REWIND THIS! – The Review: A Look Back at the Days of VHS

I admit it, I’m a sentimental old fart.  I get choked up and maudlin very often, when I think of family and friends, a moment in time when I realized the tragedy life can bring to us, or the joy.  I tear up at the movies regularly, or reading certain passages in books. But I never thought I would weep at the loss of a video system.  If you read We Are Movie Geeks regularly you must be aware of the video revolution of the 1980s, when VHS players and recorders found a place in almost every home in America.  I hope you recall the early days when VHS was neck and neck with Betamax, a technically better system. Remember the days of Mom and Pop video rental stores when almost anyone could open a store front, and with a collection of VHS tapes start making money?  As one of the many, many on camera speakers in Rewind This! a terrific documentary on the history and impact of VHS tapes points out, your tapes didn’t even have to be good.   Half the fun of renting VHS tapes was looking for absolute trash!

Rewind This! begins with collectors looking through piles of tapes at flea markets and garage sales.  We hear from so many people it would be tough to list them all.  In addition to collectors and personalities listed above we also hear from Charles Band of Full Moon Video, David Schmoeller writer and director of Tourist Trap, Kevin Tenney writer and director of Night of the Demons,  and the always ready to talk Lloyd Kaufman of Troma!  These are people who carved a niche for themselves in film making, almost exclusively through home video. Missing in action is Fred Olen Ray who, to my knowledge never got any of his product into theaters.  As it stands Rewind This! is a terrific piece of work that reawakened so many fond memories for me.    Part memory piece, but also a step by step history of how home video came about almost by accident.

Several companies experimented with different home video systems.  There was a reel to reel half inch system that was available in the 1970s.  My high school invested in a couple of those players to tape documentaries for class room use.  Cartrivision was a square cassette that played very much like an 8 track tape.  I can recall an issue of Popular Mechanics from about 1974 that detailed several systems that were in development, most of which probably never made it to the market. Originally both VHS and Betamax were intended just for time shift recording, tape your favorite television shows off air for watching later.

One of the most important people in the history of VHS was Andre Blay owner of Magnetic Video a production company that specialized in making industrial videos on 1” reel to reel tape.  Blay saw an opportunity when the VHS and Betamax machines first hit the market. He wrote letters to all the major studios seeking permission to release their back catalogs of films on VHS tape cassettes.  He offered a generous profit sharing deal with any studio that would work with him and no money down to start, just permission to use the films. And none of the studios were interested, they didn’t see much profit or need for their product on any home video format.  Finally 20th Century Fox went in with Blay and the first VHS movies were officially released including 20th Century Fox movies such as Patton and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls ( a real collector’s item nowadays!).

Those early tapes were very expensive, I can recall Nostalgia Merchants VHS version of King Kong sold for $150.  Sales were not that great, then someone realized the potential of renting tapes.  Almost overnight a new medium broke like a tidal wave all over North America.  Companies sprang up, some of them in just days to release and sell titles to what became known as Mom and Pop video stores. As one of the interview subjects in Rewind This points out, you didn’t even need good titles to make a profit, indeed renting and enjoying utter trash became one of the selling points for home video. As more than one interview subject points out no one ever really sat down and said “I wish I had some way to tape shows off the air and maybe rent movies to watch on my tv.”   But once the machines and the rental tapes were available everybody wanted one.

VHS and somewhat Betamax,  filled a need that nobody really knew existed.  The VHS revolution was empowering, viewers could now take almost complete control of their television viewing.  It was a heady experience to walk into any rental shop and find several dozen titles of movies you always wanted to see again, or had heard of and never had the opportunity to watch. We relive all that and so much more in Rewind This!  We hear from Frank Henenlotter the director of Basket Case which became one of the first run a way hits on home video earning millions and allowing Frank to buy his condo. In a discussion of the importance of VHS box art  Henenlotter states he despises “art films” that Criterion has the most boring box art of any dvd company. I like Henenlotter, I loved Basket Case and all his other movies, but there is a place for Criterion in the market.  It was Criterion that released excellent versions of Island of Lost Souls, Vampyr and Equinox among other titles.  But I digress.

Rewind This has so much extra footage the special features run longer than the actual documentary.  We visit a VHS seller in Texas who has thousands of tapes for sale. Follow along with collectors visiting flea markets and view their different ways of housing their collections.  We hear from Jason Eisener  and Rob Cotterill the Director and Producer of Hobo With a Shotgun a movie deliberately  made to look like an 80s direct to VHS release. Which segues to the phenomenon of another offshoot of the VHS revolution, the shot on video direct to stores feature.  We see clips from Blood Cult and other titles.  I did not see a clip from Boarding House, one of my favorite direct to video films but it may be in there somewhere.

Cassandra Peterson aka Elvira admits her career would not have gone as far or lasted as long without the VHS release of her titles. I had heard of David the Rock Nelson but had never seen any of his stuff, I wouldn’t bother if I were you.  We also find out that the Alamo Draft House in Austin, Texas, and other venues, have VHS night, where in the VHS decks are brought out on stage and a roomful of people sit and watch titles that are only available on VHS. We also hear from the late Mike Vraney the owner and operator of Something Weird Video who managed to release hundreds of titles that no one else thought to even find.   I bought a great many Something Weird VHS tapes in the 1990s.  The films of Dave Friedman and Dan Sonney are available now thanks to Mike Vraney, Something Weird was also the first company to release Coffin Joe movies in North America.

Finally, Rewind This! is so dense and has so much information and opinions it begs to be watched more than once.  One of the interviewees mentions the sheer joy of getting together with friends and having pizza and beer and watching whatever looked good at the local rental shop. What memories that brings back.  In the 1980s when we all lived in St. Louis I used to get together with different friends including Eric Schaefer, Tom Stockman, Tony Laurent, Doug Hart, Paul Cunard, Don and Sandy Cooper, Kathy O’Connell,  Mike Gunter, Steve Fears, Bill Winter,  Joe and Lisa Heisler and several other friends (not all at the same time mind you) and do exactly that, pizza, beer and VHS rentals.  Precious memories now.

I particularly recall one video store in St. Louis, Tele Video that at one time had three stores.  The main store was close to my neighborhood near Grand and Gravois.  Run by Filipinos Tele Video had the best selection of VHS I have ever see, I made every effort to watch every title that looked interesting.   Being run by Asians they had an incredible amount of kung fu and ninja movies, especially the now long gone Ocean Shores VHS company releases.  I never did get around to watching Three Hit Men in the Hand of Buddha but I did watch 7 Drunk Bastards versus the King Monkey Boxer! Some of us used to go in there and rent what looked to be the worst titles we could find and then, yes, pizza and beer.  I clearly recall Doug Hart picked out something called Goremet, The Zombie Chef From Hell, that appeared to have been shot on Super 8MM film, in Jacksonville, Florida by some people who decided “hey, let’s make a movie!”  All I recall is most of the movie was shot in somebody’s tavern and somebody got killed.  Which describes most of the stuff that sat on the shelves at TeleVideo.

One of my favorite VHS memories:  we had a farewell to John Carradine night after he passed away.  I think I picked out The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals, Eric picked out Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary (I believe, a lot of beer was drunk that night) and Tom brought the only real classic, House of Dracula. By myself, after Sergio Leone passed I rented Once Upon a Time in the West and watched that as a farewell to a master film maker, it was pan and scanned, that fuzzy VHS image, but I rented it when I needed it and wept all the way through (I always cry at that movie, just ask my girlfriend Radah.)

I also used to visit my Mom in Redford, Missouri and would take VHS tapes of older movies I thought she would enjoy including Hope and Crosby Road movies, MGM musicals and such. I also had memberships at Rental Entertainment on Delmar Blvd, Movie Club on Jefferson, Bijou Movies on Delmar, A to Z video on Lindbergh, National Supermarkets (good at all stores but I used to shop at the one on Gravois) IPI Photo and Video on Brentwood, Pages Video on North Euclid, Southside Movies on Cherokee, Movies to Go on South Broadway, Premier Video on Lindbergh, Movies Unlimited on South Grand (the one I used most frequently as they were within walking distance and for quite a while I did not have a car), Video Movie Outlet on Louisiana, Schnucks on Grand, Classic Movie Rentals on Virginia, Title Wave Video on Brown Road in St. John, and several others.  I also had memberships at stores in Springfield, Missouri, Jays Movie Rentals in Ellington, Missouri and several Blockbuster stores (the chain that ruined the Mom and Pop stores and then went under themselves).  I also had several memberships here in St. Petersburg including Hollywood Video, West Coast and Sun Coast Video. How I do remember all these places?  Easy I still have the member ship cards!  In fact I have several “rent a certain number of tapes and get a free rental” punch or stamp cards that either  were never completed or never redeemed, guess I can forget those free rentals!

And amazingly enough my introduction to home video was with Betamax.  My time in the Navy from 1976 to 1979 one of my jobs was running the ships tv station on an aircraft carrier, USS AMERICA.  Our shows were mostly 16mm film and some 1” reel to reel video tapes.  We had two ¾” Sony Umatics decks to tape our newscasts and we also made a nice library of movies off 16mm.  My last Mediterranean cruise we were issued two Betamax decks and the last film units I broadcast were on Betamax, I was quite impressed.  I recall one title was an Eddie Cantor musical from the 1930s Palmy Days, I had never seen such clarity on an older movie.  To this day I think Betamax was superior to VHS and in 1979 after I got off active duty I told anybody who cared to hear my opinion to get Betamax, only one friend of mine did, Steve Fears.  He liked the deck well enough and kept using it for years to tape off air but was sorely distressed when Betamax rentals disappeared. Which I don’t think is addressed on Rewind This!, there are collectors who are still devoted to Betamax and who sell and trade what few rental tapes in that format were produced. And just to add to the mix I actually resisted VHS for a while in the early 1980s.  I bought a good used 16mm projector and checked out 16mm movies from the St. Louis City and County libraries.  The features were mostly public domain but you could check out documentaries, cartoons, Three Stooges and Little Rascals shorts.  Finally I did get my first VHS deck in 1983, with the wire remote and wore it out in just a few years.

All these memories and so many more were awakened by watching Rewind This!  One of the people interviewed makes the comment that VHS would collect a history, much like a film print would get wear marks, scratches and splices VHS would collect dirt and get drop outs, especially if the movies had nude scenes.  Renters would rewind the tape again and again to see Tanya Roberts or Phyllis Davis nude scenes and thus cause a noticeable drop out, a clear signal to other renters that “a good scene” was coming up.

Which Rewind This! also addresses, pornography was a major selling point for home video, in fact that was one of the main reasons many people got a VHS deck, to watch “mature” movies in the privacy of their own home. Forgive me, I could ramble on like this for pages, Rewind This! had that kind of effect on me.  I still have some VHS tapes, titles that either are still not available or that I feel are very special to me, Rhino Videos 3D tapes of The Bubble “Paper Mister?  Paper Mister?” and The Mask “Put the mask on now!!”.  And Creepy Classics,  a collection of horror movie clips and trailers hosted by Vincent Price which was sold for $2.99 at Hallmark Stores around Halloween 1988.

I also kept all the off air tapes I made and transferred them to dvd-r and I’m glad I did, within those discs are many David Letterman shows when he was on NBC and other treasures, but also many local St. Louis commercials including The Slyman Brothers, Hi Fi Fo Fum, Becky Queen of Carpets, The Tick Tock Shop and …..wait for it……Steve Mizerany!!!!  Right next to the Bevo Mill!

I do wish I had kept some other VHS tapes, I was one of the naïve movie geeks who assumed everything that was ever released on VHS would be out on DVD, au contraire! I really wish I had kept my tape of Patti Rocks!  That has never had a DVD release that I am aware of.  Many of the titles that were released in the 1980s not only may never get to DVD, VHS copies may be the only way they will survive at all.

The point is made that film preservation itself is an illusion, no movie can ever be completely restored and preserved, film decays, even if it’s not the old nitrate stock, and video tape degrades and decays.  As Woody Allen pointed out in Annie Hall the universe itself is decaying, all matter eventually disappears. But while it lasts movies are one of the most fun things I know of, and VHS was a major, major way to see a whole lot of movies in the comfort of your own home.  Then of course I get nostalgic about the loss of drive in movies and inner city grind houses, which I helped to hurry along by staying home and watching VHS!

VHS could be enjoyed solo, I rented Jerry Warren’s Frankenstein Island at Tele Video one night and watched it all by myself and had 90 minutes of WTF!!!  Seriously, check it out sometime, it is on DVD, or maybe Bluray too, I forget.  I had the same experience the first time I saw Horror of the Blood Monsters on VHS.

The one thing missing from Rewind This! that I would love to see, a montage of VHS releasing companies opening logos.  I particularly loved Vestron Videos cheesy logo, also Media, Nostalgia Merchant, Embassy Home Video, Something Weird Video “All you kids make me sick!”, Key Video, Academy Home Entertainment and most especially Paragon Video who always had a group of trailers before every title. You can see a lot of those logos, and some are companies I never heard of, on Youtube. Even when a tape just would not play, I could enjoy it.  For example one night in St. Louis, (let me just say I was feeling no pain, and not from anything that was legal at the time)  I attempted to watch a Paragon Video called Kiss Me, Kill Me with Carol Baker.  That tape just would not track, I had to constantly adjust the tracking, but I still enjoyed it.  The real name of the movie is Baba Yaga and Blue Underground released it on DVD and Bluray, beautifully restored, immaculate, just gorgeous.  But somehow that VHS tape was more fun, I can’t explain it, I can only report what I see and feel.

Maybe I’ll visit some thrift shops this weekend and see what VHS tapes they might have.