Dom Hicks is on a mission – a rather strange and lurid one. The founder of ‘London’s Wildest Grindhouse Cinema’ has spent years bellyaching about the evisceration of culture he feels is plaguing the capital. “It’s fucked,” he says. “London’s got more in common with a financial centre like Frankfurt now than a cultural hub like New York.” As we squat in the basement bar of The Nickel, the industrial cacophony of Tetsuo: Iron Man clattering from the sold-out screening upstairs, a punter soon stumbles down to announce that he’s bailing because his girlfriend’s “head is exploding”. It unwittingly punctuates Hick’s broader point: “Eventually, you’re so tired of talking about leaving for somewhere else that you just want to find a hill to die on.”

The Nickel began as a gonzo film night taking place at a panoply of venues across London. The programme ranged from X-rated sexploitation double bills and revved-up 70s road movies, to an evening of psychotronic festive movies titled Fuck Christmas, and screenings of Eraserhead that offered a “free cigarette with every ticket”. When a Kickstarter was launched in 2024 to help fund a permanent brick-and-mortar space, it was quickly proven that Hicks wasn’t the only Londoner with an appetite for lowbrow filmmaking – nearly £15,000 was raised in a matter of months. With that, he tells Dazed, a do-or-die dynamic was fostered: “If I failed to deliver, I’d have to leave town in disgrace.”

Instead, Hicks has now claimed a brand new hovel at 117-119 Clerkenwell Road, that proudly defies the bourgeois excesses of the well-to-do movie-going culture found elsewhere in London. At The Nickel, you’ll find exposed brick walls plastered with images of Bruce Lee, shelves stacked with books on video nasties, and DVDs of titles like Death Race 2000 and Humanoids from the Deep. “It’s about stripping away the pretension and the beard-stroking mentality,” he says. In that regard, The Nickel is already a resounding success after only two months in business. 

Raising a can of lager to the endeavours of London’s most exciting new film institution, Dazed takes notes as The Nickel offers a casual primer on several decades of movie sleaze. Find some of Hick’s unconventional viewing tips below.

PHANTASM (DON COSCARELLI, 1972)

Hicks’ infatuation with transgressive cinema stems right back to his childhood. “I’d say goodnight to my mum and then sneak downstairs and watch things like The Exorcist in the dark with headphones on,” he says. “It was fucking terrifying. I’d have to flick between channels when it got too much, and watch a bit of Bullseye for a bit.”

An even richer source of nightmare fuel came from video rental stores, where just picturing what a film would be like was a big part of the attraction. “I remember the front covers and the artwork making an impression even before I’d seen anything graphic,” he continues. “Like Phantasm – with her hands covering her eyes, and her eyes coming through her hands – that was fucking scary enough in itself.”

LOST SOULS (MOU TUN-FEI, 1980)

Kill Bill opened Hicks up to the world of spaghetti westerns and Japanese films in his teens. But the latter genre could only really be navigated back then by “paying $10 to some guy on an internet forum and then hoping to get a bootleg DVD-R in the post” – a pursuit that eventually led him to the East as an adult, in search of what was once out of reach.

“I recently went to Video Market in Tokyo, [a 40-year-old DVD store] stuffed full of esoterica weirdness,” he says. “And the guy running the shop just brazenly recommended to me this rough, women-in-prison torture camp movie from [Hong Kong film studio] Shaw Bros. called Lost Souls.” The plot concerns immigrants who are trying to enter Hong Kong only to be captured at the border and trafficked into prison camps, which makes for prescient viewing from today’s perspective. “It’s very bleak,” Hicks concludes. “And very fucking violent.”

FORBIDDEN WORLD (ALLAN HOLZMAN, 1982)

Hicks had first discovered the films of Shaw Bros. through the Wu-Tang Clan, who modelled their entire mythology on the studio’s once world-renowned martial arts movies. But the Hong Kong studio wasn’t only known for kung-fu and exploitation flicks. “I have a real soft spot for The Mighty Peking Man,” Hicks says, referring to the Hong Kong King Kong imitation sitting in DVD form on The Nickel’s storefront shelf. “I love rip-offs.”

The Nickel founder is just as vocal about the works of legendary producer Roger Corman, the widely acknowledged ‘King of the B-Movies’ who “delivered rip-offs in spades” across a career that spanned hundreds of low-budget movies. Forbidden World is one of Hicks’ favourites; a 77-minute Alien rip-off “loaded with nudity and tits and nonsense.” (“They have some good craft going on as well,” he adds.)

BROTHERHOOD OF DEATH (RICHARD F. BARKER AND BILL BERRY, 1976)

Blaxploitation films are another hallmark of The Nickel. “If you’re into music, it’s like a treasure trove of cool stuff,” says Hicks, who highlights Isaac Hayes’ soundtracks for Three Tough Guys and Truck Turner, Roy Ayers’ for Coffy, and Willie Hutch doing The Mack as “some of the best scores ever made, from a time when Black music was at its peak.”

Brotherhood of Death – screening on August 1 – also wears its anti-racist themes on its military sleeves, as Black men from the Deep South wage violence and vengeance against their oppressors, the KKK. “These guys get beaten up, and then they get drafted to go to Vietnam to fight for Uncle Sam,” says Hicks. “But when they’re there, they learn tricks from the Viet Cong, which they use when they come back.”

DEATHDREAM (BOB CLARK, 1974)

Speaking of Vietnam, the “vetsploitation” sub-genre is another that’s captured Hicks’ attention over the years. “There’s one called Deathdream, about a kid whose parents are notified that he’s died in action,” he says. “But he comes back anyway as a zombie, and they refuse to accept it even though he starts eating people.”

These films function as powerful metaphors, with unresolved anger and rage being expressed through fringe films that toe the line. And Hicks feels that if you’re going to tackle a subject with this kind of weight, you do need to treat it viscerally – and make people feel uncomfortable. “Mainstream product is often guilty of playing the party line,” he rues, “by softening the language and taking your eyes away from the rougher stuff.”

THE WASHING MACHINE (RUGGERO DEODATO, 1993)

“The Italians don’t pull their punches,” Hicks continues. “There’s almost more of everything than you could every dream of in those films, they’re full of excessiveness and visual creativity.”

Lucio Fulci (Zombie Flesh Eaters) is a favourite of The Nickel – as are fellow Italo-exploitation icons like Sergio Martino (Torso) and Ruggero Deodato (Cannibal Holocaust). Of the latter’s works, Hicks singles out 1993’s The Washing Machine, a film scored by Dario Argento fave Claudio Simonetti (of Goblin), about a body that’s found in a washing machine, and “three randy women and a police officer trying to find out what’s happened”. 

FLESHTONE (HARRY HURWITZ, 1994)

Hick also believes that “people are as filthy as ever,” rejecting claims that we are less interested in sex on-screen today. “The more we treat this stuff as shameful, the more people go home and stream hardcore pornography on their own,” he says. “As far as I’m concerned, seeing sex depicted in films is quite healthy. I mean, it’s sex. There’s nothing more natural in the world.”

One fascinating erotic thriller that played particularly well at The Nickel, he says, starred Martin Kemp of Spandau Ballet as a lonely painter who finds himself in a bind after making a call to a ‘Lonely Hearts’-style phone line. “All he wants is a shag and a nude picture,” Hicks exclaims. “Instead, he gets pulled into a global political conspiracy!”

REFLECTIONS OF EVIL (DAMON PACKARD, 2002)

Hick’s final tip points to a season of films The Nickel has programmed in August under the title Los Angeles Hates Itself, about the dark underbelly of Hollywood, and those individuals who “never quite made it, trying to get into the central gravitational pull of the studio system.”

“Reflection of Evils is the one I’m most excited about,” he says, describing the two-and-a-half-hour “headache” as “the definition of outsider art.” Director Damon Packard was working exclusively underground at the time, shooting on Super-8 and putting everything he had into his craft. The result here is “a kind of PCP, tripped-out nightmare” that ends with a sequence shot without permission aboard the ‘E.T. Adventure’ ride at Universal Studios, which resulted in director Packard being permanently banned from the theme park. “I’m looking forward to putting the audience through it,” Hicks concludes.

Tickets are available via THENICKEL.co.uk, and updates can be found on Instagram @thenickelcinema