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Video Diary of a Lost Girl (2012)

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It never pays off to be the first person to do something. Lindsay Denniberg’s 2012 feature debut Video Diary of a Lost Girl is a prescient collection of everything that’s hip & trending in genre filmmaking circles right now: VHS tapes as fetish-object collectibles, the burgeoning nostalgia for shot-on-video slasher textures, the black-box theatricality of Grace Glowicki’s Gothic horror throwback Dead Lover, the green-screen psychedelia of Vera Drew’s copyright-testing personal essay The People’s Joker, etc. If Video Diary of a Lost Girl were currently making the theatrical rounds in our new warped-VHS genre nerd dystopia, it would be humming with film nerd buzz, and Denniberg would be enjoying the same kind of Extremely Online microcelebrity of current cult directors like Matt Farley, Amanda Kramer, and Jennifer Reeder. Hopefully, its recent Blu-ray release through AGFA will help correct that oversight, as Denniberg’s time is very much now, after spending a decade tapping her foot in the horror schlock waiting room.

Pris McEver stars as the relatively young, immortal succubus Louise, self-named after the silent movie star Louise Brooks (who also inspired the name of Denniberg’s production company, Pandora’s Talk Box). Louise first saw the Old Hollywood star of the original Diary of a Lost Girl in the initial 1929 theatrical run for Pandora’s Box, when she was first starting out as a succubus and a cinephile. Nearly a century later, her cinephilia has continued through her slacker job as a VHS rental clerk, and her supernatural function as a succubus has continued through her routine acts of rape revenge. In this movie’s lore, all succubi are descendants of the Biblical figure Lilith, and they need to kill once a month by fucking a man to death in order to prevent bleeding out in the “unending bloodshed” of a lethal menstruation cycle. Louise has no drive to kill, really, but she does get horny and does want to keep on living (if not only to make time to watch more vintage horror movies), so she targets the neverending supply of street rapists who seemingly lurk in every alley between her job & home. The trouble is that she eventually falls in love with a boy she genuinely wants to fuck without hurting, and he may be the very same lover she first fell for and lost in her early silent cinema days, reincarnated.

At its heart, Video Diary of a Lost Girl is a supernatural romcom that just happens to be decorated with classic horror references. Not only is Louise’s apartment wallpapered with posters for cinematic provocations like Liquid Sky, American Psycho, and Anatomy of Hell, but she also spends most of her time on the clock watching public-domain horror classics like Carnival of Souls, Nosferatu, and Night of the Living Dead instead of, you know, actually working. Stylistically, Denniberg splits the difference between the German Expressionist fantasia of old and the straight-to-Tubi horror schlock of now. The whole thing is gloriously, grotesquely cheap, playing like what might happen if Annie Sprinkle directed a vampire movie. Every surface is bathed in blacklight fluorescents. Onscreen menstruate glows like red-glitter TV static. All exterior spaces are set in a greenscreen version of Stephen Sayaidan’s Dr. Caligari sets. Characters often sit around doing nothing in particular while the soundtrack is overpowered by spooky goth bedroom pop. It’s all just an excuse to watch video store occultists surf the channels of public-domain horror relics and scrambled-cable porno while, against all odds, falling in love.

Within the opening few seconds of psychedelic video-art color swirls and tongue-in-cheek gratuitous nudity, audiences should know whether Video Diary of a Lost Girl is a friend or foe to their sensibilities. There are plenty of buzzy, hip counterculture touchstones of recent years that indicate the movie has a sizeable cult audience waiting out there, though, however dormant. The problem is that those touchstones didn’t yet exist in 2012, so Denniberg was essentially shouting into the digital void. That’s a common story for underground filmmakers & outsider artists, most of whom don’t get this kind of decade-late victory lap, no matter how deserved.

-Brandon Ledet

Stigmata (1991)

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One of the easiest ways to evoke dread in a horror film is to fake a found-footage cassette tape, recoiling from the flat digital textures of modern cameras to instead seek shelter in the spooky analog media of old. Two of this year’s buzziest horror titles rely heavily on that aesthetic cheat-code to varying levels of success; both Together & Bring Her Back explain the practical step-by-step details of their respective supernatural rituals via vintage camcorder recordings made by the cults who practice them. It’s the kind of haunted-media aura that you’d assume was earned over time, the way that scratchy old records, faded celluloid, and dusty children’s toys become creepy as they degrade but were considered innocuous when fresh. Camcorder video is different, though. Like with Polaroids, homemade video tapes were immediately understood to have a creepy aura, since their production in private, unregulated spaces could document all kinds of unspeakable evils with relative impunity. You can especially feel it in the video-art experiments of No Wave filmmaker Beth B, whose early projects like “Belladonna,” “Hysteria,” and “Thanatopsis” layered eerie camcorder video footage over horrific text pulled from Sigmund Freud, Nazi scientists and, perhaps the most extreme of all, Lydia Lunch. The real shock among those video-art experiments is how much her mid-length 40min feature Stigmata uses the exact same editing tricks as recent horrors like Together & Bring Her Back, interrupting its central narrative with shocks of contextless camcorder footage, evoking evil without ever fully explaining it. That’s not a newly creepy aspect to camcorder footage that was earned over time, like the spooky toy telephone & Fleischer cartoon broadcasts of Skinamarink. It was integral to the medium from the very beginning.

The core of Stigmata is more PBS special than analog horror. Beth B interviews six recovering heroin addicts about their lifelong personal struggles in the same black-void studio space you’d expect to see on a talk show like Charlie Rose (or, more charitably, a Marlon Riggs video). “Brutal honesty” doesn’t begin to cover the candidness of these interviews, which detail the personal, familial, and medical circumstances that lure people into hard drug addiction. Subjects explain at length how shooting heroin can be an act of self-medication, an escape from the prison of everyday life, and a relatively healthy alternative to suicide. Their struggles with the drug are confrontationally foregrounded, so that the entire screen is filled with the pain on their faces as they each recall their respective rock bottoms. The only relief valve Beth B offers the audience is occasional cutaways to unexplained home video footage that I assume was shot on vacation in coastal Europe, most likely Italy. These interstitials’ relationship to the addict interviews might mean something personally significant to the director, but that connection is left open for the audience to ponder. The title “stigmata” evokes the near-religious ecstasy of heroin use, which Beth B emphasizes by superimposing the opening credits over what appears to be an Old-World basilican dome. The subsequent interviews drag that ecstasy down to the physical level of holes being punched into bodies, while other camcorder cutaways stir up more horror than transcendence or peace. Beth B is especially fixated on the image of a stone window leading out to a seaside village, accompanied by unexplained sirens in the distance. The more that image repeats, the more sinister it becomes, as if it were found footage recovered from a self-documented suicide. The camera and its unseen operator never leap from that window, but the tension of the image never relaxes, and its ambiguous juxtaposition with the interviews make the whole project feel like a cursed object.

Self-billed as “a film/tape by Beth B,” Stigmata is included on Kino Lorber’s collection of the director’s solo works, titled Sex, Power, and Money. Along with her early reality-TV experiment Visiting Desire and her sleazy dance-club music video for “The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight,” it registers as the one of the most substantial titles on the set. Other shorts included there play with the same juxtaposition of confessional dialogue and video-art menace in more naked terms. “Belladonna” mixes found texts from Sigmund Freud case histories and war crime reports from the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele with triple-exposed images of urban transportation in modern NYC. “Hysteria” similarly clashes outdated case reports from patriarchal gynecologists throughout history with confessional interviews in which modern women critique their own naked bodies, presented as headless reflections in an unseen mirror. “Thanatopsis” illustrates a Lydia Lunch spoken-word piece about macho violence with domestic images of the punk-scene performance artist lounging in her apartment. Those are exceedingly strict formal experiments compared to Stigmata, which is less academically declarative in its own methods. The relationship between the intimate confessions of addiction and the anonymous found-footage B-roll is much trickier to define, leaving it open to more poetic interpretation. There is a sinister energy that hums underneath all of Beth B’s solo video work (except in “The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight,” of course, which is purely a party), but Stigmata stands out as the one that fully understood the evil power of its medium. It interjects home-video camcorder footage into its main narrative in the exact way that modern horror films do, establishing the visual language of current mainstream genre cinema in art-gallery experimental spaces decades ago. Beth B may be better remembered for collaborations with fellow no-waver Scott B on narrative titles like Vortex, but her solo documentary work convincingly verges on something new & lasting in its own right.

-Brandon Ledet

Video Violence (1987)

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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

Kim’s Video (2024)

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In the new documentary about the lost & recovered legacy of the cinephilic wet-dream video store Kim’s Video, narrator & co-director David Redmon surveys the current tenants of the building that used to house Kim’s famed collection of rare tapes & DVDs.  On the first floor, there’s a barcade; on the second, a gym; on the third & fourth, a karaoke restaurant.  These businesses that have physically replaced Kim’s storefront are presented as evidence of some great cultural loss and the emptiness of our current capitalist dystopia.  I’m not so convinced.  If anything, it’s somewhat comforting to know that the location was taken over by other small businesses that all have a strong social aspect built into their trade.  In a big picture sense, there’s really not all that much actual cultural difference between a video store & a barcade; they just service slightly different customer base of hopeless nerds.  Who knows, there might even be a future documentary in the works about the weirdos who regularly meet at that barcade and consider it their subcultural refuge from the unforgiving chaos of the Big City outside.  Maybe there’s a high pinball score on one of that bar’s machines that means a lot to those weirdos the same way a bootleg VHS of Godard’s Historie(s) du Cinéma would mean a lot to me. 

There are two reasons Kim’s Video is afforded a hagiographic spotlight that’s unlikely to be repeated for the workout gym that’s replaced its second floor.  The most obvious reason is that it was located in a large enough city to support a strong repertory cinema scene.  Thousands of aspiring filmmakers, NYU academics, and gorehound punks frequented the store in its pre-streaming heyday, finding access to a much larger, more adventurous library than what most American VCR owners could pick up at the nearest Blockbuster.  The documentary namedrops the Coen Brothers as former Kim’s Video members as a signal to the store’s historical importance, but the picture is much better sketched out by the slate of New York rep scenesters it gathers for testimonials.  Alex Ross Perry, Sean Price Williams, Eric Hynes . . . Its talking-heads cast list reads like a typical panel of guests for the Film Comment podcast.  The other major reason the store matters to inner-circle cinephiles is that the store’s owner, Yongman Kim, is one of them.  A failed filmmaker turned successful businessman, Kim made superheroic efforts to amass the best-curated video library in the world, out of love for the art and love for the hunt.

A lesser documentary might have stopped after collecting a few interviews about how great Kim’s Video was and profiling the eponymous Kim, who was coldly mysterious to the store’s members & employees.  A lot of its nostalgia waxing about the bootlegs & rare tapes Kim collected in the store ends early on, but after you catch a glimpse of the owner’s own rare feature film as a director (a post-Tarantino crime picture about a monk who spies on a teenage sex worker through a peephole, titled One-Third), you kinda get the sense that he’s just another dweeb who’s obsessed with movies.  He just happens to be tall & handsome as well, which makes him an anomaly on the scene.  Short of cataloging the 10,000 videos left in the Kim’s Video collection through a nonstop slideshow, it’s worrisome that there’s nothing left for the movie to accomplish just a few minutes in.  Thankfully, the mission shifts from that point to launching a David Farrier-style investigative piece about where, exactly, the collection ended up after the store closed.  Most of the rest of the documentary is relocated from NYC to Salemi, Italy, a small Sicilian village where the video collection was relocated in full.  I won’t spoil how the story develops after that expansion in scope, but it does include enough mafia threats, heist planning, and political intrigue to justify in-crowd New Yorkers making a feature-length documentary about their favorite video store.

Admittedly, the hunt for and return of the famed Kim’s Video library gets legitimately juicy as its story escalates, but a lot of this falls neatly into two familiar categories of mediocre pop media docs: the good kind (a montage of clips & posters of better movies to watch later) and the bad kind (navel-gazing diaries from a nerd who finds themself more interesting than the audience does).  The biggest hurdle in appreciating Kim’s Video as its own standalone movie is warming up to David Redmon’s personality.  He maintains a Michael Moore-style omnipresence onscreen, so that all of the film’s observations about the importance of cinematic preservation are heavily filtered through his specific POV.  It’s clear that Redmon loves Movies, but his personal version of cinephilia ultimately just isn’t all that interesting.  He has a strong handle on what qualifies as The Canon (frequently citing Godard, Hitchcock, Scorsese, Varda, and all the other usual suspects), but you can find The Canon in most public & university libraries.  When it comes to the obscure microgenre relics that made Kim’s collection special, he’s much spottier.  A stray title like Dream Demon or Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger will occasionally interrupt the endless parade of clips from Intro to Film 101 standards like Bicycle Thieves, Blow-up, and I am Cuba, but you get the sense that they’re only important to the documentary because they’re important to Redmon; they’re the ones he happened to rent from Kim’s or happened to catch on late-night cable as a child.  All of the grimier horror, porn, and experimental titles that you could exclusively find on the shelves at Kim’s only appear as VHS covers, indicating that Redmon only finds them interesting for their surface aesthetics.

The real shortcoming, though, is not in which clips Redmon and co-director Ashley Sabin select to illustrate their international movie heist; it’s how those clips are introduced.  It’s not enough for them to juxtapose images of Charles Foster Kane’s collection of treasures with the treasure vault of Kim’s video tapes.  Redmon also has to explicitly state out loud that looking at the collection reminds him of a scene from Citizen Kane.  It’s already a little on the nose for them to include clips from The Godfather to illustrate his travels to Sicily, but Redmon still feels a need to verbally explain the connection in narration.  Not only is that presentation a little clunky, but it also suggests that Redmon doesn’t fully trust in the visual medium he professes to love so much, or he doesn’t fully understand it.  I shouldn’t pick on him too much, though.  He loves Movies, so do I, and so do the other former Kim’s Video members who’d be curious to watch this and find out what happened to the treasure trove of rare tapes that used to be stored just a few subway stops away from their cramped apartments.  The documentary is ultimately a communal celebration, and Redmon & Sabin deserve kudos for turning that celebration into an entertaining story instead of a purely self-indulgent memorial for one small cultural access point among many.  I don’t know that its entertaining yarn about the recovery of Kim’s tapes is ultimately more valuable than the inevitable Letterboxd list that will catalog every title in the current collection, but it’s at least more entertaining to me, personally, than a documentary about a very special membership gym would be.

-Brandon Ledet

Dr. Otto and the Riddle of the Gloom Beam (1985)

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Much like nu-metal, Crocs, and exposed-thong whale tail, it appears that VHS tapes are hip again.  There’s already been widespread aesthetic nostalgia for the tape-warp wear & tear of vintage VHS tapes in horror cinema from the past decade or so, as evidenced in titles like Late Night with the Devil, WNUF Halloween Special, Rent-a-Pal, Beyond the Gates, Censor, V/H/S, and VHYes.  But now I’m starting to see more appreciation for the physical tapes themselves, not just digital simulation of their degradation.  Soon after the old-school video store Future Shock opened in Mid-City, renting both VHS tapes and VCR players, I attended an unrelated screening of the classic 1987 slasher The Stepfather at The Mudlark Theatre, projected from VHS to a hanging bedsheet.  At the start of the movie, the audience warmly chuckled at the tape’s brief tracking issues and the projector’s struggle to calibrate its fuzzy image quality, but that attention to format eventually gave way to sincere tension & unease.  It was a genuine 1990s sleepover atmosphere, as if we had snuck an R-rated movie past our sleeping parents.  It was also very likely the first time I’ve watched a movie on VHS in almost a decade (specifically, since we covered Highway to Hell for Movie of the Month in 2015), since that’s around the time I gave away my VCRs because they all kept eating my tapes.

You don’t have to go to bootleg repertory screenings at Marigny puppet theatres to get in on the VHS nostalgia wave, though.  While the collection & exhibition of physical VHS tapes is the domain of only a few true sickos, plenty movie nerds are exposed to VHS scans on a regular basis without intentionally looking for them.  Anyone who regularly spends time searching YouTube, Tubi, Archive.org, and thrift-store DVD stacks for cheap-access cinema has been subjected to a deluge of sub-professional digi scans of VHS tapes, which are just as rampant now in the golden age of boutique Blu-ray restorations as they ever have been.  Consider the curious case of Dr. Otto and the Riddle of the Gloom Beam, a 1985 comedy that had an initial theatrical release on celluloid, but is unavailable for streaming in HD.  All official, legal uploads of the film to sites like Tubi, Freevee, and PlutoTV are the same scan of a vintage VHS cassette, since the film was a much bigger hit as a video store rental than it was as a theatrical release.  That’s likely because the VHS cover dared to advertise the appearance of the popular character Ernest P. Worrell, despite the fact that his last-minute inclusion in the film is essentially a celebrity cameo.  In theaters, The Riddle of the Gloom Beam was an anonymous, immediately forgotten comedy starring some nobody named Jim Varney.  In video stores, it lingered on the shelves for years, boosted its official branding as An Ernest Movie.  Even now, it’s still a kind of VHS rental, just one that’s untethered from a physical presence.

Dr. Otto and the Riddle of the Gloom Beam officially marks the first big-screen appearance of Ernest P. Worrell, the fast-talking Southern fool who’s always mugging directly to the camera and addressing the audience as his good friend “Vern”.  Before he was camping, slam-dunking, saving Christmas, going to jail, and getting scared stupid in his career-making star vehicles, Ernest was a recurring character in a series of 1980s television commercials directed by John Cherry, starring rubber-faced comedian Jim Varney.  Cherry (from Nashville) & Varney (from Kentucky) mostly sold their Ernest ads to the Louisiana & Mississippi at first, but the popularity of the character spread wide enough nationally that they figured they could cash in with a legitimate feature film.  Ernest was only one of Varney’s many stock characters, though; longtime Varney Heads will surely recall fellow ad-break mainstay Auntie Nelda, Varney’s old-biddy drag act with a perpetually sprained neck.  Instead of capitalizing on the popularity of Ernest in particular, Cherry & Varney chose to use The Riddle of the Gloom Beam as a showcase for every character Varney had in his comedic repertoire, giving the actor room to test-run a bunch of vague, go-nowhere archetypes like Evil German Scientist, Australian Militia Maniac, Filthy Pirate, and Literal Trash Monster, along with playing the hits.  It’s less comedically specific than the official Ernest movies as a result, working more like a sketch comedy revue than a feature film.

The titular Dr. Otto is, of course, a Varney creation: a broad mad-scientist character costumed with a living human hand for a hat.  The evil lair where he regularly attempts world domination looks like what might happen if Rita Repulsa couldn’t afford to pay the light bill, but it’s lavishly decorated with a wide range of evildoer machines that don’t do any evil thing in particular except light up & smoke.  His first plan of attack is fairly agreeable, using his “gloom beam” machine to erase all official records of debt, throwing banks & credit card companies into chaos, to the point where CEOs are putting revolvers in their mouths onscreen in what’s ostensibly a children’s film.  Later, he threatens to use the gloom beam to kill all the world’s first-born children like a Biblical plague, but let’s not focus too much on that plot point.  Instead, let’s all boo & hiss at the hero that the banks & government nominate to take Dr. Otto down: a square-jawed American patriot named Lance Sterling (Myke Mueller), Dr. Otto’s childhood rival.  In flashback, we witness the disturbing difference between Lance’s privileged, WASPy upbringing and Dr. Otto’s miserable life in the gutter, which only encourages us to root for the mad scientist as he seeks revenge on the planet.  That’s what makes it okay to cheer on the many disguises he takes in the present—including crowd favorites Ernest & Nelda—as they do objectively evil things to prevent the squeaky-clean hero from saving the day.

None of the individual jokes or visual gags in The Riddle of the Gloom Beam are especially funny, but the movie is charming anyway.  It’s high-energy, low-budget independent filmmaking, making up for a lot of the dead air between failed bits with aggressive music-video editing tactics and handmade arts & crafts ingenuity.  It’s also incredibly dark considering the average age of its target audience.  If nothing else, it’s got to be the only children’s film I’ve ever seen include a minutes-long Deer Hunter parody, making for two visual references to suicide by gun.  When I was a kid, television and the video store were cultural democratizers.  Jim Carrey & Robin Williams may have had more legitimate, widespread distribution in brick & mortar movie theaters, but Varney was their professional equal in my mind at the time, thanks to then-lifelong exposure to Ernest ads & videos in the Southern market where he hit heaviest.  If The Riddle of the Gloom Beam had any chance of earning cult-classic status, it would’ve needed a lot more Ernest content instead of flooding the screen with Varney’s lesser-known comedic personae (despite those characters’ later appearances on his short-lived CBS sketch show Hey Vern, It’s Ernest!).  Cherry & Varney soon figured that out in better-remembered titles like Ernest Goes to Jail & Ernest Scared Stupid, which have a much more distinct comedic personality than this early outing even if they don’t match its creative, try-anything energy.  Thus, The Riddle of the Gloom Beam is the exact kind of title that belongs on VHS; it would feel sacrilegious to watch it in any updated format, since it’s such a relic of its era.  And in a way, that makes Tubi just as hip and plugged-in to The Moment as your local underground video stores and D.I.Y. neighborhood rep screenings (as long as you politely ignore the fact that the company is owned by Rupert Murdoch).

-Brandon Ledet

Censor (2021)

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I am greatly excited by the return of the New Orleans Film Festival this month, since I’m finally feeling confident enough about the city’s vaccination rates to attend a few screenings in person (as opposed to last year, when I watched Undine at an outdoor screening and the rest of the fest on my couch).  There’s a total immersion in low-budget, scrappy art films that I only experience at festivals, where I emerge forgetting what a well-funded, market-tested studio film even looks like.  My standards of quality shift from questions of technical craft to genuine engagement with films’ intents & ideas.  I imagine most of the ecstatic praise for the nostalgia-poisoned horror indie Censor was a circumstance of that immersion in the Film Festival Brainspace.  Censor premiered to strong reviews at this year’s Sundance (the festival that’s most notorious for hyping up films that play much cooler once they reach the wider public), but it’s proven to be divisive & middling as its distribution has spread in the months since – culminating in a quiet streaming release on Hulu this Halloween season.  Imagining myself in Film Fest Brainspace, it’s easy to see how that hype deflated so quietly.  It’s a movie with strong ideas, weak execution, and a stunner of an ending that leaves you on a memorable high note despite the hour of tedium that precedes it.  I assume that if I had seen Censor in a festival environment, I’d be much more gleeful about its merits myself.  Watching it at home amidst a flood of other horror indie streamers this October, however, I’m struggling to drum up that enthusiasm.

If nothing else, it’s easy to see how Censor landed such a high-profile distribution deal while so many other high-concept horrors on its budget level never make it past festival programs.  It’s got a killer hook.  Niamh Algar stars as a 1980s film censor during the UK’s “video nasties” panic, spending most of her days watching (and rejecting for public consumption) over-the-top gore gags & simulated acts of misogynist violence.  Never mind the anachronism of British film censors actually watching the horror movies they banned in order to Save the Children, as opposed to glancing at VHS covers and making a snap judgement based on the title & artwork.  The movie is more of an intimate character study about this one specific film censor rather than a history lesson on her profession.  She is haunted by scenes & performances in the films she screens not because of their brutality, necessarily, but because they evoke long-buried childhood memories of her sister’s mysterious disappearance (and likely murder).  Questions of how “real” these connections between the violent art she watches and the violence of her life are remain unanswered.  Instead, we lose sight of the boundaries between art & reality altogether alongside our doomed protagonist, until those two versions of the “truth” directly battle for supremacy at the film’s thrilling, psychedelic climax.  The murder mystery portion of the plot directly recalls the art-imitating-life murders of the similarly styled Knife+Heart—a daunting comparison to overcome—but the video nasty setting & aesthetic help distinguish it enough for it to feel like its own thing.

My main roadblock to fully loving Censor is one that a lot of low-budget festival entries suffer; it just doesn’t have enough going on to justify being a full-length feature.  Even with a delicious 80min runtime, this takes way too long to get where it’s going.  There’s a version of this movie where its anti-heroine’s quiet brooding and hazy childhood flashbacks create a throathold tension on the audience, but in the version we got they just feel like treading water.  The reality-meltdown finale is a stunner (as long as you can stay awake long enough to get there), but I enjoyed the destination more than the journey, which is never a good sign.  The movie is okay over all but great in flashes, inviting you to assess it on its ideas alone instead of its execution of those ideas, which is the quintessential film festival experience.  I did not attend this year’s Sundance Film Festival—either online or in person—so I did not get the perfect Censor experience.  Personally, I cannot wait to “discover” and overpraise some misshapen, almost-great indie at NOFF once my own critical facilities are overpowered by Film Fest Brain.  I wish I could live in that loopy brainspace all year-round.

-Brandon Ledet

Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project (2019)

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I remember when the news of Marion Stokes’s death made headlines because of her massive home-recorded VHS collection. At least, I recall the news of that self-produced library being absorbed by the Internet Archive in San Francisco years later, where its unparalleled immensity first became evident. For three consecutive decades, the seemingly anonymous, obsessive woman simultaneously recorded multiple television news networks on 70,000 VHS cassettes. In the hands of a media watchdog organization or an avant-garde digital artist, this project might have been contextualized as a radical act of persevering history. From a non-publicized, self-funded effort from an unknown, private citizen, however, it was treated more as a sign of mental illness. The inherent value of Marion Stokes’s D.I.Y. archive is instantly recognizable to anyone with a passing interest in pop culture preservation – especially given the scope & consistency of her efforts – but the discussion around what she accomplished was initially framed as an unintended byproduct in the life of a hoarder & a crackpot. Recorder, a new documentary that attempts to clarify who Stokes was and why she created such a labor-intensive archive, is an essential corrective to those misinformed assumptions. This movie vindicates Marion Stokes as an absolute fucking genius who know exactly what she was doing, even when those closest to her didn’t have a clue.

I don’t mean to suggest that Stokes’s characterizations as a reclusive eccentric and a hoarder are entirely inaccurate. Her obsessive collection of television news broadcasts extended to other, less uniquely valuable “archives” of furniture she liked, Apple computer products, books, and the tell-tale Achilles heel of many hoarders: newspapers & magazines. It’s just entirely unfair & disingenuous to suggest that Stokes did not understand the full value of her D.I.Y. television news broadcast archive, which was very much a deliberately political & academic project of her own design. At one time in her early life as an ideologically combative idealist, Stokes worked as a legitimate, professional librarian in NYC. Her political associations with Socialist and Communist organizations in the 1950s eventually locked her out of that work, as she was effectively backlisted for her leftist ideals. Her interest in broadcast television as a powerful ideological communication tool began with later appearances on a local roundtable panel discussion show called Input, where she was a regular pundit as a political organizer in the 60s & 70s. Recording & preserving a physical archive of TV news broadcasts became a personal interest to her since even the primordial days of Betamax, but it was the news coverage of the Iranian hostage crisis in the late 70s that really kicked her diligent recording into high gear. As coverage of the event evolved from news to propaganda, she became fascinated by the way TV news was reshaping & repackaging facts in real time – something that would extend to how American crises like police brutality, the War on Terror, and the AIDS epidemic would be covered in the future. This was not some unplanned hoarder’s tic that blindly stumbled into cultural relevance; it was a purposefully political act from the start.

You could easily assemble a hundred distinctly fascinating documentaries out of this one rogue librarian’s archive. Stokes’s tapes are a bottomless treasure trove for an editing room tinkerer, which leads to some truly stunning moments here – particularly in a sequence that demonstrates in real time how all TV news coverage was gradually consumed by the tragedy of 9/11. As this D.I.Y. archive is an extensive cultural record of American society over the past thirty years, the list of trends & topics that could be explored in their own full-length documentaries are only as limited as an editor’s imagination. Recorder does excellent work as a primer on the cultural wealth archived in those VHS tapes (which have since been digitized), as it both explores larger ideas of how media reflects society back to itself and does full justice to the rogue political activist who did dozens & dozens of people’s work by assembling it. The film doesn’t shy away from acknowledging that the project became an escapist & dissociative mechanism for the increasingly reclusive Stokes as the years went on, but it also makes it explicitly clear that she knew the full value of what she was preserving well before anyone else validated her efforts. Was Marion Stokes paranoid that America was being taken over the by the Nazi Right, that the media was systemically racist in how it contextualized police brutality, that all of this raw cultural record would be lost by television networks that claimed they were archiving their own material? Or was she an incredibly perceptive activist who’d be proven right on all those counts, given enough time? Recorder is a great film, but it’s only the first step in giving this visionary her full due.

-Brandon Ledet

The Watermelon Woman (1996)

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When you hear that 1996’s The Watermelon Woman was the first feature film directed by a black lesbian, the claim sounds both impossible and impossible to prove. Considering that the recently-restored Daughters of the Dust was the first ever theatrically-released film directed by an African American woman and came only five years earlier, however, it very well may be true. Part of what makes this historical context so fascinating (besides the obvious horror of how recently those milestones arrived) is that The Watermelon Woman is self-aware of the achievement, purposefully crafting a narrative about representation of queer black female perspectives in pop media. A post-modern relic of 1990s Indie Cinema that vaguely estimates an aesthetic of Spike Lee’s Clerks, Cheryl Dunye’s debut feature is both an academic look at cinema’s historic disregard for representing black femininity onscreen and a laidback comedy about a movie nerd navigating modern queer culture while just trying to live by the Gen-X ideal of Not Getting Hassled. It’s not an impeccably crafted work, but it is a surprisingly fun one, considering the importance of its subject & historical context.

Cheryl Dunye stars as (*gasp*) Cheryl, a video store clerk who spends her free time (between shifts & social pressures to pick up women) working on a video project about a forgotten movie star from the Old Hollywood era. Cheryl’s obsession with the unnamed, uncredited actress, who was mostly relegated to playing offensive “mammy” stereotypes in the 1930s, is palpable even before the discovery that the woman was also queer. Cheryl shirks social, professional, and romantic obligations to bury herself in the video project, uncovering as much as she can about someone she knows only as “The Watermelon Woman”. The Watermelon Woman plainly states its themes; it vocalizes protests that black women’s stories are never told, onscreen or off, and it includes a boldly explicit sex scene to push the provocation of its casual, intimate queer identity. It also tempers these academic ambitions with the cool™, laidback shrug of a Gen-X era indie comedy. This is a film that features both a typical bomb-throwing rant from critic Camille Paglia and an extensive sequence of cringe humor mined from godawful karaoke at a supremely awkward lesbian bar. Dunye’s sense of craft is rough around the edges throughout, but she still manages to blend those two tones expertly, both charming & challenging her audience at every possible opportunity.

Digitally restored for its twentieth anniversary after a long period of distribution limbo, The Watermelon Woman has likely never looked better. The contrast between its sharp, vibrantly colorful celluloid photography and the fuzzy grain of its VHS footage is a great match for its high vs. low brow thematic explorations. It’s a multimedia approach that only becomes more powerful once old photographs & doctored ephemera depicting the mythical Watermelon Woman enter the mix. However, budgeted through a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Dunye’s debut can often feel as if it’s barely held together. Many scenes can be abrupt, blatant and awkwardly placed, but that ramshackle, handmade quality is also a part of the film’s charm and is tied mostly to factors outside Dunye’s control, like budget & experience. I get the sense that she’s not that different from the Cheryl we see onscreen, passionately scraping together a multimedia piece on black queer female representation with limited resources while trying to stay true to her laidback, borderline slacker self. 

The Watermelon Woman is surprisingly fun, understandably uneven 90s Indie Cinema, with invaluable context as a black lesbian milestone. Its humor smartly softens what could be an alienating academic tone, forgiving much of its rough around the edges acting & craft. Its most impressive artistry is in being just as personal as it is culturally substantial, which is a difficult line to walk. I can’t believe we allowed Dunye’s work to lurk in obscurity for so long just as much as I can’t believe we allowed her historical achievement to be delayed until so recently in our pop culture history.

-Brandon Ledet

She’s Allergic to Cats (2017)

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Because its Adult Swim platform reached so many television sets and the show’s aesthetic somehow informed a wave of early 2010s advertising, the frenetic surrealism of Tim & Eric: Awesome Show, Great Job! might just turn out to be one of the most influential touchstones of modern media. The awkwardly non-professional acting, aggressively hacky jokes, absurdist shock value grotesqueries, .gif-like repetition, and deliberately low-fi visual palettes of mid-2000s artists like Tim & Eric and PFFR are starting to creep up in feature length cinema in a palpable way. Often, this psychedelically aggressive amateurism can be nihilistic in its dedication to irony & emotional distance, as with the recent shock value gross-outs Kuso & The Greasy Strangler. Those instances can be their own kind of ugly delight, but what’s even more exciting is when films like The Brigsby Bear imbue this modern form of low-fi psychedelia with something Tim & Eric never had: genuine pathos. The dirt cheap passion project indie She’s Allergic to Cats operates on both sides of that divide. It embraces the grotesque, ironic absurdism of “bad”-on-purpose Tim & Eric descendants to craft a VHS quality aesthetic that amounts to something like John Waters by way of Geneva Jacuzzi. More importantly, though, it allows the earnest pathos of desperate, pitch black cries for help to disrupt & subvert that all-in-good-fun absurdism with genuine (and genuinely broken) heart to strike a tone that’s as funny as it is frightening & sad.

She’s Allergic to Cats opens with the admission “I live in Hollywood. I moved here to make movies, but instead I groom dogs.” In a land where everyone dreams of being in show business, we focus on the Tailwaggers-employed pet groomer who dreams the smallest. Michael is, by most estimations, a loser. He grooms dogs by day to afford to live in a rat-infested apartment where he works on his VHS “video art” projects & watches Bad Movies in isolation by night. His greatest ambition in life is to direct an all-cat remake of De Palma’s Carrie, but he’s laughably bad at pitching the idea to anyone he can get to listen. She’s Allergic to Cats chronicles a series of minor conflicts in Michael’s hopelessly minor life: negotiating with his Tommy Wiseau-like landlord over rat extermination possibilities, struggling to balance his pet-grooming career with his passion for VHS art, attempting to orchestrate a hot date with Mickey Rourke’s daughter’s personal assistant (the titular “she”) despite his life & home being an unpresentable mess, etc. These trivial conflicts are frequently interrupted by the movie’s most substantive modes of expression: the VHS-quality stress dreams that invade Michael’s everyday thoughts. Spinning cat carriers on fire, naked human flesh, squinched rat faces, and rodent-chewed bananas mix with onscreen text cries for help like “My life is shit. My life is a mess. My mess is a mess,” and so on. Laurie Anderson-style voice modulation & Miranda July-style art project tinkering break down Michael’s comically drab life into a sex & career-anxious nightmare.

Buried somewhere under Michael’s sky high pile of dirty dishes & analog video equipment is a lonely, decaying heart. She’s Allergic to Cats does a great job of subverting the Tim & Eric-esque absurdist irony it touts on the surface by cutting open & exposing that heart at Michael’s most anxious, vulnerable moments to strike a tone halfway between campy comedy & surrealist horror. With a warped VHS look reminiscent of a mid-90s camcorder & a taste for gross-out lines of humor like .gif-style repetitions of expressed canine anal glands, She’s Allergic to Cats hides its emotions behind an impossibly thick wall of ironic detachment. It even goes out of its way to reference infamous so-bad-it’s-good properties like Congo, Howard the Duck, Cat People (’82, of course), and The Boy in the Plastic Bubble to throw the audience of the scent of the emotional nightmare at its core. When its protective walls break down, however, and the nihilistic heartbreak that eats at its soul scrolls “I need help” across the screen, there’s a genuine pathos to its post-Tim & Eric aesthetic that far surpasses its pure shock value peers. It’s a hilarious, VHS-warped mode of emotional terror.

-Brandon Ledet

Beyond the Gates (2016)

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Do you remember VHS board games? What if you found one that was haunted; or worse, possessed? What if completing the game was the only way to save your father’s soul?

Gordon (Graham Skipper) and John (Chase Williamson) Hardesty are archetypically, even stereotypically, different brothers. Gordon is a buttoned-down salaryman with a dependable girlfriend (Margot, played by Brea Grant of Heroes), a mortgage, and skeletons in his closet that have driven him far from his home town. John, in contrast, is a scruffy layabout with frequent run-ins with the law. Their troubled father, the proprietor of a VHS rental outlet, has been missing for seven months, and the two come together to close down his store, sell off the merchandise, and part ways, presumably forever. Following some strange dreams and bizarre nighttime occurrences, the two brothers are finally able to enter their father’s office, where they find Beyond the Gates, an 80s-style VHS board game that contains the last tape their father watched.

Upon playing the tape, the brothers first experience lost time, but when Margot convinces them to play the game, a strange woman (Barbara Crampton, of Chopping Mall and Re-Animator) appears on screen and explains that they must play through the game and go in order to save their father and themselves. The tape is obviously interacting with them directly, not playing straight through, and even attempts to enlist the authorities in the form of their cop friend Derek (Matt Mercer) fail, as he can see nothing on the screen but static. Gradually, the trio comes to accept that they’re stuck in a Jumanji situation, and there’s no way out but to beat the game and go . . . beyond the gates.

This film is a bit of a surprise, as it doesn’t get off to a strong start. Gordon is ostensibly the lead, but Skipper is the weakest actor of the main trio, and his performance comes across as broad and unrefined. Williamson’s John is supposed to be a deadbeat, but other than his perpetual five o’clock shadow, his appearance is pretty well-maintained, and there’s no real menace to his presence. The film is also awfully cheap-looking, so much so that even visually dynamic shots, like the slow pan across seemingly endless shelves of VHS tapes, look more like they were shot for a daytime soap than a feature. Once we’re out of the starting gate, however, the ride gets weirder and gorier until you’re lost in the moment. My roommate even compared the film to those of David Lynch (although I wouldn’t personally go that far), citing that he often evokes the facade of normalcy before tearing down the curtain to show the evil that lies beneath. Here, we start with a fairly basic story about brothers in conflict that gets more cinematically complex as the narrative progresses, until you’re suddenly captivated and carried away by the film than anticipated.

The game itself has a board that’s prettily designed, even if the mechanics are unclear (and ultimately kind of irrelevant), and the gore is both hilarious in its overkill and surprisingly effective in the way that it suddenly appears in the film as a complete surprise after a long period of mostly-psychological horror. There’s also a great attempt to give the characters an interesting backstory, as we learn that Gordon and Margot are working out some relationship issues that arose from his overindulgence, and John’s elaboration of how he was the son who stayed when Gordon went out to find a new life belies the cliches that this genre convention usually relies upon. My favorite part of the film may be the scene in which the brothers visit the shop where the game was purchased and have a conversation with the creepy owner (Jesse Merlin) who’s so delightfully transparent in his evil that his name may as well be “Mr. Needful.”

It takes a little patience to get into Beyond the Gates, but it’s pretty rewarding if given half a chance. There’s a lot of love for the VHS era of horror in the movie’s DNA, but unlike other throwbacks, it’s not beholden to that aesthetic or the trappings thereof. The film is currently streaming on Netflix, and is a delightful way to keep Halloween in your heart on a hot summer night.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond