10.4.11

Trash talkin'


My very best friend in the world, my wife Valarie, gave me an unexpected present yesterday. It was a copy of TRASH: The Graphic Genius of Xploitation Posters. The book features hundreds of posters and lobby cards for some of the worst movies from the 50s through the 80s.

As a young man I spent a number of years managing one of the finest movie theaters in the south suburbs of Chicago, but the theater chain I worked for also owned and operated a couple of grind houses in the armpit of northern Indiana, and I had to spend some time working in them, where I showed a lot of genuinely horrible movies. Bad science fiction, bad horror, bad sex romps. If it was bad, we played it. The thing that I grew to admire about exploitation movies is that they never pretended to be art. They never pretended to be anything other than what they were.

Anyway, thank you Valarie.







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