“I wouldn’t know what to say about that.”
There it is – the beginning, middle and end of my interview with Uncle Fuzzy on the theme, “Is VHS dead?” Crouching next to his chair, gravely self-conscious, I’m talking too much and tripping over what comes out. I can barely look at him as I ask the fateful question, surrounded as we are by the man’s monument: dozens and dozens of unruly shelves filled to overflowing with thousands of homeless videocassettes.
For about a year, The Fuzz has been the primary enabler for my latest life project, the pursuit and hoarding of VHS movies. To be sure, there have been many other middlemen. On the far end of the Old Warehouse Flea Market in St. Catharines, a charming woman leads the crowd with a chaotic splay of castoff tapes lying three deep. The same town’s cavernous and uninviting “That’s Entertainment” hides a surprising array of riches in the three-for-five front section. An afterthought VHS discount wall can frequently be found in the local used CD/DVD store, and sometimes they give up treasures. And since moving back to Toronto this summer, I have even staggered across tabletops of one-dollar treasures in the middle of Trinity Bellwoods Park – not to mention the occasional stray nugget in the recesses of Goodwill or Value Village. Truly, VHS is where you find it.
But there’s only one Uncle Fuzzy. Skeptically perusing Mizener’s Flea Market for Canadian tax shelter cinema last fall, I was astonished to find Rabid AND The Brood, Terror Train AND Prom Night, AND more – all sequestered in the quonset-hut lair of this gregarious, talkative joker, whose vendor neighbours seemed to regard him as some kind of menace. The flyer he shoved into my bag announced the dawning of the Uncle Fuzzy VHS Outlet on Barton Street in Hamilton, and my heart raced. From December 2006 to its untimely demise that March this miracle of residual culture and commerce was decisive in helping me survive the simultaneous encroaching of a) one shitty Niagara winter, b) moving home to mom’s at age 35, c) testicular surgery. (A fuller narrative of this odyssey may be explored in my own zine, 220 Days of Movies with an Enormous Ball.)
Just yesterday, I was waxing enthusiastic about these cinematic pursuits to a friend, whose reply caught me off guard. “There’s a bit of a VHS nostalgia thing going on these days,” he offered. “Now that DVD has really cornered the market with its superior quality and commentaries and bonuses, still some people are still sort of fetishising the old format.”
Nostalgia? Fetishism? Am I biting the invisible hand? Is this new and burgeoning VHS library in my basement such a linear companion to my super 8 cartridges, Atari 400, and 78 RPMs – an eccentric specialist item whose obscurity gives off a glamorous hipster cachet? I honestly doubt it.
If Uncle Fuzzy proves anything, dear reader, it is this: while the old boy may be barely breathing, VHS IS NOT DEAD. The old machines have not yet broken down the way the laser discs (which he also attempts to sell) have, and the Future Shop still deems the DVD/VHS hybrid to be worthy of display. The average kid does not draw an uncomprehending blank on seeing a VHS tape that they would over, say, an 8-track. And there is still a gratifying whiff of absurdity when certain Ebay hucksters plaster “RARE OOP” on every tawdry VHS title they post.
I compare my ongoing affair with VHS, not to some specialized underground collector’s item, but to another tool in my home arsenal: the landline. It’s not nostalgic, it’s a continued pattern of use; it’s not a fetish, just a preference; and it follows the most impeccable market logic in that it’s cheap. I would frequently see single mothers of the storefront’s low-rent neighbourhood pushing their strollers into the store to take advantage of Uncle Fuzzy’s three-for-one exchange. Despite what you may have read, fortuitous bottom-feeding is not the exclusive domain of white bohemians.
As a white bohemian and, admittedly, an occasional fetishist, I’m happy to note that in my impurity I will zip the shrinkwrap on an occasional digital video disc. My shelf contains the Dawn of the Dead collector’s edition, the Kino Buster Keaton box, and the Criterion F for Fake. Of the above, only the former will be seen on anyone’s VHS shelf, and I’m glad these are on the market. I’m even delighted about all the bells and whistles they came with. But let’s be honest: these are my very favourite movies, and when I do play them (annually at most) I tend to just watch the damn movie and skip the frills. And as any recent graduate from archiving school will tell you, the hype around DVD’s relative quality and durability is in for a slow, painful disintegration.
Anyway, the example of Uncle Fuzzy allows me to cut to the damn chase: newly-marginal VHS gets confined to more marginal (and hence more interesting) retailers, who sell them cheap, which allows you to take more chances, which makes the whole thing more fun. What’s wrong with that?
Maybe you can get Corrupt, Female Trouble, The Happiness Cage and The Astro Zombies on DVD, but not for ten bucks total, and without doing the research I am quite sure that such items as Deadly Twins or The Tower never jumped to the new format at all. (They still haven’t as of 2021; ed.) Caught up as I have been in researching Canadian film history, I want not just Rabid but Title Shot, not just Porky’s but The Pink Chiquitas; and while these consumer tapes may not be technically adequate as a public archive, they are a damn sight better than nothing, and continue to serve their purpose. A Criterion reissue of Revenge of the Mercenaries, with director’s commentary and optional subtitles? Yeah right, and barf besides.
There are already signs that the VHS autonomous zone may indeed be slogging toward its practical expiry date. On my aborted interview pilgrimage, I saw that, despite relocation to a snazzier corner of Mizener’s, Uncle Fuzzy’s stock was more static and less inspiring than in the halcyon days of a year earlier. Not only that, but the service seemed to be short on talented viewers – Dr. Butcher M. D. had been there since my last visit, Night and Fog since my first. This time, and for the first time, I left empty-handed – no interview, no tapes. And it occurred to me that Fuzzy’s reticence may in fact have been ambivalence – maybe he sees the writing on the wall for his honourable enterprise.
But I will certainly be back, and not just because I am happy to hear Fuzzy’s latest batty expostulations on Caledonia, the Maple Leafs, and the guy in the next booth. As surely as there remains a place in our culture for the vinyl LP, the VHS tape still does what it was made to do, and then some. Bottom feeders do, indeed, have more fun.
Originally published in Vol. #1, Issue #19 (the ever-popular VHS RIP issue).
JC Culp
JC Culp is a collage filmmaker and the founder of Unpopular Arts, which provides media production, preservation and presentation.