Still Quest-ing

Over at Professor Bleak's Late Late Monster Show, the Professor reflected on buying his own VHS copy of Dario Argento's Suspiria in the early 90s. Back then, most movies were not priced to be sold to the home market. VHS tapes were being sold to video rental companies, and prices of $99.99 per VHS tape weren't uncommon. Personally, I owned a few movies on VHS in high school, buying the movies that I really loved back then (for some reason or other, the only ones that are coming to mind are Excalibur and Conan the Barbarian, but I'm sure there were some horror titles in my old VHS collection back in the day), picking up what I could either used from the local video stores or whatever Musicland had on their shelves. (I would later end up working for the local Blockbuster Video as well as the local Sundance knock-off Reel Collections - simultaneously for a little while - and ended up practically working for movies, blowing more of my paycheck than I should have on VHS tapes instead of, oh, I don't know, paying my rent on time.)

I never went as far as Professor Bleak, saving up $99.99 to buy a copy of Suspiria. However, I did have similar experiences to those he describes, scrubbing through all the local video stores trying to find the movies that I only knew about because I saw them mentioned in the pages of Fangoria, Gorezone, Cinefantastique or Starlog.

Even though my parents didn't let me watch R-rated movies as a kid, I had a pretty good idea as to what the big horror franchises were in the 80s. We made weekly family trips to the local Video USA, and would pick up movies to watch over the weekend. When my parents weren't looking, I would read the back of the Nightmare on Elm Streets, the Hellraisers and all the rest. (It was at a place that sold waterbeds and rented videos where I read the backs of the Friday the 13ths while my parents were filling out the paperwork to buy something or other and at that point, I promised myself that someday, when I was old enough to rent the movies on my own, I would sit down and watch all the Friday the 13th films in one massive marathon. Now that I think about it, I still haven't indulged myself in that marathon.)

When I was able to start renting horror movies, I went a little crazy. I tracked down every title I remembered sneaking glances at, which was difficult because that waterbed/video store wasn't around anymore, but we still had plenty of small video shops in Cheyenne, WY. I hit them all, and eventually starting working for one of them (it started life as a Giant Video, but eventually Blockbuster acquired it).

Some video shops didn't have the greatest selection - I used to kid that a video store's worth could be judged by how many installments of the Friday the 13th films could be found on its shelves. Even while working for Blockbuster, where I could get free rentals, I would go to the small store down the street or the place on the other side of the bridge or the one that repaired vacuum cleaners because not one store carried everything that I wanted to see. I remember tracking down the unrated cut of Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth to one wood paneled video store, bringing it home, popping into the VCR, seeing the ad for a special documentary about Clive Barker which was only available if you mailed in the receipt from the rental shop, noting that THAT DAY was the last day this offer was running, racing back to the video store, checking in the movie and then re-renting it so I could get another receipt because I had thrown the first one away somewhere between the video store and my apartment. (And I wasn't even all that put out that I had to pay for the movie again!)

I learned a few things during my time at Blockbuster; I became one of the people whose job it was to repair broken videocasettes. (This particular Blockbuster location took very seriously making sure the tapes were always repaired when possible, especially in the case of the Disney releases, instead of removing them from inventory and MAYBE replacing them, if it was even possible to do so.) This was something I remembered years later when I rented some horror movie somewhere in Bozeman, MT, that broke while it was in my possession BEFORE I had watched it. I don't remember the title, but it was something I knew none of the other video stores had, so to watch it, I had to fix it first.

Today, we've got mostly-reasonably priced DVDs and Blu-ray discs. We've got Netflix. For the most part, most horror fans today can get their hands on pretty much whatever horror movie they want. And that's AWESOME. I could finally put together that Friday the 13th marathon with little hassle and headache (save for finding the time to do such a thing).

But I still struggle because there are still movies out there that I want to see that I can't seem to find as easily as I'd like.

One of the many, MANY ways Brenda made life better for me was by adding a Region-Free DVD player to our collection of electronics resting comfortably beneath our TV. For whatever reason, some movies just don't get released here in the states, or if they are released, it's months or even years after other parts of the world have seen them. The Zombie Diaries was released in the UK before Uncle Romero started rolling on his Diary of the Dead, and because I stumbled across this title on a website somewhere, I knew about it, sought it out, let Amazon.co.uk handle some dollars-to-pounds conversion and had the film delivered. 2007's Wasting Away was screened at the Zompire Film Festival, but it still didn't have a state-side release, so if I want it, I'm going back to Europe's Amazon.co.uk. (Wasting Away will be released here in the states under the title Ah! Zombies!! soon.) The same can be said of Apocalypse of the Dead (originally titled Zone of the Dead).

I know I'm being zombie-centric (and can you blame me), but there are other genre titles - 2006's All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, for example - that have become the gems that can give those who are pursuing them that same anticipation, that same thrill, that same rush that Professor Bleak is describing.

I just sent €20 to a filmmaker in Europe. I didn't know where to go to get a euro note; I assumed any bank would do it, but my work hours don't allow for a lot of wandering from bank to bank, asking for European currency. I found a place online that would handle the exchange, but I wasn't willing to spend the $10-$30 on shipping. I eventually found someone who had one in person, made the exchange, and I tucked it into a birthday card and off it went.

I did this to get my hands on a movie I first read about on Wikipedia.

I don't know if this is quite the same as hopping from video store to video store, looking for a copy of the latest Hellraiser or (god help me) The Howling, but it's not like having a subscription to Netflix is making it easy for me to get my hands on this movie.

Or on Six Bullets.

As a collector of film scores, I stumbled across Endless Blue's score from this short film a few years ago and snatched it up. That was a few years ago, and I still listen to it fairly often. I'd LOVE to see the movie itself (there are bits of dialogue from the movie sprinkled throughout the album, which makes the fact that I haven't seen the film yet even worse!), and I've been watching Six Bullets' website (http://www.sixbulletsmovie.com/), but it hasn't been updated since 2007. I've swapped some emails recently with someone involved in the production who said they'd send me a copy, but I haven't heard back from him after I gave him my mailing address.

There are obviously resources online - some legal, some not so much - where I can find movies that haven't received a digital release of any kind. I keep my eyes out for some of the more obscure titles, foreign films, extremely limited releases, etc., and I always find myself experiencing a little rush when I find something rare, hard-to-find or even near-lost.

A few years ago, a friend told me about a movie called Siege of the Dead. It was an amateur production (directed by Chris Kaylor), it was a zombie movie . . . it was something I wanted to see. A few emails to those involved in the production led to dead ends, but then the friend who originally told me about the movie made the movie available to me.

Is it an amazing piece of movie-making? No. But is it something I enjoyed? Certainly. I'm sure part of my enjoyment comes from some maybe even sick place of knowing that this movie is somehow rare, but even taking that out of the equation, I think it holds up. (It holds up enough for me to cover it on Mail Order Zombie sometime later this year.)

Back to the original point of this blog - I think there's still that element of the quest when it comes to finding horror movies . . . if you want there to be. We just have to try a bit harder and look in places we wouldn't normally look. There's something about seeking out something like, say, Dead Bones, Olivier Beguin's short horror Western, watching it, talking about it with your friends (and maybe even eventually reviewing it on your podcast) that gives me a little charge. I'm not showing off that I found this movie that no one in town is going to find unless they go to the same website I went to, jumped through the same hoops and so on; rather, in a weird, twisted way, I feel like some sort of archaeologist digging for the obscure, the lost, the forgotten horror gems, consuming them and doing my oh-so-small part in making sure that the filmmakers' mother isn't the only person on the planet that remembers any given horror movie.

And it's fun. Digging, Googling, Friend-ing people on Facebook, sending out blind emails, and maybe even making a few phone calls - it somehow justifies the amount of time I spend into front of this computer . . . to me, anyway.