As a born-and-bred Oklahoman, I’ve long been proud, baffled and entranced by the city of Tulsa’s right-time-right-place role as ground zero of the 1980s’ made-for-home-video horror revolution. So much so, in 2014, I started interviewing players for a massive article on it.

Then overnight, I found myself facing a divorce I didn’t see coming. All creative endeavors, like the 20-year marriage, died on the vine.

That was then, this is now. John Wooley and Bryan Crain give us Tulsa Terrors, a feature-length documentary about the 918 area code’s foray into VHS frights. Wooley’s the ideal person for the job, having covered the low-budget productions from the front line as a newspaper journalist (and later, in his 2011 book Shot in Oklahoma).

Naturally, Terrors’ initial chunk focuses on Christopher Lewis’ Blood Cult, the 1985 slasher that Started It All. Taking advantage of the movie fever lingering in T-Town from Francis Ford Coppola’s one-two punch of The Outsiders and Rumble Fish, Lewis turned $27,000 and a lousy script called The Sorority House Murders into a nationwide video-store smash.

Lewis quickly followed with the generically titled sequel, Revenge, as well as the Tom Savini-starring The Ripper. Crain and Wooley close their documentary with another threesome of slashers, all from Southern firecracker Darla Enlow: Toe Tags, Branded and The Stitcher.

In between, Tulsa Terrors turns its neck to gawk at others who picked up the camcorder torch — albeit to lesser returns, if any. For example, today you can find DVDs of 1986’s Mutilations (with its cattle killings charmingly rendered in stop-motion animation). On the other hand, IMDb-less pics like Bio-Kill (a sci-fi actioner with a hovercraft) and Curse from the Mummy’s Tomb (a Poverty Row tribute with a $75 price tag) remain elusive, other than the glimpses you get here. And to speak again of slaughtered livestock, Vigilante Blood disappeared immediately after premiering at a local Outback Steakhouse.

In a giant leap up from playing as background noise to patrons enjoying a Bloomin’ Onion, Tulsa Terrors debuted on a public university TV channel before hitting video. That’s not a slam, but more of a barometer for setting your expectations, as this isn’t polished or propulsive like Mark Hartley’s hard-charging retrospectives. While entertaining, the doc is nearly as lo-fi as the treasures it fetishizes. Naturally, the more affection you hold for shot-on-video cinema, the more you’ll get out of it; this is not the type of project designed to convert newcomers.

I do wish Crain and Wooley had widened their scope to the whole of the Sooner State. That way, they could include the likes of Offerings, Blood Lake and Alien Zone; because they saw the light of day, they all enjoy far larger profiles than any movie here that’s not Lewis’. Also missing is Terror at Tenkiller, despite being pictured on the poster. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Having grown up sheltered and overprotected, I saw Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre at the house of the kid across the street. Because his single mom let him rent any VHS he wanted. My junior-high self felt so dirty and so guilty, I never wanted to see it again. And didn’t, for decades.

Turns out, the experience of losing my TCM virginity is hardly unique, bearing similarities to the guests discussing theirs in Alexandre O. Philippe’s Chain Reactions. As renegade filmmaker Takashi Miike recalls, “For the first time, I felt that movies could be something dangerous.” (Check.) Comedian Patton Oswalt remembers encountering stills in an issue of Fangoria: “These looked like crime scene photographs that had been stolen and then Xeroxed.” (Check.)

Told in five “chapters,” Chain Reactions is that type of documentary, asking you to commit to creatives waxing nostalgic for 15 minutes or so apiece. I gave myself over willingly and pleasurably.

Leave it to Oswalt to liken Hooper’s grimy, gutsy film to Terrence Malick, Stan Brakhage and Gone with the Wind, of all things. Later, Stephen King, in what plays like pages from his nonfiction classic Danse Macabre come to life, says Texas feels like a Cormac McCarthy novel. Film critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas remarks that Leatherface “moves like Buster Keaton,” while director Karyn Kusama (XX) proclaims, “It has poetry, beauty.”

They’re all correct, and Philippe keeps up with them, slicing in not only glimpses from the scenes in question, but skillful, side-by-side juxtaposition to influences both concrete and fanciful. Past Philippe documentaries on terror benchmarks include Memory: The Origins of Alien and the wonderful 78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene, yet Chain Reactions is my favorite of his works so far — and I don’t adore TCM like I do the source material of those studies.

Perhaps it helps not to have a space in your heart carved for the work of art; the distance and difference of perspective just might cause you to view it in a new light — human mask of skin blessedly optional. —Rod Lott

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Since its release, Charlie Victor Romeo is a film I’ve always wanted to see and never wanted to see. “Always” because it employs a unique creative concept in documenting reality; “never” because that reality is aviation disasters.

For the sake of my blood pressure and anxiety, I was wise to postpone viewing until I’d safely returned home from a transatlantic flight. Sully, this is not. 

Charlie Victor Romeo presents six reenactments of then-recent airplane crashes, word for word from transcripts from the cockpit voice recorder, or CVR. (The film’s title translates that acronym via the industry’s phonetic alphabet — one that still annoys me today when I ask my dad, a retired navigator, to spell something.)

The movie is deceptively simple, as actors from the NYC-based Collective:Unconscious portray these black-box recordings in a black-box theater environment. Vignettes run as long as a teasingly stressful half-hour to an alarmingly abrupt one minute.

From severe turbulence and faulty parts to mechanic error and birds birds birds, the cause of each situation varies. At first, it’s reassuring to see the intricate, data-based methods the pilots follow. Then, when danger arrives, witnessing the differences in reactions is terrifying. (Certainly Nathan Fielder had to have seen this before embarking on HBO’s second season of The Rehearsal.)

No narrators, no talking heads and, other than a slide totaling the casualties, no explanations. Charlie Victor Romeo is both forensically sober and fucking intense. Prepare for takeoff all you want, but you’ll never be the same afterward. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Caveat emptor time, kids. The sports documentary Pay Dirt: The Story of Supercross should be subtitled Some Stories of Supercross in No Particular Order. After priming the pump with an adrenaline-edited prologue of defied gravity and severed spinal cords, Paul Taublieb’s feature goes into scattered mode, leaping from subject to subject like a dog who’s just had a dozen squeak toys thrown its way.

Want to know how the dirtbike arena competition started? Well, first, we watch a profile of Jimmy Button, a champion who bounced back from paralysis — inspiring, but wholly out of place; given its emotional weight, it arguably would work best at the other end. The whole movie is like that. With each title card rebooting the narrative starting line, the experience is like watching the full contents of a YouTube channel’s playlist.

In quick succession, Pay Dirt’s segments (really documentary shorts) surface-level examine a rivalry among two riders, the amateur kids’ competition at the Loretta Lynn Dude Ranch, another rivalry among two other riders, the dirt on the track, the sport’s version of stage parents, riders without factory sponsors and, buttering its own bread on both sides, Monster Energy’s current sponsorship of Supercross.

As an occasional casual viewer of the X Games and any Olympic event that irks old people, I’m open to this sort of thing. But an ESPN 30 for 30, this is not.

And not for lack of opportunity, as Pay Dirt absolutely chokes when it comes to the single most interesting story: Supercross creator Mike Goodwin being convicted for murdering former business partner Mickey Thompson and the man’s wife. From a prison phone, Goodwin recalls that he “was flabbergasted” and hoped he wouldn’t be blamed. What he doesn’t provide is a reason to believe him. In fact, Taublieb is so unconcerned with the crime, he gives it a minute.

I mean that literally: one minute. To a double homicide. Committed by the guy who started the sport you’re telling the “story” of. Adding insult to fatal injury, the narrator even botches the dead woman’s name as “Judy” instead of “Trudy.”

That narrator? Just one Josh Brolin, whose participation in a project far beneath his Oscar-nominated talents suggests either a big favor or a bet make-good. —Rod Lott

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Now here’s a twist on the true crime genre: the solution to a 525-year-old murder mystery hidden in the art on a deck of cards. That’s what world-champ magician Shawn Farquhar believes, at least. In Lost in the Shuffle, documentarian Jon Ornoy follows Farquhar simultaneously investigating his theory and creating an elaborate card trick based on the crime. 

The cold case at hand (as it were) involves the suspicious death of France’s King Charles VIII, perhaps killed by his queen, Anne of Brittany. Farquhar’s quest takes him to Belgium, Britain and beyond, with the occasional and fully intentional tangent into magic theory. 

Ornoy and his globetrotting star almost magically transform deep-niche nerd shit into an engaging detective story, with wonderful animated segments subbing for reenactments. Although not as Da Vinci Code-y as initially set up, their symbol-conspiratorial Shuffle holds appeal to history geeks, homicide geeks, game geeks, travel geeks, sleight-of-hand geeks and even just process geeks.

To whichever group(s) among those you belong — and even if you find Farquhar’s ultimate assertion to be a mighty leap of assumption — you’ll probably fall into the movie’s net. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.