TURN-ONS AND TURN-OFFS IN CURRENT HOME ENTERTAINMENT RELEASES : TECH FLASHES

VIDEO LOVE: While some video companies are testing the waters this spring with fictional, romance-novel-modeled series (like Sony’s “Romance Library” and Karl-Lorimar’s “Shades of Love”), others are offering guides to finding the real thing. Among the new releases: Paramount’s “How Can I Tell If I’m Really in Love?” is aimed at teen-agers, while Fox Hills’ “How to Read a Woman Like a Book” and “How to Become the Love of His Life” are meant for older romance-seekers.

VIDEO HATE: While the video industry is tip-toeing into love, it has fully plunged into violence and horror. Small companies have become not-so-small by catering to the blood-and-death audience, most notably MPI, which made a fortune from its “Faces of Death” series (documentaries consisting of explicit scenes of murder, suicide, executions, etc.) and now divides its releases between more grimness (a series on famous criminals) and such lighter fare as the Beatles’ movie “Help!”

Other companies are making a killing with cheaply made gore-galore horror films. The impact of this trend is even more evident in trade publications than at video stores. For instance, in merely one recent issue of Video Insider lurked full-page, full-color ads showing a woman having her head chopped off by the knifelike blades of a clock (for the movie “Midnight”), another woman hanging by her neck, dead, with blood splattered over a white dress (for a video compiling scenes of horror special-effects), a close-up of hands cleaning blood from a bread knife (for the comparatively classy film “Dancing in the Dark”) and three video packages in United’s “Disciples of Death” documentary series, with copy reading “Imagine the screams . . . the fear . . . the horror . . . Here are the real faces of death!” Also in the same issue were ads for “The Terrorists,” “Sakura Killers,” “Deadly Companion,” “The Hunted Lady” and “Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary.”

With people renting and buying such tapes like crazy, the next trend in video may be psychiatrists’ booths in every store.