When VHS turns bad

Last night Bryan and I decided to go out for dinner at Baru - previously one of my favourite brunching spots, but now limited to serving dinner only. Well it turns out they serve fabulous dinner as well as fabulous brunch, so I feel better about the loss of brunch.

After dinner, we popped next door to Limelight to pick up a movie. After deciding that a 156 minute movie abou the downfall of the fuhrer would be too much for an Easter Saturday, Bryan selected Stranger than Paradise. He described this to me as an independent, avante-garde, black comedy by one of his favourite directors, Jim Jarmusch, back in the 80's. This movie was rated overall 7.5/10 on IMDB, and 90 % fresh on rotten tomatoes. We were quite looking forward to it. So we walked up to the man behind the desk and asked him for "Stranger than Paradise". He looked it up on the computer and told us it was only available on VHS, and would that be ok? We said yes it would be ok. So he went into the back room to get the movie. We payed for it and we left.


We got home, we put the VHS into my antiquated TV-with-built-in VCR unit, snuggled up under blankets and started to watch. Some awful music started playing, stupid images appeared on the screen, and this title appeared "Strangers in Paradise". After calling Limelight to tell us they had given us the wrong movie, we checked on IMDB to find out if the movie we had come home with was worth watching. It wasn't.


Here's a user comment from IMDB "Worst anti-fascist musical ever made. This is mostly a political statement with some of the worst directed and staged song and dance numbers ever. Since the film is 50% song and dance, would it be too much to ask for the dancing to match the beat or the singers to lip-sync properly? The director, writer, and producer of STRANGERS IN PARADISE, Ulli Lommel, also stars as a mesmerist from WWII Germany named Sage, who is cryogenically frozen in the 1940s to escape Hitler (also played by Ulli Lommel). A group of crazy California fascists thaw out Sage in the 1980s and try to get him to hypnotize gays and punks into being upstanding citizens....".

Need I say more? It was horrible. Rated on IMDB at 5.6/10 (quite generous I think). Rotten Tomatoes apparently didn't find it worthy of a rating, but one user reviewed it and gave it 3/10.

Anyway that was my Saturday night.