Multiple reasons may exist for a carnival sideshow’s use of garish paintings and a curtain to curtail peeks from the ticketless, but I’m only interested in the most obvious: Because you don’t get what you pay for.

Legendary B-movie director Fred Olen Ray (Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers) knows this; in fact, he literally wrote the book on it. Amplified by the barker’s ballyhoo, the sideshow posters outside the tent promised one thing and delivered another on the other side of the admission booth: something always lesser, often phony. For example, what was depicted as a giant spider with a human woman’s head actually would be — zut alors! — an illusion achieved by the lady sticking her head through a prop atop of a web of rope, with everything below her neck concealed.

Which brings us to Ray’s carnival-set Spidora. Its key art and tagline — hell, its very title — prime the viewer for a fanciful, “eight-legged love story” of this so-called spider woman. This is not that.

As much of a con as the shows it emulates, this is about Princess Marina, the Lobster Girl (the Amy Adams-esque Megan Sheehan), she of the claws for hands. Now, she does don a mask to moonlight as Spidora, which we get in one all-too-brief scene. But the rest? The rest is Marina and the smitten, Shakespeare-quoting suitor (Bobby Quinn Rice from Ray’s Super Shark) who’s a regular to the Museum of the Weird, Strange and the Unexpected. (Try fitting that on a ticket.)

Ray’s affection for the state-fair “freak show” is evident and reverent, given the sheer amount of coverage allotted to Marina’s act, the introductions of the top-hatted host (Jerry Lacey, TV’s Dark Shadows), the coat hanger swallower (Grindsploitation’s Krystal Pohaku) and the fire dancer (Crystal Marie) who twirls nary a tassel, but lighted wicks dangling from her pasties.

Less-exotic-sounding subject switcheroo notwithstanding, more to interested parties’ detriment is Spidora’s running time, misleadingly labeled at “Approx 90 Minutes.” That number is accurate if you include — and the Retromedia Entertainment DVD does — 1952’s notorious Chained for Life among the bonus features. Separated from that vehicle for conjoined sisters Daisy and Violet Hilton, Spidora runs a pat 15 minutes, which is not enough time to achieve anything but a start. Ray may not have had the funding to expand the short into a full film, but he definitely had the story, however unexplored. —Rod Lott

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The retro tribute Le Choc du Futur ends with an onscreen note of thanks to the unheralded women who were pioneers of electronic music in the 1970s, with a list of names that should be immediately written on a piece of paper and taken to your nearest record store to search.

Translated The Shock of the Future, the French film details a day in the life of Ana (Alejandro’s granddaughter Alma Jodorowsky) and her obsession with 70s-era equipment — especially a then-state-of-the-art beat machine — in the attempt to make a commercial jingle. She never gets around to it, instead making a killer disco tune instead.

As she does this, Choc details the constant barriers women faced in that burgeoning age of electronic music, most notably the way every guy, though he seems to take her seriously, wants a sexual favor in return. And while I’m sure not much has changed on that front, the way Ana perseveres is actually quite inspiring.

Directed by French composer Marc Collin and written with Elina Gakou Gomba, Le Choc du Futur portrays Ana as an anachronistic music geek with definite opinions that wouldn’t seem out of place at a Saturday-afternoon record store argument, especially when she’s decrying how, staring in the face of an electronic frontier, rock and roll is dead.

At the time, no matter how short-lived that time was, she might have been right, too. —Louis Fowler

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Everyone’s favorite husky Mexican wrestler with a mask, a cape and the ability to put wolfmen in headlocks like no other — El Santo, in case I didn’t narrow it down enough for you — is celebrated with this bone-crunchin’ compilation of his greatest triumphs, both in and out of the ring.

Honest talk: I started to find the in-ring footage tedious, as there’s only so much wrestling my brain can take before shuttering operations.

The out-of-ring stuff, however, gives this Something Weird Video assemblage its delirious kick: Santo fights fanged babes; Santo tackles zombies; Santo packs a wallop to a slow-moving, human-eating blob — all in scenes from such south-of-the-border exploits as Santo vs. the Vampire Women, Santo vs. the TV Killer and Santo vs. the Diabolical Hatchet.

As you may infer from the second half of Viva Santo and His Pals’ title, friends occasionally show up. One such pal, Blue Demon, joins in the creature-hunting, back-cracking fun of Santo and Blue Demon vs. the Monsters.

If the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences ever see it fit to award Santo a Lifetime Achievement Oscar (and they won’t), the clips have already been selected, and they’re all here in this two-hour collection. —Rod Lott

Get it at dvdrparty.

Hey, man, at your next happening — people still have those, right? — don’t stick a sugar cube atop a single tongue until you have the proper atmosphere for your guests.

And by that, I mean the two-hour compilation LSD: Psychedelic Trailers & Shorts. Where else can you be terrified one minute by Sal Mineo’s suggestion of being trapped in a refrigerator, then amused the next as grown adults romp amid a groovy bedroom set with “LSD” spelled on the wall in letters insinuating it’s all going down on the shadiest corner of Sesame Street? (And does it help that the second scenario unfolds to a score that sounds like a 3-year-old dicking around with a theremin?)

From the pushers at dvdrparty, the clip comp begins with the infamous animated chicken from the hysteria-stirring docudrama The Weird World of LSD, which isn’t even the strangest sight here for your bloodshot eyes. That honor goes to the Lockheed-funded classroom scare film LSD: A Case Study, in which a young blonde hallucinates that the hot dog she’s about to eat is screaming and has the face of a Troll doll.

Other scenes shove aside the acts of tuning in and dropping out to emphasize turning on. If it’s not dancing with abandon to dancing between frat-house sheets (Stephen C. Apostolof’s College Girls Confidential), it’s outlining your sex partner’s naked body with whipped cream (Neon Maniacs director Joseph Mangine’s Smoke and Flesh).

Elsewhere, a dozen trailers advertise all sorts of cinematic trips, including Roger Corman’s The Trip, Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, the Lana Turner-starring The Big Cube and even the made-for-TV adaptation of Go Ask Alice. Whether taken in doses or all at once, the no-frills, far-out party disc presents some of the wackiest depictions of lysergic acid diethylamide ever to make their way to the bijou. —Rod Lott

Get it at dvdrparty.

When most popular musicians face a major death in their band, many times it’s best if they just break up and go their separate ways, especially when the leader of the group has just had every bone crushed in an airplane disaster, like, for example, Ronnie Van Zant of Lynyrd Skynyrd.

That rock ’n’ roll fuck-up of Oct. 20, 1977, is finally portrayed in the nail-biting Street Survivors: The True Story of the Lynyrd Skynyrd Plane Crash. The incident killed lead singer Van Zant and a few others, and the movie is told through the eyes of drummer Artimus Pyle and his well-worn vegetarian T-shirt.

A replacement drummer who’s thrown into Skynyrd’s lifestyle of booze and broads on the road, Pyle (Ian Shultis) is the band’s moral conscience, often telling wasted bandmates they need to “slow it down.” It doesn’t help, because soon enough, their ramshackle plane is out of gas and going down over a Louisiana swamp.

But that’s just the beginning of Pyle’s problems, because after single-handedly rescuing all the survivors of the wreck and then running some 20 miles through the marshlands, he has a near fistfight with a deadly snake and is subsequently shot for trespassing on some dude’s land.

If it sounds like Pyle is the hero of the story, it’s because he is; interspersed throughout the movie is an interview with the real-life Pyle, giving himself well-earned props for being the man who saved (most of) Skynyrd, although with plenty of tortured screaming at God along the way.

The band should have broken up for good after this accident, but, of course, embarrassingly kept going on down that road, forgoing any possible legendary status for the ticket sales of state fair shows. Regardless, you can still hear “Free Bird” on the radio 10 or so times a day. Can your band say that? —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.