Nazithon: Decadence and Destruction (2013)

If you're anything like me (and I sincerely hope that you aren't), your knowledge of Naziploitation probably begins and ends with "Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS" (1975). Give or take the sequels, there's not much in these movies for horror fans.

To say that Naziploitation has a niche audience of sado-masochists, perverts, and people who just like looking at sexy women dressed in Hugo Boss uniforms may be over-generalising, but there's definitely a stigma attached to this subgenre for all the right reasons. However, just out of curiosity, I decided to try out the new GrindhouseFlix site from Full Moon to see what this stuff was all about.

GrindhouseFlix is a nicely designed site with some truly weird and wonderful movies on it (with more due to be added every month). I found the navigation and sign-up process very easy indeed, but the best bit is that the video streaming software which they use behind the scenes works on Linux. Unlike Netflix (which is unusable on Ubuntu even though there's now an unofficial way of getting it to work using WINE), GrindhouseFlix works on any modern operating system.

I used a promo code to watch "Nazithon" for free so it would be churlish of me to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I have to say that the collection of trailers and clips is hardly an in-depth documentary. Basically, it's a collection of most of the nudie bits from the Naziploitation movies. There's nothing wrong with that at all, but I wish that I'd used my freebie on a full length movie instead.

Being my usual cynical self, I'd guess that "Nazithon" is really meant to be a taster (or teaser) for some of the movies which are eventually going to be available on the site, but I still got something out of it. I made a list of anything which looked interesting including "SS Hell Camp", "Salon Kitty", and "The Damned" so that I can watch them later. I'm sorry to say that clips of "Zombie Lake" didn't impress me, but that's because I've had a gutful of zombies anyway.

The hosts of this excursion into "Decadence and Destruction" aren't natural comperes, and I couldn't tell you who either of them are in the entertainment industry without looking them up. There's nothing she can do about it now, but Michelle McGee has far too much ink for an SS officer and looks a bit silly. The fact that the real SS had no female officers anyway (as far as I know) is neither here nor there. This is a Full Moon production after all.

A brief cameo by a certain female puppet from "Puppet Master: Axis of Evil" (2010) is a treat for fans of the series, but I haven't got that far through them yet and have no idea who she is either.

If you want to watch "Nazithon" for free, just click on the banner below, sign up, and use one of the promo codes from Full Moon's Facebook page. It's only 80 minutes long and you might enjoy some of it.

Hobo with a Shotgun (2011)

"A homeless vigilante blows away crooked cops, paedophile Santas, and other scumbags with his trusty pump-action shotgun."

Having just watched "Hobo with a Shotgun", this isn't going to be a review so much as a rant against intentionally making movies "so bad that they're good". It seems to be just a lame excuse for having poor filmmaking skills and I'm sick to death of this trend. I'm also getting increasingly annoyed by the word "grindhouse" and its frequent use in the claim that a movie wasn't supposed to be any good in the first place.

Until the box office failure of "Grindhouse" (2007), I had never even heard the term "grindhouse" used before. For me, it conjures up an image of porn cinemas full of dirty old men in raincoats with hats on their laps not low-budget action flicks. I'm still not entirely convinced that the word wasn't invented by Quentin Tarantino and thrown into the world as if it was something that everybody should know just so that he could plagiarise ideas from old movies. In all the years that I'd been reviewing, I'd never heard it mentioned once in relation to exploitation movies and I've come across some pretty obscure terms.

So if the word "grindhouse" is bogus, it's obvious that the films themselves don't really belong to that category especially not these new faux-grindhouse B-movies such as "Planet Terror", "Death Proof", "Machete" and now, based on another fake trailer from the theatrical release of "Grindhouse", "Hobo with a Shotgun".

There were, of course, a lot of badly made low-budget films from all genres back in the '60s and '70s ranging from "spaghetti westerns" to "kung fu" and "peplum" epics, and, obviously, there was a good proportion of sci-fi, horror and crime dramas among all the exploitation films otherwise I wouldn't have any knowledge of them. Most people have never seen or have any interest in this dreck unless a particular title has a cult following. However, these films weren't only shown in seedy fleapits but also in drive-ins and mainstream movie theatres as supporting features because they were cheap to hire. The whole suggestion that there was ever a certain type of movie other than porn which was specifically designed to be shown in a "Grind House" is therefore flawed.

To lump a group of these films together as "grindhouse" and then to try to emulate their failings rather than their good points is also just plain wrong. Those bygone filmmakers didn't set out to make bad films but they often simply didn't have the budget or talent to make them any better. The European clones of better American movies were, however, another story entirely.

"Hobo with a Shotgun" really sickened me because it was just another part of the Tarantino-inspired hipster trend to intentionally make crappy films based on the worst examples from the '70s and hype them as if they are something "cool". It's the Emperor's new clothes over and over again. Absolutely anyone can make a bad movie, just hand me a camera and I'll show you. It's the combination of talent, discipline and hard work needed to make a good one which people should find more impressive not lazy efforts like this.