<\/p>\n
There are certain memories which stay with me forever.\u00a0 Images of love, beauty, pain, loss, abandonment, and belonging.\u00a0 Great moments of my life seared into me and recalled with a breathtaking, mesmerizing clarity.<\/span><\/p>\n One such moment is standing in front of a shelf at Video 99 in Bethesda, Maryland, holding a copy of Nail Gun Massacre<\/em>. <\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n It\u2019s spring, 1989, the end of my freshman year in high school.\u00a0 I had raided the couch for $2.03 \u2013 good for two movies \u2013 and was in a quandary.\u00a0 What should go along with Nail Gun<\/em>?\u00a0 On\u00a0 the shelf in front of me was Damnation Alley<\/em>, 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\u2019s axis.\u00a0 Based off of the meandering Zelazny novel, it\u2019s one of the greatest sci-fi follies this side of Leprechaun in Space<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n There was the softcore version of Cinderella<\/em>, also out of 1977.\u00a0 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<\/em><\/span>, which was on a shelf nearby.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n There was the Skinemax version of Young Lady Chatterley<\/em>, staring the delicious Harlee McBride, who eventually married Richard Belzer and went on to enjoy a minor role on Homicide<\/em> until Michelle Forbes rolled in and took over the ME\u2019s office.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n There were hundreds of other titles, all poorly catalogued around me on worn shelves.\u00a0 Some, like above, elusive even today.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n I selected Shock Waves<\/em>, 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.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n I made a promise that day.\u00a0 I swore that I would watch everything that had been released on video, excepting the blockbuster new releases.\u00a0 The old and the bizarre, the classic, the insane.\u00a0 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\u2019s four groovy UHF stations, I had a good head start.\u00a0 Video releases, at that time, had become focused on the mainstream and the glitzy direct to video crap.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 For a few years, and even into my college years, there was general stagnation.\u00a0 Especially when Blockbuster Video crushed the Ma & Pops, bringing a mindless devotion to the mainstream video hits. <\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Slowly, the Ma & Pops died.\u00a0 Video 99 became an oriental rug store.\u00a0 Ruth\u2019s, in Kensington, became Donut King.\u00a0 As they died, the great, weird videos went out of print.\u00a0 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 \u2013 Video Amercain and the Video Vault.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But getting out to Takoma Park or, worse, the Virginia-side of DC\u2019s suburbs, was a tall order.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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<\/em>, and I returned to DC to discover that I\u2019d done all I could with traditional brick and mortar rentals.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The trouble when you put yourself through school is that it\u2019s not a smooth experience.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But every man worth his salt can support his vices.\u00a0 In 1993-94, I took a year off from college and worked four jobs, seven days a week.\u00a0 It was in that year when I realized that Blockbuster had moved beyond it\u2019s beachhead in the somewhat distant Maryland suburb of Aspen Hill and was exploding across the map.\u00a0 The days of weird video were finally over, despite my visits to every last, stubborn Ma & Pop in the vicinity. <\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n I turned to something new.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Video Wasteland \u2013 the first Netflix.\u00a0 A husband and wife ran rare and collectible videos out of their garage, or so it seemed, shipping three at a time.\u00a0 The charge, I believe, was around $18.\u00a0 Keep as long as you like, return shipping label included.\u00a0 The videos were all dubs of the originals, listed in a low-grade, Xeroxed catalog under their respective genre \u2013 exploitation, sci-fi, gore, freak, import\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 No queuing 500 movies, I had to call them in.\u00a0 At first, it was a toll number, but they eventually went 800.\u00a0 One or the other would pick up.\u00a0 If the wife, there\u2019d always be kitchen sounds in the background, as if she were doing the dishes or making dinner while she took the order.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Video Wasteland introduced me to the horrible, the unimagined.\u00a0 To what lay behind the veiled door of the Ma & Pop shops.\u00a0 I ate up a new world of gore.\u00a0 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\u00a0 cult culture was rechristened as the golden age of\u00a0 today\u2019s hip-hop Jet Li-fest.\u00a0 We all watched the silver age of these films on Kung Fu Theater \u2013 Sunday mornings, hosted by Captain 20, right after 70\u2019s sci-fi reruns at 9am.\u00a0 But, somehow, the popularity of that age faded.\u00a0 The milestones achieved were forgotten in the US as theaters, also, mainstreamed.\u00a0 Hong Kong cinema in the 80\u2019s and early 90\u2019s became hidden from us.\u00a0 It was as if Superman never caught on, but the comics were still made.\u00a0 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.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n I find modern Asian cinema to be a distasteful corruption.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Video Wasteland sustained me to the end of the decade.\u00a0 Somewhere around 1998-99, they became rude, and my needs surpassed their supply.\u00a0 They had the money to grow somewhat and the camaraderie of the phone calls to somebody\u2019s house was replaced by someone in an office with no time to talk.\u00a0 Helpful advice became exhausted sighs.\u00a0 Chatting about what was similar to the taste of the individual became curt, angry reminders that the call should be kept short.\u00a0 A reaction, no doubt, to hundreds of people like me \u2013 and worse \u2013 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<\/em>?\u00a0 Again.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 A time of higher culture was upon me.\u00a0 I left behind Nazi zombies and learned to talk like a hardboiled detective in a two room office walk-up.\u00a0 And then she<\/em> walked into the room.\u00a0 I learned to hate the real Nazi\u2019s.\u00a0 What took place in the next six days became the legend of Navarone.<\/em>\u00a0 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.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Then it happened.\u00a0 DVD.\u00a0 I was always a late bloomer.\u00a0 Hell, I still have Beta tapes in the basement, not to mention Star Wars<\/em> and a few other films on those old record-formats that preceded Betamax.\u00a0 DVD came slowly for me.\u00a0 My first video, bought and owned, was Back to the Future<\/em>.\u00a0 My first DVD, bought and owned, was The Matrix<\/em>.\u00a0 These titles, too, are marked in my memory.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n A new millennium.\u00a0 2000-2001.\u00a0 At first, DVD moved slowly through Blockbuster like a cancer and, for some time, it just wasn\u2019t worth it.\u00a0 It leaned on the classics and the mainstream hits.\u00a0 But that didn\u2019t last long, did it?\u00a0 Unlike laserdisc, and despite predictions that DVD would suffer a similar fate, there was a flash fire.\u00a0 Seemingly overnight, everyone upgraded.\u00a0 Everyone was ready.\u00a0 This was Mankind\u2019s era of change. It was a time of online discounts.\u00a0 It was a time of cheaply produced and cheaply bought DVD\u2019s.\u00a0 It was a time of storage devices.\u00a0 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.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n So it was, DVD pulled the old Viking invasion routine on the poorly defended VHS coastal towns.\u00a0 And not the rape and run, either.\u00a0 No, this was the Danelaw.\u00a0 As those DVD\u2019s made money, the studios realized that they could dump everything on disc.\u00a0 The weird and the bizarre reemerged.\u00a0 The threadbare, out of print tapes in the 80\u2019s, and their grandchildren, the collector\u2019s dubs in the 90\u2019s, no longer needed to be clutched to the chest and stored in cool, dry places.\u00a0 Now their futuristic descendents flew out onto the shelves.\u00a0 Now they appeared everywhere \u2013 the unwanted, undesired, children of the video industry were back.\u00a0 In force.\u00a0 Nothing illustrates this quite as powerfully as an extra\u2019s-loaded, well-received, breathlessly reviewed and totally cleaned up Andy Sidaris boxset.\u00a0 Seeing that made me realize that there were no more limits.\u00a0 That, if I waited long enough, I would see everything on disc.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n December, 2002.\u00a0 A Christmas present to myself.\u00a0 I would welcome in 2003 with my first three movies from Netflix.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n And, so, my dream was reborn.\u00a0 But the 50,000 movies in print were now a countless, teeming multitude.\u00a0 And, worse yet, as 2003 drew to a close, there was a new boomtown along the bustling, prosperous train tracks of the DVD industry \u2013 TV to DVD.\u00a0 To my horror, in terms of completing my goal, television shows I had missed, or forgotten, rose up.\u00a0 The cartoons of my youth, the hacked-to-pieces 70\u2019s sci-fi reruns on Sunday morning, the prime time series I only saw a few episodes from, the mini-series I wasn\u2019t allowed to stay up and watch.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Everything old was new again.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n My Netflix queue stretched to their limit \u2013 500 movies \u2013 and there it\u2019s hovered for two years now, supplemented by a few gigs of downloads every day.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Like an old timer who remembers the Depression, I live in constant fear that it\u2019ll happen again.\u00a0 That this glorious moment of prosperity will, ultimately, collapse.\u00a0 And not with speed and power, but with the slow despair that destroyed the old Ma & Pops.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n This is, of course, unwarranted.\u00a0 Like Roman coins, these discs are a dime a dozen.\u00a0 Collectible, yes.\u00a0 Unavailable, no.\u00a0 They drop out of print and reappear with an updated edition.\u00a0 They circulate on ebay, or Amazon\u2019s used store, or in the archives somewhere.\u00a0 Nail Gun Massacre<\/em> will never again vanish, and I Spit on Your Grave<\/em> will always be available with\u00a0 a commentary track.\u00a0 But the fears remain.\u00a0 Day and night, more industrious than Santa\u2019s elves, I burn DVD\u2019s.\u00a0 I get the special kind \u2013 the ones that promise to last 100 years.\u00a0 I fill storage cases, 300 discs at a time.\u00a0 All of this, of course, costs 25 cents per blank DVD.\u00a0 The days of clean living are upon us all.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n 2006. \u00a0I have not forgotten my promise to myself.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Tonight, for my $2.03, I\u2019m going to watch Damnation Alley<\/em>, a better than VHS-rip edition.\u00a0 Still out of print in the US, but recently acquired thanks to a billion yammering Chinese.\u00a0 My second pick is a quick modern piece \u2013 Neil Gaiman\u2019s Mirrormask<\/em>, which is supposed to be like Labyrinth<\/em>.\u00a0 Any mention of Labyrinth<\/em> fills my mind with images of powerful, degrading sex with the then-underage Jennifer Connelly.\u00a0 Slap that baby \u2013 set him free!\u00a0 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\n<\/span><\/p>\n