And yet, the great contradiction of the grindhouse genre is that the vast majority of these nasty little films were hamstrung by the age-old American instinct to censor—either internally (by the filmmaker himself) or externally (by a governing body). They promise to take you to the inner reaches of the slimy id, but they're really teasingly tame, always cutting away from truly taboo subject matter and veering away again and again to inanity. You might discard the end product as worthless and offensive—and that's a perfectly understandable reaction—but take a moment to consider these films' social significance. They're certainly products of a sexually immature collective consciousness.

This DVD collects two long-form "classics" of the genre. The first feature, the black-and-white Scare Their Pants Off (61 minutes), has two men kidnapping young women and forcing them to engage in staged sexual fantasies (a Beauty and the Beast riff, a ritual sacrifice, and a Nazi interrogation) in a warehouse. It contains a few unerotic topless scenes and is astoundingly, teeth-grindingly dull. The second feature, the black-and-white Satan's Bed (72 minutes), is an awkward splice of two separate films: One film follows three drugged-out hoodlums on the lookout for a score, and the other stars Yoko Ono as a young, Japanese woman who's just arrived in the Big Apple. Laughable narration tries to weave the two films together, with zero success. Satan's Bed deals with rape, and like many grindhouse flicks, treats the act as if the woman ultimately enjoys the violation. It's this kind of appalling misogyny that makes the grindhouse genre ultimately reprehensible. But, again, who can blame it for existing in the darker corners of our tight-strung society?

The highlights of this DVD, as you'll see below, are to be found among the bonus features.

Something Weird Video presents the entire disc's contents in the films' original 1.33:1 theatrical aspect ratio. Image quality is all over the map, but tending toward just-barely-watchable. Some pieces are dark and murky, and some are so washed out that you can barely discern an image. Most of the contents are in black-and-white, but some—the later 70s films—appear in color. In general, the black-and-white pieces fare the best. Some of the color films are disastrously smeared. In just about every film, you'll find much dirt and wear. All this is no fault of the DVD producer: The problems are with the source elements. Consider this a preservation of sorts. Many may ask, perhaps hysterically, Why preserve this crap? Well, if you don't appreciate grind cinema, why have you read this far?

Audio quality is equally poor. Sound levels are generally consistent, but in some films, the recording is nearly unintelligible. For example, during the lengthy street scenes in one of the extra features (Hot Skin and Cold Cash), long sections of awful dialog went by without my understanding a single muddled word. Perhaps I should count my blessings.

The DVD offers a bevy of short subjects called Grindhouse Goodies. Leading things off, the black-and-white Hot Skin and Cold Cash is filled to brimming with monotone acting and Ed Wood dialog. This 40-minute film tries to soberly convey the life of a Manhattan hooker but ends up as hopelessly naïve. It opens with a handsomely endowed young blonde frolicking about her apartment, barely concealed by negligee, and eventually embarking on a long night of whoring. She meets nerdy middle-aged men (a staple of this genre), swingers, and virgins. The movie takes on drug abuse, lesbianism, oral sex, and masturbation, and yet frustratingly cuts away from any enticing action. Still, this piece is more entertaining than either of the two main films.

The most enjoyable bits on this disc are the selection of Seedy Short Subjects and Grindhouse Trailers (also in the Grindhouse Goodies section). The short subjects are Jane on a Train (an embarrassingly juvenile stop-motion effort), Times Square Sinema (a color pseudo-documentary about the porn presence on Broadway), Couples Welcome (a color depiction of a couple masturbating inside a porn theater and discussing the value of pornography), and Girls For Sale (a black-and-white snippet of two dancing women wearing nothing but dollar bills over their genitals). The Grindhouse Trailers, uniformly entertaining, include the titles Scare Their Pants Off, Satan's Bed, All My Men, The Bizarre Ones, Career Bed, Nympho, Olga's Dance Hall Girls, Prostitutes Protective Society, She Came On the Bus (yes, it means exactly what you think it means), Sin Syndicate, and Two Girls for a Madman. They're choked with overt fondlings, voyeurism, lesbianism, promiscuity, hookers, devil worship, and pasty white men. All of them are loaded with nudity and unintentionally hilarious narration, and all of them promise much more than the actual film probably delivers. In that sense, these 3-minute shorts are more satisfying than any grindhouse movie.

The final feature in the Grindhouse Goodies section is the 12-minute Gallery of Distribpix Sexploitation Art with Skinflick Musical Hits and Sexploitation Radio-Spot Rarities. This piece walks you through a fairly large collection of poster art from the genre, to some groovy tunes and corny dialog snippets.

A final note: Over every piece of film on this disc, an SWV logo has been imprinted in the lower-right corner of the image. It's annoying and unnecessary.

Grindhouse flicks are artifacts of recent American history. It's nice to see they won't be forgotten for a while. Give this a try, if only to see how desperately horny American white nerds were 30-40 years ago. It'll be like looking in a mirror.