Last Saturday after my Pathfinder game my friends and myself settled in to watch Deathstalker, kindly purchased for me by the delightful Chris Card. For those who don't know because they've experienced joy and hope in life, the Deathstalker movies are a horrible, horrible series of ever-increasingly cheap sword and sorcery flicks that are hilarious in their incompetence. While we live in the era of the Bad Movie (the fact that Michael Bay can have money fights with Steven Spielberg after they've Cleveland Steamed my childhood fills me with a sense of cosmic depression) as any trip to the local cinema will show, the wonderful era of the delightful bad movie is sadly past us.
Which I find regrettable. I can look back with warm nostalgia at the mind-blastingly bad movies of my formative years. Movies like Troll, Trilogy of Terror I and II, The Re-Animator, Beastmaster, The Blade Master, Dolomite; true testaments to the human spirit. I really couldn't to this day tell you what Lifeforce was really about but I still rank it as a special movie, mostly because it was the first time I remember seeing a naked woman (not counting pressing my face against the TV watching scrambled porn channels like some sort of degenerate Magic Eye poster).
The death of VHS and the death of the video store were the end of that golden era. VHS was the perfect format for the bad movie, picking up the torch after the drive in let out a death rattle and plunged off the cliff. It allowed people like St Corman and the Holy Church that was American International Pictures and its chosen disciple Orion to cheaply pump out the finest schlock and knockoffs Italy had to offer. It allowed anyone with a camcorder and a dream to browbeat their friends into helping them to fulfill that dream. The dyed Karo syrup flowed, boom mikes were visible and people that vaguely remembered high school Spanish classes were given jobs as dubbers. All was right in the world.
The video store was the market of these dreams. The small business, Mom and Pop stores where you could find 2001 A Space Odyssey sitting alongside Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared Syn. The hours I spent watching horrible Euro-sleaze movies that were dubbed by what I assume were actors given horse-grade, Keith Moon approved tranquilizers were some of the happiest of my young life. Even browsing the titles was a treat, especially when spotting the same movie under two different titles and with two different sets of box art.
Occasionally one would find a gem amid the filth. Tombs of the Blind Dead at times almost approached something that if you turned and squinted could be called artful and inventive. The Resurrected is horribly overlooked when discussing the best Lovecraft films of all time. Waxworks 2 should be required viewing by anyone that rolls dice and plays make-believe. The Eliminators is like watching someones out of control, mad, brilliant RIFTS game played out. And of course the king itself: The Last Dragon, perhaps the finest Motown Kung Fu film ever produced in that august genre.
A certain pity fills me thinking of how the generations to come will miss out on all of that. Chain stores and their depressing, mediocre selection killed off the Mom and Pops, and have in turn been driven to the fate of the Dodo by Netflix. Tastes have changed too I suppose. The moronic single beat slasher picture has given way to somehow even more tasteless borderline snuff film torture porn and Dramamine required found footage films.
I guess this is more of trading across the line then any sort of improvement or degeneracy. The slasher genre has always been one I've poked with a stick, backed off, gingerly approached and then poked again before scuttling off. I always preferred the cheerful stupidity of the sword and sorcery genre and the gooey gooey hamster gablooey mentality of the Italian horror film of the 70's and 80's. But to each their own.
Time passes and inevitably things you love will fade and vanish. We are the stuff that dreams are made on after all. But as the Boss once said, "Maybe everything that dies someday comes back". So maybe someday the craptapular movies of my youth will make a resurgence. Let's hope so. I mean, Robert ZaDar needs work too people.
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