by MARK SLUTSKY

How’s this for an evening of entertainment: Corey Haim, fresh out of rehab, describing the feeling of love as being like “dolphins in your bloodstream”; John and Johnny, a pair of desperate, tongue-tied TV pitchmen, frantically trying to sell you cheap sunglasses; a McDonald’s training video focusing on bathroom maintenance and the search for the elusive quality of cleanliness referred to cryptically as “McC”; an amateur video of a biker named Kirk’s 40th birthday party.

Sure, this stuff might not be polished, slick or even scripted, but the largely undiscovered world of found video is often just as absorbing—if not more so—than Hollywood entertainment. That’s the appeal of the Found Footage Festival, a travelling show of hilarious and often poignant videos pulled from junk stores and garbage bins and curated by New Yorkers Joe Pickett, Nick Prueher and Geoff Haas.

“I worked at a McDonald’s in Wisconsin in high school,” says Prueher. “A friend of mine told me about this training video there. I just couldn’t believe how stupid it was, so I took it from the break room and took it home and showed it to all my friends, and Joe and I and some other people came up with a running commentary for the video. If there was nothing to do on a Friday night, we’d sit around and watch the video and make fun of it. But then we thought, ‘Boy, if there’s something this hilarious out there on tape, there’s got to be other stuff.’”

“There’s a special aura around VHS,” Pickett says. “Most of the videos we get are from that golden age of video, where they were just crapping out videos regularly. It was cheap, it was exciting, and everybody wanted to do it. It became a quantity-over-quality kind of thing.”

The characters in these videos—the actors playing industrial victim accidents, the home shopping channel hosts—thus achieve a peculiar sort of accidental stardom they might have never imagined. “There’s something about watching people when they don’t expect to be watched by regular people in a theatre,” Prueher says.

The Festival folks have even, on occasion, met these unlikely stars and even incorporated them into their live shows. “We met John and Johnny recently,” Pickett says, “and we thought for sure that they were going to hate us, but they had a really good sense of humour about it. They thought it was just as funny as we did. We haven’t gotten anybody who’s threatened to sue us yet.”

Just as the products of the post-war vinyl boom were re-discovered by a generation of music lovers, it seems like the video treasures of the recent past may yet find new life. “The future is very bright,” says Prueher. “Because as DVD becomes the format of choice for home movies, more and more people are getting rid of their VHS tapes, putting them in the dumpsters or in thrift stores, selling them at garage sales. There’s just this wealth of material waiting to be discovered.”

The Found Footage Festival plays at the Monument-National on Saturday, July 22, at midnight, $9, 845-2322

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