Terror On Tape!

Remember the Mom and Pop video store that you used to go to back in the day? I had a few of them because my family moved to a new town sometime around 1989 when I was 13. This particular video compilation, Terror On Tape, was on the wooden shelves of Hennessy News in Scituate MA. These days, Hennessy doesn't have much of a video section anymore, but when I was growing up, they were the place to go for your horror flicks - the other video rental store up the road got rid of their horror section and beefed up their kids section, but the lady who owned it was great and I would often rent non horror movies from her, just because I enjoyed stopping by and chatting with her now and then. Anyway, I'm getting off track here.
VHS is pretty much long gone at this point, and "Big Box" covers like the one Terror On Tape came in are valuable, desired collector's items for fans of the genre. All the movies showcased in this awesomely trashy compilation were those flicks! So you can imagine how I wish I had rented this one back when I had the chance - it's not an easy one to find, and I don't even have a VCR anymore anyway! I remember there was a picture on the back of a girl sitting in a chair, and I think she might have been dead, but it's been so many years I don't remember too well - but I remember it freaked me out a little! As an adult, I've actively searched out stuff like this that bothered me as a kid, it never bothers me now, in fact I enjoy finally seeing them because it's amusing how much more active my imagination is compared to how cheesy these movies end up being! Well, someone out there was kind enough to rip it and upload it to the internet, and I watched it this afternoon.
Terror On Tape is a hilarious video compilation of some of the goriest scenes from Continental Video's distribution collection from back in the early-mid 80's. Hosted by Cameron Mitchell, who plays a creepy video store clerk. He shows 3 different customers scenes from these schlockfests, often with amusing results!
Lots of outrageous gore and sex scenes are highlighted from various titles: (cut from Imdb.com)
Blood Feast (1963)
Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964)
Color Me Blood Red (1965)
Ghost Story (1974)
L'ossessa (1974)
Frozen Scream (1975)
Suicide Cult (1975)
To the Devil a Daughter (1976)
Ruby (1977)
Cauchemares (1977)
Prey (1978)
Vampire Hookers (1978)
The Kidnapping of the President (1980)
Incubo sulla città contaminata (1980)
Nightmare (1981)
Blood Tide (1982)
The Slayer (1982)
The Deadly Spawn (1983)
Scalps (1983)

Needless to say, good times! Now I just have to run down this list and see how many of these I can find to watch. I've already seen the Herschell Gordon Lewis titles, along with Nightmare and Cathy's Curse (aka Cauchemares - wtf is that?) Those are worth a revisit, anyway.

So... who's up for a movie night?

Nightmare On Elm Street... zzzzzzzz

My sentiments exactly.

I'm not anti remake, generally speaking. See, I love watching horror movies so much that I'm willing to give them all a chance. As a life long fan of the Elm Street series - and especially of the first movie, I was looking forward to the remake, hoping that they would make it even more visceral and nightmarish than was possible back in 1984. What I got was a snoozefest of biblical proportions.

None of the actors - NONE of them, not even Jackie Earle Haley, gave a performance worth looking at. The "kids" were boring and predictable and I didn't care if they lived or died, in fact, I was glad to see them go, when they did go. The death scenes were dull compared to the original! The Kris death scene was so lame I almost wanted to cry. What was burned into my memory as a child and still freaks me out a little to this day was dumbed down and had almost no blood in it. And the way it screeched to an abrupt halt was so anticlimactic! They did it better in Wes Craven's New Nightmare, to be completely honest!

Freddy had a couple of minorly creepy moments, but nothing compared to the original, yet again. I hate to compare this to the original, but since they attempted to borrow from it's script so many times and fell flat with everything they took, it's hard not to. The exception was the body bag scene, but even that was kinda lame, especially Nancy's reaction to it. I'm sorry, but if I ever saw my dead friend, bloody in a bag standing in front of me and screaming with blood pouring from her mouth, I think I'd be a lot more shook up than she was!

Probably the freakiest shot in the whole flick.

At any rate, I did go into this with an open mind, I really hoped I would like it, but it just plain bored the crap out of me. I will probably watch it again when it's released on DVD, more or less to see what they cut out of it, since the deleted stuff actually looks like it could have made the movie a little more frightening. But again, the characters were played so dull that it was hard to give a shit about any of them. Nancy was especially disappointing - she's a far cry from the heroine Nancy of the original series. She doesn't grow a pair until the very end, and even then... Blah.