These rare VHS films are outsider masterpieces

Earlier this year, Yale University acquired 2,700 VHS tapes for archival storage, inducting clearance aisle bottom feeders like Toxic Zombies (1980) and Stripped To Kill (1987) into a library also holding 17th Century manuscripts and Egyptian papyri. With a majority of films sourced from collectors, Yale elevated the VHS nerd from marginalized nostalgia warriors to a prioritized class of cinema historian, devoted to preserving the “cultural id of an era.” But of these salvaged videotapes, how many are an even rarer artefact, long ago consigned to the bargain bin of cultural memory?

SOV (Shot-On-Video) cinema is deserving of its own canon, yet nobody – not trash scavenger nor video hound – has stepped up to form it. The films in this list, all shot and once screened on VHS, are made of a material less vaunted but as easily degradable as 35mm, and a lack of critical respect and historical research have allowed its native works to slip into obscurity. With the clock ticking, and VHS re-emerging as a beyond-the-fringe format, it’s time to relocate and reconsider the greats of SOV cinema.

BLONDE DEATH (1983)

James Dillinger’s Z-grade masterpiece is a Badlands for the Reagan youth, set in a suburban hellscape where bad boys can whimper and good girls can kill. Tammy (Sara Lee Wade) is a “teenage time bomb” longing for love, and after her ultra-conservative stepmom and cuckold Dad leave for the weekend, she finds it in the arms of a handsome fugitive named Troy (Scott Ingram). Dillinger had a gift for poetic vulgarity, and his beautifully structured screenplay, packed with eccentrics like a one-eyed lesbian, suggest a talent who would have thrived in the post-Tarantino, post-Araki landscape of the mid-90s. In the mid-80s, however, his is a one-off celebration of rebellious youth, and the director, whose real name was James Robert Baker, committed suicide at 51.

G.B.H. (1982)

Released during the first wave of moral panic which resulted in the Video Recordings Act 1984, G.B.H. was a legendary outing for bouncer-turned-writer/actor, the “Hercules of Hulme”, Cliff Twemlow. A polymath who also wrote horror novels and composed themes for TV, Twemlow penned several cult hits in the 80s and cast himself as the over-sexed, over-qualified hero of local exploitation. Here he plays an ex-con protecting The Zoo club from extortion by a notorious gangster named Keller, and in between disco montages, and long scenes of Twemlow jogging, director David Kent-Watson finds time to let the Mancunian muscle kick ass. Sadly, although G.B.H. never made the nasties list, it’s unlikely to be re-released while the rights are tangled up with its alleged mafia financiers.

BLACK DEVIL DOLL FROM HELL (1984)

After seven minutes of swampy blues guitar laid over black-screen credits, writer-director Chester Novell Turner unleashes one of the most unsacred horror films of all time. In the Bible Belt, a virginal black woman buys a possessed doll from a pawn shop. With the doll comes a stern warning: this figure can “make your deepest wishes come true.” Novell Turner’s theme – the emotional void left by religious dogma, and best filled by weird sex – is more poignantly tapped than his trashy premise suggests, and similarly to Blonde Death, he uses it to expose a vital tension in the American suburbs, penetrating the repressed desires of a class who extol spiritual contentment.

POSSIBLY IN MICHIGAN (1983)

Cecelia Condit’s 11-minute cannibal musical is one of the great UFOs of modern cinema. Described as “an operatic fairy tale... in Middle America”, it’s a blackly comic depiction of two women putting an end to the cycle of deadbeats and stalkers running through their lives; all men in the film are seen wearing animal masks, and one disturbing line of sing-song dialogue (performed in the manner of a children’s nursery rhyme) encapsulates the whole film: “I bite at the hand that feeds me / slap at the face that eats me.” The off-kilter harmonizing, set to a Casio score, achieves an odd beauty in context, and Condit’s images, which twice recall Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970), are some of the best ever shot on VHS. Repeat viewings will be necessary.

GUINEA PIG 5: MERMAID IN A MANHOLE (1988)

Japan’s Guinea Pig cycle found international recognition when its sixth entry, Devil Woman Doctor (1986), was discovered in the video cabinet of notorious serial killer, cannibal and necrophile Tsutomu Miyazaki, a sordid association which led to their decades-long ban. Mermaid In A Manhole, the fifth entry, is in desperate need of rediscovery. A melancholy exploration of the artist/muse conundrum, like La Belle Noiseuse (1991) with oozing boils and fish guts, its story of a widowed artist who starts painting with the blood of a mermaid also functions as a moving allegory for cancer. Director Hideshi Hino crafts an intimate chamber drama which never flinches from the stomach-churning plight of its characters – this devastating film is so much more than a simple effects showcase.

TWISTED ISSUES (1988)

Charles Pinion abandoned plans to document the Gainesville punk scene to make this legendary skateboarding-zombie-slasher hybrid, which splices its revenge plot with raw footage of FL bands like Hellwitch and Slaves of Christ. With its scuzzy stock footage of Margaret Thatcher and Hitler, furious cutting rhythm, and experimental lighting (streetlamps and flashlights, shot without filters), Twisted Issues is the most technically impressive SOV movie, and an undoubted influence on Gregg Araki’s doomsday party classic Nowhere (1997) – both films feature a hypnotic TV and take place over one fatalistic night. The plot? A murdered punk, resurrected by a mad scientist, nails his skateboard to his foot and heads out on a bloody revenge spree. This is a fevered, crusty masterpiece.

THE BURNING MOON (1997)

With Black Past (1989) and The Burning Moon (1997), Olaf Ittenbach earned his title as the king of SOV splatter, and with the latter film – an anthology of disturbed bedtime stories – created one of the biggest out-and-out gorefests of all time. There’s little point recounting plot, because Ittenbach merely uses it as the connective tissue between scenes where he, well... dismembers connective tissue. Highlights include a head-exploding to rival Scanners (1981) and The Beyond (1981), and in the film’s second story – about a psychotic priest! – plenty of chopping and flaying, including an infamous “Hell Scene”, one of the maddest moments in the SOV cannon.