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 about that, but Poor Pretty Eddie is a curious entry into both the rape-revenge and hicksploitation trends of the 1970s drive-in landscape. Populated by name actors like Leslie Uggams, Shelley Winters and Slim Pickens with support from powerhouse character actors like Ted Cassidy (Lurch from The Addams Family) and Dub Taylor (a man who listed “prairie scum” as his occupation on IRS forms), Poor Pretty Eddie remains one of the most nightmarish examples of backwoods horror in the exploitation film canon. Sleazoid Express said it was “best described as Genet’s The Balcony as filtered through the warped narcissism of a third-rate Elvis impersonator.”

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 (my synopsis of the film here is largely reprinting my festival program notes). 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.