Video Ferox

Look, I’m just gonna admit this right now. I know you’re all just gonna give me shit about it later anyway, so we might as well get it out of the way first. I FUCKING LOVE SANDRA BERNHARD. I love her and I wanna fill her with wine and flattery and then make sweet Cambodian monkey love to her until her sexy lesbi-paunch swells with my babies. And it’s all because of this old TV show that USA network used to play late night in the mid 90s. If you didn’t watch it, it was because of one of the following three reasons: 1) you were too young, 2) you were too much of a fucking loser, or 3) you were way too cool to spend your Saturday nights watching edited-for-TV versions of exploitation films from the 30s to the 70s introduced and snarkishly commented upon by the most freakishly sexy host on television.

No offense, dude, but I know you ain’t no number 3 case. So either you’ve seen this show, you’re a youngin’, or you’re a loser. You’s pays your nickel and you’s takes your pick. So, listen up, losers, this article is all about one of the greatest and un(der)sung shows of TV history.

REEL WILD CINEMA

Okay, I’ve said it already, but I’ma say it again. I love Sandra Bernhard. First of all, she’s got a fucking superhero cartoon of herself that plays during the credits.

Super Sandra gonna whoop yo ass, boy!

Name one Hollywood bombshell that has her own kickass superhero cartoon. You can’t fucking do it. And in real, non-cartoon life Sandra’s as smooth as the naked thigh of a freshly Naired nudey cutie.

So, you don’t know what Reel Wild Cinema is? You’ll never be able to make that crack after tonight, baby!

Okay, crushes aside, the premise behind the show was sorta like the old Vampira/Elvira sorta shows, where B-picks and horror flicks are shown late night and you have some host pretending to be spooky, making bad Crypt Keeper-esque puns about the films. The difference between Elvira and Reel Wild Cinema is that you get more movies per hour because their team of editors cut all the boring junk out (ya know, like the “plot“) and give us only the shit we came for: blood, boobs, terrible acting, loin-clothed man-piles, raunchy catfight slut-piles, murder freakouts, chick-killin’ Tony’s, implied and overt racism/sexism, etc. In short: Exploitation!!! Exploitation!!! Sexploitation!!! MONDO AWESOMENESS A GOGO!!! Also Sandra doesn’t need to pretend to be spooky. She’s just fucking cool. She’s cool as a godamn female Fonzy that shoots flames of awesomeness from his brain. She sits there in her retro penthouse, lounging out in a swanky party dress, watching kickass movies, and occasionally chattin’ it up with a celebrity guest or two.

Sandra’s clubhouse: That’s a whole lot of trips to the Goodwill.

Sometimes the interviews are pretty boring, sometimes they’re insightful, and occasionally they’re hilarious. A good case of the latter is the one where Sandra interviews Fred “The Hammer” Williamson for the “Sword and Sandal Extravaganza” episode. Williamson has to admit to a misinformed but indefatigable Sandra that he’s never had anything to do with any Sword and Sandal movies. She does a good job of casually laughing it off, but I always wondered if an assistant producer got canned for that one. As far as interviews go, the cream of the crop is probably the dual interview with Lloyd Kauffman of Troma films and Roger Corman. Kauffman overwhelms the conversation, while a timidly polite Corman waits patiently to put in a few choice words.

So here’s a quick history lesson about how the show got started. Ex-Dead Kennedy’s manager Mike Vraney had started a little VHS distribution company called Something Weird Video. (If you have any sort of decent movie collection you own a Something Weird DVD). He was approached by Marty Sokol, who was apparently at the time just a dude with an idea (or maybe he used to work on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon?!), and Jimmy Maslon, who owned QC video (which is apparently a post-production facility in LA) which for some obscure reason had the rights to the entire H.G. Lewis and Doris Wishman collections. Marty’s idea was a show that would showcase all the old exploitation flicks that QC and Something Weird Video had the rights to. The three teamed up, pitched the idea around, and eventually USA gave them a slot on their late night roster.

(Just as an aside, Jimmy Maslon worked on both Blood Diner and Blood Feast 2, which, when you think about it, were pretty much the same movie. Does anybody know if Blood Diner was what was left of the failed 80s attempt to make Blood Feast 2, the soundtrack of which was to feature the eponymously titled Misfits song that ended up on their Earth A.D./Wolf’s Blood album? If so, this would explain why Maslon owned the rights to the H.G. Lewis collection: Lewis made the first Blood Feast movie, and they surely would have needed to acquire the rights to make the sequel. But then why was Blood Diner not released as Blood Feast 2. Anybody know the answers? There’s gotta be a great story about this out there somewhere, one that I hope involves Glenn Danzig letting his flaming hot man-fury explode all over some assholes’s face. And in as homoerotic a way as that sentence suggests.)

So those three stooges, Maslon, Vraney and Sokol, are listed as the creators in the credits, but interestingly neither are associated with the show on their IMDB pages. Or on Reel Wild Cinema’s IMDB page. What’s up with that, IMDB? After RWC was cancelled, Marty Sokol went to Britain to work on a similar show called Exploitica, which was more of a Pop-up Video style show with exploitation flicks instead of music videos. I’ve never seen it, so don’t ask me whether it was any good or not.

What was pretty great about Reel Wild Cinema, and what probably got it cancelled was the producer’s desire not to cut anything that was too scandalous or risqué. Like anything awesome, it was all about freaking the squares. Towards the second season though the USA execs got a bit antsy about all the tits and ass and the lazy censoring job which quite often during the first season was awash in nip and ass slippage. During season two the nip and ass police tightened security quite a bit, but they managed to inject a sense of humor into their job that made up for the offensiveness of modern American prudery and its resulting censorship mania that wants to surround with a black tarp anything that might offend the prudest prude in Prudeville. Their creative covering of the “naughty bits” bordered on an art in itself. Witness the following images:

Starship USA: The flagship of American morals.

Word on the street is this is pretty much what got the show shit-canned by the network. The MAN just started forcing those fucking annoying ratings boxes onto TV shows and screens, and Reel Wild Cinema was just too much of a hassle to rate. I guess USA didn’t want to take responsibility if some impressionable old church lady caught a glimpse of an unexpected blacked-boxed wang when the little ratings box omitted the big W for “Beware of Wang.” If a dude can sue a network for catching a glimpse of Jack Tripper’s nutsack on a TV show that originally aired thirty years ago, then I’d say, sadly, USA had a right to be worried. But it’s still fucking stupid. And it’s a shame that censorship mania and boobies-are-bad propaganda is what axe-murdered one of my favorite TV shows.

I wanna say Sandra’s career was doing fine after RWC went under, but . . . .

If you’d like to learn more about Reel Wild Cinema check out this page, the Save Reel Wild Cinema Headquarters, an Angelfire site long since fallen into disrepair. At the time the page was a noble and quixotic effort to bring back a long lost friend. Today it stands as a crumbling relic of a distant time when the internet wasn’t just a tool for social networking and blog douchbaggery. Though I don’t think anyone had any illusions about some kid’s webpage actually forcing a huge corporate television Network intent on world domination to renew a show that only a handful of demographically-challenged rejects watched, I’ll tell you, back in 96 or 97 or whenever it was, this little page gave me hope that we could stretch that peculiar cultural je ne sais quoi of the mid 90s far into the new millennium. But, alas, the times, they were a-changing’. And, at least for me, it was impossible to hold onto that simpler time when the only hard decision in life was whether to keep watching the movie on Joe Bob Brigg’s Monster Vision on TNT or switch a few channels over to USA to see what schlocky piece of trash Sandra was showcasing now. I miss them days.

So, as I was prepairing for this article, I rewatched all my old tapes of the show. I think the year was 97 or 98, and I knew they weren’t gonna rerun RWC for ever. USA had reshown the first season the year earlier and when they started rerunning the second season (I think at 2 o’clock on a Sunday night/Monday morning) it was pretty clear they weren’t gonna re-cycle it again. So I taped as many episodes as I could in a mad rush to preserve the show for my own self-posterity. But now I’m realizing that these tapes are over a decade old and starting to show the wear and tear of the ages, which kinda makes me sad. I mean, I could copy them to DVR, but that just wouldn’t seem right. Watching the original tapes sorta transports me back to those pre-DVD days.

It’s also a show that deserves to be watched on a vintage Television.

So a quick word to you, readers. I only have the second season on tape. If any of you RWC fans out there wanna send me copies of the first season episodes or of the British sister show Exploitica, contact me. I’d really like someday to write an in depth review of each season. You think somebody’d put this shit on youtube.

Anyway, that’s about all I can say about this show for now. So, as Sandra always said . . .

Good mid’night to ya.

And good mid’night to you, Reel Wild Cinema.

– Jason Hepcat

Tags: glenn danzig, reel wild cinema, sandra bernhard

This entry was posted on Friday, March 20th, 2009 at 5:22 pm and is filed under Exploitation, Television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.