If I was any slower with updating my journal I'd fall asleep!
I thought you may or may not be interested in seeing some pictures from my messy room and some of the things to be found in it. My room is kind of a shadow of it's formal self though, not nearly as many posters and strange things hanging from the ceiling, red and blue light bulbs and an atmosphere that was composed from patchouli joss sticks.
Ah, old age eh, I kind of miss my old room.
Anyway, first off, here are some of my current material obsessions, DVD's ! Just occasionally I will stop and question my self, why do you need to buy DVD's? And then I quickly snap out of it and say " What are you thinking!OF COURSE you need them! How unhappy would you be without a fix of 80's teenagers in peril!"
So these are the films, although some are "out on loan" grrr. Sorry, I had to photograph them in sections with my shoddy digital camera, I apologise in advance for the less than good quality of these.
At the top are some of my limited edition "Cigar Tins" from Anchor Bay including "The Beyond" "Evil Dead 2" "Hellraiser 1+2 set" and "Living dead at Manchester Morgue" (or let Sleeping corpses lie as it's called in America! ) And also some box sets and my wooden Wicker man box set with burned in logo :>
More horror cheese. The basic fact is that 98% of my collection is composed of horror films. What can I say?
The bottom half of that shelf. There are films scattered else where in my messy room too.
Ok, here are a couple of my favourite posters. These are original UK Quad Cinema posters (e.g. the ones that would have been on the walls in the actual cinema when the films were playing.) God if only the UGC or Odeon would show a double bill of "The Funhouse" and "My Bloody Valentine" now days!
My second favourite poster. Again, just imagine these films playing your local cinema today! Sob.
When I can afford it I'm going to get them properly framed, stuck on a wall can't be good for them in the long run.
I'm possibly the only person in Glasgow that still has a Betamax video. This is what a woman at a car boot sale once told me as I excitedly asked her how much her huge breadcrate full of Beta tapes and player cost? This was around 1989. She looked at me in puzzled amusement and said "Are you serious? You want to buy this stuff? You must be the only person in the world with a beta....etc etc.." I refused to look phazed by her apparent dissaproval of my intended purchase and retained my cheshire cat grin as my mind started to race about what could be on some of the tapes. Then she said "ok, the Beta tapes are 10p each! And the player is 5". I said "Em, ok, that sounds fine" not believing my ears and then I started to go through the tapes. Talk about a treasure trove,I bought about 60 tapes and the player and that day yeilded some of the films that were to change my outlook on horror films in general and get me interested in a wide variety of obscure and foreign horror ( I saw 'Lemora' for the first time on Beta which was part of this haul and spent the next 7 years trying to find out more about it. It was essentially a 'lost' film until the recent DVD release with hardly any info on it) as well as finding some nice examples of "the video nasties" (films banned in the early eighties in the UK in a tide of panic that swept Britain thanks to certain over zealous press publications such as "The Daily Mail" if your wondering. There is A LOT more to that particular piece of history! Ask me one day.) such as "I Spit on your Grave" "Last house on the left" "Evil speaK" and "Cannibal Apocalypse". You have to remember this was years before the advent of DVD and we still had a British censor board run by the late James Ferman and most of these films were still banned outright in the UK. Christ, we couldn't even see "The Exorcist" "A Clockwork Orange" or "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" legally until around 1999! Anyway I digress. I was so taken with how cool Beta was, the cute little tapes and the fact the picture was better than VHS that I started to actively seek out more films on the format. It was at once a hard task as it was a dead format and also a rewarding one as because everyone though Beta was useless, I could pick up the tapes for next to nothing at boot sales and old shops etc. Anyway since DVD I've long since got rid of many of those tapes to make way for better editions of the same films but I have kept a number of movies on Beta because of the fond memories. The above photo is a small collection of Beta tapes on a particular label "Thorn EMI" . Included is the very first release of "Suspiria" in the UK and also the now notorious release of the excellent slasher "The Burning". This little film got Thorn Emi in to A LOT of trouble! They originally released it fully uncut which did not go down well with the BBFC at the time and it was promptly banned outright. Then after it was properly certified and cut (losing much of it's gory carnage) ,Thorn EMI were told they could re-release this cut version. HOWEVER, someone at Emi made a boo boo and they managed to re-release the same uncut version AGAIN! They promptly issued a recall notice to all video shops urging them to return the offending tape because the shops were actually liable to procecution (yes really) under the new VRA (Video recordings act) which had been passed (in 1984) but many of the dealers kept the tape and simply rented it out under the counter because obviously now these films were banned so there was a high customer demand for them! Rebel Yell eh? So there's a little story for you. With that kind of history I just can't let these tapes go.
Closer shot of "Suspiria" to show the cute little tape.
Check out the crazy sleeve too! That's the other thing I miss about these old tapes, the fact that companies would sometimes create completely new art instead of using the old or original cinema art for a film. Genious!
Anyway, I'm sure I've bored you all enough by now, if you made it though my droning, thanks for listening.
Apy.
Oops- I forgot I was going to put this picture in. My Tiger Shark Jaws! Not actually my own jaws mind, that would just be scary.
I thought you may or may not be interested in seeing some pictures from my messy room and some of the things to be found in it. My room is kind of a shadow of it's formal self though, not nearly as many posters and strange things hanging from the ceiling, red and blue light bulbs and an atmosphere that was composed from patchouli joss sticks.
Ah, old age eh, I kind of miss my old room.
Anyway, first off, here are some of my current material obsessions, DVD's ! Just occasionally I will stop and question my self, why do you need to buy DVD's? And then I quickly snap out of it and say " What are you thinking!OF COURSE you need them! How unhappy would you be without a fix of 80's teenagers in peril!"
So these are the films, although some are "out on loan" grrr. Sorry, I had to photograph them in sections with my shoddy digital camera, I apologise in advance for the less than good quality of these.
At the top are some of my limited edition "Cigar Tins" from Anchor Bay including "The Beyond" "Evil Dead 2" "Hellraiser 1+2 set" and "Living dead at Manchester Morgue" (or let Sleeping corpses lie as it's called in America! ) And also some box sets and my wooden Wicker man box set with burned in logo :>
More horror cheese. The basic fact is that 98% of my collection is composed of horror films. What can I say?
The bottom half of that shelf. There are films scattered else where in my messy room too.
Ok, here are a couple of my favourite posters. These are original UK Quad Cinema posters (e.g. the ones that would have been on the walls in the actual cinema when the films were playing.) God if only the UGC or Odeon would show a double bill of "The Funhouse" and "My Bloody Valentine" now days!
My second favourite poster. Again, just imagine these films playing your local cinema today! Sob.
When I can afford it I'm going to get them properly framed, stuck on a wall can't be good for them in the long run.
I'm possibly the only person in Glasgow that still has a Betamax video. This is what a woman at a car boot sale once told me as I excitedly asked her how much her huge breadcrate full of Beta tapes and player cost? This was around 1989. She looked at me in puzzled amusement and said "Are you serious? You want to buy this stuff? You must be the only person in the world with a beta....etc etc.." I refused to look phazed by her apparent dissaproval of my intended purchase and retained my cheshire cat grin as my mind started to race about what could be on some of the tapes. Then she said "ok, the Beta tapes are 10p each! And the player is 5". I said "Em, ok, that sounds fine" not believing my ears and then I started to go through the tapes. Talk about a treasure trove,I bought about 60 tapes and the player and that day yeilded some of the films that were to change my outlook on horror films in general and get me interested in a wide variety of obscure and foreign horror ( I saw 'Lemora' for the first time on Beta which was part of this haul and spent the next 7 years trying to find out more about it. It was essentially a 'lost' film until the recent DVD release with hardly any info on it) as well as finding some nice examples of "the video nasties" (films banned in the early eighties in the UK in a tide of panic that swept Britain thanks to certain over zealous press publications such as "The Daily Mail" if your wondering. There is A LOT more to that particular piece of history! Ask me one day.) such as "I Spit on your Grave" "Last house on the left" "Evil speaK" and "Cannibal Apocalypse". You have to remember this was years before the advent of DVD and we still had a British censor board run by the late James Ferman and most of these films were still banned outright in the UK. Christ, we couldn't even see "The Exorcist" "A Clockwork Orange" or "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" legally until around 1999! Anyway I digress. I was so taken with how cool Beta was, the cute little tapes and the fact the picture was better than VHS that I started to actively seek out more films on the format. It was at once a hard task as it was a dead format and also a rewarding one as because everyone though Beta was useless, I could pick up the tapes for next to nothing at boot sales and old shops etc. Anyway since DVD I've long since got rid of many of those tapes to make way for better editions of the same films but I have kept a number of movies on Beta because of the fond memories. The above photo is a small collection of Beta tapes on a particular label "Thorn EMI" . Included is the very first release of "Suspiria" in the UK and also the now notorious release of the excellent slasher "The Burning". This little film got Thorn Emi in to A LOT of trouble! They originally released it fully uncut which did not go down well with the BBFC at the time and it was promptly banned outright. Then after it was properly certified and cut (losing much of it's gory carnage) ,Thorn EMI were told they could re-release this cut version. HOWEVER, someone at Emi made a boo boo and they managed to re-release the same uncut version AGAIN! They promptly issued a recall notice to all video shops urging them to return the offending tape because the shops were actually liable to procecution (yes really) under the new VRA (Video recordings act) which had been passed (in 1984) but many of the dealers kept the tape and simply rented it out under the counter because obviously now these films were banned so there was a high customer demand for them! Rebel Yell eh? So there's a little story for you. With that kind of history I just can't let these tapes go.
Closer shot of "Suspiria" to show the cute little tape.
Check out the crazy sleeve too! That's the other thing I miss about these old tapes, the fact that companies would sometimes create completely new art instead of using the old or original cinema art for a film. Genious!
Anyway, I'm sure I've bored you all enough by now, if you made it though my droning, thanks for listening.
Apy.
Oops- I forgot I was going to put this picture in. My Tiger Shark Jaws! Not actually my own jaws mind, that would just be scary.
VIEW 8 of 8 COMMENTS
LOL!
Are you being bowed down to yet? LOL!
So..you were just a tad late yesterday...I had to go and scope out the COFFIN JOE room...we asked a buddy to allow us to use the Boneyard (He is the groundskeeper) Garage/Storage room...so we are crossing our fingers...It better go off well...I have only been workin on this for awhile...anyhow...It was great talking to Ant...I will fill you in...But I think I have some stuff we should chat about next time either of us can tag eachother online...
(Sending your Hoodie THIS week...along with about 30 envelopes of HellBankNotes)
Talk soon...I think you are actually about 100-125 fliks ahead of me...seriously...(OH! I even brought that release of LETS SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH on DVD for you to see! Next time we talk!)