August 9, 2009
DVDS
Grindhouse at Your House
By DAVE KEHR
IN the 1970s and ’80s I spent a lot of time in Chicago, where I lived and worked, haunting the city’s still
impressive range of grindhouse theaters, not just the magnificently decaying palaces in the Loop, but the
many neighborhood theaters that operated with a discount policy, as low as 65 cents in one much-loved
location.
These theaters, like equivalent establishments along 42nd Street in Manhattan, mixed second-run
Hollywood attractions with more disreputable, exploitation movies from small distributors like Hallmark,
Bryanston, Dimension (before that name was commandeered by the Weinstein organization), Crown
International and Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, the MGM of the exploitation industry.
Much of this material was bluntly meretricious, but occasionally you would stagger home after seeing
something truly strange and subversive, like Stephanie Rothman’s feminist horror film “The Velvet
Vampire” (1971), Rene Daalder’s pointedly political analysis of revolution at a suburban high school,
“Massacre at Central High” (1976), or Abel Ferrara’s androgynous addict revenge film, “Ms. 45” (1981). In a
way the exploitation scene was Sundance for outsiders, an outlet for visions so fiercely independent that no
upscale distributor would touch them.
Some movies were regional releases, like Jack M. Sell’s 1980 “Psychotronic Man,” the story of a Chicago
barber with the power to kill by staring very, very hard at people he doesn’t like. If “Combat Shock,” made in
New York in 1983-84 and released by Troma Entertainment (in an edited, rescored version) in 1986, ever
made it to Chicago, I missed it. But I’m grateful to Troma (one of the few remaining rough and ready outfits
of the old days) for having issued a double-disc edition in honor of the film’s (almost) 25th anniversary. The
disc includes not only the 92-minute version that Troma released but also the director’s original 100-minute
cut, called “American Nightmares” and presented in a first-generation print that has never been seen on
video.
Directed by Buddy Giovinazzo, a graduate of the College of Staten Island’s film program, this is one
uncompromising picture, a movie so eccentric and so relentless that no mere profit motive could possibly
explain it. Lured by garish posters that promised a “Rambo”-style revisionist take on the Vietnam War,
audiences were confronted with a cosmically bleak portrait of an ex-P.O.W., Frankie Dunlan, living in
claustrophobic squalor on the saddest block in Staten Island.
Saddled with a nagging wife and a keening, deformed baby (played by a puppet that resembles the mutant
infant of “Eraserhead”), Frankie sets out to find a few bucks to pay the rent on his rancid apartment. Instead

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