Night Vision

Night Vision
1987
Michael Krueger

Andy Archer (Stacy Carson) arrives in the big city to follow his dreams of being a writer. He has a difficult time supporting himself and takes a job at a VHS rental store where he falls in love with his co-worker, Jill (Shirley Ross). He also befriends a small-time criminal named Vinnie (Tony Carpenter). Vinnie gives him a stolen VCR as a present. Andy finds a tape in the VCR that shows a recording of a strange ritual. It also begins to give him visions of the future.

The biggest surprise of Night Vision is the eerie atmosphere it evokes. By keeping the cult and the contents of the haunted video tape mostly obscured. We see the cult in action just a little bit but other than knowing they have Satanic connections; they are a bunch of alien weirdos. The haunted VCR displays vague unsettling images and abstract flashes. Night Vision takes the campiest element of its plot and transforms it into something surreal which in turn plays against the very broad comedy of the rest of the film.

The real horror.

The Denver, Colorado of Night Vision is a cartoonish den of crime, poverty, and short-tempered smartass citizens. Andy claims he’s from Kansas without ever stating a city but it is a place so backwoods that he doesn’t understand how hotels work. It’s a place where cloaked cultists roam the streets at night and 10-year-old kids regularly try and steal VHS porn from a rental place the size of a closet. Everyone who lives there is cagey and eager to use other people. In contrast is a character so guileless that he gladly falls in with the first opportunist hustler he meets.

A satanic VCR is an idea ripe for over-the-top storytelling, so to the turn the tables and pull off a character study out of that ends up being a delightful subversion. Instead of still horror we are forced to watch as the idealistic Andy is slowly ground down by this city and its inhabitants. The way the VCR and its contents hollow out Andy can be seen as the various forces of the city at work on him as he naively tries to pursue his writing career despite the doom closing in on him.

I hate daylight savings time too.

One of my favorite elements of this film is how the sound of the city is constantly in the background. I’m sure this was a way to try and cover for the fact that much of this film is shot on sets that are nowhere near a busy city, but what it ends up doing, is keeping the city as an omnipresent force in every scene. The city is so evil as be unreal but that only adds to the weird gloom and black comedy.

Michael Krueger is also the director of Mind Killer (1987) another film that presents itself a broad comedy but turns out to be a very strange horror movie. Krueger sadly died at 39 after directing only these two films. It is a shame because he shows he know how to create unique films with little resources. Night Vision was a delight and one of my favorite recent discoveries. 

VHS Summer Week #10 - Video Grab Bag #2!

Seven Dwarfs and Friends

1988

Amvest Video Corporation

Packaged as a cheap way to shut your kids up for half an hour, Seven Dwarfs and Friends packs some true oddities into the mix. For starters, it’s hosted by Happy Hamster. Happy is a costumed hamster who is inexplicably wearing a Michael Jackson coat. (Well, not entirely inexplicable, Happy Hamster was in another Amvest venture, a rip-off of Alvin and the Chipmunks with high pitched renditions of pop songs, at least until a copyright infringement lawsuit was brought against the company.) The cartoons are perhaps even more inexplicable.

• The Winged Scourge: Disney’s Seven Dwarfs spend 5 minutes killing mosquitoes
• The Thrifty Pig: A Nazi wolf (complete with swastika armband!) attempts to blow down the well made house of some British pigs.
• Mechanical Cow: An early black and white cartoon about a nightmarish robot cow.
• Hooked Bear: Probably the only typical cartoon on the whole tape. A bear attempts to eat some fish despite the best attempts of a park ranger

"Remember to put your mom's credit card back in her purse after ordering."

After the cartoons, Happy comes back to tempt kids into joining a club and getting an official Kid Pics t-shirt. I would to find of these for real. There's a whole weird sleazy undertone to pitch and there were reportedly many people who received nothing for their membership, and in fact had their information sold to child "beauty pageants." Amvest, you are truly one for the ages.

That’s Edutainment
2016
Basement Labs

From the group that brought you, Night of the Living Glitch (2016)  comes a beautiful transparent cassette tape housed in a transparent case. I get the feeling that That’s Edutainment is made to be enjoyed more as an object than as a video to watch. The relative difficulty in getting the tape out of the package and the brittle plastic of the tape bear this out . Nonetheless, I persisted and was awarded with 120 minutes of warped and glitched educational videos from the 1980s backed by some atmospheric electronic music. The videos range from lab safety, how to use  AOL and a sped-up selection of b-movies. It’s a really cool combination, and is perfect for having something playing in the background during a party or event. That’s Edutainment is a great example of using VHS analog aesthetics in a modern way. Every part of the video tape experience is considered, from the physical cassette itself, to the contents within. You can check out Basement Labs here: http://www.thebasementlabsworldwide.com/

Behind the scenes at Outpost Zeta.

Video Aspirin

1987

Bob Greenberg

Whereas That’s Edutainment sought to evoke the weirdness of VHS deliberately, Video Aspirin achieves it naturally.  This 18 minute video is nominally supposed to help the viewer relax through a series of  massages, counting, and an acronym that makes no sense. However, its combo of kitschy music, dated clothing, cheap sets, and video effects all combine to make something very strange. I suppose that the techniques can help, but at that same time there is something unsettling about it all. Video Aspirin is an example of how the home video market was looking everywhere for a niche to fill. It is through unusual creations like this that VHS had and still has a far reaching cultural impact. There is simply nothing like it.

SCAN ME!

VHS Summer Week #9

How the Sky Will Melt

2015
Matthew Wade

Often when a modern film invokes a retro aesthetic, there is a tendency to overstate the look of the past. Sometimes this is intentional and used satirically, and sometimes it’s simply all of the most recognizable elements of an era being thrown onto the screen at once. The trick is, that a time period with a pronounced look doesn’t feel unusual at the time, it’s just part of the milieu of then modern sensibilities. I find it a more interesting use of retro styling when it is used to create a sense of timelessness. The film may have a particularly dated look, but there are anachronisms that create a sense of distance and unfamiliarity. The strange mix of technology in It Follows (2014) is an excellent example. How the Sky will Melt uses the low resolution flavor of the late 1970s/early 1980s to place an ambiguous story in an equally ambiguous time and place.

Brought to you in Squarevision™

Gwen (Sara Lynch) has returned to hometown following the death of a bandmate. Her band is popular enough that she finds herself avoiding any publicity while encountering a few jealous friends that she had left behind. In a malaise she finds herself aimless as she pilfers the hills near the beach for strange colorful eggs that have hallucinogenic qualities. As Gwen’s paranoia begins into to grow, her friend, London (Scott Alonzo) watches a figure fall to earth. The being, which is neither alive nor dead is seemingly inert, but soon it awakens, straining Gwen’s already fragile reality.

Shot on Super 8 and released on VHS, How the Sky Will Melt evokes the soft dream like nature of catching something on late night television while half-asleep. The look of it evokes the techno doom of Idaho Transfer (1973), or Where Have All the People Gone? (1974). At same time there is an early New Wave vibe that feels akin to Liquid Sky (1982). That is not to say How the Sky Will Melt is a simple pastiche, it is very much interested in telling its own wandering nightmare of a story.

"What? Do I have something on my face?"

The narrative of the film is very reluctant to straight out explain anything, it forces the viewer to try and pry each moment open and see what’s lurking between the sparse dialogue. Thankfully, the movie also plays fair, it does answer most of the questions it raises. The things it leaves open are even stranger and more terrifying because of it. I did not expect the movie to dip into horror the way it does, but it works very well as the growing knot of tension at the heart of everything.

The acting is often amateurish, but the strange line deliveries often help the weird aura of the film rather than harm it. Occasionally the low tech production is a little too rough with muddy dark scenes and strange edits, but these are small flaws in a really engrossing larger work.

Aesthetically, and narratively strange, How the Sky Will Melt is a fascinatingly odd experience and one I would definitely recommend both as a standalone film and an example of how the medium of VHS can have merit in and of itself.

VHS Summer Week #7

On Sunday, August 7th, 2016, Outpost Zeta hosted its first VHS_Party as part of VHS SUMMER. Ever since I started looking more into VCR culture and the people who collect it, I’ve seen fun events spring up around the U.S., complete with tape trading and movie screenings. I started looking for venues that would work within the O/Z budget (i.e. free). Not much response at first, but thankfully a local venue called Vega got in touch with me. They had a date open, but it was only two weeks out, so I had to scramble to make sure we had everything we needed.

With assistance from nerdyvinyl and Soft Sandalwood, we set up a Facebook event page, did some cross posting, and bothered friends about it. I had to do  a quick tech test (I had to get a component to HDMI converter) and prep a few tapes. My goal was to run the entire event from video tape, I could have cheated and used VHS rips from a laptop, but it was my first time out and I wanted it to be authentic.

We opened the night with a fifteen minute slideshow of VHS covers ranging from beautiful to lurid and often both at the same time. I set it to music from NewRetroWave’s Crypt EP. We also screened a video by Com Truise, and finally a little Simpsonwave.


Following that, there was a short feature, Creepy Classics (1987). This is a thirty-minute tape made by Hallmark which was sold with a purchase at their stores. The video features Vincent Price introducing an assortment of horror film trailers and movie clips from the 1950s and 60s. The selection was pretty well trod ground, but Price is always a complete delight to watch on screen. He gave it his all, even with something as disposable as this tape. The strangest part of this video is the fact that it pretty much shows the entirety of Christopher Lee’s killer severed hand segment from Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (1965).

Our feature presentation was one of my favorite movies, Hands of Steel (1986). A dystopic action extravaganza that combines, cyborgs, arm-wrestling, and writing things on toilet rolls in a way that only Italian genre cinema can do it. I know that Code Red has plans to release this on Blu-ray, and I’m excited to see it cleaned up, but it does possess a low rent grungy charm that compliments VHS perfectly.

The audience (All fifteen of them) wanted more, so without much hesitation, I introduced (and re-introduced to some) the joys of Alien Warrior (1986).  This science-fiction/kung-fu/gangsploitation/religious action comedy is one hundred minutes of confounding acting, direction, and script choices. Best of all, it only exists on VHS where it belongs.

Master arm-wrestler, Paco Queruak.

Everyone seemed to enjoy the evening. They drank and ate lots of food, which should make the venue happy. They cheered and yelled at the screen, which makes me happy. I had brought some tapes to trade, but we didn’t have any other tape traders arrive, hopefully next time.

The Wal-Mart Special makes its first public appearance.

Did I say next time? Yes, I did. I’m happy to announce that Outpost Zeta will holding its next VHS_Party on October 17th, 2016. Follow the O/Z Facebook page so that you don’t miss out on the official event.

Thanks to everyone who helped, and thanks to everyone who came down to watch.

Be kind, rewind.

VHS Summer Week #5

Dudes

1987
Penelope Spheris

Grant (Jon Cryer), Biscuit (Daniel Roebuck), and Milo (Flea) are punks on their way through the desert in hopes of meeting the Go-Go's. They run afoul of some locals up to no good. One of the trio is viciously killed leading the other two on a journey that takes them from an Elvis impersonator named Daredelvis (Pete Wilcox) to the spiritual landscape of the Old West. Here they realize they must embrace that spirit if they hope to get revenge for their friend.

Under the modern lens I can see some of the antics in Dudes being considered, at best, insensitive to Native Americans, what with Biscuit adopting native dress, talking in broken English, and having spirit visions. There is such a lightness to the film that it’s difficult to believe that any of it was done maliciously. Here is a film about caricatures of punks transforming into caricatures of western movie archetypes, while they are aided by a caricature of Elvis. It attempts to reach the heart of the epic west via the silliest route possible.

"Well, Blane... fancy meeting you here."

Jon Cryer is certainly trading on some of the charm and goodwill he generated in from Pretty in Pink (1986) , he’s never quite convincing as an action hero but perhaps that is supposed to be the joke.  Daniel Roebuck steals the movie as Biscuit, his journey from put-upon outcast to mystic warrior is a cartoonish joy.  Lee Ving and the rest of the bad guys are scummy enough that you look forward to them getting what they deserve.

To date, the only way to see Dudes is on VHS. Why does such a cult oddity from a notable director have only a VHS release? The answer is music rights, which will probably be concern until someone with the time and money to untangle it comes along. The worse option is releasing it with alternate music, especially a film like this where the music is so closely intertwined with the story. The music is a mish-mash of western tinged rock, metal, and surprisingly very little actual punk music. Thematically Dudes resists being any particular thing, and since it was never going to outdo Repo Man (1984) for being the seminal  punk genre movie,  why even try?

"Alright guys, who took my sleeves?"

The relative ridiculousness of Dudes works well when its operating as an oddball comedy, but that does undermine the more dramatic moments. Key deaths in the film don’t carry quite the weight they might otherwise. The movie never creates the tonal whiplash it could veering from comedy to revenge thriller, but it never feels mean enough to dive into being black comedy either. The end result is a movie that goes through its various plot points with a certain comedic detachment. Maybe that is the most punk part of the whole thing.

VHS Summer Week #4 - Video Grab Bag!

Trollies Radio Show Sing-A-Long
1992
Greg Page

We can thank the Chipmunks for starting this odd tradition of high-pitched voices crushing the life of out once relevant pop songs (I'm more of a Happy Hamsters person myself). Trollies Radio Show Sing-A-Long is not really different in that respect, the music is usually bland, but more often excruciating.  The Trollies are puppet versions of those semi-monstrous troll dolls with wild hair that become inexplicably popular every twenty-five years or so.  The puppetry is surprisingly decent. However, no amount of passable imagery on the screen can make up for the combination of screechy music and jokes so poorly written that toddlers would get up and walk out the door.  Trollies Radio Show Sing-A-Long is only thirty-five minutes long but you are going to be living every single one of those minutes. That said, the Trollies cover of the sub-par Beach Boys song, Kokomo, is livened up by a saxophone playing crab, and that made it almost worth the $0.25 I paid for this tape. Almost.

"The forecast calls for huge mountains of Angel Dust to the north..."

Night of the Living Glitch
2016
George Romero/Art of the Glitch

Much to George Romero’s chagrin, Night of the Living Dead (1968), as most people have seen it, exists in the public domain. Throughout the 80s, it proliferated through numerous tape releases from every conceivable production company and countless showings on television. So there is something hardwired in those people who initially saw it through a CRT screen with a less than optimal source. Night of the Living Glitch takes the original film and deliberately introduces distortions and errors that are unique to each tape and each VCR that plays it. It transforms what is an endlessly repeated film into something new, and ties it back to the personal way it was experienced by many viewers. The image might not have been corrupted to quite the extent that Night of the Living Glitch displays, but I think it  adds a special personal element that many of Night of the Living Dead’s myriad remixes, remakes, and edits seem to miss. You can watch it in its digital form here.

"They're coming to glitch you, Barbara."

Rock N Roll Wrestling Woman vs. the Aztec Ape
1986
Rene Cardona Jr./Rhino Home Video

Rock N Roll Wrestling Women vs. The Aztec Ape is an edited version of Doctor of Doom (1964). It’s a tale of female luchadors, brain transplants, and an ape monster, so it’s pretty much perfect. One of the great paradoxes of luchador films is that the wrestling is often the least interesting thing in the whole production. This movie is no exception, but the trimming down of these scenes helps immensely. What makes these particular wrestlers Rock N Roll Wrestling Women, is the fact that Rhino has placed several rock-a-billy tunes throughout the story. They have been specifically written for this film and while they lack much in the way of polish, they are quirky little numbers that that manage to get stuck in your head long after you’ve rewound the tape.  At barely over an hour, the movie throws in a heady mix of music, action, plus a little gore, and manages to be quite a bit of fun.

Yep, wrestling women. Just like it says on the cover.

VHS Summer Week #3

Boardinghouse
1982
John Wintergate

Things (1989) may have solidified my interest in shot-on-video movies, but Boardinghouse is where it all began for me. It is by turns, comedic, gory, exploitative, and self-aggrandizing. It never descends into a fury of chaos like Things, which means the story is mostly coherent (this may be a plus of a minus, depending on the viewer.) This was the first SOV horror film and the first to receive a theatrical release. I can only imagine what anyone walking in and expecting a traditional horror movie might have thought about it.

Following some nearly unreadable computer text we are introduced to the boardinghouse, a site of grisly murders in the past. Now the place is being reopened, and the new owner, Jim (John Wintergate) decides he’s going to fill the place with beautiful women as tenants (I should also mention he is a practicing psychic.) Soon enough, strange deaths start happening to the residents of the boardinghouse, culminating in a house party/rock concert/psychic demon battle. 

During Boardinghouse...

Boardinghouse opens with a message that any scenes of upcoming horror will be proceeded with an image of a scary leather gloved hand in front of a bunch of video swirls, this is Horror-Vision and it should be the first indication that the viewer is in for something very odd. From this point on, the story is a thinly veiled excuse for director and star, John Wintergate to sport some upsettingly tiny underwear and hang around with women in lingerie. Boardinghouse was shot on Betacam equipment and it looks appropriately cheap.

There are endless scenes of talking, making food, and hot tubbing, which are occasionally interrupted by a murder. The gore is crude, but it is enthusiastic: eyes squish out of heads, a monster puppet attacks, and there's even some mouse barfing. Disappointingly, there are not quite enough of these moments, as they definitely liven up a very chatty movie.

Where the movie really shines (or drives views away) is in its quirks. What’s the best way to demonstrate psychic powers? If you if said, make soap spin around in the bathtub, then you must be John Wintergate, because no reasonable person would come up with that idea.  Jim seems very casual about having psychic powers too, and no one really seems that amazed by it. It is little moments like these that cast Boardinghouse into some kind of weird nonsense universe where it stays for the duration of its run.

...after Boardinghouse.

The secret MVP of the film is a strong synth score. It has a grit and menace to it that evokes some of the best of John Carpenter’s work. It greatly enhances everything on the screen and goes a long way to pushing Boardinghouse past being just a glorified home movie.

I love film that reaches for great heights and fall astoundingly short. I’m not sure Boardinghouse had aspirations beyond boobs and blood, but it fails even at that by being buried in the strange personality and fixations of its director and star. A fascinating  chunk of weirdness from the dawn of SOV horror.

VHS Summer Week #2

Things
1989
Andrew Jordan

Often the real appeal of viewing shot-on-video movies is seeing passion emerge from people who are using limited resources and skill sets to produce something unlike anything produced from large studios. Making fun of the cheapness of the effects, stilted dialogue, or poor editing is easy, but if you put that aside for a moment, you can take in how gloriously bizarre some of these films can be when not reigned in by executives looking at marking data. Things competes with The Texas Chain-Saw Massacre (1974) for films that become gloriously unhinged by the time the credits rolls.

The plot of Things (insofar as it has one) is about a man named Doug (Doug Bunston) who, upset that his wife has not been able to have children, forces her to undergo an experimental treatment. Doug’s knucklehead brother, Don (Barry J. Gillis) and his friend, Fred (Bruce Roach) show up and proceed to drink beer, watch TV and occasionally deal with some ant monsters that Doug’s wife has been birthing in the bed room. Things descends into incoherence as the trio fend off the creatures, the mad doctor behind it all, and their own incompitence.

"Oh god, I smell delicious!"

The above plot description was only been compiled by me after several viewings. Things begins with a dream sequence involving a nude woman in a devil mask and only occasionally lets up on the weirdness so that the brothers can sit around and make comments while downing a few beers. The dialogue can be legitimately funny at times, but character actions are often frustratingly at odds with what is happening. Characters vanish and reappear without explanation, and no one seems terribly concerned about a house full of monsters until they descend into utter madness about it. Things moves beyond fever dream into something akin to drinking a case of cheap beer and washing it down with a bottle of cough medicine while waving a power drill around.

The majority of the film is confined to one house. The geography of the space is never defined, but there is something claustrophobic about the whole place. The monster effects are cheap and stiff, but Things isn’t afraid to pour on the gore by the third act, and what it lacks in finesse it makes up in volume. At a certain point the film stops trying to make narrative sense all together, and it can have an overwhelmingly numbing experience on the viewer. Like Science Crazed, (1991) this isn’t a film you watch so much as survive, and you will not be the same person when you arrive on the other side.

The new Energizer battery mascot is not working out.

Things was originally released on VHS back in 1989, and I can only imagine what the casual renter thought of it when they brought it home, assuming they made it past the opening dream sequence. Although shot on 8 and 16mm film, Things feels most at home in all its lo-fi glory creeping out of a cathode ray tube like some kind of Canadian Sadako there to slap the beer and bowl of poutine out your hands and drive you mad.

VHS Summer Week #1

Cthulhu Mansion

1992
Juan Piquer Simón

Back in the 1990s when the world wasn’t drenched in Lovecraft paraphernalia, it was a bit of a shock to see the words Cthulhu emblazoned on a VHS box. Sure, as far as Lovecraft adaptions go, we had Re-Animator (1985), From Beyond (1986), and The Resurrected (1992). Aside from The Dunwich Horror (1970) and to a lesser extent The Haunted Palace (1963), very little had touched upon the actual cosmic star spawn that threatened to consume the Earth. So, I’m certain much of Cthulhu Mansion’s rental business was from eager nerds excited to see something to do with an actual elder god but, as if issued from Lovecraft’s mind itself, it was all a cruel joke from an uncaring universe.

This is exactly 50% of the Cthulhu you'll find in this film.

A gang of juvenile delinquents, and you can tell they are a gang of juvenile delinquents because they all wear leather jackets, set-up a drug deal at a carnival. Things wrong, people get shot and the gang takes a magician named Chandu (Frank Finley) and his daughter Lisa (Marcia Layton) hostage. They hide-out in Chandu’s mansion. Despite his warnings, they persist on staying there and it isn’t long until the thing in the basement wakes up and begins to take notice. It seems Chandu’s magic is real and what’s worse he learned from a book that bears the words, ‘Cthulhu.’

Sadly, I was one of the enthusiastic tape renters who raced home only to discover that Cthulhu Mansion offers up no Cthulhu beyond the title and few brief name drops during the movie.  This wouldn’t be a problem if the film had anything else to offer. The pace is leaden, the music is forgettable, and look of the film is flat and uninteresting. There is the occasional effect that is amusing at the cost of the film, my favorite being giant skeletal hands that grope at a victim after bursting forth from inside the refrigerator.  There is also a decent shower filling with blood sequence that perpetrated on one of male characters surprisingly. Combine all of this with the fact that Cthulhu Mansion was directed by the man who brought us Pieces (1982) and Slugs (1988), and you’ve got a tremendous disappointment sitting in your tape player.

The horrible secret origin of the Kool-Aid man.

It’s not 100% irredeemable, some of the monster make-up is decent enough and the performance of Frank Finlay as Chandu is miles ahead of what every other actor is bringing to the screen, but these are small bright spots in ninety-minutes of tedium.

To date, Cthulhu Mansion is only available on VHS. I can’t see anyone scrambling to get this film on Blu-ray (but then again I’ve been surprised before). In its own limited kind of way it’s the Platonic ideal of film that you would rent just because everything else at the video store has been picked over. It’s immediately forgettable and disposable but not completely devoid of entertainment. I’d say check it out only if you are either a Lovecraft or Simón completest, everyone else would be better off with just about any other Lovecraft adaption.