From 2003 to 2004, I was an employee of New York’s Kim’s Video franchise at its Ave. A, East Village outpost—the mini-chain’s original non-Laundromat storefront. Upon being shuttered, this is the location that was eulogized in the NY Times for being the “mean” Kim’s, an accomplishment of which I am still prouder than anything else I have achieved in my professional life.
Though I was fired about a month before the store closed—for chronic lateness due to an ongoing battle with the “Irish flu”— for a time I was a fair-haired boy, enjoying a meteoric rise to Assistant Manager and an accompanying $0.50 pay raise, meaning I was pulling down a cool $6.00/ hr.—tax free, chumps!
I have many fond memories of my tenure at Kim’s: Being caught by one of the Mondo’s “corporate” boys while climbing the shelving units on an adrenal high, blasting Joe Esposito’s “You’re the Best” from The Karate Kid; solemnly eating cubed turkey from a foil tray in the back room on Thanksgiving; smoking tea in that same back room and laughing myself halfway into a hernia at the very sight of John Saxon in Enter the Dragon; being jaw-droppingly rude to some customers and nice as pie to others for no discernible reason…
Kim’s was also the finest film school that New York City had to offer. This was in part thanks to the exceptional knowledge of my co-workers—this column certainly could not exist without the influence of one Steven Oddo, most famous for being the ectomorphic young man who carves ‘WAR’ into his chest at the beginning of Nick Zedd’s War is Menstrual Envy, and a possessor of one of the most fascinating individuated aesthetics that I have ever encountered. Also, though by no means the cinematheque that nearby Mondo—Kim’s 3-story flagship—was, Avenue A had a pretty extraordinary archive of oddities to pull off the shelves and enjoy on the 20” TV perched on the far end of the counter. Shift after shift, certain titles could be relied upon to give a mainline-shot of viewing pleasure, of which I hope to give a fair representation below:
Dracula (The Dirty Old Man)
I have always had a soft spot for krazy-dubbing comedy—my high school years were much improved by a well-worn tape of Zombie ’90: Extreme Pestilence—but Dracula (The Dirty Old Man) raised the genre to heretofore unknown heights. I have only just now realized that, despite having viewed this Dracula—a work well beyond Bram Stoker’s wildest imaginings—nearly 500,000 times, I know practically nothing about the circumstances of its production. I can only think this is for the best.
Jack and the Beanstalk
This was one of two kiddie pictures on a much-played 
Something Weird disc—the other was The Wonderful Land of Oz—both of which were directed by Barry Mahon, a Florida-based filmmaker who specialized in roughies and other dodgy exploitation. This apparently qualified him in the eyes of Pirates World theme park in Dania, Florida, for churning out a series of inadvertently chilling matinees, of which this cardboard-set fairy tale classic, in which Jack lives in a ranch-style house in Coral Gables or something, is the finest example. We compulsively rewatched the scene in which Honest John, the magic bean salesman, dreams about eating a steak, with actor Christopher Brooks delivering the monologue in a hypnotically halting cadence (“A big… fat……….juicy….charcoal-broiled….”) An offhand statement by Mr. Oddo while watching the film has echoed in my skull ever since: “This is the entertainment America deserves.”
Bill and Bill on His Own
Mickey Rooney received an Emmy Award for playing retarded Minneapolis man Bill Sackter in this diptych of TV movies. Awful people ever since have been turning purple guffawing at his performance.
Siegfried & Roy: The Magic Box
There is a lot of nightmarish laughter to be heard in this trailer alone, so you can only imagine what goes on at feature length. YouTube Comments are, as ever, a delight: “I would trade my life with Roy anytime, even though I will be bitten by a tiger in the throat, that’s fine as long as I can live in such dream, the palace, the white lion wandering around, the bamboo torch, the green parrot, the pool and the green field. it feels like heaven.”
The Judy Garland Christmas Special—“Steam Heat”
Liza drops by mom’s place to perform “Steam Heat” from The Pajama Game with her *ahem* “fiancée,” one Tracy Everitt… who apparently now teaches dance classes in Hoboken!
The Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Monsters
Ray Dennis Steckler, auteur of Rat Pfink a Boo Boo 
and The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, made a foray into family programming with this trilogy of Bowery Boys-esque larks, with Steckler himself, a/k/a Cash Flagg, starring in the Huntz Hall role. The principle allure of this film was the mysterious effect it had on co-worker Deidra Garcia: after being subjected to even a few frames, she would react in a way that can only be described as complete emotional and physical meltdown verging on out-and-out tantrum, so that one feared for one’s very life if it was not turned off immediately.
The Singing Detective- “Teddy Bears’ Picnic”
A reductive way to approach Dennis Potter’s very great BBC miniseries, but for some long-forgotten reason a mania for this tune (with music by John Walter Bratton and lyrics by Jimmy Kennedy), swept through a certain subsection of the staff, and the only way to get the goods in our pre-wifi wilderness was to fast-forward to the applicable scene.
All Things Paul Lynde
The Paul Lynde Halloween Special had a very special place in the Kim’s canon, but really anything Lynde was Kosher: His nuanced performance as “Bullets” in Beach Blanket Bingo; Bye Bye Birdie, which included the additional pleasure of 33-year old Jesse Pearson simultaneously completely missing the point of and predicting the future of Elvis with his hanging gut in gold lamé; the Lynde “E! True Hollywood Story” which, if memory serves, was full of salacious anecdotes about Mr. Center Square throwing hustlers out of hotel windows… Even today, when I find myself cursing the Almighty for fixing his canon ‘gainst self-slaughter, it only takes a few hours of Lynde on “The Dean Martin Show” to bring me back from the brink. Paul, I love you!
Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound Magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.