Dying to Watch It

Video stores were a primary source of my institutional learning.

In the VHS heyday, Cottonwood had a total of two (count them, TWO) video stores.

The emotions of visiting these places was palpable. The highs and lows of seeing what movies there were and what was actually available was a veritable roller coaster. These weren’t your fancy Blockbusters that had rows of the newest releases. There were a few shelves that held the portals to new worlds. Your fate was decided by whether or not there was a poker chip hanging by a finishing nail in front of the movie box. And much like with restaurants in Redding today, everybody competed for the newest product, neglecting what was new just a few weeks before. Those poker chips determined if your family Saturday night would be filled with the hilarity of Stripes, or all the drama of On Golden Pond. No child wanted to see multi-generational Fondas emoting, but it was movie! In your HOUSE! You’d sidle up with the giant yellow Tupperware bowl full of air popped popcorn and live your best life Fondas or not.

If you’re of the vintage of VHS glory days, you may also recall that there were some films that didn’t show on the general population shelves. It wasn’t just naked people movies that lived beyond that chain with the sign “must be 18 to enter!” though. It was also things that were determined to be too dark for children.

I’m not sure how I got my hands of a copy of Faces of Death. It could be that another friend rented it and maybe it had the distinction of being a multi-day rental where we could “stick it to the man” by all sharing the video that only one of us paid for. Or maybe the merchant knew that it was okay to just let me have the video because she knew us. Or since this was a time when 10 year olds were sent into stores to get their mother’s Merit Ultra Light 100’s with nary an eyebrow being raised, maybe no shits were given.

Watching Faces of Death was a much a rite of passage as piercing your own ears, first kisses and crank calls to random people out of the phone book. No one was sure how it would be to watch it though. It was of the level of saying bloody Mary 3 times in the mirror. We didn’t believe we’d be visited by the dead, but no point in risking it by trying.

Knowing my extensive bravery, I’m moderately certain I watched it in daylight. Probably though hands held up to my eyes and the corded “remote” at the immediate ready to do the only job it can; pause and un-pause. I can almost smell the perm solution when I think of it all.

I don’t remember much of the film aside from the monkey brains. I do remember the chatter about it all. “It’s totally real” and maybe “Tubular” or something. I also recall remember what essentially equates to quizzing, kids asking each other about certain parts of the movie basically to see if they had been tough enough to watch the whole thing.

Pity the kids that said they watched it, but couldn’t tell you what happened. Posers.

Those that did watch obtained street cred. It was tough to determine if it was worth it. It was a big ask. This was real death! And the faces of it!

This movie came along at time when docu-fiction wasn’t even heard of. We had no reason to suspect that the alligator attack wasn’t real. We just wrangled with the weight of life lessons about mortality delivered by somber (and I’m sure completely legitimate) presenter, Dr. Francis B. Gross.

That movie changed lives. Ultimately it gets credit for why I drove more safely and why I never ordered monkey brains as a meal.

Thanks for modern algorithms for sending me the trip down dysfunctional memory lane today with the YouTube gem, “Beyond Belief: The Story of the Most Infamous Film Franchise of All Time.” I gave you 15 minutes, you gave me a window into why I’m who I am.

You also solved a decades old mystery; as it turns out, a lot of this movie isn’t real.

We live in a time where there are many more tools to trick us and so much access to real horror. It’s also a time when anyone can be a filmmaker, take for example my own imaginary studio, 15 Second Films. But this celluloid gem took effort to earn it’s way into being a cannon moment for a generation. And for that, and for the whomever the person was that connected me to the film, I’m grateful.

Thanks for reading!