the seventies, and whose films helped define the so-called Blaxploitation genre, as well as the man who discovered Pam Grier.

Unlike most cult films, though, Hill's films were commercially extremely successful in their initial release, despite being generally snubbed by the more self-important critics of the time. But that situation has been remedied in recent years, as many of today's serious critics -- perhaps inspired by the enthusiastic support of Quentin Tarantino, who gladly acknowledges the influence of Hill's films on his own work -- have been taking a new look at some of Hill's films of the sixties and seventies and using terms like "post-modern", "ahead of their time", and "feminist manifesto" to describe them. The resulting rediscovery by a new generation of film fans has led to virtually all of Hill's films being currently reissued on home video and DVD

Filmography: