Suburban Grindhouse

'Suburban Grindhouse' by Nick Cato

'Suburban Grindhouse' (2019; 249 pp.) is a print-on-demand trade paperback publication from the UK publisher Headpress. You can order the book direct from the Headpress website, or order it from amazon.com.

This book compiles entries in the ‘Suburban Grindhouse Memories’ column, devoted to psychotronic / trash / transgressive movies, that Nick Cato authored from 2010 to 2018 for the 'Cinema Knife Fight' website (which folded in 2018).

Cato is a trash film fanatic, who has contributed articles both to print, and online, media. He also has written a substantial body of self-published fiction. His Goodreads blog page gives a sense of where he lies in terms of his appreciation for transgressive media (some of his interests are rather obscure).

I don't usually review psychotronic movies, since there are plenty of websites and print media that do this. I occasionally will write a post about a book or magazine devoted to the topic, that I find particularly noteworthy: for example, my post about the magazine Shock Cinema is here, and my post about a biography of Bill Landis is here.

I was motivated to post an overview of 'Suburban' because of its nostalgic character. Cato, who was born in 1968 (eight years younger than me) wisely frames his reviews in the context of seeing the films at any number of theatres in Staten Island (and sometimes on 42nd Street) from the late 1970s to the late 1980s. Boomers who remember filmgoing from that era will find much to identify with, in the pages of 'Suburban'.

Cato reviews roughly 80 movies, from a variety of genres, in the pages of 'Suburban', these reviews accompanied by rather low-res scans of advertisements appearing in print media of the day.

Cato avoids letting nostalgia interfere with his judgments of the merits of these films; most of them are Godawful duds and, as Cato advises, will appeal only to those hapless souls who have a quasi-religious devotion to schlock cinema. 

But Cato does have gems in this compilation, and learning (in some cases reminding me) about these productions kept me paging through 'Suburban'. Some of those gems will be familiar to Boomers: for example, Cato gives high marks, and affection, to the 1981 animated film Heavy Metal.

Other gems, of which I am only now aware, include Blood Tide, which features super 80s chicks Lydia Cornell (Too Close for Comfort), Mary Louise Weller (Animal House), and the stunning Deborah Shelton (Body Double, Dallas). 

Also piquing my interest are such films as Chained Heat (a 'women in prison' drama starring Linda Blair), Spring Break, and Friday the 13th Part 2, which I didn't pay much attention to when it came out, but which, according to Cato, is a great slasher film.

One problem that comes up while perusing the films profiled in the pages of 'Suburban', is how to see them. In the 10+ years since Cato first penned these reviews, DVDs have started to recede as a media packaging format, to be replaced by streaming video. (Although, that said, Something Weird apparently is going to cease offering downloads later this year and focus solely on DVDs.)

It's possible to see Blood Tide on YouTube and Tubi for 'free', in its somewhat grainy glory. Chained Heat also is available on YouTube, in a much better quality. For its part, Galactic Gigolo is available for rent from amazon prime for a modest fee ($2), and free at Tubi.

Granted, watching a movie from the grindhouse era on your TV, PC, smartphone, or tablet is nowhere near the same experience as seeing it in a twinplex theatre in the early 1980s, but one must roll with the times, so to speak.........

Summing up, if you're over 50 and you fondly recall those long-ago days when seeing a movie meant going to a theatre with sticky floors, and bits of popcorn mashed into the sole of your shoe, and the at-times agonizing decision about when to run to the bathroom, and miss some of the film (as opposed to peeing in your seat), then 'Suburban Grindhouse' will be a fun read.