Customer Reviews

Portable Grindhouse: The Lost Art of the VHS Box, Vol. 1 (v. 1)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A VERY dissapointing book. Although the packaging is cool, the book itself is a MAJOR letdown. Anyone expecting rare titles and wild artwork will be very poorly served by this book. For example, when I think "grindhouse" or "lost art of the VHS," I'm not exactly thinking Greatest Sports Legends starring Johnny Bench, Bowhunting Whitetails: Just For Fun!, or Network (???). Granted there are a FEW good titles here, Nightmare Circus (ANYTHING from Regal seems to have fun artwork), Night of Bloody Horror, and Video Violence. Next time, Fantagraphics might want to spend less on a fancy slipcover with blood spatters, and concentrate on producing a book with worthy art. This effort seems slapdash. I would recommend The Art of the Nasty if you're looking for interesting VHS artwork (albeit tapes from the UK Video Nasty era).

I have to agree with Bronze Horse (reviewer) on this. Fantagraphics is one of my favorite Graphic Arts publishers and the packaging here is great! But the inside comes off like a "poor man's Taschen" book with little input from the author as to why these (mostly) B movies are fun.

A lot of the VHS boxes would appear in the "cult" or "late night" or "horror" section of your local Video store. My store still has many of these VHS tapes because they never made it to DVD (and SOMEONE must be renting them!). There are a few comedies like "Going Ape" and the Jerry Lewis "Don't Raise The Bridge, Lower the Water". And why the 1940s "Dick Tracy" is here, I can't imagine. Most are from the minor video companies like Regal, Paragon and Media. And the only real MAJOR company is Paramount - with a few. No Fox,; no Warners. Except for a 4-page essay in the front (and no index in the back) there is nothing here except images of front and back of the boxes. (some even have rental coding labels). And not even dates for these films. More of a DIY project that any VHS collector (or former video store owner) could put together.

I'll chalk this one up as one that slipped through Fantagraphics editorial department.

Steve Ramm
"Anything Phonographic"

Growing up during the late 1980's-90's, my favorite hangout was the video store. I used to roam around the video stores, looking at the VHS covers like I was in an art gallery. Of course, my favorite sections were the Horror and Sci-Fi sections because those films had THE best cover art ever! Of course, some of them gave me nightmares (and I hadn't even watched them at all, let alone remember them). The video store experience is in part what made me such a film buff, along with reading a few Leonard Maltin books.

Jacques Boyreau has recaptured the video store experience with his book PORTABLE GRINDHOUSE. Starting with a great introduction that recreates the experience of when VCRs were in vogue and when VHS was THE home entertainment format, Boyreau presents us with 200 pages worth of VHS box art! There's the familiar horror box art we know and love, a few mainstream releases, instructional videos, and some surprises. Flipping through this book brought back many memories of my youth! I sure hope that there will be a Volume 2 soon, since there is so much more to be seen!

Unique packaging. A Book in the guise of a video tape. Lots and lots of pictures of art on the covers of old VHS tapes. Maybe not for everyone. Even if you never wanted to buy the tapes shown it shows a different type of art form.

I like the variety of movies selected (and how the selection of all sorts of movies, not JUST those that epitomize "grindhouse," reflects the variety and oddity of the early days of VHS.)

Trouble is, beyond the (just OK) essay at the front of the book, there's no context to anything. More detail and commentary about the movies, or the BOXES, would've been much appreciated. There was a lot of odd packaging back in the day, with significant differences even among the "big" publishers. For instance, Paramount had simple boxes just the size of the tape itself, while Warner Home Video had these really attractive oversized "clamshell" style boxes. And some of the minor publishers had these boxes that were almost comically oversized, encasing the tape in a huge concoction of cardboard and (mostly) air. All (presumably) to stand out on the shelves more.

This book would've greatly benefitted from some sort of expert commentary from people in the industry (or even retailers.) Which box art strategies worked? Which didn't? Who wrote the copy? Et cetera. As it is, the book's not much more than some guy's "Hey, look what was in this box of videos in the storage closet" collection on Flickr, but fourteen bucks pricier.

Book it's fine for the covers. I strongly reccomand to skip the intro. Author clearly knows nothing about video and i believe just a little about movies. But he pretends to know, so to justify the unjustifyable (analog video it's better than digital it's more a cinematic experience ... sic) he embarks in an philosophic metalinguistic speculation that goes nowhere, matter of fact can be reduced simply to: He likes it more.
I agree with him for the following: vhs was fun, it helped to bring obscurities to everybody, bigger case were cool (laserdiscs box sets even better) but that's it. IT'S NOT BETTER.
I'm the guy that was collecting movies since his childhood, when this dude was still playing with fisher price toys, and i still keep more than 2000 tapes in my collection of movies otherwise unavailable.
Going back to the book, as i said the covers are cool, but there's no philologic order of any kind or intro to the movies. Looks like this guy just run his collection and scanned whatever he had. The word grindhouse in the title it's misleading: Robocop 2, Vanishing point, Network ARE NOT GRINDHOUSE FLICKS, not to mention Barbie cartoons.
As an other reviewer suggested the fab press books are better, but they cover only UK releases. So if you want just a glimpse at the old vhs market in the US buy this book, otherwise just skip it.

While goofing around on the internet the other day I read a small blurb about a book by Jacques Boyreau, titled "Portable Grindhouse: The Lost Art of the VHS Box Vol. 1". I received it today and it's now one of my favorite reference/art books on cinema. I've got tons of these books, and I know the well-known covers, it's great to see these things again, it's like being back in the mom and pop video stores back in the mid-80's. The popular consensus on this book seems to be that there should have been more horror/exploitation titles included in the book. I don't think that that would have been necessary at all. Horror fans, you've seen the cover for (insert favorite obscure title here) before, and while the book is 85% horror/exploitation, it's nice to see other forgotten titles, like videos for hunting, sports, and safety, those were in the store too, you know? After a recent move I had to get rid of most of my 1000+ VHS tapes, they take up a lot of room, and really start to smell bad after a while, and probably don't work too well either after they've been around for almost thirty years. I can't wait for Vol. 2. So my only complaint on this is the title. I understand why Boyreau had to put "Grindhouse" in the title, that word means something to the mainstream now. Ten years ago most people didn't understand what grindhouse meant, and still probably really don't, but hey, if it sells copies and allows for a volume 2, he could call it "Twilight" something, I don't care, I just wanna relive my heady adolescence in a VHS cover fugue. I would have liked to have seen "Lunch Meat" included though. Vol. 2, quick!

I received this from a fellow film geek friend for Christmas, and it's a really cool book for anyone who has fond memories of browsing through old obscure VHS tapes in video stores. I'm not necessarily a "grindhouse" enthusiast by trade, so I don't share the other reviews' gripe over the selection of movies. There are plenty of funny, cheesy movies in here, and it's fun spotting ones that I remember seeing in stores as a kid. The packaging is fantastic too.