theMediaman.com

Okay, a couple of things to get caught up on. So first, the innane fun-to-blog stuff!

Speaking of “Stuff”, one of my significant concerns with all of the video rental shops removing the VHS stock to move over to all-DVD is with selection. Around the time that the ‘Big Two’, Blockbuster and Rogers Video, were making the move, I had settled comfortably into a particular Rogers Video that had a tremendous selection of old, VHS tapes of movies that I was too young to see in theatrical release.

I was suddenly old enough to give MYSELF parental guidence to view Crime dramas, horror flicks and sex comedies. No more did I have to sneak the video past my Mom, nor did I have to also rent some PG, science-fiction film so that she would quickly lose interest in the conversation when I answered her inevitable query on what I had rented.

But would that opportunistic time of my life shortly be over? Old tapes of “Porky’s Revenge” and “Creepshow 2″ would never again have the audience that they did when they initially came out on video. How many people would want to watch them, when “American Pie” gets an ‘AA’ in Canada, and the horror industry is remaking contemporary horrors, classic horrors, and even classic-classic horrors? Certainly not enough to warrant the effort of digitizing these films, dumping them on a DVD and making a crude menu system. This is where the extrodinarily low cost of DVD production comes in:

This weekend, while in HMV waiting to get Damon Albarn to sign my Gorillaz disc, I started scrounging through the DVD collection. Right there, in plain view, was “The Stuff“.

This was one of a collection of horror films I had seen countless times at National Video and Bandito Video in Barrie, and have started putting into my rotation in order to finally satisfy my curiousity. I know they’re bad films, but I want to see them anyway… only then can I die with my life complete!

Apparently, The Stuff has been on DVD since 2000, but I haven’t seen it until now. The next step for these films is to make it into the video store libraries. After that, comes the DVD treatment of “Blood Beach“!