By Terry Sherwood
The video store that one could walk into scan a wall of lurid VHS covers and choose your evening entertainment based almost entirely on the artwork. In Soho their might have been other factors one had to ask and get unlabeled tape from behind the counter. The stranger the title, the better. Video Shop Tales of Terror 2: Lust & Revenge gleefully drags it into the modern age.
Looking initially like a North American Drive in intermission visuals minus the minute countdown and the dancing confections you have a loving look of an anthology The work opens with a look at the Amityville franchise. If you’ve spent any time wandering through the lower reaches of independent horror, you’ll know just how far the Amityville name has travelled. Almost as much as The Exorcist Shark on insert name here of your favourite situation. Followed by The Beast of No-Man’s Land, followed by a wonderfully absurd spoof on trench beastie and the horror of war. Each of these items like in the bigger budget film Grindhouse from the tedious one trick pony director Quentin Tarrantino has a different look giving the a no pun intended ‘Coming Attractions” feel.
The principal wraparound story, Video Dungeon II, directed by Alexander Churchyard, returns us to the video shop and gives the whole production its Tales from the Crypt flavour. Dani Thompson provides an excellent introduction, complete with a joke about signing the wrong contracts.
The strongest segment is Invasion of Studio 69, co-directed by Tony Mardon and Churchyard. Combining Rod Serling’s, The Twilight Zone with the 1970s adult-film industry is precisely the sort of gloriously unlikely collision that an anthology like this should embrace. Laurence R. Harvey gets to channel his inner Rod Serling host, and the result is one of the more memorable episodes.
The Gory Hole, directed by Richard Rowntree, takes curiosity and desire into considerably darker territory. It works as both horror and morality tale, with Rowntree demonstrating a good understanding of how to make an audience uncomfortable especially when providing a off shoot of “vagina dentata’ that has appeared repeatedly in horror cinema and literature because it is an especially effective combination of sex, fear, and grotesque body horror. The concept has been used both seriously and for deliberately outrageous exploitation-horror comedy.
Visually, Video Shop Tales of Terror 2 deserves considerable credit. The makeup, practical effects, gore and cinematography are all impressive, particularly when you consider that this has a small budget. You get to use new ways be inventive like the film back then had to be.
The film’s biggest weakness is also its most obvious gamble: the humour. There are some genuinely funny moments, particularly in the video-shop material and the trailers with all the various people milling around as customers. In jokes for those that remember with a grave marker referring to Mary Whitehouse in a non complementary way. The humour is hit and miss, and occasionally the jokes begin to feel as though they have been pushed a little too hard. Some of the comedy becomes tedious
Plenty of blood, gore, cleavage at every opportunity and male anatomy all calculated to shock the censors like Mark Walberg’s “appliance” seen in Boogie Nights.
What makes Video Shop Tales of Terror 2 particularly enjoyable is its freedom. This is independent horror, and therefore it doesn’t have to play by the rules of the major studios which doesn’t always mean it should be seen. It can be vulgar, bloody, ridiculous, sexy, tasteless for some or be like The Who song Pictures of Lily was.
The cast including Dani Thompson, Laurence R. Harvey, Amber Doig-Thorne, Charlie Bond, Annabella Rich and James Hamer-Morton throw themselves into the material with enthusiasm, while the individual directors give each story its own personality. You don’t have to have seen the first picture to enjoy this one which is a celebration of today and yesterday’s horror filmmaking and the glorious insanity of the VHS era.
So, hang up your raincoat, switch off the lights, put the tape in, and enter the Video Dungeon And speaking of strange ideas, the film produced a particularly odd déjà vu for me. Years ago, I wrote a science-fiction comedy story called Pancakes from Hell, about little doughy creatures that popped out of the ground and began killing people. Watching this film, I encountered something strangely reminiscent of my own bizarre creation. Coincidence, undoubtedly but it made me wonder whether there is some underground reservoir of deranged horror ideas that we are all tapping into. I was only in it for the dough.
Bloody Flicks 