Combat Shock: Troma Does It … Right!?!

After decades of, let us say, “improper” handling of exploitation classics and stink-bombs alike, Troma Films turns it around with a new series of TROMASTERPIECE special edition DVDs.

Seemingly out of nowhere, Troma recently issued a glorious-looking, extras-laden DVD of The Last Horror Film (1982), writer-actor-madman Joe Spinell’s anti-ego-trip follow-up to his splat-tastic meisterwürk, Maniac (1980).

From the heavy impact of its cover art to a great making-of documentary feature, The Last Horror Film is a mega-leap forward for Troma in terms of quality and respect for the audience alike.

Now, as part of its new Tromasterpiece DVD line, the studio is providing similar proper treatment to Staten Island nihilist Buddy Giovinazzo’s Combat Shock (1986) aka American Nightmares.

I could blab to you about the minimlist artistry of Buddy G and wonder, again, if he got the idea for cinema’s ultimate Vietnam vet on a bum trip on the baddest of days from “Frankie Teardrop” by Suicide (Combat Shock’s lead loser is even named Frankie) but the movie’s reputation is established and, more importanly, it’s accurate.

Combat Shock is a no-fi/high-intensity power-dose of depression, impotence, and inescapable violence that I’ve only ever seen on big screens: once at the Lyric on 42nd Street in 1988, and again, about ten years later, at the remembered-by-nobody Lighthouse Theater, a garage on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

The movie works, which is to say that it’s tremendously unpleasant - to the point of being impressive which, as such, is oddly pleasant.

And now just marvel at the upcoming Combat Shock double-disc’s impossible-but-true bonus features:

•American Nightmares (100 mins): The Never-Before-Seen Director’s Cut
•Combat Shock (90 mins): The Troma Theatrical Cut
•Audio Commentary with Director Buddy Giovinazzo and Jorg Buttgereit (Nekromantik)
•Post-Traumatic, An American Nightmare (40 mins): All-new documentary exploring the continued impact and influence of Combat Shock, featuring: John McNaughton (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer), Richard Stanley (Hardware, Dust Devil), William Lustig (Maniac), Jim Van Bebber (Deadbeat at Dawn, The Manson Family), Roy Frumkes (Street Trash), Mitch Davis (Fantasia Film Festival), Joe Kane (The Phantom of the Movies), RICK SULLIVAN (The Gore Gazette, his first interview in 20 years!), David Gregory (Severin Films), and more!
•The Early Works of Buddy Giovinazzo: Never-before-released short films and music videos, including: Jonathan of the Night, Mr. Robbie [Note: This is a five-minute chunk of Maniac 2 with Joe Spinell], The Lobotomy, and more!
•New interview with Buddy Giovinazzo on Combat Shock
•Der Combat: Buddy Giovinazzo and Lloyd Kaufman discuss Combat Shock at the 2006 Trominale in Berlin
•Unscarred: The first interview with Combat Shock star Rick Giovinazzo
•Hellscapes: Locations from the film as they appear today
•Press and Photo Gallery
•Original Theatrical Trailer
•Solider of Misfortune: New Liner Notes by Steve Puchalski [Editor’s Note: It’s okay if you just throw those liner notes in the trash and enjoy everything else]

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As far as I can discern, that above list is for real, people.

And, as stated earlier, such a level of commitment to entertainment and compassion for movies and their makers – let alone the audience – is a bold, untested direction for Troma.

Perhaps the success of top-tier exploitation DVD companies such as Grindhouse Releasing, Synapse Films, Code Red DVD, Blue Underground, and Severin Films has pointed Lloyd Kaufman, et al, toward the path from whence actual profits arise – i.e., providing fans with quality product, lovingly-crafted, and made with the most devoted follower of any given title in mind.

Such has never been Troma’s way. Ever.

For two weeks in 1997, I worked for Troma Entertainment, tracking prints or some other such entry-level nonsense right there up in the company’s notorious 9th Avenue no-funhouse.

I walked out for any number of reasons, but the camel’s-backbreaking bone-up was the appearance of Richard Elfman’s Forbidden Zone (1980) – my favorite film of all time, which had long been out-of-circulation on video – coming across the desk of Troma’s Director of Acquisitions.

After a two minute glance at Forbidden Zone, he dismissed it, carelessly tossing the tape into an overflowing box of discarded freebies (into which no one other than me ever dipped).

Responding to my stupefied horror, the Acquisitor huffed: “What? It’s in black-and-white.”

Nobody in all of (puke!) “Tromaville” could – or would – feel my revulsion, let alone back me up.

They were all enamored of empty indie vomit on the order of Trainspotting and Welcome to the Dollhouse and they loved to talk like Billy Bob Thornton in Sling Blade, and then the Acquisitions dill actually split early to catch the big fucking re-release of Return of the Jedi (“They fixed the ending!” he gushed).

Adding insult to infuriation, another office worm summarily assessed the cream of Troma’s collection – Bloodsucking Freaks (1976), The Love-Thrill Murders (1971), Mother’s Day (1980), Cry Uncle! (1971), and even the likable Squeeze Play (1980) – and said: “These aren’t even movies.”

The sole piece of Troma dung those cock-wads could muster up any enthusiasm for was the acquisition Killer Condom, a German language horror-comedy by and for (unfunny) gay men.

(By the way, Killer Condom’s tagline - “It’s the rubber that rubs YOU out!” - was composed by me. In keeping with Troma’s tradition, I received a total of $0.00 for that and the entirety of my other efforts while I toiled there.)

My co-workers’ contempt for legitimately daring, “unapproved” cinema brought the cosmic enormity of Troma’s shittiness crashing down on me harder and more profoundly than ever before – to the point that I was done, home, and gone.

Full disclosure: during the summer after I graduated high-school, I attended the Bleecker Street Cinema’s midnight screenings of The Toxic Avenger every weekend. I loved it. I was a kid. What did I know?

But I did know, by the time of Toxic Avenger Parts II and III (one fecal discharge split in two) – let alone thousand-rungs-down dreck like Class of Nuke ’Em High (1986), Surf Nazis Must Die (1987) Troma’s War (1988), and Sgt. Kabukiman (1989) – that Troma founders Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz were most assuredly not in league with Roger Corman and Samuel Z. Arkoff, and that Troma, for sure, was no New World or A.I.P. – they weren’t even close to being Charles Band’s Empire Pictures!

Troma hated its audience, and its own movies hated themselves. And fuck that. And fuck them.

All I ever had to do was heed the final line of the mighty Bill Landis’s August 1986 Film Comment article on Troma’s place among 42nd Street film suppliers. He wrote, perfectly: “Troma doesn’t deserve The Deuce.”

Still, circa 1997, Troma was the last active schlock movie operation in New York, with a few bona fide jewels in their vaults, and so I hoped to make a difference there. Which I did not.

But now, nearly a decade-and-a-half later, somebody is making good on Troma’s potential, in the form of these new DVDs. Fucking finally.

How they got Kaufman and Herz – fun guys if you don’t work for them, by the way – to shell out a single penny for these special features is a mystery of colossal proportions.

And what magic did they pull off to get Rick Goddamned Motherfucking Sullivan back in front of a camera?

All any of us can do is wonder, watch The Last Horror Film again, and wait for Combat Shock.

As with The Deuce, based on the crap they bifurcated on disc for the longest time, Troma never deserved the DVD medium either.

But here we are now. New day rising. Shock, for sure, is the operative word.

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“Fuck It!” t-shirt available at RottenCotton.com.

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