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.

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.