Everything I Learned from VHS

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asketCase, Lemon Popsicle, Inseminoid, King Frat, Screwballs, Porkies and Class of Nuke ’Em High - everyone of them an enticing proposition of illicit thrills and mild titillation. The auditorium for the viewing of such school-holiday delights was usually the front room of a friend whose parents worked during the day and couldn’t afford childcare. Their absence meant the top-loading video player was open to anything the boys at Astrovision permitted us to rent, which was usually anything.

Not every classic horror film suffered alienation at the prim whim of Mary Whitehouse and her brigade of knee-jerk crusaders. The numerous pre- Blockbuster video rental shops that appeared in the mid-eighties were a veritable treasure trove of fascinating titles, yet to be eclipsed by a continual wave of new releases. These cinematic emporia were more akin to vintage bookshops in their appeal and were a ready source of cultish and low-budget entertainment. For a single English pound, one could spend an entire day with Chuck Norris or a bunch of horny, Popsicle-sucking Israeli teens, pausing the action to study a particularly grisly act of violence or flicker of nudity.

Maybe there was a small amount of validity in the moral panic that ensued after the arrival of VHS. I certainly wouldn’t want my teenage child watching a film that made violence titillating, promoted misogyny or featured truly disturbing imagery. It’s just a shame these self-appointed guardians of decency lacked the guile and intelligence to distinguish between smart, cinematic genre pieces and witless exploitation. We were permitted access to films we would not have stood a chance of seeing theatrically, due to our being under age. This was most likely due to video shops being run by nerdy guys who relished introducing youngsters to a variety of mondo video rarities for vicarious thrills.

It started with films such as Porkies and the slew of imitators and sequels that followed. Me and a few close chums discovered an early Stallone picture called The Italian Stallion, a softcore porn flick from 1970, re-released after the success of Rocky as a cash-in on the actor’s sudden stellar status. Whether it was a genuine mistake on the part of the store owner or indeed a sly gag, we opened the video box back at my friend’s house to discover the film we had rented was John Badham’s Whose Life Is It Anyway?, starring Richard Dreyfuss as an artist paralysed from the neck down after a horrific car accident who questions his right to die voluntarily. We didn’t know this at the time, we just assumed that The Italian Stallion had previously been called Whose Life Is It Anyway! before it had been rebranded for the post-Rocky audience and for some reason had retained its original title on the cassette. A tenuous denial, sure, but we were porn drunk and very optimistic.

We slotted the tape into the chunky VHS player and settled down to watch. Our excitement at seeing the guy from Jam and Close Encounters was tempered slightly by the creeping realisation that this wasn’t the film we had intended to hire. It didn’t say anything on the box about Dreyfuss being in the film and surely it would have, he was a huge star, not as big as Rambo but still worth a mention. It wasn’t until after at least twenty minutes of watching Dreyfuss be grumpy in a bed, getting no action whatsoever - not even from his own arms and legs - that we suspected a duping. There was also the distinct lack of a sexually active Sylvester Stallone to consider and eventually we threw the cushions from our laps and conceded that an error had occurred, requiring us to go through the whole nervous, sweaty process of hiring a bluey again.

Hire it we did, though such was our teenage fascination with sex, it eclipsed all fears of dignity loss. We watched most of the film and found its poorly shot, grainy action to be about as arousing as a quadriplegic Richard Dreyfuss and nowhere near as sensitively penned. This says a lot about the film’s failure to engage our penises, considering we could all achieve erections just by thinking about the bath and shower section of the Littlewoods catalogue.

Not all the films we watched were low-quality deposits into our wank-bank of sexual imagery to be recalled on the bathroom floor. I witnessed some of the films that became personally important to me in the darkened front rooms of local work orphans. I was initially timid about horror as a youngster. Despite regularly poring over my Encyclopedia of Horror, I found the static images alone were enough to give me nightmares, and the prospect of witnessing one of the new contemporary American horror movies felt like a step I was not quite prepared to take. I had watched the old Universal horror films despite a youthful fear of Frankenstein that sent me screaming back through the entrance of the Haunted House at Gloucester Fair in 1975. I had seen a few Hammer movies and had no fear whatsoever of monsters and dragons, I just found the wave of brutality emerging from underground American horror cinema to be very unnerving, as though it were real.

The nastiest expressions of this new wave of brutality - Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left, Michel Gast’s I Spit on Your Grave, Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre - found themselves on the list of banned films in the UK drawn up by the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, along with other far less deserving titles. Although I can appreciate why Hooper’s classic account of serial murder in rural America was singled out, it suffered more due to the effectiveness of the film’s scares, rather than simple moral reprehensibility. The images and ideas are horrific, but then it is a horror film, and whereas it does adhere to the dubious convention of punishing sexually liberated teens,м its nastiness is more a condition of its success, rather than it being purely a worthless titillating or exploitative device. In that respect, it is far more worthy than either Craven or Gast’s schlocky, unpleasant efforts.

It’s true that most of these titles were no great loss to the shelves of Astrovision and its ilk, but freedom of choice was as much our right then as it is now. As a result of its prohibition, The Texas Chain SawMassacre became one of those films that circulated in school bags and beneath desks on so- called pirate video. A friend of mine’s father worked for an oil company in Saudi Arabia and would often bring home snide copies of films to compensate for his frequent absence. On one such occasion, my friend was given a copy of The Texas Chain SawMassacre and came to my house furtively to ask me if I wanted to watch it.

This possibility had been on the cards for a while and I had mentally prepared myself for the experience by talking about it constantly, as if it was a forthcoming sports event in which I was competing; psyching myself up for the experience with deep breaths and short exhalations. When the time came, I couldn’t do it. I looked at the unmarked cassette in his hands and made my excuses. I just wasn’t ready to watch something that had apparently made people violently sick in cinemas across America.

Looking back, I think I made the right decision. When I finally watched it while at university, I had to marvel at its grungy effectiveness, at the brilliant use of sound and tension, the terrifying contrast between the ghastly organic bric-a-brac of the ‘family’s’ living space and the shiny metallic door to the killing floor, as it slides violently shut on a twitching victim. As a twelve-year-old boy I would have absolutely shat my pants. I had a vivid imagination and this masterpiece of horror would have sent it spiralling into recurring nightmare. I still find it hard to watch now.

The film that popped my modern horror cherry was to have a huge influence not only on my career but also on my personal life, in that I would eventually be lucky enough to call the director a friend. Of course, I had no idea this was to be the case as we once again drew the curtains of my friend’s front room and slipped An American Werewolf in London into the video player. What I witnessed over the ensuing ninety-seven minutes changed me forever.

From the very beginning, the film draws the audience in, adeptly establishing sympathetic characters thanks to a winning combination of writing and performance, lulling the audience into thinking it to be a warm buddy comedy about two Americans on holiday in rural England. The tension builds quickly to a horrific and devastating animal attack which resets the film as something entirely different. Even as the horror of David’s situation comes to light, amiably explained to him by his dead friend Jack, the light comic touch established early on persists, so that the extraordinary transformation effects, which win out even today in the face of CGI and continue to beg the question ‘How did they do that?’, are counterpointed by a charming levity which makes it all the more memorable.

I felt as though I had advanced in some way, as the credits rolled on American Werewolf, as if I had successfully performed some rite of passage. I had watched a modern horror film and not only had I survived with my disposition intact, I had actually enjoyed it. Not just enjoyed but loved it, to the point that it was all I spoke about for days afterwards. I quickly sought out other similarly visceral monster titles such as Joe Dante’s The Howling and John Carpenter’s The Thing, which I consumed with avid appreciation.

The Thing was a particular favourite of mine, in that it represented the darker aspect to my love of science fiction. It had been released in the same year as E.T. and presented a polar opposite version of the human-meets-alien story. This was no cute, friendly soulmate from the cosmos, this was an aggressive and relentless shape-shifter, hell-bent on assimilating every living organism on the planet via a process of slimy replication and violent death. It remains one of my favourite films to this day.

These films became my teenage obsession. As the original Star Wars saga drifted into the infinity of my eternal admiration, my new preoccupation became the horror movies I was given access to, thanks to permissive video-shop clerks. Years later, Edgar Wright, the co-writer and director of Shaun of the Dead and also a teenage horror aficionado, and I found ourselves surrounded by a support network of our childhood heroes. As our low-budget zombie movie was released in the States, Romero, Landis, Carpenter, Dante, as well as more recent heroes such as Peter Jackson and Quentin Tarantino, all made positive noises about the film, enabling us to cover our poster with impressive quotes. It was a moment of extraordinary circularity that no doubt would have required extensive use of the ESTB to fully exploit the ironies at play, although we would have reprimanded the time traveller as he appeared in front of the TV in that darkened front room for preventing us from properly seeing Jenny Agutter’s top bollocks.

Perhaps the most joyous circularity was the support and eventual reciprocation Edgar and myself received from the man who inspired us to make Shaun of the Dead in the first place. I couldn’t help but recall my fascination with Dam of the Dead as a youngster as I paced the floor of my kitchen, waiting for George A. Romero to call me. At the same time, somewhere in Florida, accompanied somewhat ironically by a Universal Pictures security guard (as if George was going to steal OUR film), George was watching Shaun of the Dead, a film which is in every way a paean to his own groundbreaking contribution to genre film-making and his single-handed reinvention of a horror-movie staple.

George Romero was born in New York in 1940 and, twenty years later, graduated from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University, intent on becoming a film-maker. In the late sixties, he and a number of collaborators, including screenwriter John Russo, formed Image Ten Productions with the express purpose of making what would become one of the most influential horror movies of modern times, Night of the Living Dead. The film tells the story of a mixed group of survivors, fending off a relentless attack from an evergrowing number of walking cadavers, intent on devouring them.

As with most of his subsequent films, the story was laden with social subtext and made comment on notions of collectivism, the civil rights struggle and America’s involvement in Vietnam. Romero was one of the first film-makers to feature a black protagonist, Duane Jones’s Ben, who is subversively permitted to survive until the end of the film, rather than serve as a sacrifice, providing the white male lead with the motivation to complete his journey. Indeed, the two main characters in Night of the Living Dead are a black male and a white female, both of whom last longer than any other character in the film. Eleven years later, film theorists would celebrate Ridley Scott for doing the same with Alien, when it is Romero who deserves plaudits for breaking with convention so many years before. The film’s climax is bleak and unforgettable, cementing its status as serious and credible cinema, despite its roots in a genre dismissed as schlock.

A decade later Romero returned to the zombie genre to create his masterwork, Dawn of the Dead. Picking up from where the original left off, we join the film as the crisis is reaching critical mass. A small group of survivors escape Pittsburgh in a news weather helicopter and seek sanctuary in an abandoned shopping mall. Dawi strikes a perfect balance of horror, comedy and sharp satire as it makes sly comment on the nature of modern consumerism and the ingrained social rituals that determine our behaviour. At once funny, tragic, heart-warming and terrifying, the film is a mesmerising take on the end-of-the-world fantasies that most of us at some point indulge in and stays with the viewer long after the brilliantly counter-scored credit muzak has ceased.

When I was twenty I finally got to see Dawi of the Dead. I watched it alone in a media-viewing suite at Bristol University and found it to be everything I had hoped for as a young child. The moments recounted by the lucky few who had seen it on pirate video were all there: the helicopter decapitation, the screwdriver in the ear, great chunks of flesh bitten out of shoulders and legs, all realised in glorious crayon red.

The images I had stared at in my Encyclopedia of Horror came to grisly, shuffling life - the machete in the head, Stephen’s gaping neck wound. Even as I experienced the closure of finally seeing the film, I could sense its influence making further headway into my psyche as I sat in silence afterwards. I was completely and utterly hooked.

I had already seen Day of the Dead by this time - the third and most gruesome instalment in Romero’s zombie series. Released after the moral panic of the early eighties had subsided, it had no problem securing a mainstream video release in 1986. Day of the Dead follows a group of soldiers and scientists trying in vain to coexist in an underground bunker, long after the walking dead crisis has consumed the globe.

This time Romero addresses the dangers of unchecked militarism and moral questions surrounding vivisection, as the zombies are experimented on and, in one case, even tamed. Howard Sherman’s ‘domesticated’ zombie, Bub, is perhaps the greatest mobile cadaver in the history of the genre, proving far more sympathetic and likeable than many of the human characters. We cheer him on at the end as he breaks free of his shackles and delivers ironic justice to his prime tormentor. Although slightly talkier and arguably less affecting than Romero’s first two zombie films (mainly due to budgetary issues and hurried rewrites), Day of the Dead remains one of my favourite zombie movies, if only for providing such memorable moments as evil Captain Rhodes’s literally gut-wrenching bisection, the conscious severed head discovered in Dr Logan’s lab still hungrily flexing its jaws and, of course, for one of the most sensitively played anti-heroes of all time. Bub stayed with me ever after and if you watch the scene in Shaun of the Dead when Shaun and his friends attempt to evade the undead horde by pretending to be part of it, it is Howard Sherman’s Bub that I am channelling as Shaun makes his attempt at zombie play-acting.

One of the key attractions for me of the zombie myth, particularly Romero’s interpretation, is the zombies’ fascinating ambiguity. They are without any moral imperative or visible emotion and as such cannot realistically be defined as evil. They are simply ‘us’, driven by our most basic impulses. They cannot be blamed for the atrocities they commit because there is no agenda or culpability, only the same ingrained instincts that motivate the living ungoverned by morality. They are the evolutionary or perhaps devolutionary extension of that old maxim of the philosopher Descartes, I think therefore I am - in the case of the zombie, they eat therefore they are.

Crucially, their tragedy and moral ambiguity is demonstrated by their being ultimately weak and ineffectual. Crippled by the tragic disability of death, their approach is slow, pathetic, even temporarily avoidable. I have written about this on several occasions, particular in light of a new wave of ‘fast zombies’, which, I feel, forgo the winning subtleties of the genre in favour of less cerebral scares. Suffice to say, Romero’s films turned me into a very particular type of nerd, for whom such details become of massive importance. If you can’t relate to that obsessive fascination with something ultimately so silly, you’re probably shaking your head right now and thinking ‘What a prick’. Well, I say this: ‘Who is the bigger prick? The prick who writes the book or the prick who reads it?’ (Well, it’s the prick who writes it, obviously.)

Time to Act

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ow in my fifth year at Brockworth Comp, and despite a lifelong interest in the performing arts, it hadn’t really occurred to me to actually try and make a living from it. People from Gloucester just didn’t go into professional acting. Such destinies only befell people who lived in London and could walk to the BBC from their house, rather than drive there on very special occasions.

I had considered a number of potential career paths, including veterinary practice and physiotherapy. I have no idea what possessed me to consider the latter. I think I took a leaflet away from one of those vague careers meetings, in which a tired, disillusioned teacher casually raises the question of what you are going to do with your life and you shrug and leave with the first leaflet you see.

As a subject at Brockworth, although masterfully represented by Mrs Brooking, drama was somewhat underestimated in terms of importance, by students and school governors alike. Pupils were given the option of studying drama at A level, but only as a third option, having elected to pursue two other more academic modules. The first two brackets offered subjects such as English, maths and sciences, whereas the inauspiciously numbered ‘third bracket’ in the three-part group contained subjects like media studies, art and baking. Supposedly bereft of any real application, drama was relegated to this Vauxhall Conference League of educational advancement and as such didn’t feel entirely credible.

Barbara Luck, leader of the Gloucester Youth Theatre, had enlisted my help in fleshing out the cast of an outdoor production of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew at Hidcote Manor just outside Gloucester. As the still sole male member of our drama club, I was a valuable vein of testosterone, a unique thing in similar short supply at Barbara’s own society, the Gloucester Drama Association. Also, I’d like to think she thought me worthy of the production, having enjoyed my robotics and swearing during the evening workshops I had now been attending for over a year.

Barbara, who was playing the female lead, Kate, would pick me up in her Austin Maestro and drive me out to Hidcote, where we performed the famous comedy for three consecutive nights. During our conversations to and from the manor, Barbara must have gleaned that I harboured a desire to follow acting professionally. She had certainly always been very encouraging during sessions at the youth theatre, apart from an occasion where I pretended to be Vyvyan from The Young Ones (taking a break from my usual Rick impersonations) and headbutted a stack of chairs over, making a lot of mess and noise, and making her tut and raise her eyebrows.

On one evening, she brought along a leaflet for South Warwickshire College of Further Education, and asked me to share it with my mum, of whom she was an old friend. One of the major attractions for me was that the college had been attended by none other than Ben Elton, co-creator of The Young Ones, and as such promised a tried and tested educational path to success in the arts. Not just success but snot-soaked, bottom-purping, alternative- comedy success, something that had until that moment appeared to be nothing more than a dream.

The theatre studies course wasn’t free, however, and Mum agonised at being unable to afford it on her own meagre wage, after we found ourselves outside the catchment area for a grant from Gloucester County Council. Fortunately, and with almost creepy serendipity, our house, although technically outside Upton St Leonards, still fell within the parish and as such made us eligible for an educational fund called the Lady Downe Trust which had been specifically set up to assist young people living in the area to pursue a career in the arts. As far as we knew this was the only fund of its kind in Gloucestershire, and, by a series of events triggered by me failing my eleven-plus exam, we had found ourselves living within the bounds of its influence.

Assuming I would pass the eleven-plus in 1981 with flying colours, the Peggs had upped sticks even before the results were in and moved from Brockworth to Barnwood, so as to be nearer Tommy Rich’s Grammar School. However, when I flunked out, I found myself having to commute all the way back to Brockworth on the bus. After a few years living in Barnwood, the house proved a little too costly and the family decided to move. A new development on the outskirts of Upton St Leonards offered reasonably priced housing within the catchment area for my school, even offering free bus travel there and back for the kids in the village. So four years later and by a somewhat circuitous route, we found ourselves in reach of this independent fund that would enable me to attend the South Warwickshire College of Ben Elton.

Mum insists that it was all meant to be and puts it down to something she calls cosmic ordering. I tend to regard it more as a coincidence but an undeniably fortunate one nevertheless. Mum and Barbara both wrote to the trust, explaining why they thought I deserved its assistance, and a few weeks later we received a lovely handwritten letter, agreeing to part fund my education in Stratford. It wasn’ta huge amount, but it was certainly enough to prevent my mum from having to eat cardboard or become a high-class hooker, which I’m sure she would have done, such was her unfailing and heartening support of my decision to enter the precarious world of acting. Actually, it’s preposterous to imagine her going to such lengths; there is no way my mum would ever eat cardboard.

The hover-bikes sped across Queen’s Park at an alarming rate, silently skimming the recently cut grass as they hurtled on towards their destination. For the riders, it was more than just a destination, it was a destiny, although destiny is technically less than destination because it’s a smaller word, but its figurative implication is massive, particularly in comparison to Lord Black’s town house, which was tiny. He conducted most of his nefarious ill-doings from a secret hideout in the North Sea, a disused oil rig which had been renovated and made to look a bit like a spider. It was an awesome and impressive spectacle, but in constructing his dastardly headquarters he had gone slightly over his budget and had to downsize his plans for a second house in the capital. It was big but it wasn’t huge.

‘Ow much furzer?’ whispered Murielle Frenchly into Pegg’s ear. The jet had been equipped with only two hover-bikes, one for Canterbury and one for Pegg. Thus the handsome adventurer and crime fighter had to give his sometime adversary a backie.

‘Not long,’ said Pegg, trying to ignore the warmth of her embrace around his midriff and the whisper of her warm breath against his cheek (he was too cool to wear a helmet). ‘Canterbury, status report.’

Canterbury knew that his master was still mad at him for having a spaz attack with his weapons systems in the boudoir. He had no explanation for the malfunction; presumably something deep within his neural network had kicked in and overridden his safety protocols. He would have to run a diagnostic on himself when all this was over, that is, if they made it back at all. Something bothered Canterbury, something gnawed at the very base of his synthetic neurocortex. His programming was impeccable and subject to constant updates transmitted from the hub; bugs and malfunctions were telegraphed by bursts of predictive code that enabled him to anticipate and remedy glitches before they occurred. It was almost as if his apparent error had been nothing of the sort and instead had been the product of a perfectly constructed artificial brain, operating at full capacity.

‘Canterbury,’ said Pegg impatiently, ‘what the fuck?’

Canterbury cursed himself for ballsing up yet again and pushed his ruminations to the back of his processor.

‘Five hundred and sixty-seven metres sir,’ said the likeable robot with efficient accuracy. ‘Five hundred and forty-seven, five hundred and twenty- seven ...’

‘We’ll stop two hundred metres before the target and proceed on foot,’ decided Pegg out loud.

‘Can’t you make eet fifty? I’m wearing eels,’ protested Murielle with a hint of Gallic bluster.

‘Don’t you have a pair of flats in your handbag?’ enquired Pegg, ‘I know I have.’

‘What?’ shouted Murielle above the rush of air.

‘Nothing,’ replied Pegg. ‘Fifty sounds good to me. The park’s dark enough and there’s no way the perimeter sensors can extend further than thirty metres, not on his budget.’

‘Very well, sir,’ said Canterbury, ‘powering down infive, four, three, two, one ...’

The bikes hummed to a stop and the silence of the night closed around them as they dismounted and prepared to make their approach. Pegg zipped up his combat suit and checked his various knives and guns, which made him look like a complete badass.

‘Canterbury, I want you to run interference, OK?’ ordered Pegg. ‘Strictly hand to hand. I’ll deal with the bulk of it. You just make sure the fight stays even.’

‘But, sir...’ protested Canterbury.

‘I can’t risk a friendly-fire incident, Canterbury,’ insisted Pegg. ‘I saw your eyes back there, it was as though you were possessed by robot satan aka, B.L.Z. Bub.’

‘Yes, sir, I will initiate an artillery escalation only if I hear the activation word. I have triple-checked my subroutines and installed a fail-safe.’ Canterbury projected his intended efficiency with an eagerness to please that seemed almost human. Pegg had to make a real effort to maintain his moodiness, but maintain it he did, giving his robot sidekick a cursory nod in reply. He looked over to Murielle who was staring at him, an odd expression on her face.

‘What is it?’ Pegg enquired, with a note of concern.

Murielle seemed conflicted for a moment, an inner struggle pulling her beautiful brows into the slight frown he himself had worn the night Canterbury caught him reading The TwIightSaga.

‘Nothing,’ she said eventually. ‘Let’s do this.’

Pegg approached her and stroked her cheek (upper right) with a tenderness his rugged exterior suggested he was incapable of.

‘Listen,’ he said quietly, ‘if anything happens, I just want to say-’

‘Don’t.’ Murielle once again flattened her finger against Pegg’s lips, squashing them into an unflattering pout.

Before Pegg could respond, a blinding beam of light illuminated the area, flooding the park with a stark glare.

‘Shit, he bought new sensors!’ exclaimed Pegg as he struggled with the Velcro on his leg holster. ‘Murielle, run!’

A sharp pain shot through his neck as if something had bitten him. His hand flew to his carotid artery with a slap and he felt something foreign beneath his fingers, embedded deep in his skin. He plucked the invasive object out and looked at it; even as his head clouded and his vision began to blur he could see the familiar fluffy head of a tranquilliser dart.

The word, sir!’ Canterbury chirped frantically, clanking over to his faltering master. ‘Say the activation word! I can’t say it myself, sir, it’s restricted.’

‘Hmmm?’ said Pegg absent-mindedly.

‘It’s something you have for breakfast,’ urged Canterbury.

Pegg’s mind dulled and folded in on itself as he struggled to remember the word that would transform Canterbury into a lethal weapon, resembling Iron Man if he’d been on the Atkins for a few months.

‘Murielle knows what the word is,’ mumbled Pegg, barely coherent, ‘but I told her to run away.’

‘She didn’t run, sir,’ said Canterbury.

Through the haze of his intoxication, Pegg noticed an odd resigned sobriety in Canterbury’s voice but ignored it. He threw his head sideways on his limp neck and saw Murielle standing nearby.

The word, Murielle, say the word.’

But something was wrong. Murielle seemed relaxed, almost distracted. A flicker of guilt registered across her face, and as the last vestiges of consciousness ebbed out of Pegg’s body, he realised the awful truth. This was a trap. She had betrayed him. He wanted to punch a window until it smashed, which it would have done after the first punch, but he was succumbing to the tranqs and by now could barely lift his own arms. As his heavy lids drew closed, the figure of Lord Black striding across the grass towards him blurred and expanded into darkness.

‘Oh bollocks,’ he thought.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 874