4 Instructional Videos Made By and For Crazy People
The worst thing about being insane is having no one to share it with. That's why lunatics make instructional videos. Below are four of the finest examples of madmen teaching madmen with the power of VHS.
Dirty Line Dancin' with John Douthitt (1993)
The first thing I noticed about this video is the warning on the front and the back of the box that it CONTAINS NO NUDITY. Are you trying to protect my delicate sensibilities, Dirty Line Dancin'? Call me non-retarded, but maybe an instructional video on how to dry hump isn't the best place to take your moral stand against nudity. I ought to masturbate to this on principle. Is this a children's video for parents who only want their daughter to look like a slut?
The instructor, John Douthitt, is a doughy man with a mullet, a lazy eye, and a set of hips made for war. Whenever it's time to get things sexy, and that's the only number on John's watch, he looks down and pounds the area near his pelvis-- just pounds the shit out of it. He has the grace of a straight jacket escape. His rhythm is so violently off that diabetics use him to calibrate the timing of their seizures. Only one woman has ever survived a slow dance with him, and she was a jeep. John doesn't know what "hysterectomy" means, but his hips have performed 38 of them.As a host, John isn't much better. He opens the video by reading words off a cue card in a way that does no justice to the horse that wrote them. But this tape isn't called Dirty Literacy
. This tape is about giving the inside of your jeans an unwanted pregnancy in a frenzy of pumps unrelated to the beat of nearby music, and that is something John can do. I just realized that this is why people in the country have sex with their cousins. Because when your dating pool is size 18 beasts crammed into size 4 shorts, you want to take your frustrations out on nature itself.Dirty Line Dancin' was designed for eroticism, but it also hopes to add personality to your line dancing-- to help you stand out in the crowd. John comes from a neighborhood where 3rd grade is considered a graduate program, so the conflicting logic here never occurred to him. The way I look at it, expressing your individuality is a hell of a lot faster if you avoid synchronized activities altogether. Plus, does it really count as "making it your own" when your addition to the dance is shaking your loose chest fat and desperately trying to fuck a mosquito? John dances like a stand up comedienne's ex-husband has sex. His excess flab has been pressurized by denim in so many unexpected directions that every savage groin movement he makes knocks the wind right out of his lungs. Every time he has to count past two, he pronounces every number as, "Hfffhhfhh!"Here's a clip. I'm really sorry about this, black people:
Maryse Nicole's Collectible Doll Care - A Video Handbook (1994)
The porcelain dolls featured in this video are exquisite works of craftsmanship, and Maryse Nicole signs each of them in 24 karat gold. Now, you might think that 5 easy payments of $59 is an expensive way to tell your house guests that you're behind them with a knife, but think of everything that comes with it! Local bats will recognize you as one of their own. You will always have someone to whisper to when your prisoners don't speak English. Plus, each doll comes packaged in a size fetus gown. Your angel will no longer have to sing to you from a frumpy mason jar or plastic bag.
Every Maryse Nicole collectible doll also contains the soul of a missing child trapped within. Pose them any way you want; their hand-crafted glass eyes will never look away from the direction that child is buried. Curious collectors can follow this gaze to come upon the Franklin Heirloom Doll Studio, a state-of-the-art production facility where haunted skeletal hands will pull you into the earth and silence you forever. You are now Kristina
, endlessly unable to scream from a golden haired doll in a gown of embossed white taffeta.
The point I'm trying to make is that these dolls make my skin crawl. To me, porcelain dolls seemed like something you only buy when you know you're going to die alone and the only revenge you have left on the world is forcing an unblinking phalanx of $400 toy children watch your corpse get hollowed out by dusty spiders.
According to this tape, I was right. I'm the first person to ever watch this video that hasn't lured children into an oven with candy. It didn't even have an ending since the life expectancy of its target audience is less than 30 minutes. It starts with instructions on how to carefully unwrap your doll from its shipping container to preserve the collector value of her bubble wrap neck brace. On a scale of one to crazy, it's already burying the needle, and it only gets worse from there. Plus, to add an extra dimension of terror, half her instructions were recorded later on a much louder microphone. Because that's what I needed to feel more comfortable, Maryse, for you to have a second voice. She might as well be saying, "Now I'll show you how to apply lipstick to your doll using THE FINGERS I CONTROL. THIS FLESHY SHELL IS MY DOMAIN NOW.
"
Collectible Doll Care taught me more than how long a grown man can sustain one terrified pee. For example, did you know that giving your doll a haircut is important enough to take up 20% of a doll maintenance instructional video? I didn't. I didn't even know that doll hair grew. And by the way, fuck you for that, sorcerers.
If I'm ever on a plane that crashes in the wilderness, I'm going to so pissed that I know to wrap a bib around a Victorian doll to protect her petticoat and slip from hairspray stains. The first thing I'll tell my fellow survivors is, "Quickly! If the gentleman of your doll's plantation has returned unwashed from the servant quarters, apply a bleach-free body lice shampoo to her undercarriage!" I'm not even sure what I'm saying anymore. Ever since I bought this video, dogs have barked at my house all night, every night. When I tried to throw it away, the sanitation department cited me $800 for a giggling trash can. Collectible Doll Care
is the video Death's supervisor showed him on his first day of work.
Magical Rainbow Sponge with Dee Gruenig (2000)
The world of scrapbooking and stamping is a terrifying place. Every time a woman presses a rubber stamp onto a sheet of embossed stationary, her vagina secretes one tablespoon of spackle. If you multiply the number of scrapbooks in a woman's home by 15 and then divide that number by one, those are the odds that her bra and panties match. If her walls are stencil-painted, she thinks a bikini wax is something you use to make horses stick to a swimsuit.
This video is an uncensored explosion of arts and crafts enthusiasm. It is the ass-to-mouth pornography of memory albums and thankyou cards. Dee Gruenig literally cannot contain her excitement about the Magical Rainbow Sponge, and it's every combination of lovable, hilarious, and terrifying. Dee is entrenched in a lifestyle I'll never understand, where gender stereotypes are things like "every woman loves containers!" And speaking of every woman, after hearing the sounds that Dee makes every time she swipes her sponge across a postcard, I realize that every woman I've ever been with was faking orgasms. Dee Gruenig could power an aircraft carrier by sitting on a generator and looking at border patterns.
Our country might really be trying to weaponize Dee's love of oh-my-gosh-wiggles. Halfway into the video she pulls out a dragon scroll with her name on it and says she got it when the Army Arts & Crafts Department sent her to Korea
. Holy crap, what?
Karatecise Workout by Master Dominick Giacobbe (1987)
Take a moment and picture what something called "karatecise workout" might look like. You were either wrong or completely insane. This is nothing like anything. Master Giacobbe is a "Karate Mind Master." It's a style of martial arts that focuses on winning fights by falling into a kind of invincible sleep. With karate concentration, Dominick can enter a warrior trance, and 80% of this workout video is bizarre demonstrations of what that means. Giacobbe and his Mind Master friends zen out and jump on broken glass, walk on knives, and let motorcycles run over their stomachs. It's beyond any shadow of a doubt the most awesome workout tape you'll ever watch.
Other workout videos are bogged down with exercise footage. Master Giacobbe laughs at that garbage. I mean, why would he show you how to do a situp when he can show you how to pull a van with your teeth
?
If Master Giacobbe concentrates for a few minutes, his unconscious body just starts stumbling around and doing the impossible. His idea of a workout is napping on the highway until a truck explodes against him, so when it's time to teach the viewer actual exercises, he seems to have no idea what's going on. He and his bearded karate pals leap and twist like a fat person ran out of donuts and had to invent a new way to mock fitness. Stretching like Master Giacobbe is almost as likely to injure you as walking across knives like Master Giacobbe. If this didn't explicitly say it was a workout routine on the box, I'd swear this was a tape to show hippies how to shake an organic tampon loose.
The karate moves he teaches aren't much better. He only demonstrates a couple of self-defense techniques, and they're both exactly what you'd expect from someone impervious to all harm-- fun diversions to perform while every incoming punch and kick successfully strikes you. I guess when you can stand on samurai swords with water buckets hanging on the motorcycle spokes through your elbows and 60 pounds of cement in your mouth
, you stop worrying about pussy crap like human fists.His main area of expertise is surviving disastrous knife mishaps, but it's not like Giacobbe can't kick a little ass when he's awake and the right conditions are met. The video includes a short clip of him in an actual karate fight, and he does really well.Karatecise warns you that you should consult a physician before attempting what you see. If you actually do this, let me know what your doctor says about the motorcycle driving over your stomach. Because I think that doctor might be trying to trick you into buying an expensive stomach surgery. In all seriousness, don't attach your mouth to a van at home. Dominick's mind is so powerful that he can tell his blood not to squirt out of holes in his body. Here, I'll let him explain:Master Giacobbe's version of history is so much better than ours. I don't think he's right, but let's not get into that tired debate of which came first, the karate trance or the bandage? All we know for sure is that if you try anything he does in this movie, the person that finds your body will be on the phone with 911 for an hour trying to describe what they're looking at.
This workout video is more than suicidal carnie tricks and bad aerobics-- there are also several scenes from some kind of theatrical karate show. It was recorded at a Resorts International convention hall, and judging from the audience reaction, it brought several Cleveland-area septic pipe distribution associates to the brink of entertainment. The highlight was a daring retelling of Little Red Riding Hood. It opened with a lounge singer panting an extra sexy version of "Hey There, Little Red Riding Hood," which would have been creepy even if she wasn't eight, and she was. Then acts 1, 2, and 3 are her kicking a wolf in the dick. Yes, it's stupid, but how ridiculous would it be if these people could jump on broken glass and read and write?
Behold, the schizophrenic wonderland that is Karatecise Workout:
