For his first feature-length collection of exploitation trailers under the GrindhouseFlix banner, Full Moon Features head honcho Charles Band chose to focus on the topic of virgins. To host, he went with someone who may not remember what it was like to be one: Playboy‘s May 2012 Playmate, Nikki Leigh, who seems calm and comfortable in her underwear-clad duties on the bedroom set, if not exactly brimming with personality.
The result is Blood of 1000 Virgins — whose onscreen transitions mistitle it as Blood of a 1000 Virgins — an exploration into cherry-picked coming attractions dealing with doing “it” … or not. Who knew there were enough of those to jam into a single package? Surprisingly, the contents are not culled strictly from sexploitation pictures, as Mighty Peking Man‘s early appearance makes known.
The program is divided into five loosely defined categories: “Female Virgins,” “Male Virgins,” “Reasons to Stay a Virgin,” “Who Hunts Virgins?” and “Revenge of the Virgins.” This allows Band and company to traipse through many genres and subgenres, including melodrama (The Harrad Experiment), possession horror (Joan Collins in The Devil Within Her), sexy sci-fi (Invasion of the Bee Girls), crude comedy (Chatterbox, starring Candice Rialson and her talking vagina), arthouse darlings (Andy Warhol’s Dracula), rape-revenge (Ms. 45) and see-it-to-believe-it insanities (Doris Wishman’s Deadly Weapons). While they sometimes ignore their own theme, they also don’t settle for the usual suspects, either.
The print quality of the trailers varies wildly, but when you’re dealing with some real rarities, I can’t say I minded all that much. In fact, I half-expect them not to emerge pristine, to better convey the grimy feel of 42nd Street theaters. Whether featuring Linda Blair or Tommy Kirk, “these virgins need no urgin'” (to borrow an announcer’s line from Run, Virgin, Run). —Rod Lott