Leather Bound Video (Not Like That)

I watched the BBC series Video Nasty the other day. It's pretty good. The trailers made it look like a period comedy set during the 1980's video nasty scare -- of which I am a bit young to have direct experience, but I remember well its legacy -- and it is sort of that, but let's just say the trailer is a bit misleading.

Anyway.

One early scene takes place in a video shop, one of the hundreds of independent -- and slightly dodgy -- establishments that dotted the nation before the chains took over. This shop had its own branded VHS cases, as you'd recognise if you'd ever been in a video shop from 1990ish onwards. Except that's not how I remember 1980's shops operating.

I remember that you'd browse the shelves in the pokey little room behind the newsagent, pick your film, take it to the counter, and then you'd get your rental VHS in a case that looked like a faux leather book. Like this:

I find this both cute and weird. Not only because people thought the appropriate way to display a VHS was to make it look like a generic leather-bound book, but also because there was apparently some need or desire to display or shelve a film you were only going to have in your house for two or three days. It looks eccentric and odd from 2025. To be fair, it looked eccentric and odd from 1995!

Video Nasty

 I don't think I've posted this one yet.

Everyone thinks this is the cover to an upcoming project because, to be fair, it looks like one! What in fact happened was, we had some space to fill in Huguenauts and Other Distractions, and I went a bit over the top.

The actual cover can be seen here.

Chainsaw-A-Go-Go!

I'm not going to do one of those top ten horror films posts, mainly because it would be Halloween at #1 and everything else jostling for second-place.

Anyway, Rol said:

Since it was banned in the UK as a video nasty throughout my youth, I expected to be disappointed by [The Texas Chainsaw Massacre] when I finally saw it. Disappointed, I was not. Disturbed, I was. Not by the expected scenes of chainsaw torture - which turned out to be mercifully few and actually quite restrained - but instead by the scene at the dinner table where Grandpa's corpse starts sucking the girls finger and she screams... and screams... and screams... and screams.

I was expecting something horrendous, so when my film buff mate Chris got his hands on a grainy VHS copy from some former colony -- this was a couple of years before the ban was lifted -- we sat and watched with high expectations; after all, it had to be banned for a reason, right?

It wasn't horrible in the slightest. Rather, it was quite silly, and I found myself laughing throughout. The bit Rol describes, where the family are trying to get the emaciated almost-corpse grandpa to bash the girl's head in with a mallet, but he keeps dropping the hammer because it's too heavy for his withered hands, struck me as pure slapstick. The way the kids casually leave their wheelchair-bound friend to be hacked up with the titular tool had to be a joke, surely. And of course the whole thing was a blatant Scooby Doo pastiche, complete with a camper van full of kids investigating a mystery and the monster being the man from the local meat-packing factory wearing a mask. All they were missing was the dog.

For years I considered the film a failure, all hype and no substance. Friends reported that they found it just as scary and disturbing as its reputation suggests, so I started to wonder if I'd missed something. Then, in the third episode of A History of Horror, Mark Gatiss interviewed director Tobe Hooper, who confirmed that the film is, in fact, supposed to be funny. Probably not the silly laugh-fest I still see it as, but not the gruelling nihilistic shocker it's been characterised as, either.

I feel more well-inclined to the film now, so I think I'd like to see it again, to see if it's still as funny as I remember.