Plastic Nightmare

During the early years of the VHS boom movie lovers were suddenly able to access hundreds of films they had always wanted to see but weren’t available on TV or had never played movie houses in their town. Many were titles they had only read or heard about from fellow movie buffs. So it is no wonder that VHS became the dominant format in the home entertainment industry for awhile. I certainly credit VHS with introducing me to countless B-movies, forgotten Hollywood pictures and genre films but also introducing me to movies from outside the U.S., especially those from Canada. Among some of my favorites are Circle of Power aka Brainwash aka Naked Weekend (1981), a disturbing drama about a corporate retreat weekend for employees led by a dominatrix-like motivator (Yvette Mimieux); Siege aka Self Defense (1983), in which a small group of people are trapped in an apartment and attacked by crazed vigilantes; Family Viewing (1987), Atom Egoyan’s hypnotic drama about alienation; and Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), Guy Maddin’s bizarre debut feature. These were all surprising revelations to me but the one that still haunts me is Pin aka Pin: A Plastic Nightmare (1988).

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Vanishing Act

People who disappear without a trace always make the most compelling cold case mysteries, mainly because they baffle even the most intrepid investigators. The famous urban legend of “The Vanishing Lady” also known as “The Vanishing Hotel Room” may very well have been based on a real person but the true facts are lost to time. No matter. The strange tale, which first emerged in the early 1900s, has been appropriated by various writers and filmmakers in some form over the years such as the 1913 novel The End of Her Honeymoon by Marie Belloc-Lowndes (author of The Lodger), Sir Basil Thomson’s 1925 novel The Vanishing of Mrs. Fraser and the 1932 film The Midnight Warning. My favorite variation on this theme is the Victorian era mystery, So Long at the Fair (1950), produced by the British film studio, Gainsborough Pictures. The title comes from the English folk tune “Oh Dear! What Can the Matter Be?,” which contains the line, “Johnny’s so long at the fair.”

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