Today local multiplexes happily show such sleaze as Jackass: The Movie and Hostel, and the great liberator DVD has made virtually everything available to view.

It is difficult, therefore, to imagine an era like the seventies, when offbeat, sleazy and trashy movies would play the grindhouse circuit and when some films were too bizarre to play in even those inglorious surroundings.

These "midnight movies" were too "out there" for the hours of daylight but built devoted audiences through rabid word of mouth.

Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream features all the right people, including the manager of the Elgin cinema which acted as a Mecca for the unclean, the transgressive, the sui non generis.

Elsewhere, Richard O’Brien provides a potted history of the rise and fall and rise again of Rocky Horror and David Lynch is surprisingly lucid as he recounts the slow-burn fanbase for Eraserhead.

Director Samuels is at pains to point out that shocking and sometimes stomach churning these films may have been; midnight movies such as Night of the Living Dead, The Harder They Fall and El Topo had counter-culture political and social points to score if you could see past the ketchup and full frontal nudity.

Well chosen clips illustrate why these films are worth the fuss; ten seconds of El Topo or Night of the Living Dead and you’re checking TV listings to see when they are on.

And wearily note that in an age of daytime telly and reality TV, these films simply don’t shock like they used to; not even Pink Flamingos, described at the time as "an explosion in a septic tank".

But, Midnight Movies is a fine eulogy for films that set out to assault their audience, and had the smarts, the muscle and the balls to do it.

Rob Daniel