Owner, operator, and fuzzy retro feelers giver at NightmareNostalgia.com.
Worshipper of our Lord and savior Boo Berry, Patti is a seasoned pro having written for the top horror websites and magazines over the past few years until she decided to go balls to the wall and make her own focusing on pure feel-good nostalgia. Mom to two humans and three furballs.
Long before Redbox, grocery chains were a formidable competitor for video and game rentals.
Many, MANY moons ago, I grew up in a quaint neighborhood where I had the privilege of having both a community center and a shopping mall about a mile away from my house. Just past the community canter and a bridge to the freeway, stood an array of stores that served my childhood basic needs, such as a McDonald’s, Naugles, Pizza Hut, Sav-On Drugs Pharmacy, the ALL IMPORTANT Mom-and-Pop video rental store Action Video, and our local Smiths grocery store-which also harbored its own video rental shop inside the store walls.
It’s another store inside a store! Cue it Mike!
Being able to grab a package of Magic Middles, some cherry coke, and a rental copy of Creepshow 2 is an experience that only 80s and 90s kids really got to live through, and I’m pretty happy I was a part of it. Although I have heard some whisperings throughout the Internet of some being active in small towns around the USA, they have mostly been lost to time and overshadowed by their big brothers of local video rental stores and the dreaded Blockbuster mass market for people looking back on video rental days with their nostalgia hats on; and I personally think they deserve a lot more respect dammit.
To be clear, I was a pretty loyal customer to Action Video, the fact that my mother worked at the deli inside Smiths sometimes made it more convenient for me rent or her to pick up and drop off my weekend requests if they were available. Plus, it never hurt that the clerk gave me free boxes of Raisinets. Also, there was something quite charming about them. They were small, quaint, and very personable. Hell, some of them even donned the ever mysterious black curtain!
It was also something to look forward to if you so happened to be dragged against your will to go grocery shopping with your parents because at least you could make that request to rent Sleepaway Camp a lot more convincing since you (or they) didn’t have to walk a few store pegs down to retrieve it; just to the front of the store by the smokey slot machines!
Don’t forget your free kid cookie card that allows you one free fresh chocolate chip cookie from the bakery on the way up there!
I also have to appreciate that if Action Video or your preferred video rental stop were out of stock of your wishlist movie or NES game, you could usually rely on ye-old tiny faithful here to at least have ONE copy of what you were wanting. Yeah, the place was like the size of my living room, (at least this one was anyway) but goddamn if they couldn’t fit at least 3,000 movies in there with their magic bred’ skills. Napoleon Dynamite would have pleased. These places did well enough mind you, but I just don’t think they had the kind of foot traffic a full sized store would have- hence the chances of your beloved rental being there even higher.
So indeed, I just wanted to take a portion of my day and salute these little video shops inside grocery chains. You made that Saturday morning food shopping trip a little more tolerable.
Short Circuit 2sure as shit might not be anyone’s favorite movie, and it’s definitely received a decent amount of hate as far as sequels go. But I’m here to set the record straight: It’s really not as bad as it’s made out to be.
I’ll admit to most people’s standards, you could consider my taste in films to be pretty awful. I was that kid who actually enjoyed terrible films like Garbage Pail Kids andMac and Me. Are they badly made films? Yes, of course, they are. But I do find some sort of sick nostalgic joy in them every once in a while? Also, absolutely yes. There’s a sly charm inside “Black Sheep” films such as these that you won’t see elsewhere. A great example is the campy and comedic Howard the Duck as it was and still is, panned critically by a lot of cinephile snobs. But, honestly, how can you hate on a movie that showed us the first pair of duck tits ever on a theater screen?
Also, they were, indeed, the first pair of legit boobs I saw as a kid.
The sequel made two years after the original cult-classic Science-Comedy debuted to audiences didn’t seem to fare over well to the same group of people that embraced the now-named Johnny Five as their machine-wired counterpart to our human existence via the glorious 80s. Plenty of people talk a lot of shit about this sweet and sensitive robot turned vigilante scooting around New York City in the 80s- and I’ve had enough of it.
In fact, I’ll just let Johnny himself tell those people exactly what I think about their distaste for Short Circuit 2…
Number Five, now dubbed Johnny Five as he so enthusiastically named himself at the end of the first film, now finds himself in New York helping Ben Jahveri (Fisher Stevens) and tag-along scumbag street-slinger “friend” Fred (Michael McKean) get Ben’s business going into mass production with mini Johnny Five robot toys for kids. Cute, right? Well of course in the middle of this old warehouse Fred had scrounged up as ground zero for the assembly line, is right in the way of a couple of diamond burglars’ plans to heist a very valuable set of jewels. And of course, we all know that our formidable heroes will have to face off against these scoundrels towards the end of the film so we have to throw in a bunch of zany subplots to fill the void until then. Such as:
Upon Johnny Five realizing he’s in a city, the once midwestern town robot immediately gets duped into ripping off car stereos by a Latin gang; and then make him an honorary member. “Los Locos kick your ass! Los Locos kick your face! Los Locos kick your balls intoouter space!”
Ben falls in love with the girl who discovered his toys and got him a deal for a line and is too socially awkward to tell her how he feels. J5 to the rescue as he hijacks a Times Square billboard where he helps woo his friend’s love interest while teaching us some insults in Spanish.
Fred tries to sell J5 on the side of his Rolex watch hustle, and our pre-Wall-E robot falls out of a skyscraper via the fear of him being a corporate slave. Just like Batman, this guy has all the gadgets and is saved by his backpack wing glider, and we get a fantastic pre 9/11 view of the New York City skyline!
Johnny gets arrested on the street because the cop thinks he’s a man in a suit or someone playing a joke.
Ben and Fred get locked in a freezer by the jewel thieves and are rescued in the most ridiculous way possible: calling Ben’s love interest (Cynthia Gibb) and using ye’ old faithful touch tones keypads to play oldies pop songs that give her clues to their location. Oh, with the help of a very nice taxi driver- which is already bullshit fantasy because ain’t no taxi driver in Manhattan that friendly.
All those filler antics have their place in the film for some sort of progression I suppose, be it the hammer over our heads that Johnny Five has emotions like the rest of us, or that we goddamn better remember the exact tune to “Doo Wah Diddy” if ever I get locked in a fish freezer. But perhaps the best moments in this follow-up film that originally starred Alley Sheedy and Steve Guttenberg, is when J5 is cornered by the jewel thieves and beaten to a “battery fluid bloody pulp” in broad daylight on a public sidewalk.
Hey, just another day in New York in the 80s!
What a fucked up segment in a movie that was aimed more at kids this time around. But eh, that’s just the beauty of 80s movies’ trauma.
This is where you might get some sort of feels going, or just laugh your ass off depending on what kind of sick fuck you are, (personally a mix of both is totally acceptable). Left for dead, J5’s backup power kicks and miraculously gets up, rather painfully and makes his way down an alley where Fred finds his frenemy. Lucky for them, Johhny damn near collapses by a Radio Shack and as we all know, that place is the Johns Hopkins Hospital for robots. With a little aid from Fred, the former military robot rebuilds himself into Travis Bickle from TAXI DRIVER and goes on a revenge rampage to track down the men responsible.He is so pissed off, he ignores his low battery warnings and literally revenges himself to death. Well, close to it anyway because what kind of ending would that be for kids?
It’s a 80s flick aimed at kids, so it would be a proper ending if you asked me.
Let’s get one thing straight. This movie may suck to a lot of people. But for the rest of us, it’s a feel-good kind of suck that we want to revisit over and over again. As a kid, we all liked these movies, this one in particular, but as I grew older, the child in people just died and formed some sort of disdain for this film; like it was idiotic to like this movie or something. And honestly, the hell with those people.
Worth noting, however, is the “Brownface” donned by Fisher Stevens as an immigrant from India, whereas looking at it now is a tad cringe and unacceptable. At the very least, they made the guy a scientist and not some corner store worker. This isn’t a dig at Fisher Stephens by any means. From what I understand, he worked very hard at getting the accent down and he is a talented guy. However, to this very day, the only guy able to pull this off and get away with it is Robert Downey Jr in TROPIC THUNDER. Other than that, looking back at films like this and SOUL MAN (1986), it’s just a little uncomfortable, especially in today’s climate of change.
Aside from the unpolitically correct problem there in SHORT CIRCUIT 2, the film does a pretty decent job of sending a good message about not being accepted in America and the tribulations of those going through the system to become a citizen. It’s a little subtle for young eyes, but upon viewing it as an adult, the theme seems a little more apparent. And hell, we get to see our Johnny become the first robotic citizen!
As zany, whacky and ridiculous as most of the movie is, at the end of the day, it really isn’t that bad of a sequel. In fact, I actually PREFER it over the first! Yeah, I said it. I just wish they would have made a third one!
On March 24th, 2020, the horror world received the news that legendary filmmaker Stuart Gordon passed away at the age of 72. According to a source that had spoken with someone close to the family, Gordon had been sick for some time and ultimately passed from multiple organ failure brought on by kidney disease. The grand visionary of independent horror and theater aficionado lit up the 80s’ VHS section with such works asRe-Animator, From Beyond, and of course, the film I really want to talk about right now- DOLLS.
If you’re familiar at all with my internet ramblings, you already know my love of horror history, watching Halloween in my diapers with my father. Around the time I was eight years old, I was well versed in the Slasher and Universal Monsters Genre; with ANightmare on Elm Street1, 3, and 4, Friday the 13th films, Halloween movies with almost a nightly visit from Stephen King’s Silver Bullet all in pretty heavy rotation in my Pioneer VHS cassette player. What can I say- creature of habit. Until one day on our Tuesday night visit to our local Mom-and-Pop video rental store, something caught my eyes that changed my comforting rotation of horror flicks forever.
As an eight-year-old little girl, I was completely enamored with the VHS cover alone. You see, I had already had a fascination with creepy dolls. Mainstream popular films like Poltergeist and at the time, a recently released Child’s Play had only fueled that curious fetish further.
Squirlling off for a second, again, just another grand example of how powerful good ol’ VHS box art had and continues to be with such online retailers as Shout! and Arrow preserving that beautiful legacy of horror home video art.
Anyway, I grabbed it off the shelf to show the Mother and disgusted as she was looking at it with an attempt to push me into another rental from the “kiddie” section, she gave in. Upon our return, I settled in with a nice juice box of Hawaiian Punch, (if you remember those boxed 10-packs- fist bump to you buddy) a can of Sour Cream and Onion Pringles and rode the Full Moon journey into this crazy ride of killer yet somehow weirdly compassionate dolls, witches, and straight to the point moral warnings to humanity. Or at least in this version-be a decent human or a witch might turn your dumbass into a creepy as fuck decorative dolly porcelain. And you know what? It’s been one of my all-time favorites since then.
DOLLS is sort of a dark and twisted fairy tale with just the right amount of gore and goofiness. The film starts with a shithead Dad, the even bigger shithead Stepmom, and a young girl Judy clutching her favorite toy “Teddy” getting stranded in the middle of creepy backwoods nowhere England with a severe thunderstorm approaching. In an attempt to seek shelter, the family heads out on foot to a spotted castle-like mansion that just so happens to be sitting close by- it’s like none of these guys had ever seen a horror movie in their entire life. Little Judy, lagging behind annoys the evil stepmother played by Stuart Gordon’s wife Carolyn Purdy-Gordon, snatches Teddy and tosses it in some bushes setting up one of the most glorious scenes in the film.
Big kudos to special effects supervisor and head honcho make-up artist Gabe Bartalos (TCM 2, Basket Case) for this magnificence that runs consistently throughout the film.
Moving on, the trio makes their way to the mansion, breaks in because why not, and gets met by an elderly toy maker couple at gunpoint played by Guy Rolfe and Hilary Mason; who then takes pity on them upon seeing the presence of a child in the mist. They take them through the endless hallways of the home to see the place is filled with hundreds, maybe thousands of nightmare-inducing dolls. Then we throw in two criminal punk rock hitchhikers with a bumbling but loveable man-child also seeking asylum and hot damn we got ourselves a movie now!
The dolls themselves pretty much do the couple’s bidding. Giving people a chance to basically just not act like a dick and be respectful. It seems like these really are the only rules in this home filled with little homicidal plastic terrors. But, we wouldn’t have a movie if that were the case, so of course, some of these people cross the dickhead line and pay the ultimate price. According to the Blu-ray from Scream Factory, Stuart Gordon reveals his inspiration behind the look and story of DOLLS, involving being accidentally locked in a room full of Victorian-style porcelain horrors for some time.
Yep. A big bag of FUCK NO for me.
Dolls, usually overlooked by such films in Gordon’s Rolodex like From Beyond and Re-Animator, has gained a monumental cult of popularity over the past ten years thanks to the multiple horror internet outlets dedicated to this sort of thing. To me personally, the story of what is actually a pretty damn abused girl by the hands of her asshole father and his new wife partnered with her pure innocence and love of toys remains extra special and a cautionary tale at its finest. It also opened up a whole new world of 80s horror shortly after as I began to expand my genre curiosities based on VHS box art alone.
Thanks for the memories and the movies Stu. Rest in peace, toy soldier.
