This story begins with a videotape. Director Oscar Harding finds an old tape he never got to watch in its entirety as a kid. Said video was titled “Life On The Farm”, a feature-length home movie made by Charles Carson, an elderly neighbor of his grandparents’. When looking into how this salt-of-the-earth, unassuming farmer managed to make a movie, Harding uncovers a great story. A Life On The Farm is the result.
At first, the contents of said tape – a grainy home movie with bad tracking and all those other bugs that make one nostalgic for the VHS era – prove disturbing. Clad in a plaid red shirt and cowboy hat, Charles Carson takes Harding and his viewers on a tour of his laidback country life in Somerset, England, spending days looking after his animals, tending to the land, showing cows giving birth in graphic detail, talking incessantly to his dead cat and ultimately, taking the corpse of his deceased mother around the farm and posing her for pictures with the animals. It’s no wonder that one talking head compares him to Ed Gein, and you’ll probably be thinking of Norman Bates and his unhealthy attachment to Norma more than once.
But just as you expect Harding’s prized discovery to escalate into a full-blown snuff film or something similar, the director does a total bait-and-switch while digging into Charles Carson’s background, and discovers a simple, well-meaning guy who turned to filmmaking due to loneliness; meanwhile, all his interviewees go from laughing and pointing to sincerely admiring the man.
Carson’s story was pretty tragic; having lived nearly all his life on a remote farm, he lost both his parents, a brother, and his wife, who also did not live with him and only visited occasionally. Left alone in the company of cows, cats and other assorted animals, Carson turned to an old video camera and a photography hobby to have a link to the outside world, and one assumes to keep himself sane.
While he first regaled his neighbors with pictures of himself on his land along with funny captions, they soon started receiving what would be his legacy, “Life On The Farm”. Sadly, Carson passed away in the mid 00’s, alone and mostly forgotten. That is, until Harding and an entire community of found footage and vintage VHS enthusiasts got a hold of his film.
Harding’s doc goes from a budding backwoods horror picture to an uplifting story of an unlikely DIY guerrilla filmmaker whose unconventional work is being rediscovered. Carson’s VHS tape also highlights the love many film fans have for physical media, which is largely disappearing in this new era of streaming platforms; bizarre little gems like Carson’s magnum opus can disappear into the ether (though this one is uploaded to YouTube, so at least it’s safe for the time being), and this film is a rallying cry for their continued survival.
Even though it starts to lay the schmaltz on a bit thick, A Life On The Farm ends up as a portrait of a one-of-a-kind artist who’s finally getting his due, whose work for many will be nothing more than a passing curiosity, but who managed to make his mark. Movies are that one special thing that can bring people together, and for Carson, they’re what brought him to the rest of the world.
There are certain things you don’t know you’re missing in life until you’re exposed to them, right? EXP TV just might be one of those things. It’s got an aesthetic that hovers around the same territory as Everything is Terrible! and Vic Berger, it even reminds me of Mike Kelley’s stuff, but that’s only going to get you in the ballpark. Which is good enough, but you just have to click on the link and see for yourself. It’s a barrage of strange imagery and is really quite an inspired—not to say elaborate and work intensive—art project. And just in time for a pandemic. Bored with Netflix? Have enough Amazon Prime? Maxed out on HBO Max? You need to tune in, turn on and drop your jaw to the floor at what’s screening on EXP TV.
EXP TV the brainchild of Tom Fitzgerald, Marcus Herring, Taylor C. Rowley. I asked them a few questions via email.
What is EXP TV? What should someone expect to see when they get there?
EXP TV is a live TV channel broadcasting an endless stream of obscure media and video ephemera from our site at exptv.org. We stream 24/7.
The daytime programming is called “Video Breaks”—a video collage series featuring wild, rare, unpredictable, and ever-changing archival clips touching on every subject imaginable. Similar to how golden era MTV played music videos all day, daytime EXP TV streams non-stop, deep cut video clips filtered through our own distinct POV.
What treasures would reward the loyal Video Breaks viewer? Ventriloquist dummy sales demos, Filipino Pinocchios, LSD trip-induced talking hot dogs, Liberace’s recipe tips, French synth punk, primal scream therapy seminars, Deadhead parking lots, empty parking lots, Israeli sci-fi, scary animatronics, teenage girls’ homemade art films, Belgian hard techno dance instructions, Czech children’s films about UFOs, even Danzig reading from his book collection. And that’s all in just one hour!
We’ve been collecting obscure media for decades, but we’ve sorted through it all and cherry-picked the funny, the bizarre, the relevant, the irrelevant, the visually stunning, the interesting, the infamous, the good, the bad and the fugly. We’ve done all that so the viewers don’t have to. They get to kick back and experience the sweet spot without having to dig for rare stuff themselves or sit through an entire movie waiting for the cool part.
Our Nite Owl programming block features specialty themed video mixes and deep dives on everything under the sun: Bigfoot, underground 80s culture, Italo disco, cults, Halloween hijinks, pre-revolutionary Iranian pop culture, midnight movies, ‘ye ye’ promo films, Soviet sci-fi, reggae rarities, psychedelic animation and local news calamities. On any given night you could watch something like our Incredibly Strange Metal show followed by a conceptual video essay like Pixel Power—our exploration of early CGI art.
Aside from our unique tone and deep crate of video materials, one thing that really sets us apart in 2020 is our format. We are *not* on demand, we are *not* interactive—just like old TV! You can tune in anytime and something cool will be on.
That’s EXP TV in a nutshell. It’s funny, it’s art, it’s music, it’s infotainment, it’s free and it’s 24/7.
We have a little bumper on our Instagram @exp.tv that illustrates this
How much material did you have in the can, ready to go at launch?
We had been quietly working on the channel for over a year so we had quite a bit of material. When the pandemic hit, we decided to launch early as a beta so people could have an alternative to the big streaming channels – something totally different.
In this modern world of all these different streaming platforms, it feels like you spend more time deciding what to watch than you do actually watching something. We wanted to make something you could just turn on and leave on for hours—days even—and you’d be guaranteed to catch something interesting. We basically just made the channel we wanted to watch.
Right now, we have about 60 hours in rotation and we are regularly adding new material—new Video Breaks, new episodes of our ongoing series, and hatching entirely new concepts for shows. Stay tuned for Kung Fu Wizards coming soon!
Do you have themes? What are some of your more elaborate productions on the channel?
Our Nite Owl block has a roster of shows centered around specific themes. A few examples include…
Pixel Power – an homage to the early days of computer graphics.
Witches Brew – a tour through the history of witches on film.
Total News – a completely gonzo take on nightly news past and present.
Bollyweird – a huge compilation of the most “out there” Bollywood musical numbers.
Pomegranates – a survey of pre-revolutionary Iranian cinema, set to Persian psych music.
Underground USA – a continuing series archiving 80s alt culture.
Cosmonaut – our tribute to Soviet sci-fi.
Incredibly Strange Metal – exactly what it sounds like.
They Call Him Bigfoot – a search for Sasquatch in cinema.
Jamaica, No Problem – a crash course in Jamaican music culture.
The David Bowie Mixtape – The Thin White Duke’s glory years captured on film and video.
Our Star Wars Mixtape – Star Wars gone wild, gone weird, and gone wrong.
Cats – an exploration of cats in cinema and beyond.
Wow – a survey of psychedelic animation from around the world.
Mosaic – meditative compilation of short films from the world of fine art.
La Videotheque – French yeye music promo compilation.
Disco Odyssey – our series exploring the wild world of Italo disco and other dance music mutations.
And there’s so much more…
Where do you mostly find stuff? Or maybe, how do you search for it?
We have been collecting video materials for decades. Years of VHS tape-trading, pouring through mom and pop video stores (RIP), even the internet! It makes our day to stumble upon a Bulgarian sci-fi animation title we never heard of. We love our work! Like a hip hop dj/producer is looking for the perfect beat, we’re always searching for that perfect “clip”, that magic moment, that video gem.
What are some of your future plans for EXP TV?
The first priority is continuing to add more cool stuff to the site. We’re looking forward to the time when there’s hundreds of hours of free entertainment.
An unexpected but welcome side effect of our offbeat media expertise is that we’ve been getting work as creative consultants to dig up obscure clips and offer fresh takes on commercials and live events. Last year EXP TV was hired to program the Red Bull Music Film Festival in LA, and we brought in cool guests like Sun Ra Arkestra, Man Parrish, Lady Bunny, and Earth. Our mixtapes were the throughline of the fest. Some of our shows made it down to Austin Film Society and Music Box in Chicago. Having met as programmers at Cinefamily, our background is in public exhibition, but we’re interested in exploring new ways to subject the world to our perspective. We’ve been running the stream on Twitch and Periscope. Someday we want to take a bunch of old CRT TVs and use Raspberry Pi’s to make terrestrial TVs that you flip on and they only play EXP TV. We think that would be a fun gift for local galleries and bars.
We’re currently working on the EXP TV Apple TV app, but we wanna see EXP TV everywhere…we can see opportunities for our particular style of obscure video mixtapes as an HBO series or maybe even its own section on Netflix!
Megaplex is the most insane double feature the world has ever seen. With a running time of 80 minutes and thousands of cuts from more than 80 movies, Smash TV has spent the past year and a half cramming the most entertainment possible into every second. It’s dense enough to pressurize these diamonds in the rough into gleaming treasures.
Megaplex is the long awaited followup to the critically acclaimed Skinemax, much more fully realized, utilizing myriad editing and layering tricks picked up over the past five years. Deeper, darker, and definitely more bizarre.
Borrowing from the Grindhouse tradition and from Tarantino’s more recent tribute, Megaplex is a double feature that both members of Smash TV worked on independently.
As a palette cleanser in between, Smash TV is proud to present Coming Attractions, a 15 minute collection of vignettes editing together previously unexplored genres and styles.
Please support the original works, these are film makers and musicians that have upheld the values of originality and creativity.
This video is protected under fair use copyright law. It is presented for the purposes of entertainment, education, and criticism/commentary only. No infringement is intended.
TURBO
STARRING MICHAEL JACKSON
Edited by Ben Craw
Rated R
Turbo, Side A of Smash TV’s Megaplex, is the coolest thing you’ve ever seen if you were a late-night-movie-brainwashed 8 year old in 1990. It is the ultimate in-your-face, balls to the wall, no holds barred, over the top, end of the world electric boogaloo dance party, fueled by neon, spandex, ooze, and steroids. So many steroids.
It’s the movie you and your best friends stumble across at the end of the night after frying your brain with nine straight hours of Sonic 2, Streets of Rage 2, and ToeJam & Earl on your Sega Genesis. Or is the whole thing just a Pepsi-induced sugar coma fever dream? It’s impossible to say. But you probably shouldn’t have drunk that fifth two-liter bottle.
Turbo is utterly shameless in its love for the most ridiculous and awesome movies that the 1980s and early 90s had to offer. It’s what would happen if Cannon Films and New Line Cinema got a little crazy at the club and ended up boning in the bathroom. It’s the nights from your childhood that you’ll never forget. Those nights are gone. But Turbo lives on in your dreams forever…and Beyond…
HBO 1983 Intro
Mr. Oizo – Hun
Actress – Image
Stephen Farris – Pepper
Jean Michel Jarre – Zoolookologie
VHS Head – Camera Eyes
Phono Ghosts – Suntan Spies
Harold Faltermeyer – Fletch Theme
Oliver – Light Years Away
Tiger & Woods – Gin Nation
Solar Bears – A Sky Darkly
COMING ATTRACTIONS
Edited by Brendan Shields
Coming Attractions is a collection of vignettes exploring different genres and themes. Comprised of fake trailers, genre retrospectives, and tributes to luminary actors and directors, it acts as a palette cleanser in between the two halves and provides an opportunity to experiment on a smaller scale.
Tracklist:
Intermission
Music: Midnight Television – Commercial Dreams
American Hunk
Music: Sparkles_161244545 – IDEALISMム
Atari Summer
Music: Suzanne Ciani – Atari Summer
Safari Ice
Music: Miki Matsubara – Safari Eyes
Miyazaki
Music: Suzanne Ciani – The First Wave: Birth Of Venus
Sunday Will Never Be The Same
Music: Spanky And Our Gang – Sunday Will Never Be The Same
Odyssey
Music: Autechre – d-sho qub
Inside Story
Music: Suzanne Ciani – Inside Story
BEYOND
STARRING SKELETOR
Edited by Brendan Shields
Rated R
Beyond, Side B of Megaplex, is a psychedelic vision quest for B-movie lovers. Comprised of some of the strangest imagery from the 80s and early 90s, Beyond is a hallucinatory experience designed to amaze, bewilder, and terrify.
Highlighting choice cuts from a strange time in the horror, sci-fi, and fantasy genres, Beyond harkens back to late nights of channel surfing, catching out of context glimpses of the bizarre and fascinating. Something unlike anything you’d ever seen before…something you weren’t supposed to see…
Combining the darkest moments of Skinemax with the layering experiments of Memorex, Beyond is a descent into euphoric madness as reality begins to unravel.
It’s the unmarked tape lying in wait at an abandoned Blockbuster, anticipating its next victim.
Franco Micalizzi – Stridulum Theme
VHS Head – Farewell Africa
Gatekeeper – Serpent
VHS Head – Angels Never Sleep
Madlib – Gentle Pilz
ADR – Sidewinder
Public Image Ltd. – The Order Of Death
Fluorescent Grey – Gnoble Door Moo Rig Rig
VHS Head – Frozen
Trust – Bulbform
iamamiwhoami – Goods
Everything is Terrible! is a Chicago-based video blogging website that features clips of VHS tapes from the late 20th century. The project was founded in 2000 by a group of friends while at Ohio University. “Every weekend or free afternoon they get,” according to NPR, they search at thrift stores, garage sales, and “bargain bins” for the worst and most outrageous VHS tapes to share with each other. The website was launched in 2007 in Chicago….In 2009, the website released a video titled Everything is Terrible! The Movie, which featured the same type of VHS clips that would be featured on their website. The A.V. Club called the video “a portal into a world halfway between showbiz and real life—a look at how the people who make entertainment for a living think the rest of us saps actually live”, adding that it’s “simultaneously enlightening, hilarious, and deeply sad”.
After the Crash 