McCabe has discovered that bad movies can be good business. In the heady days of the early 1980s, mom-and-pop video outlets could rack up profits within months of opening shop. But today the chains have muscled away 75 percent of the rental market, forcing some independents to get weird to survive. Vidiots of Santa Monica offers such fare as “Relax,” a 1937 secretarial-training film. Video Vault’s 8,000 titles cover the full range of video exotica, from biker movies to “blaxploitation” pictures to sword-and-sandal epics like “Spartacus.” McCabe’s rent-by-mail program has customers in 48 states, and the entrepreneur says he’s grossed $1 million in 1990. “Independent video stores are starting to cut niches,” says Paul Lindstrom, vice president of the Nielsen Home Video Index, a division of Nielsen Media Research. “There’s a lot of potential for success.”
The potential is growing as traditional venues for “schlock” cinema vanish. Drive-in theaters have dwindled to just 7 percent of American screens, and countless revival houses have closed or been refitted as first-run metroplexes. Late-night TV has shifted away from obscure, black-and-white movies to reruns of 1970s cop shows. “The midnight movie is dead,” says Michael Weldon, author of “The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film,” which provides descriptions of more than 3,000 obscure movies. Says Greg Luce of Sinister Cinema, a California video-manufacturing company: “We’ve discovered a starving audience dying to get this stuff.”
Dealers also find that stocking offbeat films can save them a bundle. Unless renewed, pre-1978 U.S. copyrights expire after 28 years. That means thousands of forgotten films made in the late 1950s and early 1960s–the golden age of low-budget production–have recently become public domain. Manufacturers who transfer old movies to video charge retailers just $20 a tape–compared with $90 for an “A” title owned by a Hollywood video distributor. So independent retailers can buy five copies of, say, “Beast of Yucca Flats” for the price of one copy of “The Hunt For Red October. "
Cult-video stores aren’t likely to spread to every corner of America. Although the mail-order business is expanding, the shops themselves are mostly found in big cities and college towns, where demand for the quirky is well established. The entrepreneurs work hard to spot new trends (late-1960s “nudies” and samurai pictures are the latest hot genres) and relentlessly conjure up marketing gimmicks. Each Thanksgiving, Video Adventure of Evanston, Ill., sponsors “Turkey Fest: An Annual Orgy of the Awful.” “I’m lucky to be in an area that has an allergic reaction to [the chain stores],” says owner Brad Burnside. As Burnside’s growing profits show, bad taste is nothing to be sneezed at.
