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Released by: Canadian International Pictures
Released on: August 29th, 2023.
Director: Frank Vitale
Cast: Andrée Pelletier, Anne-Marie Provencher, Miguel Fernandes, Allan Moyle, Beverly Murray, Joe Mattia
Year: 1976
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East End Hustle – Movie Review:
Directed by Frank Vitale, who co-wrote with Allan Moyle, and distributed Stateside by none other than Troma Entertainment, 1976’s East End Hustle stars Andrée Pelletier as a young woman named Cindy who makes a living for herself as a prostitute in the employ of her mean spirited pimp boyfriend, Dan (Miguel Fernandes), on the mean streets of Montreal. When she finally has her fill of his nastiness, she decides that it’s time for a change, leaving both him and her job in one fell swoop.
Dan, however, isn’t about to let one of his prize fillies leave his stable, and so he does everything that he can to coerce to come back to him and to the world’s oldest profession. Cindy, however, isn’t having any of it and adding insult to Dan’s injury, she talks Marianne (Anne-Marie Provencher), Dan’s newest and most popular working girl, into leaving his fold as well. When Marianne leaves, a few more of his ladies follow suit and before too long, Dan’s business has taken hit after hit, leaving him in a pretty tough spot.
With his back increasingly closer to the wall, Dan becomes increasingly desperate and decides it is time to call in some favors from his mobster friends and escalate violent retaliation against Cindy and her friends, but Cindy is no pushover and isn’t just going to let Dan walk all over her after everything that she’s been through…
An enjoyably sleazy mix of exploitation, crime drama and gritty slice of life storytelling, East End Hustle is solid stuff. Set to a killer synth score courtesy of Len Blum, the movie is paced well and pretty effective, even if at times it feels tonally uneven in how it balances the more salacious elements of its narrative versus the more serious, dramatic elements. Production values are good across the board, with the Montreal locations used effectively to provide an appropriately gritty backdrop for the story to play off of and the cinematography from Ivar Rushevic captures it all very well.
Performances are pretty strong across the board. Andrée Pelletier is a great choice for the lead, she’s attractive enough but also brings a weariness to her part that goes a long way towards making us sympathize with her as closely as we do. She has good chemistry with the lovely Anne-Marie Provencher, who is also very good in her role. Miguel Fernandes (who pops up in Spasms and Ghost Story and who also has a small part in Cronenberg’s Rabid made a year after this film) is pretty much perfect as the film’s heavy, creating a memorably nasty character with his portrayal of Dan.
East End Hustle – UHD Review:
The HEVC encoded 2160p transfer, is “newly scanned and restored in 4K from the 35mm original camera negative by Canadian International Pictures” and framed at 1.85.1 widescreen and featuring HDR10 looks great. Restored from its original camera negative, detail is really strong and colors look excellent without appearing to be oversaturated at all. Black levels are nice and inky deep and skin tones look lifelike and accurate. There are no problems to note with any compression, noise reduction or visible edge enhancement and while the natural grain inherent in the source material is rightly preserved, there’s very little actual print damage here to note. It’s hard to imagine the picture quality looking much better than it does here.
The English language 24-bit DTS-HD 1.0 Mono track, transferred from a 35mm optical track, gets the job done without any major issues even if the levels seem to be a little bit low. The score has some good depth and range to it. Optional subtitles are provided in English only.
The first of the many extras on the disc is an audio commentary featuring Paul Corupe of Canuxploitation.com and film historian Jason Pichonsky that does a solid job of exploring the origins of the film and going over its history. They cover director Frank Vitale’s work and offer up lots of information about the different cast and crew members that worked on the picture as well as the locations featured in the movie. They also cover Troma’s connection to the movie and some of the themes that the movie explores, as well as the film’s effectiveness in doing so.
There’s also a host of featurettes here, starting with the eight minute East End Director, which interviews writer-director Frank Vitale about how he came to make the movie, working with the cast and crew, and what it took to get this project completed. The Art Bug is an eight minute piece with Vitale his career before East End Hustle and some of his earlier projects. East End Troma spends fourteen minutes with none other than Lloyd Kaufman who talks about his thoughts on the movie and how Troma came to distribute the picture. Kaufman’s Canada is a second piece with Kaufman that runs five minutes and sees him talk about various connections his company has had to Canadian films over the decades. Writer Bill Brownstein is up next in a ten minute interview called Renegade Films where he offers up some information on Cinépix and co-founder John Dunning. The last interview is with composer Len Blum who talks four fifteen minutes about the use of music in the film and what went into creating the score.
Finishing up the extras on the disc is a theatrical trailer, menus and chapter selection options.
Inside the case, alongside the two discs, is a color insert booklet featuring a new essay by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas titled ‘Feminism, Collective Action, and East End Hustle’ that covers the feminist angles that parts of the movie take. The disc also includes some cool reversible cover artwork.
East End Hustle - The Final Word:
East End Hustle is a pretty solid exploitation movie tropes and well-played dramatic moments and Canadian International Pictures has done an excellent job bringing it UHD/Blu-ray with a fantastic presentation and an equally strong array of extra features.