Au Revoir VHS

Naturally, I collect movies. Copies of movies, that is. It all started pre-VHS with Super-8 digests of mainstream films. These were 400' reels (~14 minutes of footage) with a very compressed edit of a movie. I remember that they cost $42.00 each. I shudder to think of how much that would translate to inflated 2021 fiat dollars! The first time I saw NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD was when I purchased a complete 5-reel Super-8 sound print of it circa 1981. Fast-forward to now when I blind-buy blu-ray copies of movies that I'm curious about only to be played a single time, ultimately forgetting them. Incredulous normal people see my home-theater with hundreds of DVDs & blu-rays packed alphabetically in shelves around the room ask, "Have you really watched all these movies?" "Of course! Many of them more than once!" The time devoted to my hobby probably pales in comparison to the thousands of hours they've doubtlessly wasted watching cable TV garbage during their lives. I certainly don't say that to them, though. That would be callous. I also collect comic books but it's been a few years since I've bought one. Yes, they're investments and yes, I've read damn near all the thousands of issues in those heavy boxes. Occasionally I'll sell a comic for a tidy profit. Recently, someone posted in a "want to buy" comic-book forum looking for a specific pre-Robin Detective Comics issue that I had in the grade he wanted. We agreed on a price and I went to the Credit Union to retrieve the book from my safety deposit box. It wasn't there. Oops! I'd already sold it a couple years previously and had forgotten about it. So I had to embarrassingly apologize to the guy and explain my faux pas. Shit. I could have made a lot more money, had I waited. ..which is the case for every key issue comic book sale I've made.

It's nostalgia that drives so much of the collector's market. Children of the '80s & '90s have a particular fondness for VHS tapes. I was well into adulthood back then and collected VHS movies because that was the only format we had. Laserdiscs came along in the 90s and I was obsessed with those until DVDs took over. To this day, there are still collectors who covet VHS tapes. In 2014, the distributor of our Borderline Entertainment features re-released our titles in "Big Box" editions to capitalize quickly on a short-lived fad. This was like offering re-prints of key comic book issues. It seems at the time that the market is demanding them, but there's no collector value in a reprint, is there? That was pretty much the last hurrah for our movies. I wouldn't be surprised if that distributor had all four of our Big Box Edition titles in a bargain-basement clearance discount section of his website because they weren't good sellers. Indeed he told me this when I offered the SINISTRE Final Cut to him, thinking it might get a blu-ray special edition release like many popular classic SOV titles still do here in the year 2021. Nope, hard pass; not worth the effort.

But those niche' collectors still want the old original VHS tapes. The rarer, the better, it seems. In 2017 a Canadian VHS collector made me an offer on VILE 21, a local movie that I acted in back in 1995. I sold my one and only copy and shipped it to it's new home in Canada. That collector hosted a monthly trash-cinema program and wanted to feature it. I gotta imagine that the show was a smash hit with the audience. Later, another VHS collector offered to buy the last remaining official VHS copies of my movies. Hell, he even wants a couple Todd Sheets tapes that I happened to have and the empty clamshell box with the homemade VILE 21 insert that Mike Strain had made. Money talks, and these things have been stashed away in storage for over two decades already. I'd most likely never watch them again anyway, so why keep 'em? The rarest item I've let go is the first release of SINISTRE that Todd Sheets put out a quarter-century ago on his "Asylum Home Video" label.

It's unique in that some cuts were made and the soundtrack score got changed in a few places. I stuck this tape in the VHS deck to make sure it still played and viola! Works like a charm and looks better than I tought it would. Hell, I should have used it as a source for some of the Final Cut footage! But it's got a copyguard on it and wouldn't transfer, dammit..

Goodbye VHS tapes!

If some of my local compatriots happen to read this, who still have VHS copies of these movies and are looking to cash in, lmk. The next collector who contacts me looking for these rare-as-hen's-teeth items will be sent your way!