Grindfest: Coming to Fargo Theatre November 18th

By Christopher P. Jacobs
Staff Writer

There have always been shamelessly bad films that, intentionally or not, provide more campy fun than mainstream Hollywood releases, yet can become admittedly tedious to sit through in their entirety. However, the one- to three-minute trailers that advertise them can give just enough flavor of their over-the-top plots, exuberant enthusiasm, marginal technical competence and cheesy dialogue.

Fans of this sort of movie can get a mega-fix at either or both of two anthologies of trailers coming to the Fargo Theatre the evening of Thursday, November 18th under the name “Grindfest.” A showing at 7:00 has trailers that can be shown to a “PG” audience, even if the films they advertise couldn’t (such as the amusing and unexpectedly ambitious X-rated sci-fi parody “Flesh Gordon” that starts off the bunch).

The 9:15 showing duplicates one of those in the 7:00 set (a cute-looking kiddie martial-arts flick called “Lucky Seven), but includes mainly “R” rated trailers with violence, nudity, and language that could only be exhibited with R-rated films.

The proliferation of home video has essentially eliminated the “grindhouse” movie theatres that once proliferated around the country. These theatres specialized in low-budget “exploitation” films hoping to make a quick buck from cheap imitations of popular films, and especially from “genre” films that emphasized sex, violence, horror, action, chases, comedy, and often all of the above.

Some were foreign-made (Italian, Japanese, Chinese) hastily redubbed and re-edited for American audiences.

The films themselves exploited their most popular attributes around which to construct a loose plot, and their exaggerated advertising heavily exploited any aspect they thought would sell a ticket.

These films were designed specifically for a niche audience that was reliable but not large enough for theatres to run them more than a week or so each, if that. Hence, these independent producers and movie houses “ground out” one movie after another, so many that they often played as double-features, especially at drive-ins.

And because they could afford only a few prints, they circulated from city to city, getting more and more beat-up, scratchy, and splicey in the process.
In 2007, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino collaborated on “Grindhouse,” in which each director made an action-based melodrama inspired by that type of exploitation film they remembered growing up on during the 1970s and 80s. The results, “Planet Terror” and “Death Proof,” were released theatrically as a double-feature (just recently issued on Blu-ray), with artificially added scratches and dirt to make it look like the films had been playing for months in cheap theatres.

They even had “missing” footage, in the case of “Planet Terror,” an entire 20-minutes’ worth of plot, and had some director friends make trailers to imaginary exploitation films that ran between each feature to recreate the original grindhouse experience.

While both films, and especially the fake trailers, do a good job of capturing the flavor of 1970s and 80s exploitation films, they’re still just imitations. The trailers running at the Fargo’s “Grindfest” are the real thing - genuine advertisements made for real movies that were actually shown in many theatres from the late 1960s through the early 1980s.

Many are full of scratches (real ones, not added on purpose), some are faded, but many are actually in pretty good shape. All give an excellent idea of the alternative cinema produced outside of the Hollywood studios, although a fair number actually show attempts by the likes of MGM, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Columbia, and Universal to cash in on the exploitation market.

Some of the trailers really make you want to see the film they’re promoting (or at least give you ideas of what you might put into your own next low-budget screenplay), and others give you more than enough information to be glad the trailer is only two or three minutes long.

The futuristic political satire “Americathon,” for example, was widely panned in 1979, but the trailer at least looks uncannily timely for 2010! Others, such as the Japanese horror film “Destroy All Monsters” or the bizarre looking gay biker comedy “The Pink Angels” are likely best viewed in these two-minute summaries.

A few trailers in the selection give examples of early work by directors who went on to major careers, or later work by major directors past their prime and working for hire. For example the first batch includes a trailer to the first feature by director John Carpenter, his ultra-violent reworking of John Ford’s western “Rio Bravo” into a gritty urban crime thriller, “Assault on Precinct 13.”

You can also see trailers to Ralph Bakshi’s adult cartoon, “Heavy Traffic,” Dario Argento’s artsy thriller “Cat o’ Nine Tails,” graphic designer Saul Bass’s interesting sci-fi misfire “Phase IV,” and “Magic,” a Richard Attenborough’s thriller about a vicious ventriloquist-dummy starring Ann-Margret and Anthony Hopkins.

Joe Dante’s classic original version of “Piranha” is included in the second batch, along with a blatant rip-off called “Killer Fish.”

Trailers in the “Grindfest” programs are often grouped by themes, with several in a row showing examples of science-fiction, blaxploitation, car-chase, horror, etc. At least one grouping relates to their titles: “Don’t Go in the House,” “Don’t Answer the Phone,” and “Don’t Open the Window,” followed immediately by a trailer to the actually quite good Ray Bradbury adaptation, “The Illustrated Man,” whose introductory catchline is “Don’t stare…”

The Fargo’s upcoming “Grindfest” is the brainchild of Fargo radio personality Randal Black, who saw a similar program while visiting Portland, Oregon this summer. “The festival was exciting,” Black said.  “Although it was only a little over half-capacity, there was a great energy in the room.  People were laughing at the ridiculousness of the trailers and cheering whenever an iconic figure of cult cinema would pop on the screen.”

Black had a friend in Fargo who collected old trailers on film, DVD, and tape, and had introduced him to the exploitation genre, so he immediately called him to see if they could organize a similar festival in Fargo.

After the Portland event, he said, “I realized that I had seen at least 40% of them previously at my friend’s house!”

Consulting with both his Fargo friend and the Portland festival’s organizer, he tried to put together a representative sampling of the movies onto one DVD, showing the variety of genres, stars, directors, and attitudes.

But after reaching a 140-minute selection, he decided to add more trailers but split them into two separate programs, one a bit more family-friendly, and the other depicting the full sensationalism the films were noted for. Each of the programs is also divided into two sections.

“It truly was a very eye-opening experience for me,” says Black.  “The realization that a festival of exploitation trailers becomes nothing more than another form of exploitation itself was very intriguing to me.  And although it was a celebration of ‘low art’, I genuinely felt like this was an opportunity to contribute something to my social environment.”

The Fargo Theatre’s November 18th festival of exploitation trailers will give the community a crash-course and intense taste of what real grindhouse films were all about.

For those with more than a casual interest, several of the featured titles (and similar movies that aren’t) are actually available in lovingly transferred Blu-ray editions of the full-length films, including the original “Assault on Precinct 13” from Image Entertainment, “Magic” from Dark Sky, with “Piranha,” “Death Race 2000,” and several other Roger Corman cult films from Shout Factory.

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If You Go

What: Grindfest
Where: Fargo Theatre
When: Nov 18, 7pm, 9:15pm
Info: 701.239.8385