Bottom shelf

Plus a return to Somewhere in Time

Is this a familiar scenario? You enter a video store pledged to bring home a political documentary or a profound European masterpiece. But what you really desire is something down-and-funky, sexy and relaxing. Any teen would know what to rent. Dainty you have no clue.

This just might be the time to take a gander at Employees' Picks, that section of odd indulgences in practically every video store. "It's the last resort for people who can't find what they are looking for and don't know what to get," Mike Kadimiya explains, as we stand before his handpicked shelf in the Hollywood Express on Mass Ave between Harvard and Porter Squares, in Cambridge. "My taste?" he laughs. "Most people would say, `Bad.' They're mostly straightforward movies anyone can enjoy. My unpretentious section."

From his choices, I select Dirty Work (1998), a Norm Macdonald comedy that had passed me by. Never heard of it. Would Mike's pick prove reliable? Should you give credence to the eccentric taste of any video-store employee, even at such a knowledgeable establishment as Hollywood Express?

"Each movie on my shelf has a purpose," Jolynn Wells says, leading me on a tour: "Foxfire, an excellent woman's film. Gas Food Lodging, my favorite movie. Like Water for Chocolate, the best love story I've ever seen. Head, I'm a huge Monkee fan. Georgy Girl, a great film and in black-and-white. Not enough people watch black-and-white."

Jolynn describes Meet the Feebles (1989) as "the Muppets on crack, the most frightening film I've ever seen," so I try that one from her shelf. Also, I've never seen The Stuff (1985), a gross-out science-fiction movie from cult filmmaker Larry Cohen.

Finally, there's Nikki Tania, who explains, "My section is unofficially known as the `Lesbian-Vampire' shelf. The Hunger is usually there, and Blade, a campy vampire film. There's Beautiful Thing, a gay coming-of-age story, and When Night Is Falling, my favorite lesbian film in the last 10 years. The rest of the lesbian films bite. I'd have Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, but someone stole our copy."

I add on Blade (1998) from Nikki's pickings and take my four choices to the checkout. Meanwhile, Jolynn has lost confidence. "The Stuff is a very bad film," she says. "I'm going to take it off my shelf."

Too late, Jolynn, but not to worry. Larry Cohen's picture turns out to be an unusual sci-fi social satire in which all of America becomes enamored of a new FDA-approved product, a kind of Dairy Queen goo run amuck. Is it Communistic or from outer space? Only one little boy seems to understand that his Beaver Cleaver family, indeed his whole smily-faced country, are becoming mass-hypnotized.

Met the Feebles, made in New Zealand by Peter Jackson, is a gruesome, clever puppet feast, a Muppets NC-17 makeover. A rat shoots a porno film, a hen takes an elephant to court for a paternity suit, two furry animals suffer coitus interruptus: "Oh, shit, I was about to pop my cookies!"

As for Nikki's recommendation, Blade -- well, any movie with the reptile-eyed, heavy-breathing German actor Udo Kier can't be all bad. "I was born a vampire," he says, haughtily. "You others were merely turned into one." And there's former porn star Traci Lords luring an innocent guy into a vampire disco. American Psycho should have come up with such a decadent, blood-drenched nightspot.

Sorry, Mike, I couldn't get into Dirty Work, except for a funny scene in which Norm Macdonald, after a tough overnight in jail, lectures his sodomizers: "You gentlemen have a lot of growing up to do!"

THE BRATTLE is providing a service, I guess, with this Saturday's revival of Somewhere in Time (1980), the soupy time-traveling romance starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour that has become a fetishized cult item. The story, from a Richard Matheson novel, concerns an unhappy actor, Richard (Reeve), who lands on Michigan's superbly scenic Mackinac Island, stays at the landmark Grand Hotel, and is smitten by a woman's photo on a wall. It's of a long-deceased actress, Elise (Seymour), and Richard time-travels to 1912 to meet her, to be with her, to stroll with her by the Great Lakes.

I struggled hard through my second viewing: the acting is too TV-movie bland, and the shooting, by director Jeannot Szwarc, too pedestrian and humorless for the film to be schlock fun. But don't let me rain on the Somewhere in Time picnic. There are zealous fans out there, and many attend the Mackinac Island weekend each October to revisit the sites where the movie was shot and the transcendent romance took place. Two hundred strong were in Chicago this summer for a love-in with supporting members of the cast, including Reeve's stand-in.

Universal Studios has licensed an official Web site, somewhereintime.pair.com., where you can buy such collectibles as a replica of the Elise portrait ($150) and a music box ($80) "with a stunning photo of Richard and Elise framed under a glass lid." Fans send in e-mails, pro and con, whether there should be a sequel. Most say "no" because (a) the movie is perfect as is and/or (b) a sequel would be in poor taste because of what happened to Reeve.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com

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