Compiled by Clint Enns. Presented by VID-EXP at Cinéma au Cinoche in Montréal, Québec as part of Mix Tape Vol. 1 on December 3, 2025.
VID-EXP presents: Mix Tapes Vol. 1
Artists:
Rob Feulner, James Watts & Clint Enns
Curated by:
Sam Meech
Three local artists each curate twenty minutes of found footage oddities screened on VHS.
Trois artistes locaux présentent chacun vingt minutes de trouvailles cinématographiques projetées sur VHS.
Fry Me to the Moon
Excerpt from Gareth Branwyn & Mark Frauenfelder, “Journey to Kooktopia,” Mondo 2000, Vol. 6 (1992): 22-25.
Curiosity is a sighn [sic] of intelligence.
AL FRY
Al Fry, who lives in a one-payphone town in Idaho, is the proprietor of Fry’s Incredible Inquiries, a mail-order business of D.I.Y. kooktech manuals and books on UFOs and the coming new age. As an expert on suppressed inventions and the owner of “probably the largest selection of time travel publications ever put together,” Fry told us that some of his customers “go backwards and forwards using these machines.” Fry hesitated to give us much information about time travel: “I only go so far in most of my interest and dealings in such areas due to the dangers involved. Big Brother keeps tabs on the really high tech geniuses around and I prefer to remain just enough of the country boy to slow such problems.” Fry claims that the most advanced high tech gadgetry has been around for ten thousand years, but that the common folk have lost access to it. “The government & ‘elite’ front men have technology that is pretty mind-boggling but I can’t get any deeper than I am,” said a cautious Fry.
Fry is more willing to discuss Project Phoenix, which began as a government-run weather balloon program that unleashed a Pandora’s Box of psychic disaster upon the citizens. The most benign function of the balloons was to transmit a Wilhelm Reich-discovered radio frequency that reduced the intensity of storms by attracting Orgone, and disrupting DOR (Deadly Orgone). But the transmissions were also “pulsed & cycled” in such a way as to control the minds of people living under the influence of the balloons. The same signals, when intensified, were used to generate time warp vortices large enough to send an automobile and its hapless occupants careening through time. The scientists continued to increase the strength of the Reichian waves until giant mental constructs were unleashed and could not be contained. Around 1983, the constructs coalesced and took the form of a 25 foot-tall Bigfoot monster, wreaking havoc and terrorizing project scientists. Some feel that the monster was created by a renegade faction of the government who wanted to sabotage Project Phoenix for their own wicked purposes.
Fry is an authority on everything from the dangers of ice cream—”Smelly, chemical-laden poison that we wouldn’t even teed our dog. In its frozen form with its artificial ‘taste foolers’ it gets spooned right down our gullets.”—to proper living for trailer park denizens: “The aluminum sends deleterious rays inward which is unhealthy and draining. Polarity devices and such are of some benefit. One self-made device consists of a pan of sand that is charged up under a properly made pyramid. Set in a corner this works for around a week at which time some cold unpolluted water should be poured over the sand and its wood container to cleanse it.”
Fry also offers a correspondence course in Human Functioning Secrets that makes this modest claim: “Once you have taken the full course, you should be able to mind read, stop your mental and physical pain as well as showing others how to do so [sic], have a total memory recall, share beauty in relationships, talk a new communication, know the answers to hate, pride, prejudice and hostility, have a true knowledge of world peace and a serenity never known before. You will have answers to miracles, the beginning of time, what infinity is, how it happened and what you really are. You will have a new communication with nature and all living beings.”