Back Room Blues: A Tribute to Smut Palace Insanity

by Heather Drain

You’ve seen it; we’ve all seen it. (Well at least those of us enough huevos to admit it.) You’re at the local video store and greeting your line of vision is the back room door, it’s seclusion promising you sights that may tantalize you, turn you on, or even scare the living bejeesuz out of you. What carnal delights await you in the 18+ video room?

Well unless you have time traveling powers or an exceptional video store, you will be greeted with scores of generic faces and bodies being pried open and splattered with semen. Worst of all is that none of these porn clones have the decency to even look like they are into it. At all. It’s like getting psyched up for a blind date with an exotic stranger and being greeted by your old Science teacher naked and with a dingus up his butt. Gross, wrong, and ultimately disappointing.

Movie Review: Grindhouse Trailer Classics Vol. 1 (Intervision / Nucleus Films)

A few years back the U.K genre specialists at Nucleus Films produced their first of four volumes (up to now) of cult film trailer compilations entitled Grindhouse Trailer Classics. At the time it wasn't available for anyone outside of England unless you had an all-region DVD player...that is, until now. Severin Films’ sleazy little brother, Intervision have now locked their teeth into the region one debut of this collection with their new release making it even more available to the masses. If you have yet to see it, it’s a deliciously diabolical compilation of trash that shows some major love for the lost art of the trailer and grindhouse theaters of yesteryear.

This particular collection is pretty exhaustive as there are well over 2 hours of trailers with the different genres often associated with the grindhouse -- horror, sexploitation, kung fu, Blaxploitation, Nazisploitation and so on. Here's a list of most of what you’re going to catch on this first volume: