Greetings from Behind the Beaded Curtain

by Klon November 16, 2025

Film culture has developed an obsession with form, a bottomless search for the ideal version of every movie. Enter into any online film forum and you’ll see countless comments about run times, aspect ratios, director’s cuts, audio sources, formats, transfers, color correction, all this metadata has more to do with industry standards than with the way that we experience watching a movie. We get caught up in the gap between reality and ideals. Part of this formalism comes from a decades-long streamlining of the industry that’s also resulted in the dreary data-driven platform optimized content cinema of today. Every edit is on an action, no one “crosses the line,” every character and cast member seems designed to capture a demographic, plots are torturously airtight and everyone saves the cat. Our current moment feels like the buttoned up 1940s where a combination of tightening morals, wartime nationalism, and rigid distribution networks due to studio run movie theaters led to dull, profitable garbage. Independent film in the 1940s was so anemic that it was called “Poverty Row” and Hollywood was raking in profits but stuck in a creative rut. In the 2020s getting an independent movie made may be easier, but access to profits and an audience are much harder. However, we have the benefit today of access to past eras when movies were wilder and less concerned with formalism and mass appeal. We can look to the past, not out of nostalgia, but to relearn the joy of imperfection so that we can recognize and celebrate it in the movies of today. My goal for this project is to release the pressure that’s been building up in my skull ever since I stopped working at the video store. I’m going to drill a hole in my temple and let all of my dumbest ideas goosh out into your eager mind. My real life friends don’t want to hear my undercooked theories about the narrative structures used in nudist camp movies or the socio-economic conditions that influenced Brazilian underground cinema. That stuff is for my pretend friends like y’all.

This volume is all about Something Weird Video, a company that’s been dedicated to preserving raw and bizarre cinema for over 30 years. They wallow in the weird and want to share it with the world. They’ve released thousands of titles, a gargantuan amount. In an attempt to give as full a picture as possible in only a few issues, I’m structuring my story around a list of 69 titles that might begin to illustrate their aesthetics and refined taste. This is just a primer, but hopefully these 69 movies will be a representative sampling of what Something Weird has become known for. I’ll be discussing around five movies per issue and in discussing these movies I’ll be able to cover the history of Something Weird, the personalities involved, as well as the cinematic landscape that allowed for the creation of some of the most bizarre films ever made and how they may have gone into the literal landfill if it weren’t for this small group of film freaks. After spending time as projectionist at a drive-in, a record store owner, a concert promoter, and a manager for punk bands like Dead Kennedys and TSOL, Seattle native Mike Vraney went into video tape bootlegging. Not the camcorder-in-the-back-of-the-theater kind of bootlegger, no, he had unusual taste and a hunger for the obscure. He saw a hole in the home video market for the vintage exploitation films he loved and began hunting them down. Starting out with short 16mm nudie films, he learned how to get them transferred to VHS, eventually amassing a collection of any oddball or forgotten scrap of film he could unearth. He had atomic era “duck and cover” filmstrips, grisly highway safety films, movie trailers, concession stand bumpers, military training shorts, eventually he’d include 35mm feature films to his collection. Something Weird Video started out officially in 1990 selling VHS through fanzine ads and at horror movie conventions. You could say it started as a hobby, but Vraney was no dabbler.

In my late teens and 20s Something Weird Video occupied a huge spot right in the front of my brain. I watched a ton of their releases and poured over every catalog as they came out. I forced friends and roommates to watch objectively terrible movies (that I still love) like Thar She Blows (1968, Richard Kanter) and Mantis in Lace (1968, William Rotsler) and I’d put on their Twisted Sex compilations during parties. As much as I love them, I’m a poser compared to some of the hopeless cases that I’ve met in online forums. What are their lives like? Who has time to see that many volumes of Bucky Beaver’s Big Bust Loops??? Still, I feel like I’ve been steeped in their catalog long enough to act as a sommelier of Something Weird. On this episode I’ll be discussing 69 through 65 The Sinful Dwarf (1973, Eduardo Fuller), Ecco (1963, Gianni Proia), Teaserama (1955, Irving Klaw), Country Cuzzins (1972, Bethel Buckalew) and Teenage Gang Debs (1966, Sande N Johnsen)