Looking for cult, genre, foreign, classics, or just plain weird? Trash Video Archives brings you: new and pre-loved DVDs, Blu-Rays, collectable VHS, film-related books, magazines, posters, plus our own range of cult film T-shirts and Trash Video merchandise
From 1995 to 2010, Trash Video was a Brisbane icon: Australia’s largest cult movie rental emporium, owned and operated by unrepentant film nerd Andrew Leavold. In addition to being the most comprehensive archive of rare, unusual and forgotten films, Trash also held weekly film screenings (2000-2006), toured Australia with film-cut-ups and curated film festival programs, played host to film personalities as diverse as Larry Cohen, Ray Harryhausen and Richard Kern, and had its own weekly TV show on Briz 31 (Schlock Treatment, 2006-2010) screening old drive-in features. The shop was the subject of an award-winning TV documentary Escape From The Planet Of The Tapes in 2003; in the same year Leavold released his directorial debut, the no-budget to Doris Wishman and Sixties roughies called Lesbo-A-Go-Go.
In 2000 the store moved from its tiny hole-in-the-wall location in Fortitude Valley to a bigger (and cleaner!) shop in West End. By around 2005 however its stock was still primarily VHS tapes, and with the advent of Amazon, Ebay, streaming and file-sharing services, the rental market was over and it became impossible to even pay the ground rent. After the doors finally closed, Leavold became a full-time filmmaker, writer and film historian, touring the world several times with his documentary feature and book The Search For Weng Weng (2013) on his quest to find the two-foot-nine James Bond of the Philippines. His research on Filipino B films contributed to Mark Hartley’s documentary Machete Maidens Unleashed! (2010), on which Leavold was also associate producer.
In December 2020 Leavold reopened Trash Video Archives as an on-line store, research laboratory and film production unit, and has plans to make Trash a global empire.
Leavold continues to make films – recent projects were Pub: The Movie, on artist/shock rocker Fred Negro and the old St Kilda music scene, and The Most Beautiful Creatures On The Skin Of The Earth, on Filipino erotic cinema during the Marcos regime – and is writing a book called “Aloha Little Manila” about sin, cinema and the Filipino diaspora in Hawaii.
In 2024 Leavold journeyed to Kumasi in Ghana where he met Kumawood’s King of Kung Fu Action Cinema, Samuel K. Nkansah, aka Ninja. Over just seven days Leavold starred as the title role of Ninja’s White Devil: Freedom Is Coming playing an Australian plantation king and slave trader; he also documented the trip in a no-budget gonzo documentary Film Safari Ghana, which he toured Australia, UK and the US in October 2024 as part of a Kickstarter campaign to fund his next film. February 2025 saw Leavold return to Ghana to film a bizarre kung fu remake of The Harder They Come, with a cast of Little People and Leavold in the mockumentary wrap-around playing a failed version of himself! The Taller They Come is currently in post-production and will premiere later in 2025.
Leavold has also contributed supplementary features on Blu-Ray and DVD releases for Mondo Macabro (the Filipino horror Silip and Indonesian splatter kung fu Special Silencers), Arrow (their Inside The Mind Of Coffin Joe box set, Black Mama White Mama), Severin (their Blood Island and Hemisphere Horrors box sets, Robowar), Neon Eagle (Indonesian rape-revenge actioner I Want To Get Even), Monster Pictures (Larry Cohen’s The Stuff), Bounty’s new label Black Neon (The Set), VCI (Beyond Atlantis), and others. You’ll also see his face in the occasional Aussie feature, most recently Fags In The Fast Lane, Maganda: Milk Man vs Pinoy Boy, Serious Nonsense, and ones in Asia: Otso (Elwood Perez), and Certified Dead (Cleopatra Wong’s Marrie Lee!).
