The Found Footage Festival

I was lucky enough to find a seat for the Found Footage Fest at the Dundee Theater. Touring since 2004, the Onion sponsored creators of the event, Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett, display dutifully scoured-for VHS clips. Sought out in thrift stores across the U.S., or traded for, the duo compile categories of both funny and odd tapes. Two common categories, they said, are the celebrity hosted exercise tape and the big-hair grooming type.

My favorite involved the commercial tries of the owner of a furniture liquidator. Obviously out of his element, repeatedly he motions to the audience and interjects "all I want to do is save you money" with the word cheese. Commonly strange, he would pitch unnecessary buy-one-get-one-free items like, say, water beds. Is one water bed not enough? To make it better, there were cuts to a lazy-eyed, seemingly drunk, woman (probably his sister or something) who would mumble a paragraph of deals in front a green screen version of the store's facade. Whether it be the camera work or her slumping from consumption, she frequently slides the corner of the screen. This tape is so unprofessional you feel like you should make a pity purchase.

Other highlights included the display of and interview with the founder of the Venus 2, a $13oo male stimulation device that fits into a suitcase and, reportedly, weighs 90 pounds. When the guys went to visit the founder, he was living in a trailer across from a Renaissance Festival. I would have been a little creaped out.

If you want to find what you missed out on, check out their website for loads of clips (look for Corey Haim's Me, Myself and I) or considered buying one of their mix tapes. A movie the guys made about an underground genre of filthy trucker music, Dirty Country, is definitely on my list.