Perks & Exploitation: The 10 Best Grindhouse Games Of All Time

When B-movies are taken to their perverse extreme, you get the cinematic delicacy known as "grindhouse." Patently offensive and always entertaining, how can we not take sick pleasure in the genre's hallmarks? Gallons of blood, obscenity lawsuits' worth of F-bombs, *cough* stripper sequences—it's like visual catnip. So imagine that if instead of merely watching all this beautiful carnage, you got to play it. That's why we're here today, after all: to commemorate the release of weird-ass Japanese action-adventure Shadows of the Damned, which (thanks to the sensibilities of No More Heroes' Suda51) promises to take us to Hell and back in a scenario worthy of the seediest of midnight double features. But until you actually get to go home and crack open the game, crack open a cold one and help us count down the 10 best grindhouse games the industry's ever seen. Killers, mutant strippers, and bug people all agree!

By Elton R. Jones

You’re a mail carrier who's just been bitchslapped by reality. Say goodbye to your home, ’cause you’ve just been evicted. So what would any sane person in such a situation do? Easy: Go postal on everyone and everything. Going around town and busting shots at innocent civilians may have felt wrong, but it was your job to obey your possible mental illness and take out your frustrations on the rest of the world. Give us another game that lets you mow down senior citizens and blow up an entire marching band with a well-placed grenade, and we'll give you a game more enjoyably ridiculous than Postal.

People don’t enjoy car wrecks, but they have a hard time peeling their eyes away from them—and this game might be the only example of something that forced you to keep your eyes on brutal car-on-human violence. Carmaggedon put you into the driver’s seat of a maniac and asked you to do his evil bidding. Win the race? Sure. Screw with the other racers? Can do. Slaughter countless pedestrians with the hood of your car? Okay, now you’re pushing it. But once we were pushed far enough, we broke through any remaining threshold of human decency, and the vehicular manslaughter training sim made us smile with glee.

Remember those alien invasion and monster flicks with the horrible special effects? Earth Defense Force 2017 reminded us of your typical “Japanese ported to America” sci-fi flick: painful voice acting, laughable monsters and intergalactic battles that looked like a laser light show. We can’t tell you how much fun we had shooting the bejeezus out of aliens and insects with a crapload (as in more than 150) of death-dealing weapons. And once we got to hop into some sweet mech suits, you best believe the shit was on. Alien Invaders: 0. Planet Earth: a hundred thousand trillion. Now pass us our rocket launchers—it’s time to exterminate….

Another entry from So Bad It’s Good territory. We don’t know what it is about remote islands, but some of the weirdest and creepiest nasties seem to love it there (campers included). Add two curious college students to the equation, and voila, the perfect recipe for horror and disaster. Thankfully, there were some decent gameplay mechanics, such as the need to keep your flashlight off (since big bugs would be drawn to it and kill you). We were less than thrilled when the only things we got to fight were a tree branch and rocks at the beginning, but we got our hands on nice melee weapons throughout the course of the game. Flawed yet lovable, Escape from Bug Island is an entomophobe's worst nightmare. Which of course means we co-sign.

So you’ve done everything there is to do to zombies, correct? You shoot ‘em, you burn ‘em and you shoot ‘em again just for good measure. Ever had the bright idea to bring your lady friend along for some zombie bashing? Or, to make the experience a little kinkier, dress her up in a bikini outfit, bless her with a samurai blade and let the carnage unfold? This game was so simple, yet so addictive—a bunch of badass Japanese girls who made undead hack-and-slash sexy. If the zombie apocalypse ever goes down, we know who to call!

Or as we’d like to call it, Kill Bill: Dude Edition Vol. 1. You’re Shank, former hitman for the mob. You receive a job that makes you question your loyalty when suddenly, the mob runs up in your crib and kills your pregnant girlfriend. Shank takes matters into his own hands and sets out to kill the mob that he once killed for. Are we the only ones who heard the action movie trailer guy’s voice while we read that? A swank side-scrolling beat-’em-up with excessive blood and gore, fluid gameplay, ill weapons—chainsaws and katanas—and even iller boss fights, Shank is one downloadable worth however many imaginary laser credits Microsoft/Steam/PSN want to charge you.

We’re guessing the title of this game inspired mad perverted thoughts in your head when you came across it at your local game store. You control Eliza Dushku's fine ass Rubi Malone, a hired “problem solver” who gets to deal some damage to some dirty gangsters. Our baby girl rolls with all types of guns and a nice blade to match, but the cool factor in this game hits 100 when you jump, slide, run on walls, and seduce dudes in slow motion (shut up, it's a game) while the action gets even more hectic. Plus, you gotta appreciate a chick who refills her health with a bottle of whiskey. Just don’t splash her face with red paint or you’ll have to face her womanly wrath…

Whoa. The multiple showers we took after playing this game still couldn’t get that dirty feeling out of our system (and that Orbit gum we tried didn’t help matters either). Manhunt was, in simple terms, a snuff movie turned into a video game. Death Row inmate James Earl Cash (future country music star?) went around executing his victims with everything from baseball bats and crowbars to plastic bags and severed heads. The controversy surrounding this thing made the uproar over Thrill Kill seem like a cricket serenade. The violence looked real, the story was incredibly dark, and the cover still gives us the heebie-jeebies.

It’s a mad, mad world. It also happens to be a black, white and red world. Sega and Platinum Games created one of the few good third-party games to be released on the Wii. There was a hell of a lot of fun to be had controlling Jack Cayman and his retractable chainsaw arm, brutalizing terrorists in over-the-top sequences under the snazzy sheen of Sin City-style presentation. This joint was nothing but a simple beat-’em-up, and that’s not a bad thing. Hitting human home runs into a giant dart board is also not a bad thing.

THIS MUTHA (expletive) GAME IS THE MUTHA (expletive) truth! Shouts to our favorite detective Issac Washington on that one. House of the Dead: Overkill embodies everything we love about grindhouse movies—buckets of blood, smooth-talking heroes, curse words in every sentence, hot chicks, and bad guys with a foreign accent. There was nothing more satisfying than shooting down some zombies with a friend while hearing Agent G and Mr. Washington’s hilarious commentary. The development team at Headstrong was inspired by the film Planet Terror, and the influence couldn't be more apaprent. NOW GO GET THIS MUTHA (expletive) game!