August 2024 will see such major releases as the Criterion Collection edition of Martha Coolidge’s raw autofiction Not a Pretty Picture, Kino Lorber’s 4K discs of French New Wave classics Alphaville and Last Year at Marienbad, a new 4K restoration of Alfred Hitchcock’s penultimate film Frenzy, and the return of Ivan Dixon’s revolutionary spy film The Spook Who Sat by the Door at the BAM Cinematheque. We’ll circle back to some of these—Dixon’s film in particular has been hard to find for a while now. But you’ll have to forgive us, because we’re on a different type of wavelength this month at Shelf Life.

We’re doing as the Europeans do and going on a little holiday in August. We’re still watching movies, of course. But nothing too strenuous, you know? We’re in an inner-tube type of mood, floating down the lazy river of cinema with metaphorical drink in hand. This month’s selections are all what one might refer to as “trash”, a term we use with nothing but love. Trash is fun. Trash is great. Long live trash! See you in September, when we’ll have the mental energy for subtext and theme once more.

Frogs

Blu-ray available August 27 from Kino Lorber.

Hillbillys in a Haunted House

Blu-ray available August 13 from VCI Entertainment.

Many Letterboxd compare it to Scooby-Doo, which gives you a good idea of the general vibe: Flynnick describes it as “an extended episode of Scooby-Doo with a shockingly high amount of violence,” while Joe places it in larger context when he says that it has “DNA from The Munsters, Get Smart, Scooby-Doo, The Grand Ole Opry, and (naturally) The Beverly Hillbillies.”

Indeed, there’s a Scooby-Doo type of innocence to the characters in this one, whose bumbling makes them endearing even when the movie is, in John’s words, “baffling” and “utterly incoherent”. Hillbillys—no, I have no idea why they spelled it like that—was made in Nashville for the Southern drive-in circuit, which is a polite way of saying that its production was probably even cheaper and more rushed than Frogs. But the cast list is surprisingly stacked: John Carradine and Basil Rathbone co-star as bumbling mad scientists, with Lon Chaney Jr. as their manservant and Linda Ho as their boss, “dragon lady” stereotype Madame Wong.

The sequel to the even more obscure Las Vegas Hillbillys, the “hillbilly” in Hilbillys in a Haunted House refers to hillbilly music. It’s not a musical in the sense that the songs have anything to do with the plot, but the two genres of music (country and Western, eyyyy) were way more important to the makers of this film than horror or comedy. One particularly egregious example occurs when a character pauses for a solid ten minutes to watch a young Merle Haggard (in his screen debut!) performing on television. But the boldest refutation of filmmaking convention comes when the last twenty minutes abandon plot entirely in favor of a “jamboree” performance from the film’s stars.

Now, I like cry-in-your-beer hillbilly songs, which took me a long way in of enjoying Hillbillys in a Haunted House. If I didn’t, I might agree with the Letterboxd who consider it possibly the worst movie ever made. “The house wasn’t really haunted and the people in it weren’t really hillbillies,” Andy complains—which is technically true. But it also has two of my absolute favorite things in the entire world, which are sheet ghosts and a guy in a gorilla suit who absolutely does not need to be there. That puts me more in line with Rod’s confession that he has “a squishy-soft spot in my heart for this harmless, utterly stoopid movie.” If you don’t think you can handle it straight, Rifftrax’s legendary commentary track will help the moonshine medicine go down.

Friday the 13th

4K UHD available September 17 from Arrow Video.

By the standards of its own franchise, Nispel’s F13 is actually quite successful. Sure, the movie has no sense of place, space, pacing or suspense. But it might be the horniest of all the Friday the 13th movies, which is impressive in itself: These slashers all feature topless teens courting death while fornicating in the woods, but the ’09 version also has a backwoods weirdo licking a porno centerfold, disembodied sex mannequins, and a compliment so ridiculous it’s quoted in two popular reviews of the film: “You’ve got perfect nipple placement, baby.”

And in a slasher, where there’s sex, there’s violence. The kills in the ’09 Friday are bloody and brutal, with a Freudian emphasis on impaling people with gigantic blades and a Jason who’s been working on improving his run times when he’s not cultivating his secret weed patch and tunneling underneath the ruins of Camp Crystal Lake. Cameron is a fan of the more agile killer, writing that “while I love Kane Hodder’s inquisitive head tilts and methodical, emotionless murders, it’s so fucking cathartic to see Jason leap after someone and just fucking whip an axe at them.”

Amid all this sublime ridiculousness, the downsides of Friday the 13th are the inferior score—outdoing Harry Manfredini is next to impossible, to be fair—and the dopey, pandering nods to the franchise’s origins. I’d call the frat-boy energy that permeates Nispel’s film like a can of Axe left in a hot car overnight a minus as well, were it not for the creatively violent comeuppance that we know is coming to these bros before the end of the picture.

Basically, “​​when you adjust your expectations accordingly it’s gory brainless fun,” as Belian explains. “This big dumb piece of crap has really grown on me over the years. Love seeing some of the most obnoxious characters of the series being taken down,” Helen adds, and Ty summarizes not only this film but everything we’re covering this month when he writes, “it may be trash, but it’s fun trash!” Exactly, Ty. Exactly.

Demons / Demons 2

4K UHD and Blu-ray available August 13 from Synapse Films.

Both Demons follow the same formula: take a bunch of colorful ’80s stock characters, trap them in a single location, unleash a horde of demons and watch the mayhem unfold. The first feature has the advantage of taking place in a movie theater, which adds a giddy layer of movie-mad excitement to the story. Demons 2 (pictured above) is more divisive, with split on whether it’s inferior to or an improvement on the original. The second film, in which another group of stereotypes must battle a demon infestation in a high-tech yuppie high rise, has the potential for satire, but prioritizes the “delightfully excessive” gore and “quality stupidity” Sally Jane loves. Both are out in August in 4K from Synapse Films, so you can see all the goop and big hair in the highest quality possible.

Intrepidos Punks / Revenge of the Punks

On Blu-ray from Vinegar Syndrome.

Bava’s lone biker didn’t stand a chance against a theater full of demons, but I bet Tarzan, Pirate, Caligula and the rest of the Intrepidos Punks could take them, no problem. Vinegar Syndrome’s new double feature is trash with a capital “T”, two notorious punk-themed Mexploitation films that made their way north on VHS sometime in the ’90s and have been sought-after bootlegs ever since: Both Intrepidos Punks and its sequel, Revenge of the Punks, have been logged on Letterboxd fewer than a thousand times as of this writing.

What’s so infamous about these movies? First of all, once you hear the Intrepidos Punks (pictured above) theme song—which you definitely will, given that, as Ira notes, it “plays at least 30 times during the course of the film”—you will never, ever get it out of your head. Ira highlights the movie’s chief pleasures when he writes, “If you’d sent Roberta Findlay to Mexico… with a minimal budget, a few custom motorcycles and some leftover Mad Max costumes, I imagine you’d have gotten this exact movie, except with a bit less manic energy.”

Kasarin adds that “it’s like every other punk motorcycle film turned to eleven,” with all the pros and cons the biker-movie subgenre implies. On the upside, Intrepidos Punks and Revenge of the Punks are more interested in chaos than boring stuff like “plot”, which leads to some truly transcendent moments of decadence. The downside is that, far too often, sexual assault crashes the party. These are gritty, violent pictures that can be “repellent, offensive and deeply nihilistic,” as Ira says. The kinds of B-movies where a guy really gets buried in sand up to his neck, and then has a real bag of snakes dumped on his actual head as he screams. The cartoon sadism is compelling.

And the looks! My god, the looks! Fans of chain mail, safety pins, tinfoil spikes and spandex will be in heaven. Opinions are mixed on which of the two films are better, but Revenge has more of an actual story. Sure, a lot of it is lifted from Death Wish. You got a problem with that?