*originally posted july 26, 2018*
Alright folks....time for VHS of the week:
A few weeks back I mentioned that...after spending ages 4-8 on a steady diet of Risky Business...and walking around the halls of my catholic elementary school reciting Clark Griswold’s “I think you’re all fucked in the head” speech verbatim (I can still do this, btw)...my parents made a half-hearted attempt to wean me off of R-rated movies. So instead I watched shit like the PG-13-rated Loverboy...which is about a pizza delivery guy who “turns takeout into make out” when he starts balling wealthy middle-aged housewives to raise try to raise enough dough to return to college to be with his girlfriend. The pizza guy is played by Patrick Dempsey...who went from totally geek to totally chic in the late 80’s. Dude was like Chris Pratt and Channing Tatum...and Dustin Hoffman...all rolled into one irresistible package (heyyyo!). So as I JUST MENTIONED...dude flunks out of college and has to start working at the nonsensically named, vaguely racist Senor Pizza. He starts getting orders for pizzas with extra anchovies...which signals that there’s a middle-aged lady out there who wants to ball. Before you know it he’s delivering the goods (oh ho!) to everyone from Kirstie Alley to Princess Leia...and they are throwing mad cash at him...which is good cuz I delivered pizza for a summer and made fuck all in tips. No one tried to seduce me...but a 95 year old black lady named Ella poured me a tumbler of bourbon after I helped her use to bathroom after delivering her order of Papa Gino’s breadsticks. That was the shit. Anyway...so yeah...Patrick Dempsey is a prostitute. And this flick is full of the usual wall-to-wall racism and casual homophobia that’s typical of the 80’s comedies. For example...there’s an 80’s movie robot that speaks in a voice best described as “white person making fun of Chinese Take-out worker (“sowwy...we have no-uh robster today). Yikes! Oh and there’s this subplot where Dempsey’s parents have this theory that he’s gay...which falls apart when he shows up to ball his own mother! (they are relived because what....hetero male gigolo is better than gay? Eesh). Eventually his girlfriend finds out what’s what and is super duper pissed but Dempsey is all “I banged all these ladies for you” (his words...not mine). She’s like OK fine...hope you got a little left in the tank for me! ANYWAY....about 4 years ago I had an idea that I wanted to write for The Onion so I wrote this fake article about a family returning a decades-overdue copy of Loverboy to a video store. The Onion was like “you are not funny...never contact us again” so I posted it here and a lot of people thought it was real. It is not real....but I’ll include it here again for your enjoyment. Cheers.
It was the event Donald and Marjorie Cutler had been looking forward to all year. When the Cutler’s put their South Grafton home on the market last January they held out hope that their three grown children, Donald Sr., 45, of South Grafton, Melissa, 43, of Tampa, Florida, and Kevin, 41, of Austin, Texas, would be able to clear up their busy schedules and return home for one last weekend together in the house they all grew up in. Now, a seemingly innocuous discovery during a weekend full of fond remembrances and laughter has led to some serious legal headaches for the youngest of the three Cutler children.
“Kev was digging though a box of souvenirs and photos from his high school days when he came across the tape,” says Mrs. Cutler, speaking from the kitchen of her new home in Clearwater, Fla. The tape in question: a VHS copy of the 1989 Patrick Dempsey comedy “Loverboy”. “Kev said ‘Ma! Look at this! I must’ve forgot to return it!” What happened next has been the source of a great deal of regret for Mrs. Cutler. “I feel like such a dumbbell for this next part…but when I saw that the tape was in a Video Tunnel case I said ‘Kev! They’re still in business!’”
The following morning after a family brunch outing, Kevin Cutler decided to return the video cassette some 9,155 days after its original due date of July 29th, 1989 because, according to Mrs. Cutler, “he thought it would be funny”.
However, Video Tunnel owner Ray Thibodeaux, 64, failed to find the humor in the return of the severely overdue tape and promptly presented Cutler with a bill for $27,475 in late fees. Kevin Cutler has referred to the rather significant late fee as “far more hilarious than anything that happens in the movie “Loverboy” and has refused to pay any part of it. That’ll be for a Worcester County judge to decide when the matter heads to court early next week.
Mr. Thibodoux agreed to speak about the matter over coffee at Earth Shine Café, located on the first floor of the Mechanics Building is downtown Worcester, where Mr. Thibodeoux has operated Video Tunnel out of the basement since 1984. Save for some faded lettering on a mailbox in the building’s foyer, there’s little evidence of the 30 year-old video store’s existence. Although head barista Raylee Swartz, 22, has worked at Earth Shine since 2011 she claimed to be completely unaware that Video Tunnel was still in business. “I saw the name on the mailbox but I assumed someone just forgot to scrape the letters off,” Swartz said. When asked if she would consider renting movies from Video Tunnel, Swartz said that she “didn’t think so”.
“I got news for little Kevin Cutler: you owe me 27 large,” Mr. Thibodeoux said. “The kid really screwed the pooch on this one: he’s got a new release out for 25 years! And throw in an extra fifty cents too because, after all that time, he couldn’t remember to rewind the tape. A nice little cherry on top!”
In the film “Loverboy” Mr. Dempsey plays Randy, a down-on-his luck pizza delivery boy who spends his summer moonlighting as a male gigolo in order to raise money to return to college, where he’ll be reunited with his girlfriend. The film’s tagline of “He deliver more than pizza” did little to entice audiences in a summer chock full of blockbusters from Batman to Lethal Weapon 2. The film pulled in just four million dollars at the box office and was quickly forgotten.
Despite the film’s box office failure, Mr. Thiboduaux claims that “Loverboy” is still a sought after title. “The thing with that kid Dempsey,” Mr, Thibodeux says, “is that his career tanked in the early 90’s. But once you started to see him on Grey’s Anatomy, slowly but surely, people started asking for stuff like “Can’t Buy Me Love” and “Mobsters” again. Asked what Mr. Thibodeaux would tell customers looking to rent “Loverboy”, he said he would “tell them the truth: that it’s still checked out.”
Should the judge rule in favor of Video Tunnel, Mr. Thibodeaux says he already knows what he’s going to do with his cash windfall. “I’m gonna go out and get drunker than a monkey’s ass,” Thibodeaux says, “and then see where that leads me.”
The Cutlers hope this matter will be resolved quickly so that they can begin to enjoy their retirement and their son Kevin can return to his job as a yoga instructor in Texas. “What an awful thing!” Mrs. Cutler says. “I always told all of my kids: return the tapes on time!” Reached by phone at her home in Tampa, Melissa Cutler said she had little interest in discussing her younger brother’s legal battles, but offered that she thought the videotape fiasco was “Typical Kev”. “He’s always been the flake of the family,” she added.
Kevin Cutler declined to discuss the ongoing case with Worcester Magazine, but said that he expected to be fully exonerated. When asked what his most recent favorite films were Cutler said that he doesn’t even have a television in his Austin apartment. If he wants to watch a movie these days, he said he simply streams it on Netflix “like everyone else”.