by Adam Cesare
The disposal coughed up a miniature geyser of red before continuing smoothly, the remnants of the creature moving through the plumbing as the water from the tap rushed down the drain.
There was a sound, almost too small to hear but still full of feeling, from further down the countertop.
The other figure had finished scaling the fridge and stood on the counter now. His spear clenched in one hand, he picked at the top of his head with the other. His features were tiny, but Julia imagined she saw an expression of anguish written upon his face.
She picked up the knife and approached the end of the counter, her shadow falling over the creature.
He set down his spear and waved, then pointed at the doorway with both hands. He was motioning to the hallway, to the body that they’d been carrying.
“Mommy?” Susan asked, her voice thick with post-sob phlegm.
Julia looked at this little man, saw the violence he seemed capable of, and buried the knife in her new countertop.
The brother had tried to tell her, tried to explain, that he could have left with his father’s body, that nobody else had to die this night.
But she wouldn’t listen.
As he lay there, bifurcated by the giant blade, he thought of the rest of his clan, the rest of his village. He thought of how good their sense of smell was, what proud hunters they were, their undying memory and ability to hold a grudge.
Lastly, before the light left his eyes, he thought of how sharp their spears were, and how many of them they would raise in anger.
So Bad
“And this one too,” I say, laying down another tape. The guy on the cover looks like Charles Bronson. Actually it’s an illustration, so he was painted to resemble Charles Bronson, but the likeness isn’t right and Chuck’s name isn’t on the box. The distributor did their best, though: they put the word Death at the front of the title.
The lead actor in this flick probably doesn’t even have a moustache. It’s going to turn out to either be an alternate title for a flick I already have, some Canadian tax shelter piece of shit, or some unwatchable SOV vanity project made by some guys in their backyard on weekends.
I hope I strike gold.
I’ll find out when I toss it in later tonight.
Eddie counts the tapes like this is the first time he’s ever done it.
I’m not good with guessing ages when people are over forty, but I’d wager that Eddie is at least sixty-five. He runs a stand at the Berlin Flea Market, which is over the bridge in Jersey, a forty minute drive from Philly if there’s no traffic, a fucking-million-minute drive if there is.
It’s been a relatively light Sunday. I’ve got a milk carton of about twenty tapes, some are duplicates that have nicer packaging than the copies I have, so I’ll take a look at the quality of the tapes themselves when I get home and put the lesser dupes up in my ebay store.
I mostly collect horror, action and sci-fi VHS, but I’ll pick up an exercise tape or religious scare flick if the cover looks crazy enough, if the celebrity endorsing the workout is gonzo enough.
There’s some kind of horrifying statistic that gets passed around, that something like eighty percent of all the material on VHS will never make the leap to DVD and end up lost forever. Which is something that keeps guys like me up at night, and is almost as bad a retention rate as nitrate stock.
“That’ll be forty-two.” Eddie says. I’m his best customer, but I don’t think the old guy has any special affinity for me. I take the trip out to Berlin about once every two weeks, sometimes more if I’ve got nothing to do, but he’s never happy to see me.
It could be my age, twenty-six, and that I’ve got more life left than Eddie and he doesn’t like that fact. It could be my tattoos, I’ve got a full sleeve on my left arm dedicated to the films of Joe Dante—Gizmo and friends, one of the aliens from Explorers, a long-fingered claw from The Howling—and then some miscellaneous stuff on my right.
Eddie only has one tattoo that I’ve seen, a diving bald eagle on his right bicep, faded with time, and I’m guessing it’s from a stint in the military but I’ve never asked him about it.
“Not forty? You’re sure?” I say, kidding with the old man. He charges two bucks a tape and I’ve got twenty-one.
In the hundreds of dollars worth of transactions I’ve made, we’ve never bartered. Well, I’ve tried, but I’ve never received a bulk discount or even a “Have a good one” and a smile when I pay.
Eddie narrows his eyes, like he’s acknowledging that I’ve made a joke, but not willing to laugh.
I count out two bills and two singles and take my purchases. I brought my own milk crate.
As I load the box into my trunk, I survey the tapes before slamming the top down. It’s not a huge haul, but not a bad one, either. Among the highlights are a crumpled-as-fuck Wizard big box, Oasis of the Zombies, Jess Franco at his absolute worst, and an old rental store copy of DeathStalker II, no original art but it came in a cool plastic clamshell that still has the name and address of the store on it: VideoScope, 137 Cooper Landing, Cherry Hill, NJ 08002.
Huh. Never heard of it. The shop probably closed up in the nineties, pushed out by a Blockbuster or a Hollywood Video. Not that there are any more of those, either.
The rest is flippable junk I can use to trade or sell outright.
I wind back with my hand, make to slam the trunk closed as my eyes finish scanning the titles and I see the one tape that doesn’t have a name.
I’m curious by nature, so even though the tape, no indication as to what’s on it except for the fuzzy ghost of a label on the face and side, could just be someone’s dad’s football recordings, I have to spend the couple bucks to find out for sure.
It’s not like I’m some brave archivist, combing the backwoods and private collections looking for lost Lumière shorts or Eisenstein’s stag loops, but if I find something too good to be true, I put it up on my YouTube channel or hook up my local programmer friends.
See: I’m into the stuff that rots your mind.
Not only the sex and violence you find in your run of the mill Euro-trash potboiler, although I’d never push a lesbian vampire out of bed, but the weird movies that seem like they were made by people who’ve never even seen a movie before, no less know how to properly make one.
And yeah, before you ask “Like The Room?” Yeah, like The Room, before it got all played out and you and your friends found it, dipshit.
A big part of why I love this stuff isn’t because it’s “so bad it’s good” or some shit, but because when they’re good a film can become the perfect alchemy of misguided auteurship and a peculiarity that bumps up against the autism spectrum.
It’s not that I don’t have good taste—I’ve got a degree in film studies, bub—or that I like to laugh at these movies.
No. These films are true outsider art: they are the democratization of cinema long before everyone’s iPhone turned them into fucking Roger Deakins.
I close the trunk and have to give it a second whack before I hear the latch catch, then I hop in the front seat and begin the ride back to Fishtown, fingers crossed as to the state of the Ben Franklin bridge.
As I drive, I amuse myself with the possibilities of what could be on the mystery tape.
It could be anything, and that kind of scope gives me nose bleeds, so instead I choose to fixate on something else.
I think about Eddie and just how it is he has access to all these tapes. Enough access that he’s able to replenish his stall at the flea market between my visits. I’ve asked him before and he just grunts and says that he has a “garage full of this shit” back at his place but offers no further details as to how he acquired them.
One time I made the mistake of asking if I could stop by and have a look. He asked me “Why, so you can show up while I’m not there and knock the place over?” Not a trusting guy with a giving heart, dear Eddie.
So I have to access his cache twenty drip
s at a time. I try to do the math and between the stuff I want and the tapes I have no interest in he must have thousands. I think of that, the fact that his garage probably isn’t climate controlled, how the roof may spring a leak and ruin the tapes, and my stomach does the mambo.
Since everything seems to be upsetting me and there’s a sea of brake lights stretching over the bridge in front of the car, I turn up the stereo (some rare underground doom metal, natch), and let the drone take me through the rest of the drive.
I’ve got a small row house apartment. Neighbors upstairs and downstairs, but no roommates, haven’t had one of those since I was able to afford it.
Although I’m sandwiched on the second floor I’ve got a separate entrance and no one seems to mind the noise from my TV. I’m pretty sure the lady above me grows pot and the kids downstairs throw enough parties that they’ve really given up any right to complain.
I’m left alone and I like it that way. My day job keeps me in shit food and rent and I can watch movies on my phone while I do it.
I don’t know when the last time you were around tapes was. 2002? Did you buy one of the Star Wars prequels, even though it shames you now, before you made the switch to digital? But if you ever hefted around a bunch of tapes, maybe to put them out for a yard sale, than you know that a milk crate full of twenty-one tapes is not light.
It’s a religious fervour that’s got a hold of me as I carry them the three blocks from my parking spot and then up the stairs to my apartment.
I could split the load and make two easy trips, but fuck that. I want some spicy microwave noodles—a Shin Bowl—and I want to find out what’s on that tape. Even if it’s nothing, even if it’s a bitter disappointment, somebody’s cam bootleg of There’s Something About Mary, I’ll still have that not-quite-Charles-Bronson flick to fall back on. Or something else from the stash. Or something else from my collection.
It’s a collection that’s gotten so out of hand I hope they never hike the rent because I’d have to pay it. I can’t ever move out of this apartment because there’s hundreds of pounds of magnetized cinema lining the walls around my couch/bed. I collected, from Eddie and various other sources, until there was no wall space left and the tapes spilt over like crashing waves, forming semi-organized piles and pressing permanent rectangles into the acrylic carpeting.
I drop the crate the second I work the key into the door and it falls so hard that it bounces, tapes fanning out across the carpet but not going far because there’s not a lot of free space on the floor, just the arc of the door, an area to stomp off my shoes, and then the piles start.
Audibly cursing, I dive for the unlabelled tape, the mystery. I’m sure you’ve busted one or two in your life, if you were a collector. Ever drop a tape, crack the plastic window over the spools and still try to run it? Sometimes it works out, other times you’re treated to an ungodly crunch as the machine sucks it up.
Knocking over a stack (victims of the Video Recordings Act of 1984, pile one of three), I find where it’s flown and am relieved to see that the mystery tape is unharmed.
I navigate my way over to the VCR and press it in. Then I grab one of the remotes and switch on the flatscreen. It’s a nice TV, but if I’m feeling extra nostalgic and want to watch a tape the way it was meant to be seen, I’ve got a compact tube TV sitting beside to the newer one, curved glass and built-in tape deck.
Yeah, two TVs and no bed. I don’t entertain much.
I hit play and there’s that whirr…
We begin in medias res, on the screen are three figures in black robes, flat lighting but enough grain that I can tell that it’s film rather than video. At first I think I recognize the scene and it bums me out. Satanis, a “documentary” about the Church of Satan that’s not rare at all, in fact it already has a DVD release. But no, this is different.
The three figures each have third eyes, open and unblinking, built up with stage wax on their foreheads. Classic.
But there haven’t been any credits or title cards, so I eject the tape to make sure I’m starting at the beginning. Yup, there’s just a thin sliver of black under the left window, the minute or so I’ve just watched. That’s not a good sign. It means this may only be a partial film, who knows when it will cut out or how much I’m missing.
I hold the tape in front of me and my stomach grumbles, it’s only ten steps to the sink and another five to the microwave, it wouldn’t take me long to make the noodles but I’m too intrigued by whatever this is.
The tape’s back in and playing. It’s a different scene now. I must have paused on a cut. It’s a close up of a blonde and she’s looking directly at the camera, there’s very little headroom and neck and shoulders but no breasts in the shot. It’s a composition that tells me a little bit about the production before she even says anything.
“Accept him. Know that he can give you the best,” she says, her lips not matching up, even though she looks like she’s speaking English. Bad ADR is my first guess, as she’s speaking with a severity not matched by her expression, giving a bravura performance in the recording booth but not on set.
There’s a tracking waver that hides a cut and now we’ve got an exterior, filmed out the window of a car. Finally something to date it: as we pass parked cars and suburban houses. I’m no gear head, but I’ve seen enough movies—and enough wood panelling—to guess that we’re somewhere in the eighties, early to mid. The houses in the background look like they could be Berlin or Cherry Hill, somewhere local, then I catch a license plate: Jersey.
The camera stops on a kid riding his bike, a teenager, and the car matches speed so we can stay on him.
Oh yes, please. Is this our protagonist? Are we going to have some quality low-budget child acting? Maybe the kid will go all James Dean, start punching a wall during a dramatic monologue.
Then a rose appears over his shoulder, a squib so good that it looks real, even has a second squib exit wound, and the kid goes flying over his handlebars. He skids to a stop, helmet wedging under the bumper of a parked car as the camera keeps moving, pulls away.
There’s some insane child endangerment in this stunt. So naturally I rewind to watch it again. The colours warp as the kid gets back on his bike and the hole in his shirt knits itself back together but when I hit play it’s the blonde woman again.
Only the shot is different, zoomed further out than it was before. I think. I’m nearly certain.
She’s nude, but still looking at the camera. She’s got a great body with long jazzercise tan lines, panties and bathing suits covering different areas back then than they do now.
The woman’s so gorgeous it’s almost enough to distract me from the fact that she shouldn’t be on the screen now, that I rewound, not fast-forwarded. Almost. I hit the pause button on the VCR and then use the remote to scan through the inputs, only after I’m finished realizing that that makes no sense, could not possibly fix the problem with playback, the mystery of the magic shifting tape.
Whatever. Maybe the tape is fucked up, or my player is on its last legs. Whichever the case I should be recording this. I should plug in my laptop and begin capturing the tape as I play the whole thing from the beginning.
Part of what’s great about the VHS format is that it’s fleeting by nature. A fresh tape, played for the first time, will look pristine compared to that same tape after several plays. Not only that, the degrading of quality is not a constant factor, tapes get wear less like tire treads and more like leather jackets, broken-in in some places more than others.
Which is why if you ever rented Fast Times at Ridgemont High or Basic Instinct Sharon Stone’s crotch usually had more static lines crawling over it than any other part of the tape. That’s because a thirteen year old me had gotten a hold of it, paused, rewound and slo-mo’d over that snatch until the VCR heads had worn the tape thin, wicked all the data off it.
Every tape, if you’re paying attention, turns you into an anthropologist. Or archaeologist.
Both. I guess.
“He would love you if he knew you but you’re just so small, so he is indifferent,” the woman says, the audio ghosted with a tiny bit of feedback. It’s gibberish delivered badly. Whoever had written it thought he was cryptic, brooding, a South Jersey Jodorowsky, but there’s a bad camera bump before the next cut that rats him out as the amateur he is.
And we’re back at the shot that began the tape, the three figures with the bad prosthetic eyes on their foreheads. Between this and the naked woman’s testament there hasn’t been a single frame of the kid on the bicycle, like the tape has swallowed that footage up.
I get a bad feeling at the back of my throat, can visualize the tape when I try to eject it, the brown-black filament unspooling as I pull and the VCR eats it.
It’s playing okay now and there’s still time for me to hook up the laptop and record some of it, save it digitally for generations to come, but I’m too into the movie to take my eyes off it.
The cleric in the middle raises his hands, an antiquated powerdrill appearing at the bottom of the frame. The three sets of lips are moving in unison, some kind of chant, but there’s no noise but the drone of the soundtrack. The music is synth so bad that it’s turned some kind of corner and become genius, experimental in its atonality.
The drill has a cord that is slithering somewhere off screen, the man revs it and I can hear the tool over the score, even though their voices are still not coming through, maybe the music is meant to be their chant. Maybe this shit is deeper than it looks, maybe it’s not meant to be approached like a motion picture at all but instead an art piece, an instillation. Should I be watching it with headphones?
From the left side of the screen, the woman turns her back towards the camera and unfixed her cloak to reveal the familiar body of the woman who was just preaching. Even without seeing her fact I can tell it’s her from the hair and tan lines.
