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ON LOCATION: POOR PRETTY EDDIE (1975)

A visit to Charlie Williams’ abandoned Pinecrest Lodge

In 2024, as part of my road trip through the American South to promote my 2024 book Cockfight: A Fable of Failure with fellow film historian and locations nerd Bill Ackerman (of the great Supporting Characters‘ podcast), we managed to visit a film location I never thought I’d find still standing: the backwoods lodge of 1975 exploitation shocker Poor Pretty Eddie, aka Charlie Williams’ Pinecrest Lodge – derelict, abandoned and buried deep in an overgrown area of Athens, Georgia after closing in 2004.

My journey with the film Poor Pretty Eddie began at the original single-screen Alamo Drafthouse Cinema when I was a programmer there from 2003-2007; it was a staple of the venue’s Weird Wednesday exploitation series, originally curated by Tim League and then, most famously, by Lars Nilsen (frames from the film appearing here are scanned directly from the Alamo’s 35mm print). Before working at the Alamo I was admittedly a Euro-snob and had little truck with American exploitation. But the Alamo’s extensive 35mm film archive, which was the foundation of the Weird Wednesday series, had been cobbled out of the remains of the Southern Drive-In business – abandoned storage spaces, half-collapsed sheds, all piled high with rusty cans that Tim League was only too happy to haul away. Chris Poggiali has chronicled the film’s production and release extensively on Temple of Schlock, so I’ll refer you to him for more information, but I fell hard for this film; the locations, the weird, unsavory characters – I was instantly smitten with Dub Taylor – even the rape scene was edited like an avant garde film (I realized later it was cut by Frank Mazzola, who edited Performance). And so I brought it up north to Canada for my CineMuerte Film Festival in Vancouver, which I was still running at the time. It was decidedly less well-received in Canada.

Fast forward two decades, as Bill and I were zipping through Georgia, trying to cram in as many film locations as possible all over the state – locations from City of the Living Dead and Macabre in Savannah, the St. Helena and Hunting islands from Daughters of the Dust, the Wiseblood house in Macon, the summer camp from Little Darlings south of Athens – before a book launch and Cockfighter screening at the Plaza in Atlanta. A notice on Athens’ official “Places in Peril” list was the only thing that tipped us off Charlie William’s Pinecrest Lodge might actually still be standing – I’d assumed it was long gone. And so, we set out to find it.

THE LODGE

  • Charlie Williams' Pinecrest Lodge (closed 2004)

    Dirt path off Whitehall Road

    Athens, GA, USA

Bill and I had an aborted attempt to find it on our own, but trudging through overgrown paths in the woods as the light was fading and “No Trespassing – Or Else!” type signs were nailed to the trees everywhere started to seem like a bad idea. So the next morning we met up with Athens-based illustrator and podcaster Klon Waldrip (The Late List) who’d been there in his youth and had a better idea of where it was. With Klon by our side we were newly emboldened, and venturing further into the woods (only slightly further than we’d gone the night before, as it happens – we were so close!) we came upon the unforgettable spectacle of this storied building and its iconic waterwheel, collapsing, crumbling and camouflaged by the foliage – but very much still there.

A peek inside showed that it had been inhabited by squatters, with random furniture that had been dragged in and debris everywhere. A man loading a pickup truck nearby expressed curiosity about what we were doing, but when we said we were just movie fans after some pics of the place, he lamented that the building was scheduled for demolition the following spring (although from what I can tell online, the property is still there – the historical society perhaps working some magic). The place would admittedly be hard to save; in better shape was a small heritage building just next to the Lodge, a sign affixed to the front declaring it to be a 110-year old blacksmith’s shop that had been moved to the location and reassembled in 1960.

THE DAM

  • Barnett Shoals Dam

    Old Barnett Shoals Rd.

    Watkinsville, GA, USA

I cannot recall how we found the hydroelectric dam, only that it was Bill’s research, and that we again had to breach some no tresspassing signs to get there. The power station was built in 1910, and originally powered the town of Barnet Shoals and its textile mill, as well as sending surplus energy to southern Athens to power its streetcars. The power station was retired in 2010 and there is an ongoing project to restore the natural river flow.

As Historic Athens has written, “Much of the community has vanished over the decades since the mill shut down. Overall, all that remains of this mill and the community that came up around it includes: the ruins of the mill and the payroll office, the cemetery where millworkers and their families were buried, one chimney that was attached to the home of the mill foreman, the foundation stones that supported their church, a brick bowl-shaped water collection cistern, the Barnett family cemetery, and scattered evidence of former homesites. Many homesites are only identifiable by the daffodils that grow around them annually, but some retain scattered foundation stones and bricks from collapsed chimneys.” 

Below are pics of two ladies at the location before the dam was built; an old survey map showing the proposed location of the dam; an aerial view of the dam; Michael Christian (“Eddie”) standing in front of the dam in Poor Pretty Eddie; and inside the power station, as seen in Poor Pretty Eddie.

To stay up to date on the status of Charlie Williams’ Pinecrest Lodge, check in regularly with the Historic Athens List of Places in Peril. If nothing else, it needs to be saved so we can have a screening of Poor Pretty Eddie there!

Authors

  • Kier-La Janisse is a film writer, publisher, producer, acquisitions executive for Severin Films and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University. She is the author of Cockfight: A Fable of Failure (2024), House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (2012/2022) and A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (2007) and has been an editor on numerous books including Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive (2021) and Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (2015). She wrote, directed and produced the award-winning documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021), and produced the acclaimed blu-ray box sets All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror (2021) and The Sensual World of Black Emanuelle (2023).