America's Deadliest Home Video (1991)

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 (you can order the best movie review, film essays and research papers in our paper writing service), 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.
 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.

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.

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.