PopMatters has been avidly following Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray series called
Forbidden Fruit: The Golden Age of Exploitation Films. The two latest additions qualify on one level as serious works of art, albeit applied to the purpose of exploitation. These films reward our attention and, at their best, impress and surprise us.
Roland Price and Harry Reviers’
The Lash of the Penitentes
(1936)
Volume 9,
The Lash of the Penitentes (1936), resurrects what’s basically an ethnographic documentary about the Penitentes, people who practice an Easter ritual in New Mexico villages. In a practice disapproved by the Catholic Church, they enact Christ’s Stations of the Cross by carrying large crosses and being flagellated. We also see folk dancing, hand-carved saints and figures on homemade altars, and a game involving a half-buried rooster that gets seized by horseback riders.