Video 99

There are certain memories which stay with me forever.  Images of love, beauty, pain, loss, abandonment, and belonging.  Great moments of my life seared into me and recalled with a breathtaking, mesmerizing clarity.

One such moment is standing in front of a shelf at Video 99 in Bethesda, Maryland, holding a copy of Nail Gun Massacre.

 

 

It’s spring, 1989, the end of my freshman year in high school.  I had raided the couch for $2.03 – good for two movies – and was in a quandary.  What should go along with Nail Gun?  On  the shelf in front of me was Damnation Alley, the Jan-Michael Vincent sci-fi vehicle from 77 about a nightmare roadtrip in armored trucks from the southwest desert to Albany, NY, a utopian stronghold on an Earth so ravaged by nuclear war, it had tipped on it’s axis.  Based off of the meandering Zelazny novel, it’s one of the greatest sci-fi follies this side of Leprechaun in Space.

There was the softcore version of Cinderella, also out of 1977.  Directed by Michael Pataki, it starred the beautiful Cheryl Smith, whose drug addled life ended in horror and poverty in 2002. I had fallen in love with her in Laserblast, which was on a shelf nearby.

 

There was the Skinemax version of Young Lady Chatterley, staring the delicious Harlee McBride, who eventually married Richard Belzer and went on to enjoy a minor role on Homicide until Michelle Forbes rolled in and took over the ME’s office. 

 

There were hundreds of other titles, all poorly catalogued around me on worn shelves.  Some, like above, elusive even today.

 

I selected Shock Waves, because it had Peter Cushing as a retired commandant living on a desolate island with rotting Nazi zombies adept at hiding in inch deep water.

 

I made a promise that day.  I swore that I would watch everything that had been released on video, excepting the blockbuster new releases.  The old and the bizarre, the classic, the insane.  From Bogart to Julie Strain, from DeMille to Andy Sidaris.

At the time, only about 50,000 movies fitting my criteria had been released on tape and, with the graces of a latchkey life and a large city’s four groovy UHF stations, I had a good head start.  Video releases, at that time, had become focused on the mainstream and the glitzy direct to video crap.  The latter had yet to become the franchise it is today but, even then, those releases were stupid enough to keep the majority off of my list.    For a few years, and even into my college years, there was general stagnation.  Especially when Blockbuster Video crushed the Ma & Pops, bringing a mindless devotion to the mainstream video hits.

 

Slowly, the Ma & Pops died.  Video 99 became an oriental rug store.  Ruth’s, in Kensington, became Donut King.  As they died, the great, weird videos went out of print.  Slowly decaying over the course of time, they faded from the shelves, except for in those last bastions of indie and offbeat video in DC – Video Amercain and the Video Vault.  Until the DVD revolution rebuilt, in a backhand way, the weird video market, these holdouts stocked the shelves with copies of copies, handmade and illegal.  But getting out to Takoma Park or, worse, the Virginia-side of DC’s suburbs, was a tall order. 

 

In college, I fed off of the video stores in Elkins, West Virginia, which provided occasional gems, such as the atrocious Oasis of the Zombies, and I returned to DC to discover that I’d done all I could with traditional brick and mortar rentals.  College was 250 miles from DC, so I returned for any holiday longer than three days, and took my classes in spits and spurts with occasional years out to pay the bills.  The trouble when you put yourself through school is that it’s not a smooth experience.  Looking back, I was in DC more than West Virginia, working myself to the bone, stockpiling cash to funnel towards tuition, and to support my life while pile-driving 18-20 credit hours a semester.  But every man worth his salt can support his vices.  In 1993-94, I took a year off from college and worked four jobs, seven days a week.  It was in that year when I realized that Blockbuster had moved beyond it’s beachhead in the somewhat distant Maryland suburb of Aspen Hill and was exploding across the map.  The days of weird video were finally over, despite my visits to every last, stubborn Ma & Pop in the vicinity.

 

I turned to something new.

 

Video Wasteland – the first Netflix.  A husband and wife ran rare and collectible videos out of their garage, or so it seemed, shipping three at a time.  The charge, I believe, was around $18.  Keep as long as you like, return shipping label included.  The videos were all dubs of the originals, listed in a low-grade, Xeroxed catalog under their respective genre – exploitation, sci-fi, gore, freak, import…

 

I signed up and, like I do now with Netflix, I copied every tape when I received it and immediately mailed the box back out.  No queuing 500 movies, I had to call them in.  At first, it was a toll number, but they eventually went 800.  One or the other would pick up.  If the wife, there’d always be kitchen sounds in the background, as if she were doing the dishes or making dinner while she took the order. 

 

Video Wasteland introduced me to the horrible, the unimagined.  To what lay behind the veiled door of the Ma & Pop shops.  I ate up a new world of gore.  I consumed Hong Kong cinema and began a path down a long highway that, by the end of the decade, would be introduced to America as legitimate cinema, what was  cult culture was rechristened as the golden age of  today’s hip-hop Jet Li-fest.  We all watched the silver age of these films on Kung Fu Theater – Sunday mornings, hosted by Captain 20, right after 70’s sci-fi reruns at 9am.  But, somehow, the popularity of that age faded.  The milestones achieved were forgotten in the US as theaters, also, mainstreamed.  Hong Kong cinema in the 80’s and early 90’s became hidden from us.  It was as if Superman never caught on, but the comics were still made.  Then, discovered, enjoyed, they were remade into a new, derivative version of a corporate giant that humorlessly punched and kicked while rap music screamed in the background.

 

I find modern Asian cinema to be a distasteful corruption.

 

Video Wasteland sustained me to the end of the decade.  Somewhere around 1998-99, they became rude, and my needs surpassed their supply.  They had the money to grow somewhat and the camaraderie of the phone calls to somebody’s house was replaced by someone in an office with no time to talk.  Helpful advice became exhausted sighs.  Chatting about what was similar to the taste of the individual became curt, angry reminders that the call should be kept short.  A reaction, no doubt, to hundreds of people like me – and worse – calling from their shut-in beds and crying about never knowing the touch of woman and, please, can you send the latest Gore: New York Hooker Murder Scenes?  Again.

 

I was forced to return to the Blockbusters, trolling through the shelves in search of the cult culture and filling in the gaps with the classic films, both bad and good, catching up with all those wonderful old timer flicks and forgotten war movies, dramas, adventures.  A time of higher culture was upon me.  I left behind Nazi zombies and learned to talk like a hardboiled detective in a two room office walk-up.  And then she walked into the room.  I learned to hate the real Nazi’s.  What took place in the next six days became the legend of Navarone.  I fell in love with Kim Novak a few times, developed a weird fascination for Cyd Charisse, and we all know that Dick Powell is the best Marlowe.

 

Then it happened.  DVD.  I was always a late bloomer.  Hell, I still have Beta tapes in the basement, not to mention Star Wars and a few other films on those old record-formats that preceded Betamax.  DVD came slowly for me.  My first video, bought and owned, was Back to the Future.  My first DVD, bought and owned, was The Matrix.  These titles, too, are marked in my memory. 

 

A new millennium.  2000-2001.  At first, DVD moved slowly through Blockbuster like a cancer and, for some time, it just wasn’t worth it.  It leaned on the classics and the mainstream hits.  But that didn’t last long, did it?  Unlike laserdisc, and despite predictions that DVD would suffer a similar fate, there was a flash fire.  Seemingly overnight, everyone upgraded.  Everyone was ready.  This was Mankind’s era of change. It was a time of online discounts.  It was a time of cheaply produced and cheaply bought DVD’s.  It was a time of storage devices.  It was a time of corporate-sponsored brainwashing that catapulted an entertainment industry from some sort of weird stone age into a glittering, new world that would take us, ultimately, into a land where Martin Luther King sold cell phones and every pop song ever written became the background for a commercial that was played five times an hour until even deep tracks on a Donovan CD made you want to buy a minivan.

 

So it was, DVD pulled the old Viking invasion routine on the poorly defended VHS coastal towns.  And not the rape and run, either.  No, this was the Danelaw.  As those DVD’s made money, the studios realized that they could dump everything on disc.  The weird and the bizarre reemerged.  The threadbare, out of print tapes in the 80’s, and their grandchildren, the collector’s dubs in the 90’s, no longer needed to be clutched to the chest and stored in cool, dry places.  Now their futuristic descendents flew out onto the shelves.  Now they appeared everywhere – the unwanted, undesired, children of the video industry were back.  In force.  Nothing illustrates this quite as powerfully as an extra’s-loaded, well-received, breathlessly reviewed and totally cleaned up Andy Sidaris boxset.  Seeing that made me realize that there were no more limits.  That, if I waited long enough, I would see everything on disc. 

 

December, 2002.  A Christmas present to myself.  I would welcome in 2003 with my first three movies from Netflix.

 

And, so, my dream was reborn.  But the 50,000 movies in print were now a countless, teeming multitude.  And, worse yet, as 2003 drew to a close, there was a new boomtown along the bustling, prosperous train tracks of the DVD industry – TV to DVD.  To my horror, in terms of completing my goal, television shows I had missed, or forgotten, rose up.  The cartoons of my youth, the hacked-to-pieces 70’s sci-fi reruns on Sunday morning, the prime time series I only saw a few episodes from, the mini-series I wasn’t allowed to stay up and watch.  Shows I once watched religiously, on disc, revealed episodes I had missed, unaired episodes, commentary tracks from ancient actors, rejected alternate pilot episodes from the cutting room floor.  Everything old was new again.   

 

My Netflix queue stretched to their limit – 500 movies – and there it’s hovered for two years now, supplemented by a few gigs of downloads every day. 

 

Like an old timer who remembers the Depression, I live in constant fear that it’ll happen again.  That this glorious moment of prosperity will, ultimately, collapse.  And not with speed and power, but with the slow despair that destroyed the old Ma & Pops.

 

This is, of course, unwarranted.  Like Roman coins, these discs are a dime a dozen.  Collectible, yes.  Unavailable, no.  They drop out of print and reappear with an updated edition.  They circulate on ebay, or Amazon’s used store, or in the archives somewhere.  Nail Gun Massacre will never again vanish, and I Spit on Your Grave will always be available with  a commentary track.  But the fears remain.  Day and night, more industrious than Santa’s elves, I burn DVD’s.  I get the special kind – the ones that promise to last 100 years.  I fill storage cases, 300 discs at a time.  All of this, of course, costs 25 cents per blank DVD.  The days of clean living are upon us all.

 

2006.  I have not forgotten my promise to myself.  I continue, a willing prisoner of the cult culture in my heart and soul, to collect and enjoy the weird, the bizarre, the classic, the fantastic, the forgotten. 

 

Tonight, for my $2.03, I’m going to watch Damnation Alley, a better than VHS-rip edition.  Still out of print in the US, but recently acquired thanks to a billion yammering Chinese.  My second pick is a quick modern piece – Neil Gaiman’s Mirrormask, which is supposed to be like Labyrinth.  Any mention of Labyrinth fills my mind with images of powerful, degrading sex with the then-underage Jennifer Connelly.  Slap that baby – set him free!