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Harken back to those thrilling days of yesteryear when the advent
of rental videos astonished the movie-going consumer who could
only feed his addiction by going to the theater or watching
chopped up movies in between commercials on TV. Like vinyl, here
is the revenge of another analog cast-off: the VHS is once again
insinuating itself into American culture, and this book
celebrates the anarchic design art of those early VHS boxes.
Portable Grindhouse: The Lost Art of the VHS Box
(Fantagraphics) by Jacques Boyreau is a feast for exploitation
cognoscenti, reprinting some of the most louche, decadent,
minimo-pervo artwork to ever grace a VHS box, featuring such
movies as From Beyond, Penitentiary II, Beast of the Yellow
Night, Cop Killers, Bay of Blood, Escape from Death Row, and
Cocaine Wars. Readers will be agog at the plethora of
supertrash movie titles, and then move on to rediscover the
anarchic box designs. Throughout, editor and cultural historian
Jacques Boyreau succinctly narrates the household-piercing story
of VHS: "On par with the jukebox, disco, and neon, VHS
reformatted the world's product-intake and boosted a libertarian
aesthetic that conquered TV in the same way TV conquered comic
books in the 1950s, and allowed us to hold movies in our hands.
Posters in the lobby could advertise, even fetishize a movie;
credit sequences could identify the participants, but somehow,
VHS box-art 'became' the iconic equivalent of the movie."
Portable Grindhouse is published in a VHS "format," slyly
packaged inside a facsimile VHS box, and contains almost a
hundred reproductions of VHS art with commentary.
Check out this recent blog posting on Portable Grindhouse
on the Movie Morlocks.
Portable Grindhouse: The Lost Art of the VHS Box can
currently be ordered from bookstores everywhere.
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