A YEAR OF GIVEAWAYS: Portable Grindhouse
25 Comments | Posted: February 1st, 2010 | Filed under: Contests
Last week’s winner of the second Starman Omnibus was Jenny M, even though I disagree with her most vigorously concerning Terminator 2‘s status as a superior movie, as it’s bloated, has an entire middle act that could be cut out without any significant damage to the film’s plot, and makes me suffer through Edward Furlong’s attempts at acting. Still, random is random and fair is fair, so here we are, and I’ve got another book to offer up to you, the eager masses.
Portable Grindhouse: The Lost Art Of The VHS Box is a dose of heavy design nostalgia for those of us who haunted (or worked in) video stores in the 80s and 90s. So many gloriously awful titles are given their due here by Jacques Boyreau, who states “On par with the jukebox, disco, and neon, VHS reformatted the world’s product-intake and boosted a libertarian aesthetic that conquered TV in the same way TV conquered comic books in the 1950s, and allowed us to hold movies in our hands. Posters in the lobby could advertise, even fetishize a movie; credit sequences could identify the participants, but somehow, VHS box-art ‘became’ the iconic equivalent of the movie.”
You can win a copy by talking about your favorite VHS title from “the day,” the one that you saw and enjoyed and probably shouldn’t have. You know what I mean. The sort of thing that Andy Sidaris directed. Leave a comment before 12:01AM EST on Saturday, February 6 to qualify for the draw, which is performed using the Random.org number generator.
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Please note that because of shipping costs, this contest is for residents of the United States of America and Canada. You must leave your email address with your comment to qualify, as I’m not going to spend any time hunting down someone who didn’t want to be contacted about their amazing prize. One comment per person and yes, I will know if you cheat.
Land Before Time.
The first one, damn it!
“they live” starring keith david and rowdy roddy mother effing piper. that 6 minute fist fight is radical.
Frankenhooker, hands down.
Saw one at a video rental store with a VHS box that would talk when you pushed a button: “Wanna date?!”
Why, yes I do! ^_^
HAD to rent it just for that. Awesomely awful movie!
Well, not EXACTLY the same grindhouse genre, but…
Toxic Avenger, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, Killer Klowns from Outer Space were favorites.
I’ll pick Killer Klowns for one.
“Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone.”
I actually saw it on HBO, and THEN rented it on VHS because I didn’t get enough on the first go-round.
I rented the film Radioactive Dreams about, and I’m not kidding, seventy times in five years. I could not look away.
If you don’t know already, it’s a semi-musical set after a nuclear holocaust. Two “brothers” named Philip and Marlowe, who have raised and educated themselves on pulp novels, leave their underground bunkers in search of their fathers, who abandoned them.
Driving a classic fin car, and encountering such enemies as disco midgets, they eventually become de facto rulers of the world by acquiring keys to the last nuke in the world.
And then they dance.
It’s even more entertaining than it sounds, but it is, god help me, not any good at all.
One of the happiest moments of my adult life was finding a copy of it for sale. So I own it now.
And STILL watch it.
So, there’s that.
During my High School Years there was an independant video shop that had tons of old VHS movies to rent at 49 cents each. My best friend and I would get a dozen at a time from the horror and spend the weekend watching them. There were lots that we enjoyed, but one of the only ones that we honored with repeated viewings and rentals was “Black Roses”…it eventually became the centerpiece of theme night. If you’ve seen it, you know why. Heavy Metal horror at its finest.
“Eliminators” with Denise Crosby is quite possibly the guilty-est VHS pleasure still on my shelf (although Chris Elliot’s bizarre “Cabin Boy” comes a close second).
Crosby plays a NASA scientist who teams up with Robocop (sorry, I mean “Mandroid”) and a Ninja to fight a time depaced Roman Legion in Mexico. The film climaxes with Mandroid breaking out his “mobile unit”, a tank-tread attachment that allows him to move at a blistering foot-a-minute speed.
Did I mention there were sassy robots a la “Space Camp”?
It was radical to the extreme.
Oh man, I’m a-jonesing for this one, former video store clerk that I am (1992-1997, RIP Play it Again video).
I’m going to say “Young Lady Chatterly,” and pretend that it was a fave of my adolescent years because of Adam West’s performance.
Night Of The Demons, with Linnea Quigley. I think I actually bought the VHS tape at a pretty cheap price from a mail-order house way back when. I think it’s probably buried deep in my brother’s garage somewhere even today.
Light Years (which I later learned was called Gandahar in its native French). I still don’t know what the fuck was going on with this movie. I’d love to own it on DVD, but it’s not available in region 1.
Street Trash (which I just saw again recently). How do you top psychotic bums, killer booze mutagen, castration football, Apocalypse Now-styled flashbacks, and gratuitous sex and violence? Answer: YOU CAN’T.
Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator from 1985 – H.P. Lovecraft through an 80′s filter. I can’t decide if its genius . . .
Videodrome was the sickest one. I rented it so many times that when the store went out of business they gave it to me.
Puppet Master. All of them that were out on VHS before they all went direct to…Oh wait, I think they were all direct to video. The third one was probably best. I thought because they fought Nazis that my grandfather might like it. I was wrong.
They Live – John Carpenter and Roddy Roddy Piper. I swear that no one, no one can watch the sunglasses fight then say this is not the greatest film ever made.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqKFadyJxwg
Wild Thing was co-written by John Sayles, directed by nobody in particular and had a musical score by George Clinton. It starred a young Robert Knepper of Prison Break and Transporter 3 fame alongside a young Kathleen Quinlan, coincidentally also of Prison Break (and other, actually really good films).
The film was a bizarre amalgamation of Tarzan and Batman, in which a young boy watches his parents get murdered and then grows up feral in the slums. Then Kathlenn Quinlan shows up to fall in love with him and put herself in danger (she’s named “Jane” incidentally), forcing the hero to save her life using weapons crafted from discarded junk, like an umbrella with sharpened prongs.
The VHS cover art was actually pretty disappointing, showing a Bowie-esque Wild Thing crouching triumphantly over the title of the film, indicating that he has already conquered his own biography.
http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/41/58/4722225b9da0cbe11e456110.L._SL500_AA280_.jpg
I have not seen this movie since 1989 yet I remained convinced that it is AWESOME.
I still own my copy of Tougher Than Leather (starring Run DMC, Beastie Boys, Rick Rubin, and Russell Simmons) which I bought in the street from a crackhead.
It’s in some purple hard plastic cover because it was borrowed from the public library and never returned.
Dead Alive a.k.a. Peter Jackson’s Braindead.
This was a film that my friends spoke of in hushed, amazed tones. I wasn’t sure I bought the hype until they sat me down to see for myself. We watched a VHS copy that my friend Andy had sought out for months. It was the unrated version, with yellow subtitles in Spanish we couldn’t turn off. I was awed. It had all the exuberance of Evil Dead 2 with the gore turned up even further. A priest who kills zombies? Zombies killed en masse by a lawnmower? Truly, this was a thing of beauty. All my searching for the perfect B-Movie culminated in that glorious, insane film.
Oh, and later on, I heard that the director made some other movies too.
I’m going to go with Lair of the White Worm, which was a work of weird-ass Ken Russell genius.
Auntie Lee’s Meat Pies – Basically a redneck Sweeney Todd with Karen Black in the title role, Pat Morita as a Southern sheriff, Michael Berryman doing his freaky looking Michael Berryman thing, Pat Paulsen playing a quickly-dispatched priest, and a bunch of former Playmates offing dudes in the sort of cost-ineffective ways that would make Arcade proud.
“… one that you saw and enjoyed and probably shouldn’t have. You know what I mean. The sort of thing that Andy Sidaris directed.”
This sounds to me like we’re supposed to name a video that we beat off to.
Anyhow, “Freebie and the Bean” is a fucking masterpiece, even without muscle men and chicks with huge cans.
‘Night of the Comet.’
Scenes from this haunted me for years of my childhood, and I couldn’t remember what movie it was until stumbling across it much later in life.
There was a little Canadian movie, “Highway 61″, by Bruce McDonald (of “Pontypool” quasi-fame), but I suspect that in these times of cavalcades of quirk the charm would have worn off. So I’m going to go with something trashier — “Ice Pirates”, essentially a third-rate “Star Wars” pastiche played for laughs featuring a bunch of good actors slumming (as well as Robert Urich). Even nine-year-old me could tell what a derivative mess it was, but I loved it to death; I must have rented it ten times.
Steve’s the last entry! We’ll announce a winner on Monday!