Posted Jun 8, 09 02:00 PM
(Shiny) Vault of Horror
To diehards, hunting down genre titles can be a laborious, if not painful mission during which months can stretch into years of empty-handed disappointment. No one seems to have that movie that gave you late night heebie-jeebies when you were ten. You know, the movie? About that guy? He did those creepy things? It starred that actor you can't remember?
Netflix and Blockbuster, naturally, are expanding their libraries. But these giants, by necessity, skew their inventories for supply and demand. Harder-to-find sleepers and experimental terror flicks only trickle into subscription choices. But what about the IMPOSSIBLE to find, the stuff never released on - excuse me while I blow the dust off - VHS or Beta? Movies for which distributor/filmmaker legalities whipped a nasty wrench into any possible possibility of home viewing? Movies whose projected audience rentals, downloads and purchases simply don't justify a cost-effective DVD release?
Try what would have been your first option back in the 1980s: The independent video store. Their ranks have emaciated, but the fittest have survived - and gotten savvy, if not saucy, in the process.
Eddie Brandt's Saturday Matinee in North Hollywood, CA, is the undisputed movie rental Mecca - indeed, the structure formerly housed a church. Its over 72,000-and-counting (that's not a misprint) titles span back to 1892, to the admittedly bizarre but so much more wonderful film warehouse of mother and son Claire and Donovan Brandt. It's the kind of joint that the word "joint" was coined to describe. A clutter of $8 laser discs lay off to the side of a figurine of Lon Chaney in London After Midnight. Gracie the dog rests behind the counter while off-colored Polish jokes fly. As mail orders get stuffed and someone fields an inquiry call from a university archivist or old movie theater owner, customers spontaneously break into dialogues with the staff about which such-and-such 1953 movie starred who.
An unplanned stroll down rows of shelves endlessly distracts any curious horror palate. Even those whose appetites hark back to the Silent Era.
Demon...Demon Hunter...Demon Keeper.
Hmm. Sinful Dwarf?
There's Deadly Blessing, an early Wes Craven film with Sharon Stone and Ernie Borgnine...Deadly Eyes - that Canadian giant rat movie with Scatman Crothers...another Wes Craven piece: Deadly Friend with Anne Ramsey from Throw Momma From the Train and Matthew Laborteaux, who played Albert on Little House on the Prairie. Cool, cool...hey, Shelly Winters in Witchfire.
I pick up a foreign horror film, circa Italy/Spain 1971, and once-over the label: "Scream of the Demon Lover. A 19th century baron has killer dogs, with a monstrous brother scarred by fire. It was co-billed with Velvet Vampire." Fascinating.
CHILLER chatted up Tony: Loyal staffer, East Coast Joe, and monstrous cinema encyclopedia in his own right.
Chiller: So how do you locate difficult-to-find films, or do they find you?
Tony: We usually already have a lot of them. You know, the "loaner tapes" (titles not showcased on the regular floor, available to patrons in good standing) are things we've gotten off TV or from collectors. A lot of customers ARE collectors. They do Internet searches and whatnot.
Chiller: Are there horror titles in your archives that you can guarantee are barely - or not even - available?
Tony: Oh, there was a movie I was looking for called The Undead. And The Black Sleep. Movies like From Hell It Came - for me, that was a great find. Someone else might think it's ridiculous...because it is.
They're out of print now. They haven't been issued on DVD yet.
Chiller: And did you just get them off of TV?
Tony: We had them. When they were in print.
Chiller: Wow. I'm glad you guys found Sasquatch!
Tony: Yeah, and I found Bigfoot with John Carradine and Chris Mitchum.
Chiller: That's from 1971. I'll go for it the next time I'm in. Do you have a "bomb shelter plan" - you know, some underground storage facility in the mountains with back-ups of certain precious movies?
Tony: I don't think so. We just kind of keep our fingers crossed. How do you choose which ones to back up?
Chiller: What's your take on the future of independent video stores - especially when your inventory is thousands of TAPES (and lots of DVDs, of course) vs. fewer people owning VCRS? There's the transition to DVD, new technology like Blu-Ray, online competitors...
Tony: I don't know. It's a day-to-day thing. People are getting spoiled. And the younger people are less interested. A lot of the stuff that we have, people my age and older want - the stuff they grew up watching on TV. But now, young people... if it's black and white, they couldn't be bothered, you know? So maybe this interest is going to die off. People call up and they want an old movie - and to them, an old movie is made in the ‘80s.
Editor's note: "Die off?" I don't think so. Diehards are reborn.
Posted by Mike Kalvoda at 02:00 PM