I am a sucker for trailer collections. The problem with that is one tends to see the same coming attractions pop up, ad infinitum. That is not the case with Video Dimensions’ Mondo Sleazo: The Sleaziest Trailers in the World, which immediately became apparent, as electroshocked nipples tend to do. Even better, unlike a majority of the movies it features, it lives up to its title!

The program’s two hours are separated loosely into six categories that collectively represent a hodgepodge of weird genres, from kung fu (The Flying Killer) to blaxploitation (Disco Godfather), and weirder subgenres that include the sexy swashbuckler (Tower of Screaming Virgins), the spoof film (The Sex O’Clock News) and even puppet porn (Let My Puppets Come), the latter of which can’t be unseen and forces me to rethink my stance on yarn.

By the time you get to the third grouping, their interchangeability becomes startlingly obvious. See if you can guess what theme links these titles: The Smut Peddler, Blazing Stewardesses and Another Day, Another Man. If you guessed “sex,” you’re correct, and possibly gutter-minded.

Yes, as something titled Mondo Sleazo should be, it is filled with flicks about Child Brides and Street Girls, about Caged Virgins and Girls for Rent. Mind you, this is no complaint — not when something like Sugar Cookies dares to compare itself to Hitchcock (not once, but twice) and when Mundo Depravados pits stripper Tempest Storm against “a sex fiend killer,” the former playing Agent 48-24-36. That’s exploitation genius, as much of this disc is. —Rod Lott

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Happy nine-month anniversary, Yan and Elise! My gift to you two lovebirds is this glimpse into your immediate future: It’s gonna suck!

So goes the game of Eroticide, a truly twisted tale of romance by Canadian filmmaker Matthew Saliba, ringleader of 2009’s underseen Frankenstein Unlimited anthology and director of the 2011 Italian exploitation homage Amy’s in the Attic.

This short begins with Yan (Jocelin Haas) and Elise (Stephanie van Rijn), our heretofore happy couple, celebrating their momentous occasion at a restaurant. Who should walk in and interrupt but Kendra (Lisa Di Capa), Yan’s ex-girlfriend; she evidently hasn’t let go of their half-decade together, because she delights in disparaging Elise in general and Yan’s erectile dysfunction.

Later that night, as Yan and Elise make love (she puts it rougher, actually), Saliba skillfully intercuts their thrusts with Yan’s imagined submissive activities with Kendra rather than his “silver medal” gal. But the real weirdness doesn’t kick in until the next morning.

Saliba’s specialty isn’t off-kilter subject matter; it’s whatever lies at taking a hard left turn when one reaches off-kilter subject matter. Viewers never can be sure what awaits them in the next scene. What does can be shocking, but never just for the cheap sake of doing so; it serves the story.

And this story hints at a lot that it does not depict, adding layers of mystery to an unsettling surface. It’s suggested that Yan and Elise had their “meet cute” via gruesome car crash which may have resulted in his bedroom troubles; says the French-speaking Elise, “The road to your heart was paved with my blood.”

That you want to know more about its origins speaks highly of Eroticide. All three cast members do great work, but Di Capa gets the juiciest role as the manipulative rhymes-with-blunt. She also gets the last word at the harsh ending — abrupt but appropriate. If you’ve seen Brad Pitt deliver the denouement of Killing Them Softly, you have a hint of the cruelty to come. —Rod Lott

All but lost, the unreleased Banned represents the final film of cult New York director Roberta Findlay (Tenement). Beholden to no genre and without an internal logic to call its own, the movie is utterly strange even for her.

Ostensibly, it’s about the ghost of Sid Vicious-esque punk rocker Teddy Homicide (Neville Wells), he of Rotten Filth. While laying tracks at Impulse Studios, he suddenly snaps, mows everyone down with a machine gun, and then drowns himself in the toilet. His soul remains in the commode for 10 years, until the band Banned (get it?) scrounges together enough cash to cut an album there, and jazz guitarist Kent (Dan Erickson from Mrs. Findlay’s Blood Sisters) becomes possessed when sprayed with toilet water. It happens.

Findlay only marginally pursues that angle; it’s secondary to everything else, which can be broken into three major categories:
1. automatic weapons — Guns are handled by many characters throughout. Whether incidentally or in the hands of a Middle Eastern terrorist trio, they’re played for laughs, no matter how many lives are snuffed out. Ditto Banned‘s climax of Kent/Teddy being chased through Central Park with a rocket launcher.
2. groupie sex — Banned’s drummer, Serge (Fred Cabral), balls anything with a cervix. He never finishes, because copulation is interrupted by the ringing of an alarm clock, which he then hurls against the wall. Its broken parts fall into a pile of so many, it’s a wonder Serge doesn’t have the HIV. Among the women who strip nude is D-list scream queen Debbie Rochon (Santa Claws), in only her sixth credit of (at press time) 225.
3. slapstick comedy — Or “attempts at,” to get technical. Characters plunge into open manholes, and if it’s not funny the first time (and it’s not), Findlay hopes it will be the third (nope). Similarly, when Serge lapses into a religious rant, his pals press a surge protector labeled “Serge Suppressor” to his chest; Findlay draws attention to the pun thrice just to make sure you won’t miss it. You won’t, but you’ll groan instead of guffaw.

Depicted twice, the weirdest gag has Broken Records’ owner — an old, short, round Jewish man — snort lines of “beef adrenal tissue,” thereby turning him into a young, tall, muscular African-American hulk à la Kentucky Fried Movie‘s Big Jim Slade.

Almost as an afterthought, Kent is exorcised by a preacher who moonlights as a plumber. Banned is worth about an equal amount of contemplation; while certainly not boring, its intent and execution are perplexing. Erickson bothers to give an actual performance, but everyone else — to borrow a line from the movie — can “go fuck a coconut.” —Rod Lott

Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers is both a crime film and a crime against film. The critical adoration for it puzzles me, for the indie is about as deep as the puddle of urine its largely vapid quartet squats to make on the pavement in broad daylight.

Four girlfriends are anxious to flee college for Florida for spring break, but don’t have enough cash between them for even one night’s stay (yet somehow, they are consistently able to afford cocaine). Problem solved: Rob a diner using squirt guns and sledgehammers, and it’s par-tay time! The young ladies then imbibe and engage in all sorts of 24/7 debauchery — always in their color-coordinated bikinis, presumably hand-picked to match Korine’s Sour Skittles palette — until cops bust up the fun. They’re bailed out of jail by Alien (James Franco, Oz the Great and Powerful), a white, cornrowed rapper/dealer with a fox’s sly smile … if foxes sported enough gangsta grills to nauseate four out of five dentists.

The skeevy Alien leads the ladies further down a slippery slope, headfirst into his trumped-up fantasy world of loaded machine guns and hot-tub threesomes and (I assume) vicious STDs. Halfway through, the God-fearing good girl named, of course, Faith (Selena Gomez, former Disney Channel princess of Wizards of Waverly Place) decides she’s had enough and flees. Viewers may pray they could go with her.

It’s not that I find Spring Breakers‘ content offensive — a recurring theme involves pornographically sucking everything from Rainbow Popsicles to gun barrels — but what I do find offensive is how empty that content is. It serves nothing but itself. Flirting with the mainstream, provocateur Korine (Gummo) is not framing his flimsy story as a morality tale; his leering camera is too busy focusing on the crotches of women whose faces are cropped purposely out-of-frame, reducing them to mere holes.

Franco’s on another level than the female cast (Gomez, Ashley Benson of TV’s Pretty Little Liars, Sucker Punch-er Vanessa Hudgens and Korine’s wife, Rachel), but his performance is hardly a saving grace when the movie revels in maddening repetition. One such instance is the oft-voiced rallying cry of “Spring break forever, bitches! Spring break forever!” The trip certainly feels endless. —Rod Lott

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Here’s a textbook example of a true exploitation film: an on-the-cheap word of warning on any given “social ill” (in this case, racism) that engages in the very subject it claims to decry. The opening three minutes of My Baby Is Black!, although far from politically correct, compose its highlight — a birthing sequence culminating in the bold, brazen exclamation of the title.

The rest of the black-and-white (pun not intended) film is not as in-your-face. In fact, it’s a somber, limply acted, robot-dubbed, French-lensed, melodramatic seriotragedy about a snowy-white Parisian girl named Françoise (Françoise Giret) attracted to a visiting, handsome African-American med student named Daniel (Gordon Heath, Animal Farm).

Together, they hold hands, laugh hysterically at nothing, express their love in voice-over and have lots of unprotected sex. They don’t have conversations per se; they speak in despair-drenched soliloquies so serious, you’d think they’re aching to set them to iambic pentameter.

As the title tells, Françoise gets preggers, prompting her father to attempt coercing her into an abortion, which he justifies by saying, “It is not a sin to get rid of a dirty stain.” The most racist segment arrives in a bizarre moment of supposed comic relief when a black child tells the police about asking the butcher for some ham, only to be smeared with lard and shoved into the fridge. The butcher’s reply: “I was only joking.”

My Baby Is Black! is full of skewed analogies, particularly from the academic voice of reason (Aram Stephan, Bedtime Story), who reasons, “Racism is like a lot of ants. … All ants must be trampled.” Daniel, however, argues, “I can’t agree with what you’re saying, professor. I like ants very much.” That’s not helping the cause, Daniel. —Rod Lott

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