As a child of the late seventies and early eighties, a VCR allowed me to watch a huge number of films that would not have played in my suburban town’s movie theatre – movies with titles like Invasion of the Blood Farmers, Shriek of the Mutilated, Hitch Hike to Hell, Werewolves on Wheels, I Drink Your Blood, Bloodsucking Freaks and Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS. Writer/Director Jason Rutherford clearly shares the love of movies that are more fun than well-made, movies that were made on a low budget (or no budget), movies that border on the self-parodic and ridiculous. My friends and I used to purposefully seek out the dumbest, lowest, most bizarre, outlandish, and ludicrous exploitation films to fill our weekend nights.  Rutherford has assembled interviews with almost one hundred writers, directors, cinematographers, editors, and actors (often all just the same person in some interviews) and clips from hundreds of the films they made into an almost-four hour long tapestry of glory to the grindhouse movie.

Watching Masters of the Grind is like sitting with a group of dirty old uncles talking about “the good old days,” perhaps for longer than you were interested in sitting with them. The film is neither narrated nor visibly structured in any way. The film seems to meander through the history, people, and themes, but it does flow – moving from topic to topic, anecdote to anecdote, loosely tied together in the moment. The stories are interesting, the people often unhinged, and the entire thing is a salute to what one exploitation filmmaker calls the cinema of “unintentional surrealism.” That might be the single best definition of low-budget exploitation cinema I have ever heard.

The participants are a who’s who of grindhouse cinema some better known and with perhaps more enduring legacies than others: Jim Wynorski, Sybil Danning, Ray Dennis Steckler, Clu Gulager, Hershell Gordon Lewis, Larry Cohen, William Lustig, Lloyd Kaufman, Fred Olen Ray, Jamaa Fanaka, William Crain, Linnea Quigley, Ted V. Nikels, and over a hundred more. The film repeatedly checks in with Dean Cundey, who began in the grindhouse but ended up working for Carpenter, Spielberg, and other Academy Award winning directors. He still speaks highly of the experience of working on these film.

The interviewees celebrate and love their work, even while recognizing that times have changed.

“We used to own the drive in market,” crows one filmmaker. Then the advent of VHS and then DVDs found new markets and distribution for low budget cinema. That, combined with a culture of admiration and celebration of grindhouse as seen in everything from the Quentin Tarantino /Robert Rodriguez film Grindhouse (2007) to most American urban centers having at least one independent movie theatre that shows old exploitation films, to the adoption of the studios of the grindhouse aesthetic and mode. As one filmmaker notes ironically, “Used to be the studios made art pictures and independent filmmakers made exploitation films. Now studios make exploitation films and independent filmmakers make art pictures.” When dealing with exploitation films made in the Philippines, there is a little overlap with a previous documentary, Machete Maidens Unleashed! (2010). Fans of that film, however, will enjoy this one just as much.

Again, at almost four hours the film does feel a bit overlong. I’m glad I watched it but cannot imagine sitting through it repeatedly, although I can imagine dedicated exploitation pix fans doing so with delight. The interviews and clips continue under the twenty-minute closing credits. Perhaps dividing the film down into one hour sections make it more digestible, if and when the film streams.

Regardless, if your eyes light up at the prospect of a screening of Microwave Massacre, have I got a documentary for you.