Night Vision (1987)

A young virgin who’s already off his rocker comes from Kansas to the harsh, mean, brutal, crime-ridden, deadly streets of, uh, Denver to become a writer and gets mixed up with a pagan cult after he acquires a haunted VCR. One wonders if a simple head-cleaner would solve his problems. He never tries that, though. Instead, he gets twitchy and paranoid as people around him start dying. Also, the video store he works in is robbed and he wakes up mornings with pages typed that he doesn’t remember writing. Let’s not forget the blood that sometimes drips down his TV screen for no reason, either. In the middle of all of this, he manages to score himself a girlfriend. She’s your regular hard-boiled egg in a movie that’s full of them, another soul jaded by life in the urban hellhole of, uh, Denver. This is some half-decent 80s straight-to-video that wants to be more of a head-trip movie full of fuzzy reality than a shock job. The weird sense of humor helps, as do some baffling background details (Why is the video store so disorganized? They have Arthur in the horror section!).