Video stores—wandering around them as a kid. There was a young kid in Beyond Video today. 2024. A little less than 30 years ago, I was walking through the aisles and sections of World of Video in Tribeca. Although we went to Kim’s regularly, World of Video was just a few blocks away from our apartment, and that’s the place I remember most vividly, probably because it might’ve closed by the time we moved a few blocks south to Hudson and Duane in March 1999. It might’ve still been there, but the memories I have of posters in the early-2000s are from Union Square and Chinatown: L.I.E. and Hedwig and the Angry Inch coming soon or playing now at the United Artists Union Square 14. Talk about tiling—when window shopping meant more than scrolling through new releases on whatever streaming service, every box the same as the last, from The Shining to Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
Video store movie posters: A Clockwork Orange, Eating Raoul, Army of Darkness, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. It didn’t take me or anyone else interested in film to see Kubrick’s 1971 mod masterpiece, but for whatever reason I took my time with the others. Eating Raoul is the best among them, a neglected masterpiece despite its proper place in the Criterion Collection; and a couple of months ago, I wrote about going to see Army of Darkness for the first time at a revival at the Charles Theatre in Baltimore. From St. Mark’s Comics in Tribeca to the Charles in Station North (or isn’t it just Mount Vernon Plus? Really, when can we chuck these stupid new neighborhood names?).
I liked Army of Darkness. Not really my thing, but undeniable and sturdy. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer: Portrait of a Lazy Liberal. Filmed in 1986, but shelved until 1989, Henry had the good fortune to come out right when the NC-17 was conceived—giving the movie an enormous amount of publicity it never would’ve had otherwise—and to come out when the slasher trend was still running, if not thriving. It wasn’t at its apex like in 1986, but horror wouldn’t come crashing down from its ridiculous 1980s run until the early-1990s. Horror “was dead” for a bit until Scream revived it, then Saw and Hostel, and all the remakes of classic horror movies that I never saw…
Henry: Portrait of a Mediocre Filmmaker. John McNaughton’s film follows Henry (Michael Rooker), an American serial killer with a passing resemblance to Ted Bundy (Bundy was better looking). He lives with his old prison mate Otis (Tom Towles), and one day Otis’ sister Becky (Tracy Arnold) comes to stay with them in Chicago. She’s “done dancing,” just out of an abusive relationship, and when she finds out Henry was in jail for killing his mother, she gets the hots for him. And of course there are emotional late-night conversations about his mother making him wear a dress, and how she was “a whore,” and how he stabbed her when one of her johns was in the house. Maybe I just saw Marnie, but it's not just the content of Henry's "origin story," it's the execution: after-school special sentimental, and too clichéd to live.
Henry’s friend is named Otis. The serial killer's friend is named Otis. Whoa! It’s not that we share a name, just another move with zero imagination: not using an actual serial killer’s name, but the actual name of a serial killer’s sidekick! The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was inspired by Ed Gein, but you never heard his fucking name in the movie! And the girl falls for the guy who stabbed his mom because she thinks she can fix him? No doubt this happens in real life all the time, but in a movie trying to “deconstruct the slasher,” earnest use of cliché is deadly. It’s not a parody or a satire or a condemnation of a slasher, it is a slasher—and a BAD one! Henry isn’t fun, it isn’t funny, it isn’t exciting, it isn’t playful, it isn’t surprising, it’s BORING and DUMB.
The music is fucking awful. The worst canned 1980s chintz, aged like mold, and all the synth swells and sound flashbacks to murders Henry’s committed in the past, or in between scenes… come ON! Again, something you'd see in the wastelands of cable television 20 years ago.
There are so many bad movies, and so many bad horror movies; that’s fine, when Jason Takes Manhattan disappoints, it disappoints within parameters. It wasn't a good Friday the 13th movie; they barely tried. It's more langorous than Henry and nearly as lacking in imagination, but it's still a better movie. Henry still somehow has an aura of respectability, a "serious" horror movie for people who hate horror movies or don’t understand them, people who don’t see the humor and the joy in cinematic violence (this was one of Roger Ebert’s favorite movies of 1989). Henry: Portrait of a Memory of a Poster in a Video Store Near the Porno Section—I’ll keep that version in mind from now on.
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