Mail Order Murder: The Story Of W.A.V.E. Productions is a documentary about Gary Whitman's W.A.V.E. Productions, and the phenomenon around it. It looks at the history of the shot on video (SOV) movie industry, where Gary comes in, and then how he revolutionized it by creating his paid request model, where fans could pay to have Gary and his team act out the movie they wanted. These were often fetish films, that involved bondage, violence against women, etc., but it turned out there was a market for them beyond the individual fan requests. The film then interviews the women and men who made W.A.V.E. Productions happen, like Debbie D, Tina Krause, and Pamela Sutch, to give us a full sense of what it was like making films for W.A.V.E.
I really enjoyed this. It was one of the rare films where the 97-minute runtime felt too short, like I could have listened to them talk about W.A.V.E. productions for another hour. The way it captured a moment in time, and movie history--can I call it "film history" if the films aren't shot on film?--but then took it further to show how Gary Whitman and his production company became even more successful. We were seeing the first crowdsourcing model, where people at home were essentially the producers and the money behind the film. But we also see that these films wouldn't have been a success if it wasn't for the no-nonsense women from South Jersey and areas nearby like Philly who were up for anything. "Tie me up and pretend to strangle me for ten minutes? Let's do it." "Cover me in fake blood while I'm lying naked on a table, and pretend to have people eat my organs, so I have to smell old animal organs going bad in the heat? Why not." It was a great film, and my only complaint, which might be a first here on the DTVC, is that it wasn't longer.
American society loves to give Millennials a hard time, and while I'm not here to pile on them--plus depending on the date range an authority gives, I may actually be one!--one interesting thing that's happened is their sheer size compared to Gen X, or ones on the cusp like me, has allowed them to change certain narratives, one of the biggest being around Blockbuster Video. Many of them were too young to remember the mom and pop video stores that proliferated in towns like mine in the 80s and early 90s, they remember after when Blockbuster ran them all out of business, and as such, they have more of a fondness for Blockbuster that people my age and older don't have, which explains the Blockbuster nostalgia we see online. What I'm getting at though is it was through those mom and pops that SOV films were able to gain a foothold in the market. With a major chain like Blockbuster, they wouldn't want anything to do with something like that, they were looking to put dozens of new releases on their shelves--in fact, the only rare stuff they had was stuff they grabbed from the mom and pops they ran out of business. But the mom and pops needed stuff, and if a type of horror film sold, and they saw a catalog offering similar titles, it didn't matter if it was SOV, they put them on the shelves and hoped they sold too. And they did sometimes. Kids like myself might get them home and watch them during a sleepover with friends and think "this is ridiculous! Where can I find another?"--or even adults for that matter. I guess YouTube allows for something similar, but it's not quite the same as it was then, and this documentary really captures that unique moment in time.
The fan-funded element that allowed W.A.V.E. films to take off feels like a precursor to the crowdfunding approach to filmmaking we see now, but I think that too doesn't have an exact equivalent. Crowdfunding involves the filmmakers offering perks to people who donate to the funding of the movie, but ultimately the filmmakers are putting their own vision on the screen, not that of the people donating. What Gary Whitman was doing was saying give us the money, and we'll make your movie, but then beyond giving you a copy, we may also sell it so other people can see it too. And it turned out there was enough of a market. As two guys who were familiar with a lot W.A.V.E. Productions said in the documentary, it's like you get to see what other people fetishize, and it makes the films all the more fascinating. I've had a chance to watch a few of them myself, and they're something outside the normal bounds of what we consider "film," which means some of the usual value judgements we use to understand movies have to be tossed aside. And while that's not for everyone, what this documentary showed was that it was for enough people that W.A.V.E. Productions became successful. (And it should be noted, this documentary was finished with a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo.)
None of this happens without the women starring in the films being game for whatever comes up, and this documentary did a great job of spotlighting their efforts. It started with Clancey McCauley, and she has the ultimate "let's just go for it" attitude. She said she appreciated turning the tables on the baddies, but she had to be up for what the baddies would do to her first, and she was, which set the stage for what W.A.V.E. would be. One of my favorite stories was Laura Giglio's. She said when she auditioned, she was still living at home with her parents, and her mother wouldn't let her do a lot of the things she would've been asked to do at W.A.V.E., like nudity. When she was older and had moved out, she thought, "now that I'm no longer living at home, I can make my own decisions on these kinds of things." So she contacted Gary, and he put her in a movie right away where she ended up getting eaten. Then we have someone like a Tina Krause who has had a horror career outside of W.A.V.E. Productions, but got her start there. That these shot on video productions would be such a phenomenon that the stars would get parts in other films is a testament to how much fun they were and how much there was an audience for them; and it's also a testament to the women who starred in them that they would be that much in demand afterward.
Finally, we always leave this last paragraph as something tangentially related to the film, and this one won't be an exception. Since W.A.V.E. Productions started in the late 80s, we've had a stylistic change in English that's gotten away from periods after every letter in a multi-letter abbreviation, which makes sense, because putting the periods after every letter in "W.A.V.E." is a pain. You'll notice on my site, we say "NFL" not "N.F.L.," or "USA" and "UK" instead of "U.S.A." and "U.K." I would say this shift started when I was in college. I remember proper formatting for Anthropology papers did away with the periods between letters back then. The thing is though, W.A.V.E. Productions started in 1987, when we still did the periods, and they haven't changed--they may not be able to due to copyright issues--so I had to get used to adding the periods in again, even if it's just this one time.
And with that, let's wrap this up. You can find this on Tubi here in the States, and it's well worth it. It documents a true independent spirit, something we love at the DTVC, but an independent spirit that comes with a sense of danger, which we also love.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8714166
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