I’m Not Saying I Should Have Seen All These Things But I Am Saying I’m Glad I Did

Monday is about movies. And today it's the Video Nasty Era, the trash that I've decided is actually treasure...

I love a good weird film, a good exploitation load of gore, nonsense, grimness and outright creepiness; those films on the edge of the fringe, those movies you can almost smell – and then you certainly wish you couldn’t.

As I write this, I’m up early to squeeze in a screening of Schoolgirls in Chains before work. Now, this film features neither schoolgirls, nor chains. Instead, its provocative title (for the time, 1973) is there to offer menace and possible titillation. The film itself is an extension of Psycho, deranged brothers kidnapping women to impress their mother, carrying out depraved ‘games’ that end in torture and murder. It’s worse than Psycho for what it depicts. It is definitely not going to be for everyone. (It would come with a holster for all of its trigger warning if released today. Well, it wouldn’t get released today).

I will watch this film then head off in my office cosplay for the day. I won’t think of the film for too long after – most likely. Though I’ll quite possibly Google its soundtrack and see if I can find that for an isolated listen.

When I was too young to be watching such things, we were given the video card and told to amuse ourselves. We’d head to the Green Frog Video Store in Napier and see how far we could stretch it. We’d watch ‘dare’ movies. Something we’d heard about at school. Class of 1984. Or the documentary Being Different. Those Mondo titles. Martial arts madness. B-grade horrors from the 50s and 60s. B-grade horrors from the 1980s, for sure. It was a time. We just told the video store clerk that our parents knew we were watching it. We just said that they said it was okay…

I was very amused, a couple of years back, watching Fright Night with my son and my parents. My dad told me it was inappropriate, as he all but clutched pearls to his chest. When I told him I’d seen it at the same age as my son he didn’t believe me. “I wouldn’t have allowed it” he said most piously. “You were at work”, I replied with the deadpan. School holidays were all about a bike ride for a milkshake and an edgy movie. The funniest part of this story is considering Fright Night as having any edge whatsoever of course.

There is a world of dodgy films out there – and I don’t try to watch the most extreme movies I can. But I’ll sometimes give it a go. I should probably stop saying this out loud, I guess. The last time I wrote something along these lines, a reader offered me his copy of Visitor Q. But worse than that, I accepted the offer. I watched it one afternoon. I’m sure the ‘black comedy’ of it would out on a second viewing, but the initial watch just presented the taboos. And it felt like I was peering in on the world’s most serious porn film. Like I’d crossed a line I hadn’t known even existed. It was (probably) too much for me. But I made it through. My badge of completion didn’t feel like much in the end – but I was able to add it to my Letterboxd list of films I’ve seen. (It’s currently up around 8,500 as I try to remember all the movies from my past while adding in the ones I’m watching each day now).

About 20 years ago, a friend went to see The Rules of Attraction (yep, 20 years! I just checked). It was a work outing. They’d achieved their targets and the company took them out for lunch, paid for their afternoon off and shouted them all a movie ticket. In 2023, the weirdest movie you could make might be that exact plot. But anyway, my friend was not into the movie at all. There are some confronting scenes in it – though it’s not at all on the level of the rest of the flicks I’ve mentioned here. It was a mainstream release starring Hollywood’s best and brightest, and it’s based on a Bret Easton Ellis novel. My friend felt it wasn’t the right way to lead into the weekend. Not her favourite Friday afternoon fare. Her exact quote, “I go to the movies to escape reality, not to confront it”.

She’ll likely never know what a gift that has been. And I don’t mean this in any patronising or condescending way, but I think about that line she offered most weeks. It’s there in my mind, often, when I’m choosing a movie. It’s there with me as I’m watching many movies. But, as you might have guessed, I’m thinking about it in reverse. Escaping reality is fine, and certainly valid, and there’s nothing at all realistic about one of my favourite comedy-trash films like The Toxic Avenger, but I’m all for confronting reality. I’m all for watching Bad Boy Bubby, where you might laugh at the lines and some of the absurdity and ‘challenge’ of it, but you’re also likely to cry at the startling humanity.

I watched Hounds of Love a few years back, I guess when it was released – around 2016. I’ll likely never see it again, but I think about it so often. It was harrowing, but somehow beautiful. You wait until the final frames of the film for its payoff, and you almost feel it on behalf of the character. That is a journey. And I realise it’s not one that everyone needs to be prepared to take. But it’s most certainly my sort of film journey.

Elsewhere, though, I’m as happy to see a martial arts film where someone pisses in another person’s face during a fight and tells him it’s warm beer and he needs to lap it up (Born To Defence), I try to watch Silent Night, Deadly Night most Christmases – it’s up there with It’s A Wonderful Life for me as the most-requested Christmas film; I hardly ever seem to get any takers.

Something changed in me when I saw those death scenes in Class of 1984, when I watched a limbless slug of a human roll and light a cigarette in Freaks, when I saw the kid on a bike get mangled in The Toxic Avenger, and when I saw the kid get shot in Assault on Precinct 13. I’m not saying I should have seen all those things (and especially not at the age I did in some cases) but I will say that I’m glad I did. These things sit with me now, as some sort of bizarre Standard when I’m watching a film. I don’t crave this, I don’t need it, I don’t expect anyone else to entirely understand it, nor would I force it on anyway, but I really respect it. Sometimes dumb, hideous films contain the most profound wisdom. One person’s trash is another person’s treasure. Sometimes confronting reality is far better than believing you could ever escape it.

So I’m making a list over on my Letterboxd account of the Video Nasty Classics, the weird and sometimes wonderful. And I’d love your help. What’s your idea of a confronting cult classic that sits with you still? Maybe it’s not ever your favourite film, but it could be something you think about more than any of your favourites, right? And that tells you something.

I’d love to know what weird and/or wonderful trash and exploitation films you have been startled into submission by; which movies have held you on (or over) the edge; the films you think about when you think about profound oddities (that possibly contain visceral wisdoms). Share your picks below and I’ll make sure I’ve seen them and add them to the list.