VHS A GO GO: Misadventures in the post-cert world

 

It was Gene Barry who sent me down the slippery slope of VHS collecting...well sort of.

In these days of physical media ownership on a grand scale, it becomes harder and harder to remember just how exciting and out of the ordinary it once was to own a film outright.  Such was the case when my parents bought me a sell-through release of Gene’s Sci-Fi classic ‘The War of the Worlds’ in the late 1980s.  The first VHS I ever owned.  It was quite the novelty to be able to watch a film anytime you liked, never have to take it back to the video shop the next day or worry about forgetting to record it the next time it was on TV.  Even so, I was slow to be bitten by the collecting bug, and over the next couple of years only remember owning a handful more videos.  I once went shopping with my grandmother, who was fond of indulging me and who ended up buying me ‘Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb’ and ‘THX-1138’ from a supermarket that had a few videos in a bargain bin.

I didn’t really begin getting into VHS collecting until my family started hitting the car boot sales and markets- second homes for ex-rental and unwanted older tapes.  My earliest contact in that world was a woman called Mandy, who ran a video stall in Bury market and earned the nickname ‘Miss Mandy’ due to her resemblance to Dick Emery in drag.  Mandy’s underling/co-worker was a bald headed, moustachioed fellow, who I ended up nicknaming ‘Otis’ due to his resemblance to Tom Towles in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.  I always lived in fear of forgetting that wasn’t his actual name, and referring to him as Otis, since he did look the sort who’d get that cinematic reference.  Some of my earliest pick-ups from Miss Mandy were Goke: Body Snatcher from Hell, and Dance of Death - not the ideal introduction to Boris Karloff, but embarrassingly those deathbed Mexican productions were the only visible films of his on UK video at the time.  However, my attempts to buy the John Travolta film Blow-Out, was vetoed by my father who felt an “utterly filthy foreign film about people eating themselves to death” wasn’t suitable for me, having mistaken it for Marco Ferreri’s Blow-Out.  Two rather different films.

There is a scene in Censor (2021) where the protagonist is able to talk the stereotypical owner of a ‘sleazy’ video shop into selling her a banned, under the counter horror video with the word ‘cannibal’ in the title, all during the space of one visit to the shop.  This is beyond idiotic, as well as laughably inaccurate to anyone who lived through that period.  The reality is that the Video Nasty furore had left an atmosphere of fear and distrust among those who kept the outlawed material around.  It took a long while for Miss Mandy to get the measure of me, and invite me round the back of her stall, presenting me with a cardboard box full of the pre-certification tapes she daren’t put up front.  The forbidden fruit that I can remember being The Toolbox Murders on Hokushin, Cannibal on Derann, Return of the Evil Dead on Precision, and Curse of the Devil on Intervision.  

Thus I’d joined the chosen few of about three people who were hustled around the back of the stall, becoming privy to the side of Miss Mandy’s business that her other customers knew nothing about.  Over time though, you’d quickly learn the lesson that not everything released during the early days of video was pre-cert gold, among the duds Miss Mandy foisted upon me were ‘Spare Parts’, ‘The Heroin Conspiracy’ and ‘Vampire Hookers’.

Just as my enthusiasm for the back of Miss Mandy’s stall began to wane, a competitor to that side of her business popped up, just a few stalls away.  At first glance it looked like nothing special, just some guy selling a row of sleeveless three hour tapes.  It was only when you got closer and took notice of the home made, written on a typewriter labels that you realized you’d stumbled upon the hard stuff....bootlegged video nasties.  Sensing this was going to be a short lived opportunity to catch the most notorious films of the 20^th century, I jumped at the chance, and it was this way I first managed to see The Last House on the Left, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Cannibal Holocaust and Cannibal Ferox.  If I remember rightly each three hour tape had two films recorded on them, and he was knocking them out at £7 each.  Despite the low-key appearance of the stall, he quickly began doing a roaring trade in these bootleg tapes, which didn’t go unnoticed by his rivals.  Miss Mandy in particular was livid over how much business the law-breaking competition was taking away from her, and demanded I turn snitch, by pressing me for details of the tapes I’d just bought from his stall.  The next time I showed up at Bury Market his usually busy stall was empty and vacated.  Apparently during the week the police had shown up and hauled him away after being tipped off by a ‘concerned member of the public’, a concerned member of the public who dare I suggest may have also had a video stall on Bury Market.  So after a few exciting weeks of forbidden film discoveries, it was back to buying the dead wood of the pre-cert era from Miss Mandy’s stall.

The more you delved into the UK VHS industry, the more you became aware of an underbelly to that world.  Ultra-cheap companies whose releases never made it into the rental stores or chains like HMV and Our Price, and only tended to show up at car boot sales and bargain basement shops.  These labels included Apex Video, Turbophase, Network, MPV video, Elephant Video, European Creative Films, Stablecane and Viz video.  Their bread and butter tended to be regional American obscurities, Italian horror, blaxploitation and biker movies.  At the time, very little had been written about the type of movies these labels specialised in, so you were pretty much without a compass on this journey into the unknown.  As the dodgier of these labels put out nothing but re-titled product –a sure-fire way of keeping one step ahead of the proper rights owners- even working out the real identities of these movies took a fair amount of detective work.  The deerstalker would have to be donned to discover that ‘Revenge of Dracula’ was in fact Al Adamson’s Dracula Vs Frankenstein, that ‘The Psychopath’ was Curtis Harrington’s The Killing Kind, that ‘Horror Farm’ was the regional American horror film Pigs, and that ‘Hydra’ was Zaat/The Bloodwaters of Dr Z.  Many of the same films were released on different labels, under different titles and with sleeves tailored to different markets.  I once remember seeing a horror film called ‘Werewolf Woman’ in a Blackpool bargain basement shop, then stepped into a similar shop in neighbouring Cleveleys and saw the exact same film being marketed as soft porn under the title ‘Naked Werewolf Woman’.  Inevitably, you’d get caught out a few times, I once bought a video called Zombie Graveyard, which turned out to be Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things, a film I already had on tape under the re-titling Revenge of the Living Dead.

Blackpool was a Mecca when it came to such video releases, the majority of shops catering to the tourist trade carried them alongside their stock in trade of Blackpool rock, candy floss and bucket and spades.  At the height of their popularity there were even entire shops in Blackpool that were wall to wall cheap VHS releases, rarely retailing above £2.99.  Lytham Road, which served as a popular commute between the two big tourist draws of the Pleasure Beach and Blackpool Tower, has fallen on hard times in recent years, and today is a depressing vista of decaying, shuttered up businesses.  Back in the 1990s however, this street was a lively line of cheap and cheerful shops whose VHS arm offered an unpredictable ride through undocumented cinema.  On Lytham Road, you just didn’t know what lay behind tacky, often ridiculously misleading VHS artwork.  Would you been in for good ol’ drive-in movies like Night Fright, She Freak and Death Curse of Tartu, or make the acquaintance of such art-house fare as Death Watch (1980, Bertrand Tavernier), Malpertuis (1971, Harry Kumel) and Walerian Borowczyk’s La Bete and Dr Jekyll et les Femmes....or ‘Death’s Ecstasy’ and ‘The Bloodbath of Dr Jekyll’ as they were known on the streets of Blackpool.

Eurosleaze showed up in the bargain basement shops thanks to Careyvision, who under the banner ‘Horror Theatre’ released a trio of films from the Paris based Eurocine company: Crimson, A Virgin Among the Living Dead and The Invisible Dead.  Hard as it is to believe now, there was a period in time between the pre-cert era and before Redemption video came along in the 1992, when Jess Franco was entirely represented on UK video by that bastardised version of A Virgin Among the Living Dead, with its sexual content replaced by idiotic zombie scenes directed by Jean Rollin (making it the only representation of Rollin on UK Video as well). To add insult to injury, a lack of information around at the time meant the Pierre Chevalier directed The Invisible Dead was frequently being attributed to Franco too, on account of it starring Howard Vernon in his iconic Dr Orloff role.  Meaning that poor Jess was carrying the can for that one as well.

Italian horror made its presence felt in Blackpool, thanks to Stablecane video, whose releases provided a crash course in the genre and its leading lights.  Riccardo Freda was represented by The Terror of Dr Hichcock, Mario Bava with Shock, and Dario Argento by The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.  Other Italian flavoured Stablecane releases that haunted Lytham Road included the Victor Buono starring cannibal comedy ‘The Strangler of Vienna’, and the British made, Italian gothic horror imitation ‘The Black Torment’.  Stablecane also released two older B&W Italian horrors, Bava’s Black Sunday and Cemetery of the Living Dead, but these were less frequently seen in the bargain basement shops, black and white seemingly being a deal breaker back then.

Of all the Blackpool bargain basement shops, the one that vividly stands out was literally located in a basement.  That of Pricebusters, a two story market of small, independently owned stalls that hung on in there until 2007.  It was there that I first laid eyes on some of the most memorable videos to emerge from the post-cert era.  There was the ‘one movie and they’re done’ label, HBL video, which threw concerns about copyright infringement out of the window by releasing a film they called The Exorcist 3: Cries and Shadows.  That extraordinarily ballsy re-titling would be enough to cement that video release’s legend, but it was trumped by the utter gibberish that passed for a back cover plot synopsis –worthy of Stanley Unwin- which I’ve never known anyone to be able to read from start to finish without being reduced to gales of laughter. 

Another ‘It Came from the Basement of Pricebusters’ title was The Bloodbath of Dr Jekyll.  Blackpool’s favourite Walerian Borowczyk movie, which warranted not one, not two, but three separate video releases.  ‘The Blood of Dr Jekyll’ a release aimed at the soft core crowd, a sci-fi make over as ‘The Experiment’ and finally the horror themed ‘The Bloodbath of Dr Jekyll’ whose cover was a cut and paste collage of stolen images from I Madman, Faceless, The Serpent and the Rainbow and Barbed Wire Dolls.  It may well be the high watermark when it comes to the lost art of dishonest video packaging.  

the three faces of Dr Jekyll

Another Pricebusters discovery was the Southern drive-in movie ‘Psycho from Texas’, re-titled The Butcher, which was put out twice by the same label, Bronx Video.  Once with a blood splattered mask on the cover, giving it the appearance of a slasher movie.  Another time selling it as a redneck action caper, thanks to a graphic sleeve depicting a vengeful sheriff blowing away the titular character with a shotgun, it didn’t seem to bother Bronx video that this gave away the ending of the film.  Such releases might have still had to go through the BBFC, but as they were never intended for rental shops or high street chains like HMV, were able to veto the video artwork censor board the VPRC (Video Packaging Review Committee) and could be as outrageous as anything from the pre-cert era when it came to depicting blood and guts on their sleeves.  Other titles that took full advantage of this included ‘Retribution’ (aka Dark Sunday, a dark Earl Owensby thriller from 1976) which had a man getting a bullet through his head on its cover, and The Witchmaker, a dull, shot in Florida horror film that failed to live up to its sleeve, which featured a masked occultist waiving a severed head around.  Elephant Video’s Eaten Alive also boasted the kind of sleeve that would have never passed the VPRC –a topless Me Me Lai being threatened with a knife- yet that release proved so popular that one place in Blackpool had multiple copies of it on show as you entered the shop, in order to cope with customer demand.

Due to the BBFC, few of these releases could deliver what they promised.  The scene depicted on the sleeve and numerous gut munching scenes were absent from the Elephant video release of Eaten Alive.  While their releases of fellow extreme Italian horrors, The Beyond, City of the Living Dead and The House by the Cemetery, were similarly watered down editions.  Doing the rounds in heavily cut form at the same time was Dawn of the Mummy on Apex, and Contamination and The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue on the European Creative Films label.  Years later, when I finally acquired the older, uncut video releases of Contamination and The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue, I couldn’t in good faith sell on those post-cert releases without first taping the uncut versions over those censored abominations.  My small, futile fight back against the oppressive censorship of the time.  Occasionally, a film would accidentally slip through the net, such I suspect was the case with Bronx video’s The Butcher/Psycho from Texas.  The official line is that the BBFC insisted on 5 minute and 20 seconds of cuts.  However due I sense to laziness, cheapness or incompetence on Bronx Video’s behalf, rather than a deliberate attempt to defy the BBFC, their release of Psycho from Texas sure looked uncut to me.  The only scene in the film that could have warranted that level of censorship –in which the Psycho from Texas forces a barmaid to strip, then pours beer over her- being left intact.  Bronx Video’s only other release of note, the nutzoid Godfrey Ho horror/action mash-up ‘Scorpion Thunderbolt’, was another example of BBFC cuts being asked for, but never implemented on the released product.

Unfortunately, Pricebusters also exposed me to one of the most despicable con-tricks that the low-end of the video industry ever played on the British public.  ‘Special edition 1 hr approx’ words that struck terror and contempt into the hearts of video collectors back then.  If those words mean nothing to you, then consider yourself lucky.  I’d guess at these so-called special editions coming into existence as a result of a player in the industry acquiring a vast stock of one hour tapes and deciding to use them to re-release many older titles that hadn’t been seen since the pre-cert days.  How do you fit feature length films onto one hour tapes? Why, simply by indiscriminately chopping off half an hour from a film.  The very first experience I had of this practice was the one hour VHS edition of The Day of the Triffids, you’d be watching the opening credits then suddenly...everyone was blind, Triffids had taken over the world and the docklands were on fire, leaving you to think “wasn’t there a build up to this, the last time I saw this on TV”.  Further victims of the dreaded one hour editions included House of Whipcord, Frankenstein Island, Hells Angels on Wheels, Satan’s Dog (Play Dead), The Body Snatchers (The Horror Star), Blood Vengeance, and the ever popular Bloodbath of Dr Jekyll.  How you’d come to dread to see “special edition 1 hr approx” stickers on tapes, which would leave you with the dilemma of...do you pass these by and hope you’ll be able to track down the full version at some point, or is ending up with two thirds of a movie better than never seeing them at all.  In the majority of these cases, the incomplete versions of these films did wet my appetite enough to eventually see the complete versions, the exceptions being Satan’s Dog and Frankenstein Island which I’m unconvinced are worth anything more than an hour of my time.

Only a fool would argue that these cheapskate, post-cert releases were the ideal way to watch these films.  Picture quality was generally two or three generations away from an original tape source, the BBFC would often demand their pound of flesh, the films would be panned and scanned, be given dumbed down re-titlings, and if you were really unlucky missing half an hour to squeeze them onto one hour tape stock.  Yet, to give them their dues, these releases made these films accessible and affordable to the average person, employed the art of deception to bring people into contact with difficult, unorthodox films like Death Watch and Malpertuis, which otherwise may have been a hard sell.  They fostered a new generation’s interest in exploitation cinema, and raised the profile of filmmakers as diverse as Al Adamson, Jess Franco and Walerian Borowczyk, without which more dignified releases of their films on superior formats might never had been possible.  I’d never want to turn the clock back, but I do think the colourful world of post-cert video deserves a doffed hat moment of mourning. 

Bury Market had largely dried up as a source for older, pre-cert tapes, and my quest for those bought me to Salford Market.  A scummy, dangerous place to be, that eventually got shut down by the council in 2011, after becoming a hub of criminality and counterfeit activity.  It was there I met the male version of Miss Mandy, a slob named ‘Ian’ aka ‘The Tree Rape Guy’, who ran a video stall with his comparatively normal and reserved wife.  It had the veneer of ‘play it safe’ respectability, with only a handful of pre-cert tapes scattered about upfront, but enough purchases of that nature meant you’d soon earn his trust and be invited to the back of the stall to see ‘the other stuff’.  If I remember rightly the videos that earned me a ticket to the back of the stall were ‘Lemora’, ‘Shocking Asia’ and a VHS double-bill of Michael J Murphy’s Invitation to Hell and The Last Night, with its blatantly phony 15 certificate stickers.  

It had echoes of the Miss Mandy situation, and likewise the back of the stall material began strongly with the uncut version of Don’t Go in the House, Blood Rites, The House on the Edge of the Park, and Australian imports of Shocking Asia 2: The Last Taboos and Driller Killer.  Soon however the well began to run dry and I was turning down more pre-cert dreck from him than I was buying.  Sensing he was losing his appeal, the Tree Rape Guy began pulling out ‘The List’.  A hand written collection of titles that a contact of his could run off bootlegs of at a week’s notice. As you might expect these included all the video nasties and likeminded extreme gore movies... Color Me Blood Red, The Undertaker and his Pals, Ilsa She Wolf of the SS...etc, etc.  Quality was predictably atrocious, which occasionally lent surreal hilarity to the proceedings.  Such as the bootleg Zombie Lake, with sound so low that it partly retained the soundtrack of what had been recorded on the tape before it.  Imagine watching Zombie Lake and suddenly having the theme tune and laugh track from ‘Only Fools and Horses’ bleed on over into the soundtrack.  Unfortunately, the Tree Rape Guy also had a habit of regaling you with gross stories of his own triumphs in the world of video collecting.  His endless bragging over picking up a pre-cert copy of The Evil Dead being the source of his nickname.  “It’s not like in the later release, where they cut out the tree rape...in this version you see her legs being pulled apart and y’know the tree going right in her” he enthused with a look in his eyes that left you in no doubt he’d been jerking off to that scene.

two from 'The List'

If you wanted to cast the net wider than the Video Nasties and pre-cert tapes, you had to take a trip to Manchester’s northern quarter.  Specifically a building on Church Street that now houses the high end Supercity ApartHotel.  Prior to this gentrification, that building really did embody the area’s boho spirit...two floors of shops selling records, rock magazines, movie memorabilia.  A greasy spoon cafe on the second floor, shops catering to the goth scene, shops selling incense, the smell of which hit you the moment you hit the second floor.  Another fixture of the second floor was ‘Kemal’ a VHS bootlegger who initially specialised in extreme Asian cinema, his tiny, discrete shop being stocked up on pirated, un-subtitled copies of the Lone Wolf and Cub series, as well as vomitious Hong Kong productions like The Untold Story and Ebola Syndrome.  The Japanese movie ‘Entrails of a Beautiful Woman’ (1986) proved a real stomach turner, even from the perspective of a seasoned video nasty viewer.  Fixated on rape and degradation committed by a Yakuza gang, the lack of subtitles and pixelated genitalia made the experience all the more alien and unsettling.  Eventually a female victim of the gang gets revenge by transforming into a skinless monster with a massive cock, which it uses to fuck the sole female member of the gang to death...a scene that ends with the monster cock bursting out of her stomach.

Entrails of a Beautiful Woman

Kemal then branched out into rare, but expensive pre-cert tapes such as The Black Gestapo and Tomb of the Living Dead, but really found his niche as a counterfeiter of the American video companies that were emerging at the time.  Something Weird Video, Alpha Blue Archives and Luminous Films and Video Wurks were the main three companies that were being ripped off by him.  Fear of custom seizures and police raids put many in the UK off ordering directly from these companies, but Kemal was fearless in that respect and reaped the financial rewards.  He only had to run off a few copies of the original NTSC tapes he’d ordered from these companies to break into profit.  In the process we’d get a second hand look at the cinematic excavations that were going on in the States, with each of these video companies having their own distinct personalities.  Alpha Blue’s bag was the extreme end of the 1970s XXX market, with titles like Forced Entry, Hardgore and kinky loop compilations.  Something Weird unearthed then long lost horror movies like Bloody Pit of Horror and Horrors of Spider Island, the Madame Olga series and the films of Mike Findlay and Coffin Joe, all of which had been impossible to see for decades before Something Weird came along.  Kemal was especially fond of the Something Weird line, dismissing the dust gathering pre-cert tapes in his shop and citing Something Weird tapes as “next level stuff”. 

Luminous Film and Video Wurks applied their own subtitles to films that had never had an English friendly release, and released composites of films, made up from several tape releases in order to put together a completely uncut edition.  Often you could tell they were enthusiastic amateurs rather than professionals, especially when it came to subtitling.  Their release of Joe D’Amato’s Porno Holocaust contained several uproarious examples of badly translated dialogue, including a reference to its zombie antagonist looking “like a mixture of King Kong and a normal black man”.  Then there was ‘Sodomia’ which turned out to be the Italian release version of Jose Larraz’s Violation of the Bitch, rendered even less appealing by the inclusion of hardcore inserts.  Luminous’ release of Dr Jekyll et les Femmes finally allowed me to see the material snipped out of those bargain basement Bloodbath of Dr Jekyll releases, and had the novelty of reverting to a dubbed into Spanish version during the explicit moments.

Kemal also had a regular stall at the Film Fairs that were held every few months at a rundown hotel, which conveniently was just a short walk from the Church Street place.  These Film Fairs had a couple of above board stall owners, older guys selling stills, film posters and pressbooks.  For the main part though, they were dominated by Kemal and his kind.  People who weren’t shy about selling pre-cert tapes, porn and pricey American DVD releases, like barrow boys they employed hard-sell tactics on the punters.  A guy selling a VHS of The Awakening of Emily, laid it on so strong to me “that’s Koo Stark in that one mate, THE Koo Stark...and she gets naked” that I ended up feeling guilty about depriving him of it.  The worst and loudest of the bunch was a bald headed pal of Kemal who yelled lurid descriptions of the 1970s porn he was attempting to sell to mortified passersby “that one has got John Holmes in...it’s like watching a child’s arm holding an apple” or “you’ll love this one mate, its part porn, part horror” whilst waiving around a copy of the bigfoot XXX movie ‘The Geek’.  The same guy also subbed for Kemal at the Church Street place- whenever Kemal was away on one of his mysterious foreign holidays- where he was every bit as annoying and sleazy.  “I couldn’t believe it...earlier in the week there was a woman in a really short skirt in one of the other shops and when she bent down I could see EVERYTHING”.

In the end the Film Fairs began issuing disclaimers on their advertising that ‘no counterfeit or illegal goods are to be sold here’, but the house rules were never observed, and instead this appeared a ploy to deter the authorities.  Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.  During my time at the Film Fairs I witnessed several raids by trading standards.  On one occasion, customers- oblivious to the presence of the trading standards people- continued to browse and maul the videos that trading standards were trying to confiscate.  Some even mistook the trading standards people for the stall owner, and tried to buy tapes off them.  One of these killjoys eventually lost his composure “stop touching the videos...nothing here is for sale”.

The lad himself, Kemal, always seemed one step ahead of trading standards, leading many to suspect he had snitches feeding him insider information.  Whenever he’d get a tip off, Kemal’s film fair stall would get a squeaky clean make-over, and regular customers would be told “there’s meant to be a raid, come back in half an hour, and if it hasn’t happened, I might start selling”.  On one hyper-paranoid occasion, Kemal would only accept people’s money upfront, then agreed to meet up with his customers at a set time down the filthy back alley behind the Church Street place, where he dished out tapes he’d concealed in a black bag. 

The only instance I know of when Kemal really got into hot water was when he stood on big, Hollywood shoes by selling bootleg videos of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, while it was still on theatrical release in the UK.  I arrived at the Church Street place to find it shut, amidst rumours from the other boutique shop owners that the police had shown up and Kemal had attempted to leg it out of the building, only to be apprehended outside.  It all sounded a bit farfetched, so I was taken aback to read in the local paper- The Manchester Evening News- that an unnamed man had indeed been picked up for selling Star Wars: The Phantom Menace bootlegs on Church Street.  Strangely, The Manchester Evening News, which was as bad as the tabloids when it came to ‘violent videos’ scaremongering, made no reference to him dealing out porn and banned horror movies from the premises.  Kemal returned with his tail between his legs a few weeks later, resuming business as usual, but never again fucked with Star Wars and mainstream Hollywood.

I continued attending the Film Fairs, at one I bumped into Hammer Horror queen Ingrid Pitt, who had booked a stall for herself and clearly was under the impression this was a very different type of gathering.  No one went to these Film Fairs to meet famous people and get autographs, and she did look badly out of place among stalls selling porno DVDs and Video Nasties, all of which she was being ignored in favour of.  I have to admit my heart did break a little for Ingrid that day, she deserved better.

Kemal himself was rumoured to have connections to the low, low end of the film industry, one story having it that this had got him into a spot of bother at French customs.  I’ve no idea if that is true, but he was noticeably into promoting those ghastly ‘Fantom Kiler’ movies at the Film Fairs.  Making me wonder if he was part of the Fantom Kiler set-up.  If not, Kemal was definitely their biggest salesman, with a never ending supply of Fantom Kiler DVDs, and multiple copies of ‘Sinerama’ a one-shot magazine designed to promote and mythologize the Fantom Kiler series.  Claiming to be Polish in origin, the Fantom Kiler movies were a largely plot-less excuse for heavily accented polish lovelies to have knives rubbed over their breasts and freshly shaven genitalia by a black gloves wearing killer, who stalks, then stabs them in their holiest of holes, in an alleged homage to Italian giallo movies.  Fantom Kiler’s idea of comic relief includes a downtrodden man being tasked with pulling a wooden spoon out of his female boss’ ass.  Accidentally left in details, like British car number plates, tipped people off that these films weren’t as Polish as they made out.  A more credible version of events had it that the ‘Polish’ angle to these films was a smokescreen to keep the UK authorities dumb to the fact that these films were being shot and distributed domestically.  Rather than Warsaw, a chilly warehouse in Stoke Newington was pointed to as the filming location.  My inquiries into this resulted in a flurry of heated emails from the apparent owner of the warehouse, denying he made the Fantom Kiler films, and accusing me of being born outside of wedlock...in not so many words.    

a collector's item....someday

Abducted by the Daleks (2005) was another production by the Fantom Kiler people, that Kemal was desperately hyping at the Film Fairs.  Initially straying little from the Fantom Kiler path, Abducted by the Daleks finds several more Polish babes being stalked in woodlands by a serial killer, natch’ they suffer the humiliation of having knives rubbed over their genitalia by the masked man.  Before he can inflict any nastiness, the women and their assailant are then beamed aboard a spaceship by three Daleks, who take over the degradation by firing laser beams at the women’s crotches and forcing them into girl on girl action.  The stolen soundtrack includes everything from the ‘One Step Beyond’ TV theme tune, ‘War Pigs’ by Black Sabbath and ‘Lucifer Sam’ and ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ by Pink Floyd.  “It’ll become a collector’s item someday” Kemal claimed, hmmm...we’re still waiting for that day to arrive, but the film’s distribution would indeed be extremely short lived.  Whereas the notoriety of the Fantom Kiler movies never spread beyond horror movie collector circles, Abducted by the Daleks gave the Fantom Kiler people their only taste of mainstream exposure, when its mixture of tits, bums and copyright infringement warranted write-ups in The Sun, The Daily Star and The Sunday Sport.  Apparently the production had attracted the attention of the BBC and the Terry Nation estate, who were determined to bury it. “BEEB bosses have gone ballistic after discovering the Daleks are starring in a porn flick” is how the Sunday Sport put it.  Sure enough sightings of the Abducted by the Daleks DVD were few and far between after that, the film briefly returned to the Film Fairs under the bogus title ‘Abducted by the Daloids’, but no one was being fooled, and this too quickly disappeared.  Even today, Ebay auctions of the Abducted by the Daleks DVD are known to get shut down by the BBC.

The only person I knew in collector circles who had a foot in the legit side of the business was Steve Haynes, who ran Sovereign Multi-Media, and the ‘Satanica’ video label.  Satanica initially made its presence known by releasing films by Pete Walker (The Flesh and Blood Show, The Comeback) and Norman J Warren (Satan’s Slave, Terror) which hadn’t been seen since the pre-cert days and coincided with a resurgence of interest in both directors.  Subsequent Satanica releases tended to have less appeal, being of films that had bounced around other labels for years- Aerobicide, Mausoleum, Horror Hospital- and as a result the label never achieved the same level of popularity and brand recognition as Vipco and Redemption.  Steve held on as the dying days of VHS gave way to DVD, and through his Stonevision label became the first person to release Zombie Holocaust and Inseminoid on UK DVD, at a time when the number of horror films that had made it to DVD in the UK could still be counted on one hand. 

Steve also ran a mail order business from which he bought and sold rare VHS releases.  If you lived locally he was prepared to make house calls, and on the couple of times I met him in this capacity seemed a friendly, pleasant chap.  Unfortunately, lack of quality control on my part caused this relationship to go haywire, after I slipped him a Vipco pre-cert of The Bogey Man, whose cover turned out to be photocopied, and a VHS of Exorcism starring Paul Naschy, which turned out to be defective.  Both of these tapes originated from, but of course, the Tree Rape Guy.  Following that faux pas, my emails to Steve went unanswered and we never did business again.

Steve did sort of get the last laugh, when one of his video releases led to the only time I’ve been heckled in public for my taste in films.  I’d been busy VHS shopping in the much missed three story HMV in Manchester, only to be met with dirty looks outside from a very scary  homeless looking individual (if you want a mental image, think of the cricket eating chap in Hellraiser).  He trailed me from the HMV, around Piccadilly gardens and to the bus shelter.  It was there he sat down beside me and began his spiel “excuse me, my son, can I speak to you about our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ?”  Attempts to brush him off fell on deaf ears “its thanks to him I’ve gone from zero to hero, I can show you the way”.  This guy didn’t look like anyone’s idea of a hero, and his crazy outburst continued for several minutes until fortunately the Number 37 bus came to whisk me to safety.  It was only onboard the Number 37 and while examining the videos, that the penny dropped over the red rag that had set the religious loony off and earmarked me as a soul in need of saving: the Satanica VHS release of Satan’s Slave.

Video collecting was beginning to lose it lustre to me, and anyway all signs were that an era was coming to an end.  Where once I was coming back from the Film Fairs with bags full of tapes, posters and magazines, now I often left empty handed.  The Church Street place went the way of all genuinely cool things in Manchester and got gentrified, becoming the faceless, corporate hotel, gym and Tesco express combo you’ll find there today.  The Tree Rape Guy got ripped off by one of his VHS bootleggers, who sold him a shed load of tapes with supposedly ultra-rare films recorded on them, only for their actual content to be hours and hours of daytime soaps like Neighbours and Sunset Beach.  Miss Mandy made the transition from VHS to DVD, before throwing in the towel and began selling cakes instead, hopefully they are of better quality than the bootleg of ‘The Exorcist’ she once tried to sell me.  Censorship became less and less of an issue, titles that once had little chance of being legally seen in the UK such as Salo and the uncut versions of Zombie Holocaust and Dawn of the Mummy began showing up on the DVD shelves of HMV and Virgin Megastore.  Fast forward to 2022 and cult film collectors live in a reality that people in the 1990s could only dream about, with boutique blu-ray labels and streaming services offering up pristine versions of films that once you’d have to settle for watching in third generation video copies with burnt on dutch subtitles. Whereas once you’d go to HMV and be hit by the discouraging sight of heavily cut Vipco VHS tapes, those same shelves now fly the flag for uncut blu-ray releases of Night of the Demon and Don’t Go in the House.  The stigma of collecting such movies having long since been consigned to history.  Everything is so much easier, and allot less dangerous, today.  Do I secretly miss the wild west days of the collector’s circuit?...maybe from time to time...then again I think I’ve seen enough copies of Fantom Kiler and ‘Special Edition 1 hour approx’ stickers for one lifetime.