Years ago, when VHS was king...
I was sitting with some mates drinking a lot and watching a particularly terrible video from the local video store.
It finished and we discussed the general shiteness of it all.
"There should be a warning on the front of the tape about how crap it was," someone said.
And a lighbulb went off over my head.
I owned a video camera, one of those huge JVC devices that took a full size HVS cassette, so we got a sheet, spray painted a skull and crossbones and "Video Pirates" on it and hung it off a wall.
Then I sat on a chair in front of the banner, pulled on a balaklava, my mate put some tape over the little hole that prevents you taping over the movie, slipped it in the camera, cued it up to an appropriate place near the beginning and hit record.
"Right," I said, "This is the point where the story goes downhill. His sex doll just got killed, so he breaks into the big guy's palace to rescue the missing girls, there's a pathetic laser gun fight, they get away and the red-haired kid just gets more annoying*. It's a crap film and we've just saved you a lot of time. Long live the video pirates!!!"
Then we rewound, checked it was there, giggled like schoolgirls, rewound the film all the way, put it back in the case and walked back to the video store and slipped it through the slot.
I'd like to say this became a regular event and we became local heroes and people stopped sitting in front of the gogglebox, but went out and started community gardens instead, but no.
The next day we woke up, remembered what we'd done and shat ourselves. We were convinced the video store would just look up who had last rented the movie and phone the cops, so the banner came down and we spent the next paranoid week jumping every time the phone rang or someone came to the door.
Still it would have been nice to think at least one person was saved from the hell that was Spacehunter, Adventures Across The Forbidden Zone.
( difficultchild, Thu 21 Jan 2010, 1:27, Reply)