SPRING STRAIGHT TO VIDEO (AND DVD)

 

We're out of another long, cold, damp winter. Spring is here and it's time to change up the theme on the blog again for the coming season. 

This year I thought I'd do something a bit different over Springtime, so I'm going to be looking into the world of the straight to video movie.

Anyone of a certain age can remember going to the Video rental store, usually to rent the latest hot blockbuster only to find the dreaded "elastic band of doom" wrapped around that copy of Batman or Ghostbusters 2. That band meant that the film was out, so you'd have to rent something a little less... mainstream.

To be fair this was actually usually the best part. Looking at those rows of straight to video movies that you'd never heard of and basking in the glorious (and lurid) cover art of titles like Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, Zombies From Outer Space and Vampire In Venice. Titles and artwork that stimulated the imagination to produce a film that was far better in your mindseye than anything that was actually committed to magnetic tape back then.

Straight to video films where cheap, cheerful, sometimes terrible but also sometimes minor classics in their own right.

Naturally times change - the humble VHS went the way of all flesh, but that didn't stop enterprising low budget filmmakers fully embracing video's heir apparent - the DVD.

These glorious shiny disks had a greater storage capacity than a mere videotape. Now they could store hordes of extras, commentaries, special features and even more than one film.

This lead to the rise of the cheap multi pack DVD - containing 10, 50, 100....sometimes even 200 low budget horror, sci-fi and B-movie delights. To a lover of exploitation movies like me the early DVD era holds just as much nostalgia as the VHS rental era - if not more so (after all, it's how I managed to build most of my physical media film collection on the cheap).

These days we have streaming services to provide us with some low budget fare, and for the most part it's got some pretty good stuff on there (I'm a huge fan of Tubi which has an insanely large horror and sci-fi section, easily as good as what Shudder has, what's even better is that unlike Shudder it's absolutely free - although you do have to sit through adverts which can be a bit of a bummer). 

Despite this I still find streaming to be a bit....well... impersonal. It'll NEVER replace the joy of going to a video store in the 80's, 90's and early 2000's and renting out a shitty film to watch on a Friday night with beer and a pizza, or cracking open a Millcreek 50 pack on DVD to watch something a bit cheap and tacky.

So join me in the Backroom all throughout Spring as I bring back those wonderful days (and nights) where low budget fare reigned supreme. I can't promise all the films I'll be covering will be any good but whatever happens they're all bound to be lots of fun.