Grindhouse Trailer Spectacular!

| Alec Gruba |

Grindhouse Trailer Spectacular! plays at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, February 3 through Sunday, February 5. Visit trylon.org for tickets and more information.

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Look, I don’t know what’s going to play at Grindhouse Trailer Spectacular!, but I do know what I’m ready for:

• Context-free explosions and slow-motion car crashes
• Ghouls
• BloodSatanic biker gangs
• Practical effects
• Black leather gloves reaching out towards unsuspecting victims
• Wah-wah guitars and synthesizers
• Drum breaks
• Funky bass lines
• Martial arts and, possibly, the Dark Arts
• Unnecessary nudity
• Warnings made to audience members who may be faint of heart

I’m expecting to be showered with slogans by dozens of carnival barker-style announcers inviting me to dozens of freak shows, traveling attractions, new worlds and universes filled with monsters and conflict. Beautiful slogans such as “Torso!…Torso!…Torso!” (you know, from the film Torso, 1973.) Hopefully we get some questions, like the one posed in the trailer for Ted V. Mikels’ The Corpse Grinders (1971): “Do you know what this is? … It’s a … Corpse Grinding Machine!” Wonderful stuff. Here’s the other fun thing about The Corpse Grinders trailer: It lays out the whole picture for ya, front to back, tied up in a nice bow, without needing to slog through the transitional scenes or stagnant dialogue. Plus, there’s a SPACED OUT echo on the announcer’s voice. Real zonked-out stuff. 

An evening of features that are less like a Rubik’s cube and more like a bouncy ball. One-note pictures for the audience to cast off on.  An “Oops! All Berries” style evening of trailers. A real “accident at the cookie factory”-style night chock full of trailers.

In a world where everyone has to curate their own isolated viewing experiences on a daily basis, the notion of submitting oneself to an array of hand-selected sleazy exploitation cinema comes as a welcome relief. I’m ready for it. To just roll over and have the images wash over me.

I want to take a quantum leap onto 42nd Street, less the world of Travis Bickle and more like the one of Joe Spinell in The Last Horror Film (1982), so I can catch glimpses of films that I’ve only ever read about in Psychotronic Magazine. 

Basically, the possibilities are endless with what might be shown at this screening and, in some ways, that’s the beauty of trailers. We have a rough outline of what’s involved, some sizzle scenes, some explosions, but we don’t know exactly how it’ll all pan out. That’s wildly appealing.

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Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon

GRINDHOUSE TRAILER SPECTACULAR!