David F. Friedman, a film producer who cheerfully and cheesily exploited an audience’s hunger for bare-breasted women and blood-dripping corpses in lucrative low-budget films like “Blood Feast” and “Ilsa: She-Wolf of the S.S.,” died on Monday in Anniston, Ala. He was 87.
The cause was heart failure, said Mica Brook Everett, a relative who was also his caretaker. Mr. Friedman had lost his hearing and his eyesight about 10 years ago, she said.
Part carnival barker, part adman, part good-natured, dirty-minded adolescent, Mr. Friedman plumbed the low-rent depths of the movie business with a sense of boldness and a sense of fun. In the early 1960s he and a partner, the director Herschell Gordon Lewis, made a handful of films in a genre known as “nudie-cuties,” in which young women would perform ordinary household tasks or cavort in sun-dappled settings half-dressed or entirely undressed. (Some of the films were shot at Florida nudist colonies.) These movies were not openly erotic — there was no sex — but in their deadpan presentation of public nudity, they delivered a naughty, subversive wink at censorship standards.
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