Requiem for a Video Vision (Pinned Post)

I spent a good percentage of my teens and twenties in video stores.  The former age range had me on one side of the counter, pursuing the new releases and captivated by the possibilities that lied beneath the lurid box art with a devotion most of my peers relegated to sports or music.  I was more than willing to make the leap to the other side of the counter as soon as I could, and I did so my senior year in high school, landing a job at Blockbuster Video.  

This would prove to be the most corporate of my video store gigs – a job featuring sanctioned work attire, a hefty manual, and a corporation known well to the world of cinephiles as an enemy due to their reluctance to carry films that weren’t “family-friendly” enough to contain their branding.  I was anxious to leave, and I soon did, spending the next dozen or so years working for various video rental establishments in which I didn’t have to wear a light-blue, long-sleeved golf shirt every time I checked into a shift.

To varying degrees, I have fond memories of all of my video store experiences, but my favorite store experience has always been working for Video Visions, located in the now-departed Prospect Mall on Milwaukee’s east side.  For those who weren’t in Milwaukee at the time, the Prospect Mall, which closed in 2006 and has since been replaced entirely by the Overlook apartments, was a bizarre cavalcade of businesses, including a few doctor’s offices, a movie theater, a book store (sometimes two), a couple of restaurants… and the greatest video store known to man.  Or at least to Milwaukee man.

Video Visions was the epitome of a ramshackle establishment that expended to fit the space as the business grew without any real regard for a grand plan.  Originally opened in 1982 as one storefront in the mall, the business had grown to three by the time I was hired in 1995, and the décor was a mishmash of styles and shelf types, with VHS tapes behind the counter towards the front and Laserdiscs and special orders in a separate, often-closed, room with a separate counter in the back.  (A 1984 photograph taken by an unnamed photographer at Wisconsin Step magazine speaks to their original layout – and even their availability of adult titles.)   

The organization of the store was, at best, questionable, with the VHS boxes not arranged in any order beyond genre, and even then, meaning nothing, as a title’s availability was only registered by the existence of a 3x5 card that represented the inventory number.  (These cards were often misfiled and frequently just vanished.)  The whole store hadn’t been fully dusted in years, and weekly vacuuming of the shag carpeting using an ancient model seemed to kick up more dust than was actually cleaned.  In short, it was a place that fit in perfectly with the pastiche of commerce that the Prospect Mall provided.

And I loved it.  As a video store that had been open since 1982, working at Video Visions was like being a part of video store history, as the owner, Jim Howard, never got rid of anything.  The depth of catalog was unimpeachable in the area, and easily surpassed the number of options afforded to current users of most streaming services.  The co-workers were fantastic, and bonding over the trials and tribulations of the customers and the store, coupled with the fact that Video Visions was essentially the resource for video on the east side of Milwaukee, made it a pleasure to come into work every shift.  Even if the pay was terrible.  And the place was a mess.  And some of the clients were kind of creepy.

Video Visions shut down in 2003, and Jim passed away in 2009, but I’ll always remember my time behind the counter of Video Visions.  I’ve worked at plenty of video stores, dealing with formats from Beta to Blu-ray, but Video Visions will always be the dingy retail establishment closest to my heart.

Released and Abandoned: The Podcast

There's more to me than just words on a page!  There are also words in your ears, which I provide via the "Released and Abandoned" podcast below.  Feel free to click play, sit back, relax, and listen to my dulcet tones discuss the issues with video store nostalgia.

Music: "Betamax Defender and the Vinyl Kid" at freesoundtrackmusic.com.

Schroedinger's VHS Tape and the enigma of STORM

I’ve owned a copy of STORM, a thriller that started filming in 1986, was completed in 1987, released to theaters in 1988 and finally issued on VHS in 1989, for years.  The label indicates that it once resided at Hollywood Video, so my guess is that I picked it up when that franchise was getting rid of all of their VHS tapes, allowing customers to fill a grocery bag of the bulky medium for twenty bucks.  My bizarre fascination with the film, however, dates back before that, as we carried the film amongst our thousands of other titles at my aforementioned workplace, Video Visions.  There’s nothing remarkable or noteworthy about the movie – it’s got a no-name cast, and outside of some decent cover art, there’s nothing in particular that would draw someone to the box in order to rent it.

That is, except for Patrick.

Patrick was a co-worker at Video Visions, and one of my favorite people to work alongside.  An eternally cheery person, Patrick could always be counted on to talk movies, and he had a wealth of knowledge about the store’s huge inventory.  And for some reason, he kept trying to get people to watch STORM.

It may not have been intended as a sincere recommendation.  It may have been a running joke that started long before I became employed there – Patrick may have watched the movie once out of curiosity and he may just mentioned it at first sarcastically, as though replying to a request for a recommendation with the most generic response possible.  If this was the case, this line had been long-since blurred, and any sense that the choice of STORM was meant ironically had been distorted.  As a result, Patrick would bring up STORM on several occasions, mildly suggesting that I watch it, without any real sense that the movie was either some unseen classic or that the recommendation was meant as a joke.  It was simply there, instilling in me a sense that STORM was a movie that was, in some way or another, worth seeing.

The whole time I worked at Video Visions, I never actually watched STORM.  I never gave in to Patrick’s advice, as I could never really tell if it was serious or not.  Part of this was out of uncertainty – what if I hated STORM and Patrick was being sincere in his recommendation?  Or worse, what if I loved it and Patrick had meant pointing out the film as an example of what not to do in a thriller?  There could be no guaranteed correct answer, so I never took the plunge.

I never even took the plunge years later, after I acquired the movie on VHS, long after I’d ceased working at Video Visions.  I purchased the film, sure, but just to have a copy, in case I ever wanted to take the plunge into knowing what this mysterious film was about.  (This proved to be a good idea, as the film has never surfaced on DVD or on any streaming service – the 1989 release via a struggling Cannon Films may prove to be the film’s final resting place.)  It would take up space in my collection for years, a Schroedinger’s VHS Tape that was both a great, underrated thriller and a bland, unremarkable footnote in my eyes, the tape itself untouched by VCR heads for decades.  The tape itself looked brand new, so it’s certainly possible that even when available for rental at Hollywood Video, it never left the shelf.

Until last night.

Yesterday evening, I decided to end the mystery.  I popped the VHS copy of STORM into my VCR and let it play.  And I understood.

Patrick was messing with me.

STORM is an unremarkable Canadian thriller directed by David Winning, who would later helm TURBO: A POWER RANGERS MOVIE.  The plot concerns a pair of college lads who decide to go camping, only to have their truck break down in the middle of the forest, where they spot a trio of elderly men digging up the score for a bank heist made 40 years ago.  The rest of the film features the former robbers facing off against the two teenagers, running around the forest and occasionally having hallucinations.

That’s all there is to the film, and when I discovered thatit’s based on a short that the director had made in 1979, I wasn’t the least bit surprised, as it feels like a 30-minute film stretched out to feature length.  There are long dream sequences that establish nothing.  There is lots of running around in the forest.  There’s a set-up involving the two kids being into a simulated hunting game that doesn’t really amount to anything.  (The VHS box, in fact, compares the movie to the paintball-espionage thriller GOTCHA!, which it’s nothing like.)  It’s a slow, if not particularly bad, film – I wonder what the original 79-minute cut was like before the producers made the director tack on an extra 20 minutes for no good reason.

There’s nothing, however, that really makes STORM particularly noteworthy, leading me to believe that Patrick’s strange obsession with it was merely a long-term personal gag.  I completely understand this – I’ve got a bizarre fascination with 1991’s horror pic DEMON WIND even though there’s basically nothing special about it. 

Of course, I could still be missing something.  Or maybe the secret to STORM was relegated to that particular incarnation of VHS tape, the one that gathered dust in an east side Milwaukee video store for over a decade before vanishing to parts unknown, and another copy of the cassette, maintained by a giant conglomerate of home video, could never hope to recapture its magic.  Or maybe, just maybe, STORM is just a boring movie with some decent cover art that happened to strike a co-worker’s fancy for no discernable reason.  

Patrick, if you’re out there, send me an explanation.

THE HOUSEKEEPER and the close relationship thrillers of the '80s and '90s

The ‘80s and ‘90s were a time of thrillers, and one of the most prominent subgenres of thrillers in the era were those in which a person with whom an audience member may have normal contact with on a regular basis was secretly a psychopath intent on killing everyone around them.  These thrillers were usually given a minimalist title, describing the association to our leads – THE STEPFATHER started it all, but the likes of THE TEMP, THE PAPERBOY, THE CRUSH, THE SECRETARY, THE SISTER-IN-LAW, THE EX and THE BANKER soon followed.  (The genre soon petered out with the desperate THE GREENSKEEPER and THE CATCHER, thankfully sparing us the sight of a latte-slinging murderer in THE BARRISTA.)  Sure, some films in the genre had slightly more imaginative titles (witness SINGLE WHITE FEMALE and THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE), but the formula was the same: A stranger inserts themselves into our hero or heroine’s life, they become a trusted confidant, and soon dead bodies start showing up whenever someone comes between our titular character and the protagonist.

1986’s THE HOUSEKEEPER would fit neatly into this mold, had it not originally been shot under the title A JUDGMENT IN STONE, taken from the Edgar Award-winning Ruth Rendall novel on which it was based.  Produced in Canada  by Castle Hill productions (whose output regularly lined the video store shelves in VHS form, but has mostly been relegated to obscurity), the film certainly features several standard thriller tropes, but there’s enough intriguing twists and commentary on social constructs in order to set it above the standard straight-to-video fare.  It’s not too surprising that the same material was used again less than a decade later, when French thriller director Claude Chabrol adapted the story in 1995 for the significantly artier LA CEREMONIE.  

THE HOUSEKEEPER stars British ‘60s icon Rita Tushingham as Eunice, an embittered woman who suffocates her abusive father via pillow in the opening scene.  Feigning ignorance as to his death, she’s soon on her way from Great Britain to America (the Canadian setting is never specified nor hidden) to work for an upper-middle class couple with two children, both from the couple’s previous marriages.  The family, however, is not aware of Eunice’s secret – due to undiagnosed dyslexia, she never learned to read, and becomes increasingly frustrated when confronted with her own limitations.

While continuing to be aloof with the family in order to hide her illiteracy, she befriends local postal shop employee Joan, played to the hilt by Canadian character actress Jackie Burroughs.  Joan is a reformed prostitute, who has struck back against sin to the extent of religious zealotry, and her slow influence of Eunice preys on her already-fragile psyche.  After a slow build, the film climaxes in a scene of brutal violence, in which “class warfare” takes on a very literal meaning.

Most reviews of the film weren’t quite sure what to make of the film, and it’s true that it’s a bit of a mess.  The directorial debut (and, to date, swan song) of well-regarded cinematographer Ousama Rawi , the film has a very “made-for-television” feel to it, one that New York Times reviewer Vincent Canby mentions.  The plotting, however, is sound, and the performances of Tushingham and Burroughs make the film rise above your standard THE BLANK-styled thriller.  It’s no surprise that the film ended up being a mid-afternoon basic cable staple for years – it’s exactly the sort of film that’s perfect to fold laundry while watching.

And honestly, that's perfect for exactly the type of movie it is.  I love the "close relationship thriller" genre partially because it sticks with convention to the point of familiarity.  There's something deeply comforting about a genre whose staples you know so well that it almost lulls you to sleep - and that you don't feel like you missed anything if you dozed off for a moment or two.