The grindhouse is open for business again and ready to present you with some of the worst cinematic nightmares to ever grace the silver screen. Grindhouse however is a huge part of the movie industry, at least it was, and the days of double features are long behind us save for the few art house theaters and drive-in’s that exist. Welcome to the Grindhouse revisits those glory days of atrocious cinema.. The theme with this volume is sex, beaches, and basketball, though not necessarily all together at one.

As with the other releases of Welcome to the Grindhouse, special features aren’t something that is necessary, and wile on occasion you do find there are some achieved bits of material that can be added onto DVD releases, it seems to be quite rare. Instead, the Welcome to the Grindhouse release are presented in a fashion that is akin to what theater goers might have seen it. This includes trailers for other movies that look truly awful as well as intermissions. It’s all in good fun though.

The first movie, The Beach Girls, is a throwback to the days of sex filled cinema that only the 80’s could bring you. The plot is a simply one and three friends, Sarah (Debra Blee), Ginger (Val Kline) and Ducky (Jeana Tomasina) head to the beach for a vacation before heading back to school. And what exactly do all young girls in the 80’s want? Oh, you didn’t know? It seems that girls in the early 80’s, and the rest of the decade for that matter, were after sex, drugs, booze and all with a lot of nudity. As far as the rest of the story . . . .there really isn’t one. That’s really about it, The Beach Girls pure and simply put is a party movie, and when you have those kid of films, and plot isn’t really a central points of selling the movie.

But, how do you sell a movie with no plot you might be wondering? How does a porn film sell itself? Nudity and sex, and while The Beach Girls isn’t hardcore, and it isn’t the type of movie that fits the softcore billing so it can be aired late at night on Cinemax, The Beach Girls has plenty of bare breasted ladies running around in the pool, in the house, and everywhere else for that matter. There’s a subplot involving a cargo ship that’s carrying drugs or something along those lines, but no one really cares about that. The Beach Girls really plays itself out more like it wants to be an adult film as we find the ladies calling for pizza, a repair man, and anyone else they can think of, though always inquiring if the person that is being sent it cute.

As for acting, there really isn’t much of any, and it’s not important. Again there’s the comparison to the adult film industry. Who needs to act in those? It’s the same here, and the teenage, sex driven film industry of the 80’s didn’t need people who could act either. It was more about who was willing to take their clothing off for the camera, and that ladies and gentlemen, sells tickets. It may not be the greatest film, but when you think about it, The Beach Girls is probably a lot more interesting than if you were to take a camera and film a party that you had.

Next, it’s time for a flashback to the late 70’s with the film Coach, and it wasn’t the basis of the television series. Instead, we find a high school basketball team who has been losing poorly thanks to their coach. Once he’s fired, a new coach is hired only based on resume and it turns out that Randy Rawlings (Cathy Lee Crosby) isn’t a man like they believed. After threatening to sue if they don’t hire her, Randy takes charge of her new team though she has some people on the school board doing everything they can to get her hired. For some reason that doesn’t seem to be essential to the plot, she falls for one of her students, Jack Ripley (Michael Biehn) which I guess leads to a misuse of hands and traveling with the balls so to speak.

At first, Coash seems to be a bit too much like The White Shadow in some ways, but it was actually released prior to the series beginning, so there’s really no room for comparison. However, there are a number of similarities to the Remember the Titans, and while you might think that there were decades between the two films, keep in mind that Titans was based on real events that occurred back in 1971. You had an African American coached hired for a high school football team who put his career on the line if the team lost a single game, the same thing that’s found here.

I also have a good feeling that if this movie were released today with the exact same idea, people would be up in arms, especially with the concept of an adult women dating and having a relationship with a high school student. While it becomes a big portion of the film, there’s really not many repercussions that occur and it’s really just a means to add more time into the movie or apparently no reason at all. It has little to do with the basketball aspect, it’s never discovered by anyone, and it’s just a very pathetic subplot that in the end, becomes nothing at all.

Your decision to watch these movies will probably all depend on just how much you can handle movies that have very little sustenance to them, and neither The Beach Girls or Coach do. These still may be a great example of what the true spirit of grindhouse was, but they are the types of movies you can sit through once maybe, and then forget that you ever saw them.

- mike -