A New Yorker opens a video store in a small town. One day a homemade snuff film finds its way into the overnight return box. Naturally, the cops don’t believe his “crazy story” because the movie would be over as soon as they do their job. Or maybe they’re in on it… maybe. (I’m not just being flippant here. It really is kind of hard to tell.)
I began snickering almost as soon as Video Violence began. In the opening scene, a couple of sports store clerks wait for an unsuspecting shopper to go to the dressing room before bursting in and beating her to death with a baseball bat. That isn’t the funny part. What’s funny is these aren’t actors, just people the director probably talked into being in his little horror movie. I imagine the writing process was like this: “Hey, I know a guy who owns a sporting goods store, so let’s set a scene there!”
In 1985, United Home Video gave us Blood Cult, which was billed as the first straight-to-video horror movie. Whether or not that claim is true is debatable, but I cherish the VHS copy I found in the clearance bin because it was shot in and around my hometown. (United’s follow-up, The Ripper, has scenes shot about two or three blocks from my current address.) Video Violence references Blood Cult twice and there’s something oddly pointed about it.
According to Wikipedia, Video Violence is an angry response to the cheap horror films which were infiltrating the relatively new video market. The director, who worked in a video store himself, claims he was disheartened by the fact so many people were into these sick types of movies. So what did he do as a response? He created one of the sickest of the bunch. At least one section is as uncomfortably brutal as the scene in A Clockwork Orange, complete with the instigators using scissors to reveal the victim’s nipples.
So it’s remarkable that out of Blood Cult, The Ripper, and Redneck Zombies, Video Violence is the most watchable. The other movies were boring more often than not, but even though it’s longer, Video Violence has that certain undefinable trait found in Neil Breen films and Tommy Wiseau’s The Room. The actors probably have no business being in a movie, but what they lack in talent they make up with charm. Imagine driving through a small town and seeing this guy on the sidewalk:
I always loved the idea of everyday people picking up a camera and making a movie. Youtube has kind of ruined the novelty of ultra-low budget filmmaking, but back then it was great to think an impromptu horror movie was the talk of a small town in a Waiting for Guffman kind of way. Video Violence drags a little towards the end, but atones for its slip-up soon enough.
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