Headpress Publishing
2019
249 pages
b&w illustrations
Available in
paperback and hardback
ISBN: 9781909394667
RRP: £17.99
(Paperback) & £25 (Hardback)
Review by Adrian
Smith
Before you roll your
eyes at the thought of yet another film review book, hear me out: Nick Cato,
author, podcaster and columnist, is not simply offering us his opinion on
dozens of forgotten 1970s and 1980s exploitation films including Hitch Hike
to Hell, Goin’ All the Way, Horror Planet (aka Inseminoid),
Lunch Wagon Girls, The Loch Ness Horror and Psychos in Love,
but he is also recalling the experience of watching those films in cinemas in
and around the New York area. This is a series of flashbacks to a time in the
early 1980s when, as a teenage boy, he and his friends were interested primarily
in two things; horror and nudity, and the lengths that they would go to in
order to gain admission to the cinemas where these films were showing. He
discusses the enticing ad campaigns, clearly aimed at him and people like him,
and how frequently they were disappointed by the films themselves. He also
recalls the viewing experience, where often the worse the film got, the louder
and more entertaining the audience became. There was even a time a friend’s
ex-girlfriend dumped a milkshake all over them. These digressions and
descriptions of noisy, howling audiences really paint a vivid picture of that
grindhouse experience that has become so mythologised of late thanks to the
likes of Tarantino. For those of us who never attended such a venue,
recollections like these here are akin to a dispatch from the front line.
Originating as a
column on the Cinema Knife Fight site, Cato wrote about dozens of films
and cinema-going experiences, and he also took the opportunity to occasionally
discuss more recent films and speak to filmmakers and actors. Interviewed in
this book is, amongst others, Peaches Christ, the director of 2010’s All
About Evil, and grindhouse royalty in the form of director Frank
Henenlotter.
Suburban
Grindhouse is a nostalgic and entertaining look back at
the cinema experience in the early 1980s, when a thirteen-year-old boy with a
moustache could gain entrance to R-rated films and be either titillated or
terrified, sometimes by the films and at other times by the audience.
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