The Story:
Shock Festival is a 3 disc set tribute to the golden age of Grindhouse cinema.
Disc One’s first feature is a fan made phony trailer marathon from mainly B movie filmmakers including David Hartman (Spiderman, Bubba-Ho Tep), Richard Griffin (Feeding the Masses), Dave Neabore (Dog Eat Dog), and Michael Gingold (Managing editor of Fangoria Magazine). The second feature comes in the form of an Exploitation trailer marathon. Over 40 trailers including such classics as Cornbread, Earl and Me, Flesh Gordon, and Venom to name a few!
Disc Two serves up an offering of buckets of blood, and creature features in an ultimate horror marathon. Another 40+ trailers including Deep Red, God Told Me To, and Black Belly of the Tarantula. If that’s not enough to fill your brain pans there’s also a T.V. spot marathon of vintage re-mastered trailers, and a poster gallery. Lastly just when you thought you were safe, another 10 trailer marathon brought to you by the most notorious exploitation distributor of the 1970’s, Independent International!
Disc Three puts the icing on this bloody exhaustive cake with Radio Shock Festival which includes over 300 radio spots to fill your DIE-Pod! All this and even more as the set is packaged with a book of how this wonderful DVD came to be, as well as a mini poster that’s good enough to frame!
The Characters:
Brimming with heroes, villains, monsters, aliens, mutants, cops, porn stars, etc. It’s all over the map, from the B movie underground, to the Hollywood hills, and beyond.
Effects/Gore:
It’s seven hours of blood, nudity, monsters, and makeup effects! You get to watch lots of classic moments with traditional effects, just the way it should be.
Lasting Appeal:
Shock Festival is a great set, there is so much on display it’s hard to remember everything on one watch alone. By owning shock festival you have enough content to have multiple movie nights with friends. The set has everything, the only thing you need to provide is alcohol, and friends to have an unforgettable experience in Grindhouse trash cinema.
Final Headcount:
This set is absolutely amazing! You can tell the love of trash cinema was the driving force behind the project. It gave me everything I was looking for, and maybe even a little more. Thank you Shock-O-Rama for giving another low budget project the care and attention it deserves! My only complaint is it opened my wallet to a whole new world of possibilities. It also loses half a point for a couple of fake trailers that didn’t stand up so well to the rest. I’ll let the classy words of one Stephen Romano close off this review “Watch my DVD or I’ll blow your fucking head off.”
