Lee Frost

Overview

• Born

  August 14, 1935 · Globe, Arizona, USA

• Died

  May 25, 2007 · New Orleans, Louisiana, USA (heart attack)

• Birth name

  David Kayne

Mini Bio

Lee Frost rates highly as one of the best, most talented and versatile filmmakers in the annals of exploitation cinema. Frost was born on August 14, 1935, in Globe, Arizona. He grew up in Glendale, California, and Oahu, Hawaii. He eventually wound up in Hollywood, where he started his career making TV commercials for the studio Telepics. Frost made his film debut with the early 1960s nudie cutie Surftide 77 (1962). He went on to make a slew of films in many different genres: tongue-in-cheek horror comedy (House on Bare Mountain (1962)), mondo shock documentaries (Hollywood's World of Flesh (1963), Mondo Bizarro (1966), Mondo Freudo (1966)), perverse softcore roughies (The Defilers (1965), The Animal (1968)), crime drama (The Pick-Up (1968)), westerns (Hot Spur (1968), The Scavengers (1969)) and even Nazisploitation (Love Camp 7 (1969), which has been widely cited as the prototype for the notorious Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS (1975)). A majority of Frost's 1960s features were made for legendary trash flick producer Bob Cresse. Moreover, Lee added sex inserts into such foreign films as London in the Raw (1964), Night Women (1964) and Witchcraft '70 (1969). Frost continued cranking out entertainingly sleazy drive-in items throughout the 1970s; they include the startling psycho sniper outing Zero in and Scream (1971), the passable biker opus Chrome and Hot Leather (1971), the gritty Chain Gang Women (1971), the hilariously campy The Thing with Two Heads (1972), the immensely enjoyable Policewomen (1974), the gnarly blaxploitation winner The Black Gestapo (1975), the rowdy redneck romp Dixie Dynamite (1976) and the jolting roughie porno shocker A Climax of Blue Power (1974). Frost often cast former football player Phil Hoover in his 1970s movies and frequently collaborated with producer/screenwriter Wes Bishop (in addition to their own pictures, Frost and Bishop wrote the script for Jack Starrett's terrific Race with the Devil (1975), which Frost was originally supposed to direct as well). Both Frost and Bishop often appear as actors, usually in small parts, in Frost's films. Lee worked as an editor on industrial movies for a film laboratory throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. His last feature was the straight-to-video Shannon Whirry erotic thriller Private Obsession (1995).

Lee Frost died at age 71 on May 25, 2007.

Quotes

• I never went to film school or anything like that.

• [on John Alderman] Johnny was a good guy. He was just a wonderful, cooperative, sweet fellow. He did a lot of work for a lot of good people--he was a stock player for Dave Friedman [David F. Friedman], I know.

• [on why he stopped making movies in the mid-'90s] Let me explain the world to you. It's changed. We're not the same people we used to be, and it's not the same industry it used to be. We were making little movies, grinding them out, and putting them on the screen. Well, you can't put them on the screen anymore, so there's no reason to make little movies anymore. Where are you going to play them? I could've made porno movies, but I didn't want to do that. So I just stopped--as did most of us.

• I wasn't interested in what people thought of the films, I was just looking for another project--"Let's get another script, let's shoot again." If we made any money on it, fine. If we didn't, fine. I was never into the business end of it.