At the Video Shop

 

My very last VHS player crapped out and died on me over Christmas. Don’t feel too bad about this though as, truth be told, I hadn’t used it properly in years, but this got me thinking about the VHS era, and my history with it, a story that now has a definite beginning, middle and end.  My family were relative late comers when it came to video, I don’t think we owned a VHS player till around 1986.  So the famous Video Nasty furore had largely been played out by the time my parents scrimped and saved enough for a VHS player.  The very first video rental shop we went to was “The North West Video Centre”.  Which all sounds very grand but in reality was just some guy who, in a moment of Thatcherite entrepreneurialism, had hollowed out his front room into a video shop, decking out the four walls of it in video shelves, with a dividing VHS stand down the centre of the shop, which initially separated the VHS releases from the Beta releases. Yes, Beta was still hanging in on there till as late as 1986, but it wasn’t long before the shop became a hundred per cent VHS.  Which, come to think about it, must have been a massive setback for these small, independent video shop owners, given that nearly half their stock suddenly became obsolete.  Somehow though, the North West Video Centre weathered the death of Beta, and for many years this tiny little shop seemed to have the monopoly on video rentals...I don’t recall any other video rental shop in the immediate area.  The closest that it seemed to have by way of competition was the local library, a Brutalist monstrosity called The Lancastrian Hall and Central Library, which half heartily branched out into renting videos, albeit only with a relatively safe and mainstream taste in movies...The Man with Two Brains, I-Man, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Disney’s Baby were amongst the titles that I for some reason remember.  Whether it was a knock on effect of the Video Nasties saga, I don’t know, but horror titles were thin on the ground at that place.  Their only horror title that sticks in my memory was The Beast Within, with its “please kill me” tag line.  Since I would have been about 8 or 9 at the time, there was of course no chance I was going to get to see movies like that for a long time.  

Alarmist newspaper pieces might have been awash with scare stories about irresponsible working class parents letting their kids watch Driller Killer or Cannibal Holocaust at home while they went down the pub, but in reality myself and everyone I knew had parents that kept a fairly vigilant and responsible eye on what their kids watched.  At that age, the only things down at the North West Video Centre that my parents allowed me to watch was a Captain America cartoon (I still have that “when Captain America throws his mighty shield” song imprinted on my brain) and Time Bandits.  A little admission, I’ve always hated Time Bandits, I don’t know if it is the film itself, or whether it just came to represent my own personal nemesis when it came to getting in the way of the really cool looking horror films I wanted to see at the North West Video Centre.  Inevitably, when you were in those places it was the titles that you couldn’t see that had the greater hold over your imagination.  Ones I vividly remember were Galaxy of Terror, The Monster Club, Time Walker, Ragewar and Zone Troopers.  These days I have managed to catch up with the majority of those, with the exception of Ragewar, and have to wonder if I had been able to see these films as a kid, whether they’d have had the same impact on me.  Don’t get me wrong, I would be prepared to fight in the corner of some of them, but none ever really lived up to my childhood expectations.  Especially Galaxy of Terror whose cover, if you remember, had this skeletal bird creature attacking a woman, and for years you try to imagine how that scene will look on screen, and of course when you eventually watch the film you discover that scene isn’t in the film.  That VHS cover presumably being born out of the Roger Corman theory of thinking up a title and poster before the film itself, and may have been my earliest life lesson in how B-Movies can play fast and loose with the truth.  

Looking back, my parents weren’t entirely spoilsports when it came to what I was watching.  Anything that showed up on late night television was deemed okay, so I got to see all the Hammer and Amicus movies at a relatively young age.  Curiously, I don’t recall seeing any Hammer or Amicus films on the VHS rental shelves, with the exception of The Satanic Rites of Dracula on Warner.  I know some of those films had pre-cert VHS releases, but by the late 1980s those appeared to have disappeared from the shelves.  I wonder if the fact that those films played so much on late night TV back then meant that there was a perception that they weren’t going to do much business at the video rental stores.

former site of The North West Video Centre 

I’m sure the people who were born after the VHS era, or who only saw the back end of it, have the idea that VHS store owners were these rogues who’d offer kids video nasties under the counter when their parents weren’t looking, but I’m afraid the ones I was around had an unfortunately moral streak to them, albeit with the occasional touch of twisted humour to go with it.  I remember I nearly came close to talking my parents into renting Return of the Living Dead for me, but then they decided to open up the question of whether I was old enough to watch the film to the owner of the North West Video Centre, who with a mischievous grin then went into the most lurid description of Return of the Living Dead I’ve ever heard.  It was along the lines of “well...do you think he is old enough to see a film where half a dog is squirming about on the floor, or where brains are eaten, oh and a head is sawed off...” and then he began describing scenes that weren’t actually in the film “is he old enough to see maggots tearing through human flesh”.  What version of Return of the Living Dead had he been watching?  Needless to say, when he started describing a scene involving a certain Ms. Quigley, I resigned myself to the fact that we were going home with Time Bandits again.

The North West Video Centre always stocked up on the Charles Band movies though, which rarely ever troubled the censor beyond the 15 certificate.  So while Return of the Living Dead was still off-limits to me for a few years, Band movies became my gateway drug into the horror movies that existed beyond the safety net of late night TV.  Two of my absolute favourite Band movies from the days of the North West Video Centre were Ghoulies 2 and Terrorvision. I’m sure we rented out those two so many times that this alone kept the North West Video Centre afloat for many years. 

Now in my mind, and I accept my mind only, Terrorvision is forever synonymous with the 5^th of November, Guy Fawkes/Bonfire night.  Have you ever tried to explain Guy Fawkes night to people from cultures that don’t celebrate it, without making us seem like a nation of macabre oddballs.  

Well, every year we celebrate the life of a failed terrorist by sending children out on the streets with a dummy of the man’s corpse to beg for money by saying “penny for the guy”.  As well as attending fireworks displays and public bonfires that usually end with an effigy of Guy Fawkes being burned to death...all of which has caused more people to die, be burnt or maimed than Guy Fawkes could have ever had hoped to achieve had he actually been successful in blowing up the House of Lords.

Still, I always used to enjoy Guy Fawkes night allot.  That was until one year in school when they showed what I guess you’d call a public information or classroom scare film about bonfires and warning of the dangers of the 5^th of November.  Now, I know you hear about people who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s being traumatised by public information films about children being electrocuted, nuclear war or the spirit of dark and lonely water, but honesty all that must have passed me by, apart from this one scare film about bonfire night.  Maybe memory is exaggerating its content to me, but at the time this PIF felt to my young eyes as extreme as a Faces of Death film.  There were scenes of hands being burnt by sparklers, fireworks going off in children’s faces....a real horror show...I swear this film also showed a photo of a real life, badly burnt corpse too, and because they showed this particular film year in, year out at school, I’d always try and memorise whereabouts this shot appeared in the film, so I could look away at the precise moment...sadly without much success.

Needless to say, after that film I never wanted anything to do with bonfire night ever again.  My parents would ask if I wanted to go to a fireworks display or a bonfire this year...and I’d be like “no, no, no...can’t we stay in and rent a video instead”.  So, on a yearly basis we would rent out a video on the 5^th of November, and Terrorvision gradually became the coward’s way to celebrate bonfire night.  

I absolutely adored Terrorvision as a kid, and even today it is a film I still have tremendous affection for.  I suppose Terrorvision is the closest horror cinema has ever come to a National Lampoon’s Vacation film, it does tap into the same dysfunctional all-American family unit.  There is the hopeless klutz father, the super hot mum, and their two kids who are considerably more smarter than the parents.  The dad and mum, Stanley and Raquel Putterman are played by Gerrit Graham and Mary Woronov, who of course have a truckload of charisma, comedy chops and cult film appearances between them, and more than fit the bill as the B-level Chevy Chase and Beverly D’ Angelo.  When Stanley puts up a massive satellite TV dish in the back garden, the Putterman household is blessed with hundreds of TV channels, broadcasting wresting, B-movies and softcore porn at all hours of the day.  Unfortunately, the dish also beams an excitable dog-like space monster into the household that has a habit of eating people.   I’m sure if you watch Terrorvision these days, it looks more than a little dated in terms of the tech, but at a time when we only had four TV channels and just this tiny little video shop down the road, the world of the Putterman’s looked like Nirvana.  None of the characters seemed to work, the kids were allowed to stay up all night watching horror movies, and because they were Americans they could run around with machine guns and hand grenades too.  This all sounded great with a capital G to me...and who wouldn’t want Gerrit Graham and Mary Woronov as their parents?  Can you imagine if those two had actually had kids, they could have bred a whole new master race of coolness.  One aspect of Terrorvision’s appeal that I think may have been taken for granted by an American audience, but had a greater impact outside of the States was its depiction of horror host culture.  A long standing tradition in America, but something that was largely unheard of in the UK, and something we only really learned about through movies like this, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark and to a lesser extent the dreadfully unfunny Norman Thaddeus Vane film Midnight.  Terrorvision’s Elvira like horror hostess being Medusa, who wears a tacky, fake bunch of snakes on her head, and introduces horror movies in linking segments that place particular emphasis on Medusa’s ample bosom.  

From what I understand Terrorvision wasn’t really a big success in its day, despite me continually renting it out from the North West Video Centre, which is sad but looking at it with a more critical eye- you can kinda see why it initially fell between the cracks, and needed a bit of time to find an audience and grow into a cult movie.  At first appearance Terrorvision looks like a kids movie, and it is an out and out comedy, which I think may have kept the hardcore horror crowd away, but it doesn’t quite fit the mould of being your typical 1980s family film either.  There being a level of adult themed humour that would, and trust me did, go over the head of a younger audience.  In the long term though, I think this aspect to the film is to Terrorvision’s benefit, because it is the kind of film you can enjoy as a simple monster movie as a kid, and then revisit as an adult and discover this whole extra layer of humour.  Most of which evolves around the fact that the Putterman parents are swingers, and have a subplot where they invite another swinger couple into their home. Only for it all to go awry when they discover that the male half of the other swinger couple, Spirio, is bi-sexual and wants to get up to some gay fella business with Stanley.  Of course, watching Terrorvision as a kid, none of this registered in my innocent eyes.  I just thought the Puttermans were merely a very friendly couple who wanted to meet new people, and couldn’t understand why Stanley took against Spirio when he discovered Spirio was “into Greek”.  It’s only when you rewatch the film as an adult that the penny drops, and you realise...ah, that’s what being into Greek means. 

Up until the end of the 1980s, the North West Video Centre was the only go to place in my area when it came to VHS rentals, but eventually a couple of chain stores began muscling in on the action.  I think the first one to appear was Jack Beanstalk video, which was a much bigger and professional affair than the North West video centre.  Initially Jack Beanstalk video actually had one of the pillars in the video shop decked out to look like a beanstalk and a cuddly toy version of Jack climbing up it. I don’t know whose idea it was to name a video store chain after a fairy tale –strange bedfellows indeed- but credit where it’s due, I still remember it all these years on.  Whereas with the North West Video Centre everything felt very random, Jack Beanstalk was completely organised into genres, with newer and older releases segregated.  Jack Beanstalk was also the only chain I ever encountered to have its own ‘erotica’ section which was located in a discrete far corner of the shop, next to the horror section.  This corner also had a pillar in the centre of it that you had to walk around to see the erotica section, which kept it out of view of your casual customer.  In all honesty, I didn’t pay a great deal of attention to the erotica section, but would occasionally get a sideways glance of it from the horror section.  From memory, I don’t think there was much to write home about there.  A couple of the Porkys films maybe, a few likeminded American sex comedies, possibly The Stud and Emmanuelle.  The only one I can clearly remember is a film called ‘The Sex O’Clock News’.  I will admit to caving into curiosity and watching that one on Youtube recently- and yeah- I clearly didn’t miss much by not exploring the erotica section. 

former site of Jack Beanstalk Video

Jack Beanstalk video was also one of the few chains I knew that also sold videos, not ex-rental tapes, but brand new £9.99 priced sell through releases, which didn’t appear to be a very popular sideline.  Believe it or not, it was still very uncommon for people to want to own tapes back then.  One tape that they had for sale was ‘Staying Alive’ and I swear from the day Jack Beanstalk opened till the day it closed, they couldn’t give that tape away.  I remember picking it up once, spurred on by the title Staying Alive and thinking it was a horror film, but then realising it was just about a guy trying to make it as a dancer.  Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park was another video they had for sale, and I guess the Kiss army didn’t extend to Walkden because you could blow the dust off that thing.  Return of the Living Dead 2 was another sell through title they had for sale, and yeah the public told Jack Beanstalk were they could stick that one as well. 

The videos I did buy from Jack Beanstalk were the Vipco ones.  This being the second coming of Vipco on VHS in the early 1990s, which allowed younger viewers a diluted idea of what was around during the pre-cert era ...so I would have picked up The Groove Tube, The Deadly Spawn and The Bogey Man from there.  I remember though that they only stocked one Vipco release at a time, when one Vipco tape sold they’d order the next one...and so on and so forth.  Meaning that you’d have to pretty much buy everything Vipco put out, in order to get your hands on their next release.  

Vipco's Greatest Hits

The rise of Jack Beanstalk also coincided with the Ninja phenomenon of the late 1980s, and their shelves were soon groaning with all manner of Ninja movies.  I tended to gravitate towards the Godfrey Ho type movies like Ninja Terminator, rather than American made fare like Enter the Ninja and the American Ninja series.  The Ho stuff always seemed a bit more off the wall and wacky then their American cousins, and silly as it sounds because they were made in Hong Kong and had predominately Asian casts these seemed more ‘authentic’ Kung-Fu movies in my eyes.  The irony is that the Ho films were of course re-jigged and re-edited versions of HK movies with new footage starring Westerners in an attempt to make them more palatable to round eyed tastes.  There were so many of those movies about then...Ninja Terminator, Golden Ninja Warrior, Ninja the Protector, Ninja Holocaust, Ninja Thunderbolt, Ninja Commandments...over the years they’ve all blurred together in my mind, a mass of multi-coloured Ninjas, guys with too much eye shadow and Garfield phones.  In their humourless, killjoy manner the BBFC would often prune these films of the sight of ninja stars and nunchucks, even though toy shops were doing a brisk trade in plastic replicas of such weaponry, aimed at ninja loving kids like myself.

Jack Beanstalk’s horror section was a wee affair, but nevertheless I did make a couple of interesting discoveries there. It was there I first encountered the films of Pete Walker...House of the Long Shadows and Schizo being the only two of his films that were still in circulation back then.  Not the greatest introduction to his films if I’m being honest, I have to admit I’ve never been big on House of the Long Shadows, I know some have affection for it on account of it being the only time its four horror icon actors (Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, John Carradine) were onscreen together, but they’ve all been in much better films separately.  Schizo, I suppose gives you a far greater idea of what Pete Walker films were all about, but even so the general consensus is that it isn’t one of the better ones, especially in that Warner Home Video release which had so, so much cut out.  I finally got to see my first Friday the 13^th film in Jack Beanstalk video too.  Friday the 13^th Part 8: Jason Takes Manhattan, which I know isn’t one of the better ones, but because it was the first one I saw, and the first time I was considered old enough to finally see Jason in action, I probably have more affection for it than it deserves.

Trying to do the maths, I’d estimate I’d be around 13 at the time, and begrudgingly in a couple of instances I have to admit that maybe I was a little too young to be watching this stuff.  ‘The Video Dead’ is burnt into my brain for that reason, boy...was that a gory movie for 1987.  Censorship wise that one got away with allot for the period, an iron is stuck into someone’s head, a zombie is cut in half with a chainsaw, and in one scene characters cannibalise each other.  Briefly, it centres around a bunch of zombies who haunt a TV set, and are initially seen in a Night of the Living Dead type b/w horror film playing on the TV, before emerging from the TV to kill the people who are watching it.  Technically, I suppose the film should be called The Television Dead, since they emerge from a TV set rather than a Video recorder, but since when did B-Movies let a thing like plot accuracy get in the way of a brilliant title?  The only way to stop the Video Dead from coming out of the TV is to tape a mirror to the TV set....and this is so embarrassing I can’t believe I’m publically admitting to it, but such did this film get under my skin that after watching it I seriously asked my parents if we could tape a mirror to the TV set that night.  Just in case this film had any basis in reality.  At which point they seriously began to consider whether I should be allowed to watch horror films at all.

Jack Beanstalk wasn’t the only video chain to open up shop in the area.  We also got a Ritz video, I’m struggling to remember which came first Jack Beanstalk or Ritz.  It seemed like they both sprung up roughly around the same time.  Ritz had this red lettering on yellow background logo, and I remember yellow and red being the predominate colour scheme of the store itself.  Ritz was the only store I ever encountered that was a two story affair, new releases on the first floor, and older releases on the second floor.  In terms of atmosphere, Ritz had by far the greatest horror section, you had to go up this long, dark staircase to get to the horror section on the 2^nd floor.  Once you got there you were met by four walls of VHS, no windows, and nothing but dead silence, you could hear a pin drop in there. A whole wall was dedicated to shoulder to shoulder horror titles.  Ones that I remember are Mutant, Mutant 2, Scared to Death, CHUD, Night of the Living Dead, The Devil Within Her and Night of the Alien.  The rest are a bit of a blur but I’m fairly certain An American Werewolf in London and a couple of the Friday the 13^th and Prom Night sequels were there as well.  Mutant, I saw again recently and while there are a couple of moments that I vividly recalled from the VHS days, like zombie children attacking the heroine in a toilet cubicle, I was a little taken aback by how slow paced it was.  Frankly, I’m amazed that younger me made it through it.  Mutant 2 was a bit of a con-job, in that it was an unrelated foreign film that the distributor- Entertainment in Video- had re-titled.  Mutant 1 having presumably done enough business on UK video to warrant a sequel, even if the distributor had to invent one.   Devil Within Her was an Apex video tape, a budget price label, whose releases you rarely saw on the rental shelves, so that in itself was an abnormality.  Night of the Living Dead was that awful colourised version that Palace Video put out in the late 1980s.  People tend to forget that the colourised abomination was the only way to see the film in the UK for many years.  There had been a pre-cert VHS of the b/w version but that had largely disappeared from view by this time, it wouldn’t be until 1995 that Tartan video re-issued the b/w version on tape. Until then you were stuck with turning the colour down on your TV set to see the film as Romero intended.  Scared to Death is another film that like Mutant, looks a little slow paced today, but all in all I’d say lived up to the expectations of its VHS sleeve, and stills of its Alien-like creature the Syngenor, that I’d seen in Starlog magazine.

Night of the Alien was another con job re-titling of a film the rest of the world seems to have gotten as Future-Kill, but in the UK it was Night of the Alien, complete with a piece of HR Giger artwork that had been commissioned for the Future-Kill poster.  Based on that and the UK release title, you’d imagine this to be the type of movie that Scared to Death was, an Alien imitation set on earth due to its lower budget.  In reality, it begins like a mixture of Scorsese’s After Hours and a frat comedy, with a bunch of nerds being dared into spending a night in the rough area of town, which is lorded over by a disfigured bad guy called Splatter (Texas Chainsaw Massacre icon Ed Neal), who wears a metallic mask and kills people with a spiked glove.  So technically, yes this is a film about people spending a night in a territory that is ‘alien’ to them, but c’mon no one renting a film called Night of the Alien would have expected that to be what the title referred too. The predictable BBFC cuts didn’t help either.  

Looking back, I can’t emphasise enough how creepy it was up there in the horror section, and dangerous too.  No windows, no emergency exit, and just a staircase to downstairs as the only way out, pretty much a health and safety nightmare.  For the majority of the time you pretty much had the place to yourself as well, on the rare occasions there was anyone else up there, they tended to be older guys, loitering around.  On reflection I suppose I should be grateful that the only traumatic thing that happened to me up there was being eyeballed by the characters on the VHS covers of CHUD, Scared to Death and Night of the Alien.

formally The Ritz Video Shop, the stairway to the horror section visible to the right

The most amusing incident to play out at the Ritz video shop, actually took place on the first floor.  My grandparents, who were a bit of a soft touch when it came to me, were talked into renting out Predator on my behalf.  So, we were driving back to my grandparents to watch it, and half way home I noticed that the tape in the generic, see through Ritz video box, bore a 15 certificate.  Upon opening it, I discovered that the tape the cashier had given us was in fact Children of a Lesser God. The Oscar nominated film about a deaf woman falling in love, which of course is very easy to mistake for Predator, the plots of those two films being practically interchangeable!! So, we turned the car around and rushed back to the shop.  Fortunately they still had the correct tape, thus preventing any poor sod who actually wanted to see Children of a Lesser God from going home with Predator instead.  Ever since then though, those two films have always been intertwined in my mind...Children of a Lesser Predator.

Ritz eventually moved to the other side of Walkden Shopping Centre, without much change to its set up.  Two floors, new releases on the first floor, older stuff upstairs, lengthy staircase to the second floor, which tended to keep the regular customers confided to the first floor.  Although my eyes would always go towards the horror section, for some reason when it comes to Ritz mark two, I tend to remember the videos in the other sections the more.  The ‘action’ section had Blazing Magnum, the Italian film with Stuart Whitman, Special Effects by Larry Cohen, and Crimewave by Sam Raimi. I’m pretty sure the comedy section had one of the Confessions films...probably Pop Performer, and Rosie Dixon: Night Nurse. So the British sex comedy films were still around back then, the fact that they weren’t allowed to play on TV, presumably giving them a shelf life in the VHS shops that the Hammer and Amicus films of a similar vintage didn’t have.  One other thing I remember about the second incarnation of Ritz is that the top of the staircase that took you to the second floor had a poster for Troll 2, which remained there for the longest time, and yeah, Troll 2 was quite the jaw dropper going into it expecting a direct sequel to Troll.  This of course being years before the ‘so bad its good’ cult sprung up around Troll 2, these days I don’t think you can ever fully recapture the experience of what it’s like to go into Troll 2 blind.  I actually had a bad experience at the 2^nd Ritz once. Me and my mother were on the first floor minding our own business, and I was looking over the VHS box of Class of 1999.  I don’t even think we were considering renting it, but this old crone behind the counter saw me with that video and started laying into us, claiming “I don’t think it would be appropriate to rent that out for him, that is an extremely violent film, they don’t put 18 certificates on these things for nothing”.  Really reading the riot act to us.  I still actually have Class of 1999 on video, despite the fact that I don’t really like the film all that much, nor do I even have a machine to play it on, but I like keeping it around.  Call it my symbolic victory over all the censorious killjoys of the VHS era.

As far as I remember the North West Video Centre, Ritz and Jack Beanstalk video all co-existed together.  Obviously they were in competition with each other, but I don’t remember any of them putting the other out of business.  Then came the big one, Blockbuster Video and when they dropped one of those on Walkden, things changed considerably.  I’ve never really understood the nostalgic love for Blockbuster video.  Out of all the rental stores it was the one that felt the most corporate and impersonal...plus we were hearing all these horror stories from the States about how they were killing off all of the smaller video chains over there.  It didn’t stop us from going however, and it is true that Blockbuster did kill off the competition. The North West Video Centre, Ritz and Jack Beanstalk all disappeared off the map pretty soon after.  Blockbuster’s edge over the competition was that they had multiple copies of the same movie, thereby removing the anxiety and disappointment of going to the video shop and not getting the film you wanted.  I remember Jack Beanstalk only had one copy of Robocop 2, and you’d go there and find it had been rented out, go back the next day and find it hadn’t been returned on time...etc, etc.  So in those smaller stores it could be quite the wild goose chase to get hold of new movies.

By this time my taste in movies had tended to drift outside of the mainstream anyway, and in fairness if you were prepared to spend some time exploring their soulless shelves, Blockbuster wasn’t all mainstream dross.  Among the older stuff that was still on Blockbuster’s shelves was the Deathstalker series, Bruce Lee films, Truck Turner with Isaac Hayes, Black Mama, White Mama, Twilight People, they also had that rare, English dubbed release of A Better Tomorrow that RCA/Columbia put out a good few years before John Woo became a cult figure.  

I’ve mentioned this in depth before but my local Blockbuster also had this strange, regional American film called The Hunted (aka Johnny Vik), which Intervision video had ridiculously tried to pass off as a Rambo/First Blood type movie. It was very rare to see a pre-cert era tape still on the rental shelves by then, so that alone attracted me to that one.  The irony is that these type of tapes were the first to end up in Blockbuster’s ‘for sale’ bin, in order to make way for multiple copies of Titanic, Gladiator and Braveheart, and yet all these years on those older tapes are the only ones to have any value, whereas all those mass produced, mainstream titles are now the absolute dead wood of the VHS era. 

Now, I’m no expert or historian when it comes to physical media, I was just someone in the field, but from my perspective what seemed to be the death knell for Blockbuster was the transition from VHS to DVD.  The DVD format felt like it didn’t lend itself well to the overnight rental model.  Whereas with VHS all that tended to be on the tape was the film itself and a few trailers, DVDs suddenly had extra scenes, audio commentaries, interviews etc etc, something you couldn’t just consume overnight and return the next day.  During the VHS era there also seemed to be a lengthy gap between a video being available for rental and a video being able to buy.  Whereas that gap didn’t seem to exist during the DVD period- and most people tended to go with the option of buying a DVD rather than renting it.  From what I remember when Blockbuster made the switch from VHS to DVD, we only ever rented the one DVD from them, an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie called- oh so appropriately- End of Days.  That indeed, was the end of days for me as far as movie rentals go.  The video rental shops, the North West Video Centre, Jack Beanstalk, Ritz had all gone by then, and Blockbuster folded in the UK a few years later. Time moved on.

the unmarked grave of Blockbuster Video

As I was saying to an internet buddy recently, I thought that when we end up on the very, very wrong side of thirty, we are meant to be all jealous and bitter about the technology and freedoms that are enjoyed by young people which weren’t around in our day, but I’m still waiting for those kind of feelings to start kicking in.  If anything, I actually feel sorry for people growing up in these days of COVID-19 and all the other unrest and upheaval in the world, and take pride in the fact that I grew up in the video era. It’s true, not everything was great back then- this isn’t some rose tinted look back at the VHS era- the films were often cut to shreds, many key horror films were banned outright, we were frequently duped by re-titled movies that didn’t live up to expectations, tapes got worn out, beaten up and ended up looking like shit, but I can say I grew up in a era that people who were there look back on fondly, and that people who weren’t now view with fascination and wonder. A claim that tragically is going to be denied to anyone growing up these days.  That’s the problem with golden ages though, you never truly realise you’re living through one until it is all over. 

Don’t forget to tape a mirror to your TV set tonight.     

 

                     

Demonsoul (1995)

 

A fairly rare example of a British Shot-On-Video horror film from the 1990s (although it did bypass the UK market).  Demonsoul was a film I remember being mentioned in passing in a few of the horror mags of the time and I think FAB press’ Ten Years of Terror book (a fairly derogatory mention, if I recall correctly) but since its VHS release was confided to the States, Demonsoul quickly fell off the radar. The film’s profile only being raised slightly by its recent reappearance on a cheapo US DVD release, that partnered it with three other SOV titles. 

Erica Steele (Kerry Norton) is plagued by nightmares about black masses, vampirism and the mysterious Selena (Eileen Daly). “I wake up and I can never get back to sleep” Erica tells her shrink “then I turn up to work tied and restless, and piss everyone off”.  Visits to pervy hypnotherapist Dr Bucher (Daniel Jordan), who uses hypnosis as an excuse to grope female patients, don't help and soon Erica is seeing vampire Selena on the street and having visions of Selena fucking her boyfriend Alex. During one of his touchy feely sessions Bucher discovers that Erica is in fact being controlled by Dana.  No, not the Irish Eurovision song contest winner, rather Selena's long dead lesbian vampire lover of the same name. Bucher attempts to enter into a pact with Dana, even offering his secretary to her as a blood sacrifice. Only for it all to backfire on Bucher when Selena and her hooded followers kidnap him and Alex leading to some BDSM and spirited blood drinking by leather clad vampires. 

Demonsoul does have Eileen Daly's sapphic vampire shenanigans going for it, a shtick later to find a better known home in Razor Blade Smile (1998) a few years later. Alas, the film does tend to fall asleep when she isn't onscreen, leaving you with some flat supporting actors and echoey sound recording to test your patience. Norton and Jordan are fine, and contrary to the idea that actors who appear in SOV productions are on a hiding to nothing, seem to have enjoyed lengthy and successful careers, but when the one-movie-and-they’re-done cast members take to the screen, Demonsoul does get brought back down to a home movie level.  Along the way though there is gore, nudity, kinkiness and a few truly bizarre moments to wake you up like Alex being mobbed by cult members in a park, which apropos of nothing is intercut with shots of a cute l'ttle squirrel going about its business….awwww.  Allen Bryce, the editor of The Dark Side magazine also shows up as the head of a lunatic asylum towards the end.

Demonsoul’s credits reveal it to be the work of several pioneers of the American SOV scene.  Co-producer Matt Devlen was the man behind The Abomination (1986), one of the more famous SOV horror films of the Eighties.  Another producer Jerry Feifer was the mastermind behind the long running ‘Witchcraft’ movie series, which managed to make it to sixteen entries.  Demonsoul has the feel of a test movie, to see if Feifer’s Witchcraft formula of horror, sex and no-frills production values could work in a UK setting.  A test it presumably passed since Feifer temporarily relocated the Witchcraft series to the UK for 1998’s Witchcraft X: Mistress of the Craft which retained this film’s director and brought back Eileen Daly in its cast.  Too cash strapped for any gothic horror trappings (we only anecdotally hear about Dana’s persecution and death in ye olden times) Demonsoul is resolutely contemporary and despite its American financing resolutely British too.  The opening credits are a runaround of the capital that manages to include just about every piece of London iconography that you can think of, the Tower of London, Big Ben, Tower Bridge, double-decker buses, black cabs, red phone boxes.  This isn’t just a glamourous travelogue made with American tourists in mind though, Demonsoul is happy to get its hands dirty location wise, with SOV production values making 1990s Britain look even more colour drained than usual.  Demonsoul’s London takes in shots of garbage ridden streets, the stiflingly middle class blandness of the office Erica works at, while a dirty, disused church plays host to the majority of the horror film incidents here.  Then there is Erica’s lodgings, with its dirty kitchen sink, Jean-Luc Godard poster and where characters pass the time playing Monopoly, all of which feels on the money in terms of young people living on the low down in 1990s London.  Seemingly the only concessions to its intended American video market is a reference to Erica “needing a vacation” and a last minute appearance by R.J Bell, a Canadian actor who lent a bit of transatlantic flavor to many British productions of the era. 

As well as giving the vampire myth a contemporary spin, Demonsoul zips it up in a PVC costume and firmly entrenches it in the era’s fetish scene.  A reoccurring theme in Demonsoul, and the heart of its fetishistic appeal lays in seeing obnoxious, domineering men having the tables unexpectedly turned on them.  Erica, firmly under the influence of Dana, struts her stuff around the backstreets of London, attracting the attention of a longhaired bloke who slaps her about and calls her a bitch, only for her to hit back with dirty talk “let me go, you peasant” before baring her fangs and going for his jugular.  A gimpy guy clad in leather underwear and a dog collar is regularly brought out for Selena to straddle and torture with a knife, before her leather clad underlings make a bloody mess of him. This man’s lack of connections to other films suggesting he was here for the party rather than the acting experience.  Bucher is built up as such a repugnant creep, who only got into hypnotherapy after being discredited as a medium, and uses it to con women out of money and sexually molest them while they are unconscious.  Naturally, given the film’s fem-dom inclinations it is Bucher who suffers the most, as he is rendered powerless when Erica/Dana gets the upper hand during one of the hypnotherapy sessions, stripping off, becoming the dominate one sexually, then tearing off his shirt and biting his chest.  The ultimate frightmare of a predatory guy who likes ‘em passive and passed out.  Later on he is whisked off to by whipped by Selena, who adds insult to injury by tearing into his back with her fingernails “You’re pathetic, you worthless piece of slime”.  Demonsoul showcases the dominatrix bitch persona that Eileen Daly would take on a roll for many years, from Redemption VHS covers to the aforementioned Razor Blade Smile, before reinventing herself as a kooky, Big Brother contestant (although surely anyone who appeared in three Richard Driscoll movies along the way must surely have a masochistic streak to them as well). 

The first time I saw Demonsoul I have to admit that I didn’t make it all the way through, the second time I managed to get through it but didn’t like it, the third time around and I have to admit to warming to it, and I daresay the film might make a convert of me yet.  SOV productions do tend to be the unwashed urchins of the horror movie world though, in that it does take a bit of persistence, not to mention perseverance, in order to see any good in them.  The 1990s was a punishing time to be a British horror film fan, trust one who lived through it and spent a little too much time staring into that abyss.  You would hold out hope that the next film to come along would be a return to former glories, only to be confronted with bores like Beyond Bedlam, Tale of a Vampire, merely adequate schlock like Breeders and Proteus, or retarded garbage like Revenge of Billy the Kid and Funnyman.  Believe me, it is no coincidence that the same decade saw many adopt a backwards gazing stance and choose to rediscover later day Hammer and Amicus, plus the films of Pete Walker, Jose Larraz and Norman J Warren, rather than champion the present.  However Demonsoul does suggest that there was the odd glimmer of hope which we may have overlooked whilst we hurried back towards the comforting bosom of the 1970s.  So it’s sad to discover that the film's director Elisar Cabrera (billed here as Elisar C Kennedy) died recently at the young age of 49.

The Rise of the Mummy (2021)

From what has to be the busiest period of British horror filmmaking in history, shuffles The Rise of the Mummy, formally known as Mummy Resurgence, a film that has a slight connection to 2019’s The Mummy Reborn.  It is made by the same producer Scott Jeffrey, and brings back the same mummy costume, if not the same mummy character, from the earlier film.  Now, fortunately this is only a slight connection, because while I have to admit to being a pushover when it comes to modern day British horror, The Mummy Reborn was one I struggled to get through.  That one was an in your face, out and out comedy that courted the youth market, and suggests out and out comedy and being  down with the kids wasn’t these peoples’ strong point.  One thought that ran through my mind while watching The Mummy Reborn was “this is such a great mummy costume… albeit rather derivative of the Eddie character from Iron Maiden albums… if only they’d gone in the direction of a straight horror movie instead”.  Fortunately this second Mummy outing does give Eddie from Iron Maiden a more dignified British horror film to do his thing in.  Fingers crossed Iron Maiden’s lawyers never see either of these films though.

I’m still not sure I’d completely classify The Rise of the Mummy as a totally straight horror movie.  It does ditch allot of the BBC3 level comedy that marred The Mummy Reborn.  Tonally, this is more in the lineage of films like Horror Hospital and Psychomania.  Films that work as straight horror if that’s what you want them to be, but also have a cheeky sense of humour to them, and are happy if you want to laugh along with them too.  Make no mistake, this is an utterly preposterous film, that seems quite aware of its own absurdity. 

The Rise of the Mummy opens with three people being pursued through woodlands by a Egyptian mummy, and performing a ritual involving a severed heart, the spreading of Pettex Roman Gravel on the ground, and reading out loud from a book.  All of which is meant to lift the Mummy’s curse and render it immobile.  Pettex Roman Gravel incidentally is what is used in the bottom of Fish Aquariums, but according to this film also comes in handy for undoing a Mummy’s curse…okay.  All this has the desired effect of stopping the Mummy in its tracks, but then the army shows up and kills everyone, in a gung-ho attempt to recapture the Mummy and prevent the truth from coming out.  So, try to follow this logic, the army are fully aware of the threat the Mummy poses to the public, and are willing to murder civilians in order to hush this up, and yet after the opening credits have rolled, we discover that the Mummy has been sold to a university, once again putting the public at risk.  While one of the university’s teachers Miss Dawson (Amanda-Jade Tyler) frets that most of the university’s budget was spent on buying this Mummy, they also just leave it lying about on a classroom desk, under a cloth.  I guess it would have stretched the university’s budget a little too much to have ponied up for a sarcophagus.  Miss Dawson is given the thankless task of teaching Egyptology to a bunch of dim witted students.  The hook that is meant to engage these students into coming into contact with this moldy old Mummy is that this is a once in a life time opportunity to study an undocumented Mummy, and that they may become well respected archeologists on the back of their studies.  I tend to think Miss Dawson is being wildly optimistic there though, given that she has to point out to them that Egypt is a “pretty hot country” at one point, it doesn’t feel like we’re dealing with the future brains of Britain here.  You certainly don’t get the impression that anyone here is destined for greatness on the back of this university course, a ‘mummies for dummies’ course if you will. 

Of the students, Holly (Abi Casson Thompson) is signposted early on as the one who is going to go the distance, by virtue of the fact that she is allocated a background story.  Holly having a brother who is bi-polar and eventually takes his own life.  A subplot that does tie this in slightly to The Mummy Reborn, whose heroine had a brother with severe autism issues, although the manner in which these films tackle these issues couldn’t be more different.  The Mummy Reborn used the autism subplot as broad comic relief, whereas the brother’s mental problems and death are portrayed in a far more serious fashion here, and has clearly been intended to add a bit of dramatic weight to the proceedings.  The rest of the students are a less well defined bunch, there is Kira (Mya Brown) who is good for a few snarky comments and has amazing eyebrows.  Holly’s boyfriend, the token American (modern British horror being sweet on having American characters, or at least American accented ones).  There is also Jessie (Megan Purvis) who wears a coat that looks as if it belongs to a second hand car salesman, and Lyne (Barbara Dabson) who initially appears to be the sniveling coward of the bunch, hiding in the toilets at the first sign of trouble, but then does a 180 and proves to be quite handy with a baseball bat later on in the film.

Between them these meddling kids accidentally manage to bring the Mummy back to life, thanks to a combination of messing around with his bling, and Holly reading out loud from an ancient book that the Mummy came with, this Mummy obviously having been sold with added accessories.  So, soon ol’ dusty bollocks is up and running again and terrorizing the students of this so-called University.  A University that never quite convinces as a University, instead looking like the High School that it is in real life.  They even goof at one point and leave in a shot that reveals the name of the actual shooting location…Archbishop Tenison’s Church of England School.  Which I believe has previously been used as an actual High School setting in another Scott Jeffrey production ‘Cupid’, and checking out the trailer to his upcoming film ‘The Wishing Demon’ reveals it has also been used as a location in that one as well.  So evidentially Archbishop Tenison’s Church of England School is quite the hub of British horror filmmaking at the moment, I’m sure the Archbishop will be turning in his grave, but then again I don’t suppose High Schools are being used for anything else at the moment.

I did get an unexpected buzz of nostalgia from The Rise of the Mummy.  I’m a child of the 1980s, and automatically assumed that today’s high schools would be flashier, trendier affairs, closer to the glamorous American high schools you used to see in movies back then.  On the basis of The Rise of the Mummy though, little about British high schools appears to have changed since the 1980s, they are still as mundane, cold and impersonal as they were back then, Grange Hill style vibes abound from this film’s location.  Which is to the film’s benefit, dropping an Egyptian Mummy into such an otherwise dull and unmistakably British location makes for an often striking juxtaposition. 

To give credit where it is due, The Rise of the Mummy is quick witted and a fast talker when it comes to providing excuses for its budgetary shortcomings.  The script manages to get round any awkward questions over why there are only a handful of students and teachers in this ahem… University –that just happens to have a sign saying Archbishop Tenison’s Church of England School in the middle of it- by having the Mummy plunge the location into a time loop.  Meaning that time is frozen and no one can enter or leave the building for a 24 hour period.  Whenever one of the gang attempt to leave through the University’s reception doors, they reappear in the reception, Groundhog Day style, a few moments later.  The Rise of the Mummy also gets around killing off characters on a regular basis whilst still keeping its very small cast around, by bringing the Mummy’s victims back as sightless, snarling zombie like slaves, who get deputized into doing most of the slow moving creature’s dirty work.

Should anyone be keeping count, The Rise of the Mummy also marks another Brit horror appearance by Youtube Vlogger ‘Coolduder’, or as he is known in the non-viral world Shawn C. Phillips.  Like a bargain basement Nick Fury, Phillips’ Vlogger character has so far shown up in multiple British horror films (via various characters’ laptops) forever on hand to explain the origins of whichever monster the Brits are up against this week.  So far his know-it-all Vlogger character has worn the hat of a mermaid expert in The Mermaid’s Curse, a witch expert in The Candy Witch, a tooth fairy expert in The Tooth Fairy, a scarecrow expert in Bride of Scarecrow, and a leprechaun expert in The Leprechaun’s Game.  Here he adds yet another feather to his cap as a font of all knowledge on Mummies and Egyptology, while at the same time providing a case for all these low budget British horror films being part of a shared, cinematic universe.  There is a hilarious moment when they cut between Coolduder dishing out information on Mummies, which is delivered in his customary, excitable, rosy cheeked fashion, and the facial reactions of Kira, she of the amazing eyebrows.  Kira looks bored out of her mind and not unjustly questions why when they are stuck in a time loop and being stalked by a Mummy, they are taking time out to listen to this manic American rabbit on and on about Mummies via a laptop.  All of which incenses Holly, who shuts Kira down by yelling “bitch, watch” at her.  Which does seem a little out of character, not to mention a bit rude, considering that Holly and Kira are meant to be best friends, and Kira has been Holly’s shoulder to cry on during her brother’s death, but she still gets called a bitch for talking over a Coolduder video anyway.  I guess Coolduder must command a pretty high level of devotion from his online followers. 

‘Current events’ do seem to have left their mark on The Rise of the Mummy, and forced the cast into masks for a number of scenes.  The narrative excuse that they give for this is that because the Mummy is old and moldy, it may be giving off toxic fumes, therefore people need to mask up when they are in close proximity to it.  However these ‘rules’ aren’t abided to throughout the film, in some scenes people don’t seem to be concerned about being close to the Mummy without a mask, other times every cast member is masked up.  No idea what was happening being the scenes, but to hazard a guess I’d say that filming guidelines became more stringent as the production progressed.  It does feel like events beyond the filmmakers control forced this aspect onto the production, rather than this being a deliberate attempt to hold a mirror up to the events of 2020.  As such it is a pity that this ‘masks on’ aspect will forever timestamp this as a 2020 production, a year that, let’s face it, we were all happy to wave goodbye too.

Something I’ve found with Scott Jeffrey is that the films he directs tend to be of a higher quality than the ones where he is only the producer.  It feels like the directed ones are the films where his funds, time and creativity are poured into.  On the other hand, the producer ones, like this, are more cheap and cheerful affairs that carry the impression of being thrown together in a slapdash manner.  I mean, with The Rise of the Mummy, you have a fairly small cast, an off-season high school location and a pre-existing Mummy costume, it looks like something that was quick and easy to put together, as a sideline in-between directing his own films.  In terms of the films he has directed…Don’t Speak…Cupid…Clowndoll…The Final Scream and the more recent Hellkat, Jeffrey is going from strength to strength and has the kind of track record that earmarks him as one of the most promising talents to emerge from this period of British horror filmmaking.  The Rise of the Mummy, I think is likely to be remembered as a slight and fairly lightweight title in his filmography, but c’mon there is still lots of fun to be had here.  I remember a couple of years ago, someone remarking that Moonstalker starring Cliff Twemlow was the closest Britain ever came to making a Don Dohler movie, but if anything I think The Rise of the Mummy comes closer to being a Dohler movie relocated to a British setting.  Like a Dohler film, The Rise of the Mummy doesn’t cheat when it comes to showing off its creature, it is not shy of putting the Mummy right there in the first scene-and after a brief downtime for the bereavement subplot to play out- amounts to a very simplistic, creature feature runaround.  In the past when British films tried to do creature features, like Proteus, Grim and Breeders from the 1990s, it seemed like they could never fully shake off the British reserve and enter into the B-Movie ethos in the same way that low budget filmmakers across the pond were able to.  Hang ups that Jeffrey’s generation of filmmakers appear to have thrown aside, and whole heartedly embraced the trashy, having taken to making very unpretentious horror movies like ducks to water.  Maybe now, more than ever though, we all need a silly B-movie diversion from real life once in a while, and let’s face it diversions don’t come sillier than Eddie from Iron Maiden stalking people around a Grange Hill School that is caught up in a Groundhog Day style time-loop…do they?