Never eat spinach with a stranger and never judge a book by it's cover. The same goes for judging videos by their cover boxes.
Older movies are a different story — if the cover box of Black Shampoo wasn't so intriguing I don't know if it that movie would hold such an important place in my heart today. What I'm talking about are newer movies.
Ask any porn afficionado and they'll tell you that the cover boxes are sometimes a million times sexier than the movie they're hold within and the same holds true for soft-core stuff that lines the shelves of the Suspense section at your local Blockbuster Video.
But it shouldn't be that way for decent films, especially small independent films, especially independent films that don't have that much or anything at all to do with sex.
Looking at the cover box for Guillermo Del Torro's Cronos, you'd expect to see a video about sexy vampires that are aroused by blood through the use of a golden scarab placed on one's breast. That's hardly the case. I don't think there are any twentysomething year old women in Cronos, especially blonde anglo model types like the one on the cover. This film is about an old man, his grand daughter, and Ron Perlman's nose.
Even more deplorable because it uses the actual actresses from the films on the cover is Allison Ander's Gas Food Lodging. This is a very moving film that recalls films like Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, not Roadside Whores, Fill'Er Up Girls, or A Bite On The Side. The cheesy blurb about "When Shade's good, she's very good. But when Trudi's bad, she's better," makes absolutely no sense in the context of the movie. Shade is a virginal disco queen while Trudi is a confused lass, sexy, but not a sex-pot boiling over with desire at Mel's Truck Stop. I don't think Faruza Balk's hair is even the same color or length as it is on the cover and the picture of Ione Skye on the back is taken from a sex scene that is definitely more in the "making love" end of the spectrum than the balls-out teenage fuck-fest that the cover would imply.
I recommend both of these films but don't expect to see what the covers promise.
—MW