Trash, Exploitation, Resource, B-Grade, Low Budget, Bizarre, Cult; Paperback Book - New
Trash Cinephile is an irreverent guide to 99 intriguing examples of exploitation cinema from a wide variety of sub-genres. These are films that are often branded as B-movies, Trash films, and also rather unfairly as 'bad movies'. Many are so bizarre that they defy any kind of generic definition; which is why you will find the films discussed within these pages gathered together in eight very loosely themed chapters.
The murdering "performance artist" Sardu in the the film Bloodsucking Freaks said it all: "To display sadism and discipline alone would only lead to imprisonment. But . . . simply disguising it with a story, a minimal plot, and a score will result in me being hailed as a creative genius."
Gore, Psychedelic, Horror, Obscure, Rare, Cult, Cannibal; DVD - Ex Used condition
From the title Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood, one might expect a Herschell Gordon Lewis style B-movie gore fest. Instead, one gets a creepy, atmospheric, low-budget cross between art and exploitation. A young woman and her parents discover strange goings-on at the run down carnival at which they recently began working, and they find themselves having to escape from a nightmarish situation. The plot is fairly minimal, with the movie feeling more like a creepy tone poem than a strictly narrative piece. The cast and crew use the run down carnival location to great effect. The amount of atmosphere they generate using found materials and a very limited budget is quite impressive. Filmed in 1973 and thought lost for almost 30 years, the film is not as widely known or seen as other films of that time. Its experimental and psychedelic atmosphere makes it an interesting artifact from its era and essential for fans.
Surreal, Breton, Magritte, Ernst, Art, Poetry, Games; (1991 reprint) Paperback - Ex Used condition (some writing inside front cover)
Surrealism is far more than an aged art movement: it is also a collection of tools for perceiving and representing the world in ways that transcend normative perspectives. This delightful collection allows everyone to enjoy firsthand the provocative methods used by the artists and poets of the Surrealist school to break through conventional thought and behavior to a deeper truth. Invented and played by such artists as André Breton, Rene Magritte, and Max Ernst, these gems still produce results ranging from the hilarious to the mysterious and profound. This great little book is packed with word and image games that surrealists developed to create their written and graphical art. If you have any spark of creativity, you are strongly encouraged to get this book to help loosen the holds of quotidian existence on your craft. And it makes a great book of activities for parties that you want to rise above petite bourgeois posturing.
Mondo, Shockumentary, Trash, Documentary, Cult, Something Weird; 4K scanned Double Feature DVD - Ex Used condition
In 1966, the notorious producer/director/distributor team of Lee Frost and Bob Cresse (HOT SPUR, THE SCAVENGERS) combined the extremes of the Mondo genre with their own depraved aesthetic to create two shockumentaries that put Olympic International on the map and changed the face of exploitation forever. Cresse himself narrates MONDO FREUDO, "A world of sex and the strange & unusual laws that govern it." Featuring Hollywood strippers, Tijuana hookers, London lesbians, Times Square satanists and topless Watusi clubs. In MONDO BIZARRO, the team's 'hidden cameras' go 'beyond-the-beyond' to expose Bahamian voodoo rites, Japanese massage parlors, Nazi theater, and an Arab sex slave auction that looks suspiciously like LA.'s Bronson Canyon. Both films have been scanned in 4k from the original Something Weird 35mm vault negatives.
Cult, Mondo, Shockumentary, Documentary, Classic, Something Weird, Riz Ortolani; 4K scan DVD double feature - New Sealed
According to George Sanders, Ecco means to “Look, witness, observe, and behold.” He takes us on a narrated and somewhat fractured tour of various areas of the world, revealing many unusual practices of people from different nations and backgrounds. Highlights include German fencing amongst young men, Mardi Gras taking place in Rio, a secret Satanic ritual, graphic footage of men hunting whales, a Grand-Guignol theater performance, the nightlife activities of teenagers in Stockholm, blindfolded buttocks-touching, sliding sharp implements through various body parts with no apparent pain, mass reindeer herding, and much more. While some of it is fairly tame due to decades of exposure to many of the same or similar events, some of it is still quite offensive and gruesome.
In The Forbidden, we primarily witness moments of the erotic and unlawful variety, such as floating strip clubs, Swiss sex rituals, Parisian dancers, virgin strippers, a faithless husband and his vengeful wife, erotic nightclub acts in Brussels, teenage protests on the Sunset Strip, Nazi strippers, and much more. The footage presented here is more of an attack on so-called perversion rather than a neutral exploration like its predecessor, meaning that the narrator makes repeated judgments as we see the various activities taking place. For those of the delicate persuasion, only one instance of bloodletting occurs in one of the film’s re-enactments.
Australia, Graffiti, Street Art, Bombing, Rare, Train, Magazine, Sydney; Zine - Ex Used condition
Another seminal Australian Graff zine, Straight and Narrow issue 3 from Sydney (2005), hard to find in Excellent condition like this.....
Peter Greenaway, Experimental, Arthouse, Absurdist, Surreal, Short Film, Collection; DVD - Ex Used condition
“He has other reputations as well—as an academic, as a maker of curious artifacts, as a cataloguer of the bizarre and as a librarian of the absurd.” Peter Greenaway might well have been describing himself in this thumbnail sketch of Canton Remodell, a character in an unmade project. Before his international arthouse hits like The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover and Prospero’s Books, Greenaway made a series of highly inventive films that established all the obsessions that run through his later work. The content of the six playful shorts featured varies widely—from the condensed, wry history of 37 people who have fallen to their deaths from windows (Windows), to a sequence of 92 maps to guide a dead ornithologist on his way into the afterlife (A Walk Through H) set to a thrilling score by award-winning composer Michael Nyman (The Piano). All of these quirkily delightful works take great pleasure in outlandish detail, fake erudition and corkscrew narratives. Contains the films: Intervals (1969, 6 mins), Windows (1974, 4 mins), Dear Phone (1976, 17 mins), H Is for House (1976, 9 mins), A Walk Through H (1978, 41 mins), and Water Wrackets (1978, 11 mins)
Arthouse, Surreal, Mexico, Dark, Disturbing, Award Winning, Perverse, Import; DVD - Ex Used condition
An urban family, having moved to the countryside of Mexico, experiences raw drama and ambiguous fantasy in this cinematically fresh and rewarding film by Reygadas. The cinematography is ethereal and at times haunting when combined with such unsettling imagery. That's not to say the films imagery is horrifying in itself. The imagery of Post Tenebras Lux is unsettling in that it's picturesque and lush while also being new and confounding. This is partially due to it's hypnotic, almost tunnel vision take on the 4:3 ratio. This way of presenting the story only adds to it's mysterious nature. The narrative in itself is overtly expressionist as it's partial auto-biographical and moves with fluidity removed from reasoning. It's a film that's entrancing and bewildering at the same time - an atmosphere that just seems to work. It certainly worked to make one of the most original films of the year.
Bizzarre, Strange, Cult, Underground, Arthouse, Absurdist, Fantasy, Rare; DVD - Ex Used condition
An all-time classic of the underground cinema, featuring original music by Oscar-nominated composer Danny Elfman (PEE-WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE, BATMAN), FORBIDDEN ZONE must be seen to be believed. There is a mysterious but forbidden door in the basement of the Hercules family's new house in Venice, California; it doesn't take long for daughter Frenchy, returning home from her bizarro school that features a machine gun-toting teacher and a chicken boy, to succumb to temptation and open it. Becoming trapped in the Sixth Dimension, which is ruled by randy midget King Fausto who, as luck would have it, is looking for a new concubine, Frenchy catches the king's eye. Unfortunately she also incurs the jealous Queen Doris's wrath, and is imprisoned along with the ex-queen, who plots Doris's demise. While Frenchy's brother Flash and her Gramps endeavor to save her, a dancing frog, robot boxers, Oingo-Boingo, and Danny Elfman as Satan, all make their appearances in the Forbidden Zone.
Poland, Punk, Oi, Skinhead, Arthouse, Foreign; DVD - Ex Used condition
Cracow, a small group of punks make leather shoes in order to survive, but also to trample the surface of the streets in any way they deem fit. This film swifly plunges us in black and white into this little microcosm that makes its own rules while still remaining part of the system it rejects. Without any commentary, the film-maker Lech Kowalski follows the little artisanal company in its daily routine, given rhythm by the blows of hammers and the singing of anarchistic songs. Connections are spun, between workshop machines and electric guitars, between sewing needles and syringes. Little by little, manufacture improves, lives become organized, and the film recovers colour in a second part where various changes make themselves felt.
The camera moves around, discreet but always totally immersed in the events. It moves into extreme close-up, without hesitating to show the roughness of the leather and the scars in the skins. The pictures are tactile, tangible, touchable. The Boot Factory confronts us directly with reality, in a relationship of proximity sometimes pushed to the extreme. The film translates the brutality of the situations by unexpected movements of the camera and sudden changes in shooting angles. The sounds are incisive, the music intrusive, the scenes gather and tumble together. Everything about this film makes it a raw product. Nevertheless, the apparent spontaneity of the pictures conceals a real mastery of cinematographic techniques. In a very intimate manner, Lech Kowalski observes what is done and undone before his eyes, while retaining the necessary distance. He skilfully films the steps of the protagonists, not forgetting that it is also important to film the tracks they leave behind them.
Jandek, Outsider, Acoustic, Live, Concert, Experimental; DVD - New
Quite spirited bass and drum accompaniments, but a fairly "by-the-numbers" performance as far as the Corwood rep is concerned. Bonus points for "Whose Mister Is This", which might be one of the creepiest-sounding things Jandek has ever released, and that's saying a lot.
Evan Parker, Improv, Jazz, New Zealand, Leo Records,
Richard Nunns is a New Zealander of European descent who studies and plays traditional Maori musical instruments. His pairing with Evan Parker (in a performance recorded at the 1999 International Jazz Festival in Wellington), while not necessarily an obvious match, works largely because of the saxophonist’s extraordinary flexibility. Many of the Maori instruments are percussive and produce little sustain. They’re made of natural materials like gourds, wood, or shells; they don’t reverberate in the way a modern designed and manufactured instrument like Parker’s saxophone does. Consequently, the music here tends to be sparse and quiet. Parker plays in a near subtone much of the time, and occasionally sounds as if he’s playing at some distance from the microphone. A person unacquainted with the subtleties of the Maori instruments is, of course, unable to evaluate Nunns’ skills from a cultural standpoint. But the music he produces is indeed moving. The gestures are small but concentrated. The instruments’ nature doesn’t give Nunns the flexibility to follow and respond to Parker’s every move, so he instigates, as Parker responds and embellishes. It’s much to the latter’s credit that he’s able to adapt to Nunns’ aesthetic so completely. It’s equally admirable for Nunns to have successfully absorbed the Maori manner of making music. It says something about the timeless nature of improvised music that modern jazz’s most advanced saxophonist can improvise convincingly with a musician who plays instruments so ancient in conception. Undoubtedly the most affecting element of this music is its innate humanness; on one particular track, for example, the breaths pulsing through Parker’s sax and Nunns’ Pukaea rakau kauri (a wooden trumpet) sound as if they might be coming from the same set of lungs, so well-attuned the men are to one another and the exigencies of improvised performance. A unconventionally beautiful meeting of souls. ~ Chris Kelsey
