If you have a story to tell then send it to my personal messenger, and a photo or two would be nice.
This chapter written by Andy Allard who readily admits that it was mainly video cassettes that was his interest. His tale comes in two parts.
Video collecting in the 1980s
I’d been fully aware of video recorders since 1981 when a mate invited a few of us round to his house one Friday afternoon and we watched Zombie Flesh Eaters. With half a dozen sixth formers more interested in sneaking his dad’s alcohol, there was only me and one other lad who watched the film through. And with the curtains open, in daylight, it was a tough watch. I can’t even remember if it was the ‘Strong Uncut Version’ now.
A few months later I formed the Whitgift Sixth Form Video Club. We had 10 members and we all paid £6 each to join a mail order video library. £60 membership, then £6 to hire one movie through the post, so 60p a person after that. We hired Enter the Dragon, The Warriors, The Wanderers… and then went for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. When it arrived we were all excited, until the headmaster stepped in and banned us from watching it. That pretty much spelled the end of the Video Club.
Fast forward to Tuesday 11th May, 1982, and I finally convinced my Dad to rent us our own video recorder, a Ferguson 3V30 Videostar, with corded remote control and a free E60 one hour videotape. Suddenly I was in the world of film collecting! After an inauspicious start (not realising how long an E60 tape ran for, I was mortified when it cut off 30 minutes before the end of the first film I tried recording), my Dad – always a great supporter of my collecting endeavours – bought me two Maxell Epitaxial E180 tapes at £8.99 each.
The first film I recorded properly was The Shadow of Chikara, a film which remains a firm favourite to this day (and one which I own on VHS on Hokushin, and which is aching for a decent HD release).
For the next year and a half, I built a steady collection of off-air recordings, buying new blank tapes whenever my Dad could afford to treat me. When I found RCA blanks in WHSmiths for just £6.95 I was able to buy them in greater quantity.
One thing I could never afford were pre-recorded originals. Two of my mates, slightly older than me, got one each for Christmas 1982. One got The Best of Blondie on VHS for £20, the other Star Trek the Motion Picture on Beta for £29.95. Both were second-hand.
In 1983 I left school and got a job as a trainee accountant earning a magnificent £190 a month. Then two things happened almost simultaneously which enabled me to start collecting pre-recorded original films.
First, I went into a local video library one Friday night after work and they were selling off their Beta stock. So what if I didn’t have a Beta machine? I’d been eyeing up a Sony C7 and with my new job I felt I could afford a VCR for my bedroom and Beta might be a good idea for a second machine. The tapes were being sold at the ridiculously low price of £2.50 each! At this time the cheapest blank tapes were still £4.95.
I went a bit crazy, spending £75 of my £190 wages for the month on 30 tapes. The tapes were in immaculate condition, hardly rented (which undoubtedly explained why the library was selling them off). Thing is, I can’t remember many of the titles I bought that night. I believe Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Flashdance and Footloose may have been amongst them… One thing I am sure of, there were no big horror titles.
They came in the next month or so. I’d seen lots of horror films on rental over the past 18 months, ranging from the big budget blockbusters to the miniscule B-movie goreathons, and I was after seeing one a neighbour had recommended, I Spit on Your Grave.
I went into High Street Video in Cleethorpes and asked the guy at the counter if they had the film. I’d known him for the best part of a year and we chatted regularly. We went upstairs to the stock area and he showed me a box full of films the library had been forced to remove as they were officially banned. I’d heard of banned films, seen quite a few, but never really discussed them with someone in the know. He offered to sell me I Spit for £4. I was intrigued, excited, and went through the films in the box with great interest.
I agreed to buy the whole box full at £4 a tape. There were 40 tapes in all and I bought half that night and half the following month. The majority were VHS, some were Beta.
I found a DPP list in one of my video magazines and the hunt was on to locate the entire magic 39 banned films, though there were others ‘not quite as banned’ (the section 3 titles) of which I amassed quite a collection. In my hunt I managed to find 33 of the 39 – I never did locate Beast in Heat, Cannibal Holocaust, Devil Hunter, Faces of Death, House on the Edge of the Park, and Island of Death.
So, without the demise of Beta, and the banning of the video nasties, both of which resulted in the mass appearance of cheap pre-recorded original tapes, I’m not sure the collectors’ market in original videos would have taken off with the rapidity it did. Suddenly there was an influx of stalls selling large quantities of banned films at Sunday markets and at car boots for ridiculously cheap prices, often multiples of the same title. There were so many in fact, it became the norm. There was no pressure anymore to find the more common titles; there were so many of them available. Every week there’d be more as stall holders cleared out more and more video libraries…
And then, as suddenly as they appeared, they were gone.
By 1988, as the final phase of the Video Recordings Act effectively banned all unclassified videotapes, video libraries knew they were on a sticky wicket if they maintained stocks of uncertificated titles. A massive surplus of unclassified titles hit the secondary markets, replacing the nasties, diluting the stocks of the market stalls and the car boots. Whilst some collectors delved into the myriad diversity of the UK pre cert, others (including myself) became more attracted to uncut versions of horror films available on tapes imported from the continent and the United States. With the advent of the horror film fanzine, a whole new arena opened up, showcasing director filmographies, exploitation classics, sleaze and gore,
and suddenly collecting videos took on a whole new different spin.
The time of the ‘tape exchange’ was here…
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