June 18, 2008
Purveyor of filthy flicks
Pat and I were in the midst of a bickering match in the parking lot of Pantera's Pizza when we first noticed Movies Unlimited. Curious, we called a truce and wandered across the street to see what the video rental had to offer. A quick appraisal of the store's extensive cult and horror sections left me almost lightheaded. Movies Unlimited, indeed! They had everything: Richard Kern's The Right Side of My Brain, Russ Meyer's Bosomania collection, Troma trash and a whole slew of Something Weird videos. Because the owner was trying to purge the store of its VHS titles, all tapes were on sale for $5, and we bought The Gore Gore Girls and Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things.
A couple days later, Pat returned and bought Blood Feast and The Last House on the Left, the runners-up to our first purchases. In tenth grade, I borrowed a bootleg copy of The Last House on the Left from a beyond-weird classmate, whose sole interests were White Zombie and the Leprechaun series. Minus the soundtrack (a hermit plunking a splintery, secondhand banjo somewhere in Appalachia), I remembered enjoying the film and was excited to see it again. But when we slid the tape out of its case, we found a movie labeled Extreme Groping and Grabbing at Spring Break #2. Hoping the tape had been marked incorrectly, we popped it in our VCR, and watched in dismay as creepy dudes, sporting Hawaiian shirts and backwards visors, shuffled around the beach doling out plastic beads to any spring breaker willing to put the beer funnel down long enough to lift her shirt.
I haven't even seen the first Extreme Groping and Grabbing at Spring Break, and I'm not one to watch movies out of order, so the next day we returned it, reasoning that if Extreme Groping and Grabbing was in the case for The Last House on the Left , The Last House on the Left must be in the case for Extreme Groping and Grabbing. We explained the switch to the clerk, a batty, bespectacled guy, and asked if we might try to locate the case for Extreme Groping and Grabbing. He led us through two swinging, spaghetti Western-style doors into a room laden with enough porn to satisfy every man, woman and child's prurient interests. God, you'd need a search party. "It's like looking for a needle in an extremely smutty haystack," he quipped before leaving us to wade through the vault o' porn.
As my eyes scanned the titles and focused on a door in the back leading to yet another room, where, the clerk informed us, the really hardcore porn was kept, it dawned on me that, above all else, Movies Unlimited is the neighborhood smut peddler. In all my exuberance at finding rare horror films, I'd failed to notice the bulk of the videos starred T and A. We never found Extreme Groping and Grabbing/The Last House on the Left, and we left, our eyes burning with vulgarities, and skulked back home to shower.