Ungawa! #3

A pre-Cancel Culture celebration of deviants, buxotics and social outliers

I had my brief phase of being greatly enamored with and somewhat influenced by “exploitation culture” in the late 80s and early 90s, and proudly toted around my Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, my Film Threat mags and a variety of VHS rips of blaxploitation & softcore sex films for a year or two. It was part of the zeitgeist of the times, I suppose, and a rite of passage for a certain type of twentysomething dweeb, of which I was one. There was a thriving subculture devoted to anything & everything that The Cramps liked, and in San Francisco, where I lived, I found myself often surrounded by a colorful plethora of rockabilly girls and their wallet-on-a-chain boyfriends; cro-magnon Betty Page obsessives; intelligent nerds chattering about Russ Meyer & Alejandro Jodorowsky films; and even strange unemployed humans who went overboard on watching syndicated TV from the 50s and 60s all day long, and felt it important to tell you all about Green Acres, F-Troop and the like.

It was a scene that, shall we say, doesn’t age particularly well. It’s super fun at age 22 when you’re falling into these worlds for the first time, no question, but also quite easy to back away from when you’ve realized how ultimately empty the “ironic gesture” can be. I first saw Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! during this time, and fell head over heels for Tura Satana, the cover star of Ungawa! #3, which dates from this time period. So no complaints at all on this dazzling cover, or even that many for Ungawa! itself, a slick fanzine from the UK that picked at the edges of this world and celebrated it unabashedly.

In fact, editors Foss Hagman and Cathal Tohill set up their target audience up quite clearly in an early comic in this issue called “Guide to Lowlife Scum”. “They’re guys in their 20s….urban & single….trash culture mutants!”. They love, among other things: TV, punk, fanzines, burgers, beers, and Shemp from The Three Stooges. I loved at least three of those things, and still do. They generally worship and slather over women that are way out of their league, a la Tura Satana, and there’s probably something psychologically troubling about the fetishizing here both of a kick-ass woman like Tura and of various S&M types, such as this issue’s “Interview with a Dominatrix”. Tell me what to do, Mommy! Gross.

So you get a great heaping helping of retro irony prattle here. They review books about bondage, divas, Betty Page, Anton LaVey and torture instruments. There’s a film column called “The Doberman Dozen”, with recommendations that you watch Kitten With A Whip, Mondo Cane 2; The Wild, Wild World of Batwoman; Hitler’s Children and the like. There’s “A History of Monster Magazines”, a thing about Jean Rollin’s vampire films and a complete trip through his demented oeuvre, and the aforementioned interview with a professional dominatrix. When they talk about something modern, it’s to praise Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer - an almost unwatchable film, for me anyway.

It’s hard to be too cynical about these birdbrains, though - there’s a terrific section simply called “Things” of ridiculous items you can mail away for. It’s such an oddball mix of goofus stuff that their excitement about it all is quite literally infectious. I wish I could have had my SASEs ready. Like, why not send away for Vaginal Creme Davis’ outstanding Fertile La Toyah Jackson Magazine? Or the Bible Believers Evangelic Association catalog? Or perhaps join the Mr. Ed Fan Club, or get an issue of Foot Worship News? If Foss and Cathal actually held onto all this stuff, they’d be able to put together a Collected Ephemera-esque publication that’d easily top mine eight ways from Sunday. I hope they do.

They also nail two strong interviews with people who are no longer with us: Kenneth Anger and, yes, Tura Satana. Anger’s Q&A includes some excellent discussion about whether or not Clara Bow made it with the entire USC football team, whether Cary Grant was half of a gay couple with Randolph Scott, as well as other sordid stories from his Hollywood Babylon books. Satana discusses how she used the unlikely combination of her Japanese ancestry and natural endowments as a way to stand out early on; dating Elvis Presley and how he’d once asked her to marry him; meeting Russ Meyer when she was stripping, and other assorted sordid tales that are doubtlessly in the forthcoming documentary about her.

There’s something almost a little quaint about all of this. I mean, there are still legion of exploitation film fanatics, publishing fanzines to this day, and I even saw a rockabilly girl with the leopard jacket, the jumbo fake eyelashes and the pink accoutrements on the bus just this year. The wild, over-the-top reverence for this 40s/50s/60s stuff in the 1980s and 1990s was primarily a celebration of how weirdos of what was then 20-40 years ago stood out so radically against a generally conservative and conformist American culture. So now, looking back over the same timeframe from our current vantage point in 2025, we’re looking at 1985-2005, when libertinism had mostly taken over culture, and which it’s therefore difficult to be ironic about, I don’t know, “Limp Bizkit” or whatever. Some of our most libertine liberals turned into quite reactionary scolds for a time there as well, making Ungawa! probably something that’d have been highly unwelcome in more than a few circles circa 2014-2021.

As you can probably tell, I straddle the mushy middle on this one, as I so often do. I like a world where long-tail subculture magazines like Ungawa! are published and bought, while still reserving my god-given right to call the people that revel in this stuff doofuses and ding-a-lings.