Copying videos illegally on a mass scale is one thing, but making a marketable product out of them is quite another. Just think of the most basic problem: language – your average customer won’t be a polyglot! The answer to that problem all over Central and Eastern Europe was a practice called rychlodabing, or speed dubbing in Czech, which consisted of one sole actor voicing all characters, with the original voices usually still audible beneath. This is how millions of people in the ČSSR encountered many forms of cinema for the first time in the 1980s, and how many foreign words became lodged (in a corrupted fashion) in everyday language. Some expressions (often curse words) were born. That’s popular culture at its liveliest.  Video Kings is an oral history monument to the art of rychlodabing and some of its masters, as well as a collective reminiscence from a time of political transformation, and how ordinary people were agents of that change in extraordinary ways.

Video Kings

When self-help guru Dr. Reinis (Jaroslav Dusek) led his students on a retreat to ponder the meaning of life, he had no intention of leading them all to their doom. But when gut-munching zombie woodsmen emerge, the group finds itself locked in mortal battle. Alternately sickening and silly, this gruesomely hilarious Czech horror flick co-stars Jan Dolansky, Eva Nadazdyova, Anna Fialkova and Eva Janouskova.