Once VCRs dropped to around 200 bucks, pretty much everyone got one. “Getting a movie” became a big thing to do (especially for a dork like me who spent his nights either watching rentals or hanging out in his solitary friend’s basement playing Duck Hunt and talking about hot girls he was terrified of being around.¹)

Soon thousands upon thousands of video stores with millions of video boxes lining the shelves popped up to meet the demand. The box became a big marketing piece for the mass of less-than-choosy or well-informed renters, and as a result there arose the related phenomenon of video box deception, and coat-tail movie making. Soon after a big hit made it to the video stores, a cheapo direct-to-video jobber would pop up designed to capitalize on the hit’s successes. Sometimes, the knock-off would be a movie tangentially related to the hit, like Ruby was to JFK. Other times, however, the movie would have nothing at all to do with the real movie. They would just make the box for the direct-to-video movie look like the poster for the major release. Sometimes they would even give it an alphabetically similar name, so as to be placed in close proximity to the hit. A good example is Dragon Fire which is a blatant rip-off of Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, right down to the exact flying kick in front of a fiery ball on the front cover.

But who are these movies for? I understand how they could confuse the least discerning or most confused video store renter, like foreigners who speak English as a second language or my mother. (My mother is a woman who to this day, God bless her soul, can not tell the difference between caffeine free and diet Coke cans, and once rented the Anthony Quinn and Bo Derek T&A flick Ghosts Can’t Do It when she thought she was getting Ghost. Of course she shouldn’t have been renting “Ghost” for that matter either.) But besides foreigners and my mom, who else are getting these pieces of crap? Do people go into video stores like zombies and just pick out movies based on sub-conscious reactions?

“Um. . .you do realize that’s not Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story right?”

(Glassy eyed robotic response): “Yes . . . but I associate it with that brand . . . and I will rent it.”

“Yeeeeeaaaah. . .well you see Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story isn’t a ‘brand.’ It’s a movie. Specifically, it’s a highly fictionalized biography about Bruce Lee. What you have there in your hand is a bad action movie staring a poor-man’s Jeff Speakman – if that’s somehow possible.”

“Which I associate with Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story . . . An association that gives me comfort.”

What’s even more curious is the recent willingness of marginal and faded stars to be involved in these travesties. We expect such behavior from the C. Thomas Howells, Christopher Lamberts, and bottom of the barrel Baldwins, but Tiffani Amber-Thiessen teaming up with Tom Arnold to deliver Shriek, a wacky satire of Scream, and a blatant rip of what Scary Movie already did is a bit surprising.²

The most disheartening example I found was Emilio Estevez in something called Late Last Night the front cover of which has Emilio with that goofy grin of his, dressed in a scaly suit, and holding out a Martini glass. Also, the background color and the font of Late Last Night bare more than a passing resemblance to a certain Vince Vaughn movie made a few years back. Emilio, we knew with D2, you were jaded, but Late Last Night sounds the death toll to your career.

I . . .

• listened to prog-rock like early Genesis,
• was into They Might be Giants, before like ANYBODY else was.
• watched MST3K religiously.
• broke out viciously.
• didn’t drive until I was 18.
• had a big sweeping gelled up pompadour like early Tony Hawk except really gay looking.
• owned a purple paisley shirt that I used to wear with equally garish ties.
• owned a copy of Monty Python’s Search for the Holy Grail which I watched about a dozen times during High School, and yes, I probably did quote from it on occasion.
• was stick thin, but had a little belly, a nasally voice and no hair under my arm pits.
• owned 4 Bloom County t-shirts.
• never drank
• was the product of a subtle, but very successful campaign by my parents to keep me terrified of girls and guilty about my sexuality.

²Shriek’s movie box even rips off the Wayons’ Don’t be a Menace. . . by giving the movie the subtitle of . . .if you know what I did last Friday the 13th. They also print on the box, “It’s a Scream!” which at first looks like a review, but the line isn’t attributed to anyone. The producers of this movie suck so very very hard.