America’s Deadliest Home Video (1991)

Posted on May 16, 2001 under "Hot", Action-suspense, Horror |

Written and directed by Jack Perez
Starring
- Danny Bonaduce
- Mick Wynhoff
- Mollena Williams
- Melora Walters
Produced by Michael L. Wynhoff

A while back, when I reviewed Deadly Intruder (1985), I mentioned that it was Danny Bonaduce’s sole credit between H.O.T.S. in 1979 and America’s Deadliest Home Video in 1991 (or 1993, if you trust the IMDb). In reference to that, Rick Luehr, who had been unit publicist for the latter movie, got ahold of me and asked me if I’d like to see a copy of it. Well, shucks, I had been planning to track it down at some point, especially after having seen features in it in Fangoria and Independent Video so many years ago, so why would I turn him down?

I thanked Rick after I got the tape. But I thanked him so much more profusely after I watched it. Because this is one of the best damned movies you’ve never seen.

**In its later installments, the Children of the Corn series was hampered by dwindling budgets.**

Now, because Nathan likes to hear himself type, here are some preliminary thoughts on the whole pseudo-genre of shot-on-video movies. There are two basic philosophies behind shooting a movie on video. The first, and most common, is basically to shoot a movie as if it were film and hope that no one minds that it’s on video. Bloodletting is an example of this, as is, say, Redneck Zombies. The only thing that would really be different if these had been done on film (all other things being equal, such as budget) would be that, well, they would look like film. They’re movies; the medium is is supposed to be as transparent as possible in order not to detract from the story.

The other philosophy was practically unknown until a certain surprise hit in the summer of 1999: The Blair Witch Project. In this darling little flick (which was imaginative, if not completely original, and which never should have been shown on a big screen), the fact that a large portion of it is shot on video is made germane to the plot; the footage was produced as part of the story, and thus has a reason to be there. No need to pretend that the video isn’t readily recognizable as such; it’s supposed to be obvious video. Whatever your opinion or intestinal reaction to The Blair Witch Project, you should admit that it was an ingenious device to create a movie on video without having the attendant stigma.

Since that time, the opportunities for shot-on-video features have widened somewhat. Unfortunately, because that very idea of the filming being integral to the plot (rather than some kind of omniscient viewpoint) is what made it possible, too many videomakers have been unable to come up with a story that didn’t also imitate BWP. In fact, most of those projects have been either ripoffs or parodies of BWP, which managed to use up any residual goodwill really damned fast.

The absolute last thing you want to see when you take your lens cap off.

America’s Deadliest Home Video uses that same basic device as BWP: The filming is part of the narrative, with the camera being operated by a character. It’s not an original idea, either — it wasn’t new when Ruggero Deodato used it in Cannibal Holocaust in 1979 — but writer/director Jack Perez makes also manages to tell an incredible story here, one which doesn’t rely solely on the novelty of the medium (as some have charged of BWP) but of which the medium is an integral part of the story.

Gee, is that enough pretentious verbiage? On to the movie itself.

The tape starts as Doug (Bonaduce) sets up to videotape his anniversary, though the reaction of spouse Debbie (played by Gretchen Bonaduce) shows that we’re not exactly witnessing marital bliss here. Doug’s a bit of a garden-variety jerk, and putting a camera in his hands doesn’t make him any more likeable; he continually gets in Debbie’s face, and like every male somehow thinks that he’ll be able to persuade her to, ahem, “perform” on camera.

Things kind of change course when Doug hears rumors that Debbie hasn’t been spending her evenings at the bartending course she’s supposedly taking. How do we know this? Because Doug records it on the same tape, talking to the camera as an introduction to an excursion to Debbie’s actual whereabouts, catching her tryst on tape.

Were I an image-conscious criminal, I don’t think I’d purposely record the fact that I wear tighty-whities.

As revenge, he takes her minivan from the driveway and simply leaves — him, the van, and the camera, a Kerouac-esque road trip (at least, that’s what he wants to believe). He uses the tripod to catch small travelogue scenes of himself as he meanders across country (pretty damned fast meandering: He manages to hit Utah, Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska, Indiana, and Wisconsin — in that order — in four days). He films a small segment of himself standing in front of a Wisconsin quarry, and manages to catch some suspicious people pushing a car off the edge to crash into the pit; and then those suspicious people manages to catch him with guns up his nose.

His captors are the three members of the Clint Dryer gang: Clint himself (Mick Wynhoff), a personable and manipulative fellow who’s a walking picture of the dictionary definition of “sociopathic personality”; Gloria (Melora Walters), his blonde gunmoll; and Vezna (Mollena Williams), a solid black woman with a chip on her shoulder the size of the QE2 (she’s the one who always says, “Let me kill him! Can I kill him?”). They take Doug and his minivan prisoner; Clint is instantly enamored of the idea of taping their “exploits,” and wants to keep Doug around as their official recorder (no, he didn’t ask if Doug likes the idea).

A captive to them, Doug becomes the unwilling eye on their crimes, recording both their convenience store robberies (and the inadvertant but frequent deaths that accompany them) and Clint’s post-robbery winddown. And because Doug’s eye is usually the camera’s eye (with some notable exceptions), we follow exactly what he finds himself looking at — and too often, it’s Gloria, whose relationship with Clint is along the lines of a love/hate one.

**“No more copies of Bring It On? But it’s a guaranteed rental!”**

One senses that, even as a prisoner, Doug finds some kind of safety behind the lens; as long as he’s only filming the proceedings, he’s only a designated voyeur, not an actual accomplice — a self-deception that takes him right up to his own first armed robbery and, later, his own first bullet wound. Will he, armed only with his camera, ever get the gumption and the opportunity to stand up to his armed captors? Can he help Gloria escape the life that she is — quite literally, in some scenes — roped into?

The brilliance here is that the entire story quite naturally fills a normal videotape, told in the sequence in which it would naturally be shot, in scenes which are just as long as they would be in normal amateur shooting. The Blair Witch Project gave itself a safety net by having multiple cameras and an editing team to piece the “found footage” into a concise story (a feature which makes it the director ancestor of Survivor — not an heritage of which one should be proud). This movie has no such escape hatch; each scene ends when the camera is turned off, and the next begins when the camera is turned back on. This leads to some ingenious transitions, such as when the gang forces Doug to see a dead body they buried on the beach at night: Doug turns to run, the camera bobs wildly and topples to the sand — and the next thing we see is Doug tied to a chair in a motel room and Clint staring into the lens, saying, “The red light means it’s going, right, Dougie?”

Given that we can’t cut away from distasteful action, nor can we use conventional editing tricks to convey meaning, director Perez uses more than his share of brilliance in finding alternate ways to give his scenes impact. At one point, Clint borrows a camera to record a night’s activities alone with the semi-willing Gloria (an interesting counterpoint to Doug’s own earlier attempts with Gretchen). After tying her up on the bed and taunting her with his switchblade, he cuts her bra free and removes his tighty-whities — at which point (right when I start wondering if the ensuing scene will be legal here in Utah), the “Low Battery” icon flashes and the picture fades… The shot is the breakfast table at a restaurant, where Clint is complaining to Dougie that the camera went out last night. Gloria, meanwhile, is sitting stony-faced to the side, flicking a lighter repeatedly. That’s just damned good storytelling.

**“I let myself be terrorized by a crook with a mullet! A mullet!!“**

(Another notable workaround is the death of a video store clerk. With the camera swinging around as various shots are fired, the actress playing the clerk is substituted for her identical twin, made up already with a bullet wound. I knew to look for the switch, thanks to the Fangoria article, and it still worked beautifully.)

The only complaint I have is the final ingenious workaround. In the climactic chase and getaway, part of the action is shown from the point of view of a camera crew riding with the highway patrolman, COPS-style (gee, it must be a loser cable station that has to get their police footage in small-town Wisconsin). While this is a clever way to show events that logically can’t show up on Doug’s camcorder, it does effectively destroy the conceit we’ve been building up this whole time: That the entire movie is simply what was recorded sequentially on Doug’s camera.

Be that as it may, it still doesn’t lessen my admiration for the video as a whole: A brilliant fusion of content and form that allows the videocamera to be a much more natural participant in the events it records. Add to that deeper character interactions and an actual plotline, and you have a movie that should have enjoyed much more success than it did, even though I don’t think a camcorder movie would have looked right on the big screen. As I write this, America’s Deadliest Home Video is long out of print; there’s not a single copy available on eBay, nor has there been for the last thirty days. This is not a movie that most people, even most movie buffs, will ever have a chance to see unless they really really work for it, and that’s a damned shame.

And no, you’re not borrowing my copy.