In addition to the usual reviews and comments you would find on a horror movie blog, this is also a document of the wonderfully vast horror movie section of the video store I worked at in my youth.
Lloyd Kaufman’s video empire Troma Entertainment has been around for as long as I can remember. I’ve seen some of their recent offerings like Tales From The Crapper and Poultrygeist at different screenings – I see Kaufman in Toronto so much I think he must have a time share here or something – but didn’t realize how deep their catalogue went until I was hanging at my buddy Jacob’s place last weekend. Troma’s filmography numbers in the hundreds because they not only produce movies, but also distribute them too. Jacob (whose knowledge of B-movies seems to have no bounds) spun a couple of movies from his expansive Troma collection while I was there. They were 2000’s Unspeakable, which featured, within the first ten minutes, a dude performing oral sex on an invalid that had just shit herself and 1998’s Buttcrack, which seems fairly self explanatory. Ah… good times.
Yet, at no point was I like, turn this shit off. And that is the thing about Troma. I rarely seek out their stuff, but I don’t avoid it either. And I wouldn’t say I’ve not liked any of the twenty or so movies I’ve watched of theirs over the years. There seems to be this intangible air of watchability to the stuff Troma associates with. I suppose it could be argued that Troma Entertainment is the cinematic equivalent of a train wreck, but I still maintain that there is wayworsestuff out there.
Troma had a fairly large presence at my video store and I was introduced to Lloyd and Company through, like most people of my generation, The Toxic Avenger. For this installment of Coverbox Wednesday, I explore the colourful world of Troma.
Have you ever been listening to a song, heard something sampled from a movie or show and then racked your brain trying to remember where it was from?
In 1993, a similar thing happened to a man named Peter Cigéhn, while watching the 1982 David Cronenberg film Videodrome on late night television. After finding out where the samples came from by posting a query on an Internet discussion forum, he had the great idea of starting a website that catalogued the sources of audio samples used in music. And so The Top Sample Sources List was born. For those not in the know, audio sampling is when an artist culls a sound effect or dialogue from a movie, TV show or other media source and uses it in their music. Industrial - the musical genre that utilizes this technique the most – bands like Skinny Puppy and Ministry have sampled hundreds of things from a variety of sources over the years, as have many other artists ranging from Ice Cube to Big Audio Dynamite.
Horror films are an extremely popular source for audio sampling and when my older brother introduced Skinny Puppy to me circa 1990, it was a match made in hell. What a fantastic idea, I thought; using bits and bobs from horror almost like a percussive instrument, much like singer Nivek Ogre’s distinctive vocals. After having devoured their back catalogue, it was always a surreal experience whenever I would hear something Skinny Puppy had used pop up in a flick I was watching. Like this one, for instance.
That was a clip from the 1982 animated film The Plague Dogs. Any Skinny Puppy fan will recognize that immediately, as it was used in the song Testure from their 1988 album VIVISect VI. So, when I discovered Pete Cigéhn’s site in the late nineties – it was a burgeoning database of information by then, with almost four thousand entries – it was absolute bliss. I could find out where all those mysterious clips from Skinny Puppy, Front 242, Front Line Assembly, Thrill Kill Kult etc, came from and then seek those titles out. This is another reason why coming across Queen and Suspect Video was so momentous for me. They had so many films that I had learned about from the site. My first ever contributions to the World Wide Web were sampling submissions to The Top Sample Sources List.
The reason I am posting about this now is because I recently re-discovered it. Several years ago, it seemed to just up and disappear. One day, my usual bookmark http://www.sloth.org/samples/ came up as a broken link and every web search I tried for years led back to that same dead web page. Then, last week, by total fluke, I’m on Wikipedia and follow a footnote about Blade Runner being the most sampled film of all time and voila, up pops that familiar header for The Top Sample Sources List. It hadn’t been updated since 2004, but the 7836 listings were still there in all their encyclopaedic glory. And I FINALLY got to look up something I had been waiting for since I first laid eyes on the site almost ten years previous.
The sample at the beginning of TKK’s Daisy Chain 4 Satan is from an episode of the seventies TV show The Sixth Sense entitled Dear Joan: We’re Going To Scare You To Death, featuring Joan Crawford in her last acting gig.
What a relief!
So, if you are in the same boat and looking for the source of something that has been clanging around in your brain for ages, be sure check out The Top Sample Sources List. Answers could be only a few clicks away!
After being popularized by the likes of Tarantino, Nolan and Inarritu, it seems that films that use non-linear storytelling are a dime a dozen these days. While it is true that the independent film market is saturated every year with efforts using this device, that doesn’t mean that a good number of them aren’t worth your time. Take Karen Moncrieff’s The Dead Girl for example.
Several points of view are explored after a dead girl’s body is discovered in the desert.
The Dead Girl is engaging stuff, apparently conceived from a murder trial that Moncrieff (who’s previous feature Blue Car was a festival darling in 2002) sat in on as a jury member. It is a shame that works like this often fall through the cracks of mainstream recognition. What really stands out is the huge ensemble cast assembled for this project. There are a dozen meaty characters in The Dead Girl and are all portrayed by a recognizable face. Marcia Gay Harden as the mother and Rose Byrne (a veteran Aussie actress just waiting to explode) as a young woman with a missing sister are especially strong. I almost didn’t recognize Brittany Murphy (who appears as the ill fated dead girl) at first. Not that playing a trashy character is anything new to her (see Spun among others), but she seemed different somehow. She looked taller, skinnier; even her speech patterns were different. I’ve always had a soft spot for Murphy, which made the inevitable conclusion all the more tragic. The subject matter is ugly and there are as many unlikable characters as there are likable, but most of them make it through their story arcs with a ray of hope; all somewhat facilitated by the death of the title character.
For excellent performances brought forth by quality storytelling, look no further than The Dead Girl.
With digital distribution and online rental services, the brick and mortar stores are on their way out, but in the eighties and nineties, video membership cards were cluttering up wallets and purses everywhere. I have accumulated more than a few over the years, as I am sure you did, too. Back in the golden age of home video – which just happened to coincide with my formative years – taking a trip out to the video store was a special treat and as big a deal as visiting the arcade with a pocketful of quarters. I mean walking into these places was like entering that cave at the beginning of Raiders Of The Last Ark… minus the traps, of course. Who knew what treasures you were going to find in there?
The names of the first two stores my family used to frequent in the early eighties have long escaped me, but I still have flashes of remembrance. The first store was in the indoor mall that I would end up working in many years later. They had a huge Maniac poster by the entrance. Sadly, I was well into my twenties by the time I finally able to see that one. The suburban area I lived in seemed to be under some sort of ‘video nasty’ ban because certain titles like Maniac, Evil Dead and Last House disappeared for a great number of years while I was growing up. It wasn’t until I started venturing into Toronto that I was able to cross off some of those hard-to-find titles. This was long before Blue Underground and the many other distribution companies that thankfully made re-releasing those vintage titles a priority. The second store used to keep their movies behind glass like it was fine jewellery. I suppose that wasn’t far off, considering that back then a blank tape cost twenty-five bucks and the retail price of a movie was over a hundred. How times have changed!
The first video establishment that I could stake as my ‘home’ store was a place called Reel Fun. It was a short bike ride from my house and I burned a lot of time there in the mid-to-late eighties. Their horror selection didn’t take me too long to get through – I probably wore out their copy of Evil Dead 2 – but they also rented Atari 2600 games. In retrospect, I’m actually surprised they didn’t kick me out after all my incessant loitering.
Major Video became my favourite store quickly when it opened circa 1988 and eventually became my first place of employment and the home of The Horror Section. As an employee, we had unlimited rentals, which I abused like no man. I remember there was some grief from the manager about me renting restricted titles – my first week I basically had to sneak out a copy of The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover – but I was able to smooth things out eventually. In her defense, she was just sticking to policy (I was sixteen) and The Cook does open with someone getting a plate of shit rubbed in their face. Ah, memories…
As plentiful as the selection was at Major, I did have other haunts. There was, of course, Jumbo Video. It had this whole separate room set up behind this whole castle wall façade, that I have spoken about before. Jumbo had goodies like Rats: Night Of Terror and Night Of A Thousand Cats. And free popcorn! It was also the place that ALMOST first supplied me with The Evil Dead… until I got it home and realized it was the Beta version. That didn’t go over well, let me tell you.
Then, there was Metro Video. This place was pretty shady. They did however, have some obscure titles like Intruder (which I would not realize was heavily cut until many years later), Junior and Terror On Tape, which made it worth the trip. If I remember rightly, Metro got shut down for renting bootleg copies a few years later.
As you can see from the card, Entertainment For You was pretty bare bones, a glorified convenience store to be honest, but it was the closest to my house and serviceable for last minute occasions.
Mammoth was another store that popped up in the mid-nineties. I didn’t go there often, but I do remember picking up episodes of this really cool UK horror anthology series called “Chiller”. You can also see that this was back when anime was still sometimes referred to as Japanimation.
Video 99 was more known for its porn section, than its horror. It was a lot less conspicuous detouring into that little curtained room in a legitimate video store than having to actually go inside those seedy adult ones with the soaped over windows. Not that I’m speaking from experience or anything. What I mostly remember about Video 99 though, is the strained broken English phone conversations with the Korean owner. Even though they were way across town, Major Video’s tapes would accidentally get returned there all the time.
Unfortunately, Major Video went into receivership in the summer of ’92 and was swallowed up by Blockbuster. It was all downhill from there. They even pulled their “family video store” bullshit right out of the gate, by giving the underage employees a hard time about renting restricted titles. It wasn’t a big deal for me as I was only a few months shy of the big 1-8 by that point, but that didn’t stop my co-workers from taking the piss and printing me off my own ‘special’ membership card, of course.
Rogers is ying to Cockbuster’s wang. I haven’t spent too much time in there over the years, mainly just rented a video game or two because they tended to have better rates. Though, these days, on the rare occasion I do have to go the brick and mortar route, I will opt for Red over Blue. And speaking of colours…
I’m not sure why “Scary” is blue. Wouldn’t black or red be more appropriate?
Highlander’s was a store that came and went pretty quickly a few years ago. They had this huge painted mural of Connor MacLeod on the wall. Highlander’s specialized in carrying early films of Hollywood stars, like Sandra Bullock’s Fire On The Amazon, Russell Crowe’s Romper Stomper and Tom Hanks' He Knows You’re Alone. Sadly, their downfall was a really shitty location, hence the over explaining on the card.
And at long last. Queen Video! This is where the journey ends. It was literally like discovering a whole new world. They had so many titles I’d only read about in magazines and the Web and so many more I’d never even heard of. I always had to go with a list; otherwise I would just wander around entranced by the sheer volume of vids. They had so much stock in such a small space that the VHS sleeves were flattened down and you flipped through them like vinyl records. It was at Queen that I finally found Maniac, as well as countless others. I filled in the blanks of my Argento catalogue, including the (STILL somehow unreleased on DVD) final part of the animal trilogy Four Flies On Grey Velvet. You should have seen this copy. It was dubbed in English, but would randomly switch to French at points and had Japanese subtitles throughout. And yet, still, I loved it! Queen also had gobs of Asian cinema, which I ate up with a rather large spoon. The first time I ever saw Battle Royale… Hot damn, I was in love! Best opening EVAR!!!
I’m getting off track here, but let’s just say that the fourty-five minute drive to rent a couple of movies was worth it every time. I also don’t want to leave out Suspect Video either because they were very important in my cinephile development, as well. Alas, they used a password system, thus no card. That fateful day last February stung something awful. However, Suspect still lives on in the Markham St. location and the newly opened Eyesore Cinema. I visited there a few months ago and when I spied Noriko’s Dinner Table wedged in between Erotic Werewolf In London and Maid In Sweden, I knew the spirit of underground video was alive and well.
So, I hope you enjoyed this trip down memory lane as much as I did. Please feel free to snap a pic of any old cards you have lying around and send them to me. I’ll add them to the collection. Here’s to the sweet smell of newly laminated plastic.
