Rental Store - Encore Entertainment

This Encore Entertainment label was on my copy of the zombie buddy-cop comedy Dead Heat. The Renton, Washington store was around long enough to have to convert from manual cataloging to digital. The UPC was covering this old-school label.

Rental Store - Stars Family Video & Nord TV

Both of these stickers were on my copy of Helter Skelter. Based on the area code, Stars Family Video and Entertainment appears to have been somewhere in the greater north and east parts of Connecticut.

Nord TV & Video Outlet of course, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Weird because I found it in a used shop in Seattle.

The New Complete Pointing Dog

The New Complete Pointing Dog With Harold Adams

United States - 1998

Stover Publishing Co., 1998, VHS

Run Time - 43 minutes

Puppy Puzzle

Puppy Puzzle

The Hastings Approach to Evaluating the Structural Quality of Puppies

United States - 1998

Dogfolk Enterprises, 1998, VHS

Run Time - 55 minutes

# 600 - Breathing Fire

Yes it's true folks, this is officially our six-hundredth post on Lost Video Archive.

To commemorate I'm dropping a review that I've been sitting on for almost a year, something both representative -it is random and generally "low quality" (by normative standards, not mine)- but also atypical -it's on DVD and martial artsy. I love you all so much I give you this gift.

So please, raise a glass to Lost Video Archive and peruse my babblings on the nugget of 90's that is:

Breathing Fire

United States – 1991

Director – Lou Kennedy, Brandon Pender, Brandon De-Wilde

Echo Bridge Home Entertainment, 2004, DVD

Run Time - 1 hour, 26 minutes

Lesh do shome training....

When Uncle David comes to their father’s home in search of sanctuary, two brothers, Tony and Charlie (Jonathan Ke Quan) discover that the washed-up drunk is another in the long and vaunted cinematic tradition of expert martial-artist Vietnam veterans. Uncle David has taken custody of a young woman, the daughter of a war buddy who was killed by a ruthless criminal gang of (other) martial artists. When the thugs, including the ever-bulging Bolo Yeung come looking for the girl, the brothers want to help, but find that Uncle David is reticent to get them involved. When the thugs prove to be too much for David to handle, (even with the help of a pint of whiskey,) he reluctantly takes Tony and Charlie under his tutelage. In an inspiring and epic montage of choreographed grimaces, sincere grunts and underage shirtless-boy backslapping, Tony and Charlie become a hypothetically formidable low-rent recreation of Double Dragon.

Fortunately for the plot up to this point, the helpless female token has completely failed to recognize that her own host, Tony and Charlie’s father Mike is the leader of the very gang that smashed down her door and murdered her parents. Of course it helps that everyone else has also remained happily oblivious to Mike’s glaring sleaziness and casual indifference toward the pugnacious goons who keep dropping by to smash things and snatch the girl away. But that was before Charlie and Tony were green berets. Once they have tested their mad skills against some bartender-karate-midgets they have a revelation just in time for the big showdown with dad. Of course, as we’ve known all along thanks to some extremely convincing flashbacks, Mike is also the sociopathic, racist kung-fu ‘Nam vet who murdered Charlie’s Vietnamese mother during the war. Guilt-tripped by his brother into adopting the orphan, Mike got his revenge with the kid's name. The child will always be an enemy.  Nevertheless, this revelation comes just in time to unburden our spectatorial minds for the unambiguous third act climax.

With all of this historical mayhem revealed, the multigenerational camaraderie that has sustained tension until now predictably falters. Mike and Tony go their own ways and David and Charlie bitterly follow suit. But this premature bifurcation is not to last, for there remains a final reunification, a coming to terms which in the presence of anything “’Nam” must symbolically, if only superficially, represent the healing of the American nation itself. In a scene typical of the heartwarming coming of-age watered-down karate film that was so popular at the time, Charlie and Tony spar out their differences at the California State Tae Kwon Do Championships and all returns to normalcy in a moving fraternal-love-conquers-all freeze-frame embrace as the credits roll up and the salty eyeball liquid of joy rolls down.

Now that you're done with that, go read my friend Karl Brezdin's review of this fucker at his wonderful blog Fist of B-List. He's got better screen caps than me! Go!

Red Heat

Red Heat

United States - 1988

Director - Walter Hill

International Video Entertainment, 1989, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 46 minutes

Oh what a classic. Walter Hill, the man and master director behind such exploitation classics as The Driver, Hard Times (BEST), The Warriors and Streets of Fire went even more culturally specific with this little buddy-cop gem which I wish to Thanatos I hadn't gotten rid of. Sure, sure, it's out there, I can buy a new one but I damned sure wish I could just pop this fucker in the player and watch Schwartzy wrestle mostly naked in the snow.
Doesn't that one-liner, nay one worder, when Schwarty's Ivan Danko stumbles across the porno channel in his hotel room in the US just say it all? Shaking his head in expected disappointment;
"Capitalism."

Dead Heat

Dead Heat

United States - 1988

Director - Mark Goldblatt

New World Video, 1988, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 26 minutes

Among the more bizarre buddy cop films, Dead Heat ranks pretty high up there. Although the plot itself, with a mad-scientist transplanting old people-souls into young people bodies, isn't all that exciting, the execution is pretty damned fun. Joe Piscopo and Treat Williams are at their knuckle chewing best as endlessly annoying and whiny buddy cops respectively. Who would have them any other way? Quite possibly one-upping the medical supply warehouse scene from Return of the Living Dead in which the butterflies and split-dogs are zombified, Dead Heat features a similar scene in a Chinese butcher shop
They don't make 'em like this any more.

The Burning

It's always been my policy to avoid posting horror movies during October since everyone else already has that genre pretty well beaten to death. But since I had to do this one more or less on assignment, I'll throw it out there, on Halloween day no less, just to contradict myself.

The Burning

United States - 1981

Director - Tony Maylam

Mostly forgotten until it’s re-release on DVD in 2007, The Burning has earned a minor reputation among horror enthusiasts. It is true that the slasher genre, begun definitively with 1978’s Halloween but presaged in the stalker thriller movies of the foregoing decade, has a limited appeal. But after thirty years and numerous remakes, it’s much easier to look at the originals as ‘classics.’

So why is it that despite being one of the earliest entries in the genre, The Burning was until recently a relic? Despite a relatively large budget, it suffered from the typical maladies; bad acting and a predictable story. In fact, The Burning is a near copy of its predecessor, 1980’s Friday the 13th. Instead of being murdered by a protective mother, this passel of summer campers are killed by a vengeful groundskeeper hideously burned in a pre-credit prank. 1981 was probably too early for there to be a slasher formula per se, but not for lack of The Burning trying.

That’s what is appealing about this film however. It doesn’t try to out-think itself, it puts on no pretensions or fancy twists to keep things surprising because there was not yet a need to do so. It’s important to remember that just a week before this film, Friday the 13th Part 2 was released followed by Holloween 2 in October of that year. By the end of the decade the three major slasher franchises would have spawned a total of fifteen sequels and countless knockoffs. In retrospect I see The Burning as one of the most honest of its cohort for it has nothing to hide and goes straight for the guts.

This rad poster comes from Phantom City Creative

Rental Store - Video Show Room

Rage of Honor

Rage of Honor

United States - 1987

Director - Gordon Hessler

Media Home Entertainment, 1987, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 32 minutes

Rage and Honor

Rage and Honor

United States - 1992

Director - Terence H. Winkless

Columbia Tristar Home Video, 1992, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 33 minutes

Rental Store - Video Update, Texas

I found this Video Update label on my copy of the vintage indie flick The Alien Factor, but something wasn't clicking. Hadn't I seen a Video Update label on another tape, and hadn't I posted it? Yes I had, HERE. That label was on a copy of Miami Horror from a Mukilteo, Washington store.

As it turns out, Video Update was one of the many franchise chains acquired in the 90's and early 00's by the Movie Gallery corporation which also purchased the late Hollywood Video name and the Movie Scene name. Movie Gallery went out of business as a brick and mortar in 2010 but continues to operate as an entertainment news aggregate site.