I wonder how true film snobs feel about the current moment in restoration & distribution. In past decades, Janus Films & The Criterion Collection were the standard-bearers for cinephilic home media, putting a heavy emphasis on getting classic art films into customers’ living rooms before they were lost to time. Nowadays, that effort has been overrun by a gang of boutique distribution labels that produce high-gloss prints of low-class genre schlock, best represented by Vinegar Syndrome’s dozens of genre-specific sublabels and its pornographic sister company Mélusine. Instead of collecting the cleanest scans possible of masterworks by the likes of Bresson, Godard, and Buñuel, modern cinephiles spend hundreds of dollars hunting down pristine copies of bargain-bin martial arts novelties, shot-on-video slashers, and vintage narrative pornos. I am not complaining. Personally, I love that there’s a Blu-ray company that specializes in every disreputable subgenre you can name, catering to an increasingly niche clientele of antisocial freaks (myself included), but I also imagine there’s a silent class of classic film snobs out there distraught by the sordid state of things.

To see some of that old-fashioned film snobbery in action, I recommend returning to its roots in retro video store culture, as represented in the 1987 cult curio Video Violence. It’s a shot-on-video horror film about a video store owner who’s disgusted with his gorehound clientele, directed by a real-life video store clerk who was disgusted with his gorehound clientele. For classic film snobs, it’s a cathartic screed against the scumbag schlock gobblers who overrepresent low-brow genre trash in the all-important Film Canon of great works. For the horror nerds  actually likely to watch it, it’s the filmic equivalent of getting smacked on the snout with a rolled-up newspaper. For the vast majority of us who fall somewhere between those polar extremes, it’s a documentary relic of 80s video store culture, with lengthy explanations of video-return drop boxes, membership cards, late fees, and the democratizing nature of the display shelf (wherein when a customer requests “that chainsaw movie” they’re handed a copy of Pieces, not the more obvious Tobe Hooper classic). At a time when retro hipster video stores like L.A.’s Vidiots (or, locally, Future Shock) are making headlines and Alex Ross Perry is constructing feature-length essay films entirely out of video store representation in pre-existing films (Videoheaven), that temporal snapshot of 80s video stores in their prime is just as essential as documenting the film nerd-culture bickering that terrorized their aisles.

Gary Schwartz stars as director Gary Cohen’s onscreen surrogate, a disgruntled cinephile who used to program art cinema in an New York City repertory theater and now finds himself renting out video tapes to local yokels with no discerning taste. He’s trapped in small-town America, where everyone is an anti-social loner with a VCR, frustrated that his customers would rather watch cheap-o horror movies or “the occasional triple X’r” in the privacy of their own homes than chat about “the Woody Allen or a classic Abbot & Costello” with the knowledgeable store clerk. Hosting a podcast would have fixed him. Instead, he grows increasingly disgusted with the mouthbreathing ghouls he peddles tapes to, especially once they start returning home-made tapes to the store instead of the professional movies they rented. Several mysterious blank tapes land on the poor movie buff’s counter, which he soon discovers are real-life snuff films made by the gorehound townies, torturing & dismembering outsiders who don’t fit in with the local culture. Of course, he foolishly investigates these horrific deaths on a vigilante mission and eventually becomes a videotaped victim himself, with his humble video store ultimately run as a co-op by the bloodthirsty freaks who used to come to him for their gore flicks before they started making their own.

The only thing Video Violence hates more than its audience is itself. While describing the mysterious snuff tapes to his incredulous wife, our video-store-clerk-in-peril explains that he knows the violence in them is real because it’s all shot on video, likening the production values of that format to soap operas & TV commercials, not a proper film. Its most hateful “fuck you” to its audience is a scene in which a customer asks whether a horror film titled Blood Cult is rated R for violence or for nudity, since she’s only willing to show it to her young children if there’s no nudity. So, when the staged snuff footage then lingers on grotesque shot-on-video violence—like a human arm being processed by a deli slicer or a basement sadist giving his screaming stab victim a bloody kiss—it feels like being potty trained by having your face shoved into your own piss. You can absolutely feel the difference between this self-hating, “Is this what you sick fucks want?” approach to video gore vs. the more self-indulgent, guilty-pleasure gore of Lucio Fulci’s Cat in the Brain, which delivers the same goods with introspection rather than revulsion. Video Violence is a movie made by a classic cinephile who’s disgusted with what’s been done to his artform of choice, and I imagine that sentiment is still lurking out there somewhere in the ether now that the vintage-schlock lunatics are running the boutique-label asylum.

-Brandon Ledet