Slightly Icky and Necrophiliac But All in the Service of Cinema

Lemon Pledge and death were the dominant smells: I bought a collection of ten thousand VHS tapes stored in the apartment of some recently deceased heir. Just before dying there, he'd spent his fortune on rare films, many smuggled out of archives in the pan-and-scan VHS format. My friends and I call it "The Dead Man's Sale". The occupant was apparently decomposing for days before his body was discovered. There were ground up cockroach parts in the plastic gears of the tapes. (I feel like he left his fortune, and his vermin, to me.) Anyhow, the original sources were often mysterious, shady bootleg characters whose serial killer penmanship I recognized from tapes Kim's Video used to buy. In the vast collection, I found a COMPLETE copy of GHOST TRAIN! Plus tons of Nazi-era musical comedies that made Fred Astaire look klutzy. Andre Breton now seems a piker of Surrealism to me. Some of the directors were killed by Hitler.

by Daniel Riccuito

Illustration: Tony Millionaire