VIDEO STORE MEMORIES
I grew up loving video stores. When I 5/6/7/8 years old, I lived in a small town in Illinois (Jacksonville, birthplace of the Ferris Wheel and Ken Norton, and immortalized on Sufjan Stevens' Come On Feel the Illinoise album). There was no Blockbuster, but we had two mom and pop video stores. They each carried both VHS and Beta, to give you an idea of what an old man I am. There was Stars and Stripes Video, and I can't remember the name of the other one. The nameless one had a hook hanging below each box cover, and there was a red and a yellow tag hanging on it, red for VHS, yellow for Beta.
It was an in store play in Stars and Stripes Video that first made me fall in love with The Little Mermaid, but other than that, I didn't spend too much time in the kids section. I rented every wrestling tape in the store, tons of comedy of varying quality (my holy trinity were Chevy Chase, Bill Murray and John Candy), and horror. I'm a horror nerd, and a lot of it is due to these video store experiences. I'd stare at the crazy box art and imagine what kind of insanity these movies contained. I was allowed to rent horror tapes, even R rated ones, but there was some limit. To me it seems like an arbitrary limit (I was allowed to watch Hellraiser but not Nightmare on Elm St.), but that only lent some of the forbidden titles more of a mystique. Almost without fail, the film failed to live up to its amazing box art when I actually ended up seeing it.
When I was a little older, 13/14/15, I lived in Land O' Lakes, Florida. Mash up Bully and Gummo and that was Land O' Lakes. Land O' Lakes had Video View, the kind of video store nerds dream of. It had all the pop culture obscura you could wish for. It had a coin op vending machine with holographic WWF stickers that were at least 10 years out of date. They even had a video there which I can't even find referenced on the internet. It was called Faces of Torture and consisted of really bad special effects of stuff like guys with their eyes bugging out and dams breaking and flooding towns and nails driven through hands. There was footage of Marilyn Monroe doing some tame nude modeling while a devil voiced narrator talks over it: "Oh Norma Jean, what have you let them turn you into?" and some interview footage with James Dean talking about racing cars with weird echo and effects laid over it.
It also had a legit porn section. I never actually went it there, but it is a transition to mention the somewhat erotic element of these movies. Like a lot of people my age (ie, those who came of age pre-internet) a lot of my sexual awakening was by way of gore movies (so of course I'm very well adjusted today). Sex and violence go together like beans and weenies. And again, a lot of it was just the cover art. They don't make 'em like this anymore. Here's five VHS covers I have a special relationship with:
Look at that shit. That's one of the most iconic images of my childhood. So much so, that I didn't actually rent this movie until close to a decade later, and even then it was a case of "I should watch the movie that went along with that cover I loved so much." Even at eight years old, I somehow knew that the movie could never live up to the cover, unless it was just an hour and a half of that guy standing there spraying fire over anything that moved. I knew if I rented the tape that there would be scenes of people talking and stuff, and I was not interested. I drew this cover over and over in school, sometimes adding speech bubbles that said "DIE, SCUM!" and so forth.
You can see an influence on some of the wonderful Doom cover art that would so overshadow those games. (Much of the reason I never got huge into first person shooters is that the games weren't as awesome as the box). The fact that this is Exterminator 2 is also a good way to mention the fact that I was often introduced to film series with the sequels, and the box art is a lot of the reason. Sequels often went more over the top with their cover art, because the films were usually inferior and they had to sucker you in. Clearly it worked, too. Everything from Toxic Avenger to Revenge of the Nerds, I saw part two first.
Really inappropriate movie for a child, and there's no way my mom would have rented this for me if she knew what it was like. The cover looks fairly innocuous, and that's why I wanted to see it. I thought the idea of some demon slam dunking the planet was amazing. I wasn't a basketball fan, but I did have a fascination with monster hands. Is that strange? I was enamored with the Amityville 3D cover because of the giant monster hand sticking out of the house. Remember the scene in Ghostbusters where the hands come out of Dana's chair and hold her down as she's sucked into... the realm of Zuul, I guess? I used to rewind that and watch it over and over. I used to try to imagine the monsters who those hands were attached to, gave them back stories. I guess I was an odd kid. I particularly liked the one with two fingers and a thumb, just like the one of the Amityville 3D cover.
Anyway, that's why I was drawn to Monster High. I liked high school movies, both horror and comedy. I used to fantasize about growing up to be a cool high school guy (my idea of this was basically the scene in Billy Madison where he pulls up in the Firebird Trans Am blasting "The Stroke"). I also had a vague idea that there would be a monster in this who was big enough to palm the Earth. I suspected that it might not be true, but the "final boss is huge" trope was legit from enough video games (as well as Killer Klown from Outer Space, and Ghoulies 2) to give the idea some legs.
No. This movie is just tits, tits and more tits. It's actually really degrading and disrespectful to women, even by monster titty movie standards, too. The fact that "Monster High" went on to become the name of a line of dolls beloved by me and preteen girls everywhere is perhaps the final insult. I imagine some innocent child stumbling across this in a video store and being traumatized, but then I remember that there aren't video stores anymore.
Oh man. This movie. I was definitely not allowed to watch this as a kid. I did rent it from Video View much later, but the box was an iconic image of my youth. It was on a high shelf, probably due to the content, but also because it was in an oversized box for some reason. To address the film itself, this is sort of the reverse of Monster High. You see this box and you're struck by two things: the title (had to be my first exposure to "death metal song titles". Just words strung together in that way to form that kind of sentiment. You know what I mean, I hope. I had never seen anything like before), and "Nice ass." You might think it's a sexy times movies, but it's so not. You watch this and there's a rape scene that, for my money, is the most harrowing and difficult to watch from any movie, worse than Irreversible or The Accused, and then just the most brutal, cringe inducing savage violence and death. And then it's over. I honestly can't think of many fictional films that have this kind of visceral impact. Maybe Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, and even that is somewhat diminished by the fact that Michael Rooker went on to become a well known actor.
Some say the film is feminist, and this argument is supported by the fact that the rape in this movie is not sexualized at all. If you're titillated by I Spit on Your Grave, you're dangerous. So why the cover art? It's so misleading. And, as a standalone, it is a great shot. People remember it. For evidence of this, there were quite a few rip offs of this film made (I Piss on Your Grave, I Spit on Your Naked Corpse, etc., as well as the utterly tasteless 2010 remake), and every single one of them has a sexy girl's ass on the cover. So, sex and violence, unforgettable title... looks like one of the most memorable, best designed covers of all time. I'd hang the poster on my wall. So why is it attached to one of the most soul eviscerating films ever made? Because God is dead and we're alone.
Faces of Death IV (1990)
Speaking of heavy metal, I'm using part 4 here, but this could really be any of the Faces of Death series. I could only find the DVD cover, but the VHS box art looked the same. I wanted to rent Faces of Death because of it's amazing death metal artwork, but I was told I couldn't because it contained real footage of people dying, and was a sick movie. Of course, this skyrocketed it to the top of my list of things I had to see. Matt in the previously mentioned Dinosaur Dracula article makes a point that's very applicable here, so I'm just going to quote him:
"As a kid, I never realized that movies like this only appealed to a certain segment of adults. I just assumed that all adults watched this stuff, and that there was nothing “weird” about it. It almost seemed like a rite of passage, and I guess it was, but certainly not in the way that I imagined.
I’d spy on the gory horror movies, and the purely adult movies, and the ones (like Slashdance) that mixed the two, and be simultaneously horrified and exhilarated by the thought that, someday, my time would come. As sure as I’d have to get my driver’s license, I’d have to watch movies about demons ripping naked people in half and eating whatever spilled out. It was a strange feeling that’s hard to put into words. Hopefully, many of you get it."
I so get it. I felt exactly that same way. I used to imagine growing up and renting porno tapes when I didn't even know what porno tapes were. I just knew they had something to do with sex (I also didn't know what that was), but it was something that adults did, so it was something I was going to do. Faces of Death was that exact same way. I used to watch tons of horror movies, but this was where I got the idea that there were scary movies for kids, and there were also scary movies for teens (which is what I watched, and many of my classmates weren't allowed to see these), but that there were also really bad movies that you had to be a grown ass adult to watch. And I couldn't wait. I had no idea what they were, but I wanted to be first in line.
Of course, when I actually saw Faces of Death, it was the corniest, fakest thing you can imagine. I actually purchased Faces of Death IV from Video View on the dark day they went out of business (the space became a fucking nail salon), and it's probably the funniest entry in the series. The original host, Dr. Gross (haw haw) is gone and a new bug eyed doctor has taken his place. He's a terrible actor, and he has a lava lamp in his office. The film closes with a song (!) which I have embedded below. Just let this wash over you, and be sure to take note of some of those names.
I don't need to say much about Return of the Living Dead because anyone who's even slightly interested in this sort of stuff has seen it. I just have to say that it may well be the coolest box cover of all time. At my local, they actually had a poster up in the horror section, giving me an even better look at the most amazing artwork in the whole store. Remember back at the beginning of this post, I said almost without fail, the films failed to live up to the artwork? Return of the Living Dead is the film that made me have to include that "almost".
It's truly a miraculous film. It hits you with an untouchable cover, a cover that's impossible to live up to, and then it fucking lives up to it. I can only compare the experience to the first time I heard of GG Allin. "You won't believe it. This guy comes out naked, takes a shit on stage, beats up the audience and rolls around in broken glass." and I'm like "Okay, I'm sure this guy's out there, but there's no way he can live up to hype like that." and then you see him and he's even better than the impossible hype. Return of the Living Dead is like that. It has everything. It's funny, gross, sexy and punk as fuck. I didn't really realize it until writing this blog, but if I had to sum up my personality in one movie, Return of the Living Dead is a damn good choice.
I suppose it's only fitting that they changed the godlike cover art for the special edition DVD. Return is a product of its time, and if you didn't come to it in a mom and pop video store (or a grindhouse theater), you can enjoy it, but it's not really your thing. I think I've just talked myself into a RotLD tattoo.
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