Thomas Hodge’s VHS: Video Cover Art is hardly the only book to lovingly collect outré boxes from the dominant home-video format of the 1980s and ’90s, but it’s the first to feature this eyebrow-raiser from the back cover of the 1986 sex comedy Free Ride:
“HEALTH WARNING
Superglue is not a penis enlarging cream
See inside for details”
Woe be to the horny renter who couldn’t read, I guess.
That’s merely one small delight in Schiffer Publishing’s horizontal hardcover, full of colorful, kitschy boxes handpicked by Hodge, aka The Dude Designs, the moniker under which he creates wonderfully evocative key art of his own to cult flicks of today, from Hobo with a Shotgun to WolfCop. His style clearly kneels at altar of the cassette-rental heyday. It was a time when we were drawn to tapes we knew Mom never would allow us to bring home. With fondness, Hodge remembers the “rows upon rows of fantastically fun, crazed art depicting moustached muscle men, buxom beauties, big explosions, phallic guns, and nightmare-inducing monsters,” he writes in his introduction. “How can the Mona Lisa inspire after you’ve gazed upon the likes of Lust for Freedom and Silk as a kid.”
How indeed? (Although I’m more of a Silk 2 man, myself, being unable to resist photography of Monique Gabrielle wearing nothing but a shiny white bra.)
Hodge also wishes readers will discover many gems, and you will. That’s not because similar books — Jacques Boyreau’s Portable Grindhouse, Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher’s VHS: Absurd, Odd, and Ridiculous Relics from the Videotape Era — have zero overlap, but because Hodge is British. Therefore, the 250-ish tapes featured — obscurities like Blood & Guts: Heavy Thunder, Searchers of the Voodoo Mountain and The Chinese Typewriter — come from companies different from those stateside, meaning the covers are largely alien to Yankee eyes.
Being low-rent, such commissioned illustrations for the UK tapes manage to look really porny. Those companies got away with showing a lot of tits, and we’re not even talking X-rated titles. At least they retain the American practice of seemingly every tagline including dramatic ellipses, e.g. “ONLY ONE MAN WOULD DARE … CHALLENGE THE NINJA” and “THE INNOCENTS HAVE TASTED BLOOD … AND THEY LIKED IT!”
Choice as those lines are, they have nothing on the lost art of back-cover box copy, judging from these examples:
• What a Way to Go: “Kidnapped by a household of women to make love to a sex-starved fat woman”
• Spectreman: “Live actors attempt to outdo Superman through a new power to right wrongs, Spectreman. DEFINITELY FOR THE KIDS”
• Banzai Runner: “Cocaine trafficking is emerging. As one U.S. Drug Enforcement agent puts it: ‘Who’s going to catch you when you’re doing 200 mph.’ The answer could be Dean Stockwell.”
Could be! And yet VHS: Video Cover Art is a must-have. —Rod Lott