Rating: C
Dir: Gary P. Cohen
Star: Art Neill, Jackie Neill, Bart Sumner, Lisa Cohen
You’d be hard-pushed to call this good. It’s cheap as hell, rarely looks anything else, and some of the performances should have been dispatched with the same enthusiasm given to the victims. But it did sustain my interest, albeit more as a time-capsule than a horror movie. For this dates back to a long-ago time when, to watch a movie, you had to leave your house and go to a dedicated shop which rented films on black cartridges, that you brought back home and plugged into a special machine, connected to your TV. I know: difficult to believe, isn’t it? There’s a whole generation growing up, for whom this movie will literally make no sense, never having seen a video store.
The hero is Steven Emory (A. Neill), who moved from New York to up-state Frenchtown, New Jersey, to open a video rental business. It proves very popular, though he’s a bit weirded out by the residents’ preoccupation with slasher movies. Things get worse when someone accidentally returns the wrong tape, and on watching it Emory discovers what appears to be someone being hacked apart. The local police refuse to believe him, even after Emory’s assistant goes missing. It’s up to him and wife Rachel (J. Neill – I’m going to guess she’s probably his real-life wife?) to figure out what’s going on. Which is, of course, that just about the whole town is involved in a murder and snuff-movie ring.
It feels somewhat ironic that Cohen made this partly as a critique of cheap horror movies, because what he has is frequently indistinguishable from a cheap horror movie, exploiting the lure of gratuitous sex and senseless violence every bit as much. There is an occasional sense of humour displayed, such as when a customer comes in, asks for a copy of “that chainsaw movie” and is given a copy of… J.P. Simon’s video-nasty, Pieces. If I were that customer, I would be pissed. There’s also a discussion, supposedly inspired by a real conversation when Cohen was working in a video-store, with a mother who wants to make sure the R-rated movie she’s renting for her kids to watch, doesn’t contain any nudity, just violence. The soundtrack is what would now be called synth-wave too.
However, any positives are heavily countered by a slew of embarrassingly hammy performances, right from the start, where a customer in a clothes store is beaten to death by the leering staff. Easily the worst is William Toddie, the package of deli meat playing the Chief of Police (his IMDb credits comprise this film and its sequel, which by all accounts leans more into the comedic angle). He makes the cast of 2000 Maniacs look like Daniel Day-Lewis in Academy Award mode. If this is intended as satire, it ends up falling into the trap of becoming what it’s supposed to be satirising. In a world where every imaginable atrocity is just a mouse click or two away, this period piece feels almost quaint in its concept.