With the rise of television throughout the 1950s and the breaking up of studio monopolies in production, distribution and exhibition following the Supreme Court’s Paramount divestment decree in 1948, studios gradually abandoned the B-movie units which had not only provided supporting features for double-bills but also served as a training ground for actors and crew people.
This is largely explained by two connected developments in the movie industry. I should probably be scrawling a message on my wall in blood saying “Stop me before I do it again!” I assumed I’d have finished the Vinegar Syndrome cache by the time my big Severin bundle showed up – and no doubt I will, as a month later Severin still hasn’t shipped my order and there are only two VS disks left from the sale (though my July bundle arrived last week!).Ī young Dennis Quaid as privileged rich kid Phil Lawver in Walter Grauman’s Are You in the House Alone? (1978) Televised Terror (Various, 1978-90)Īlthough they didn’t get a lot of respect, made-for-television movies were a fertile ground for writers, directors and actors from the mid-’60s into the ’90s. Severin followed in June with their big mid-year sale and I ordered their nine-release bundle before all the titles had been announced.
I even added six catalogue titles to that order, eventually receiving a big box stuffed full of exploitation gold (though some of it turned out to be exploitation pyrites). Vinegar Syndrome had a big sale in May with a bundle including three box sets and a couple of fancy special editions I pre-ordered that in March even though two of the releases weren’t actually identified until the sale. Wings Hauser has reason to be angry, playing Detective Huck Finney in John De Hart’s Champagne and Bullets (1993) A growing awareness of the percentage of dross arriving in the mail may be provoking a bit of a backlash which will finally start reining in my knee-jerk “order everything” behaviour. Over the past year I’ve become much more of a well-trained consumer! And my collection has swelled accordingly with the inclusion of disks I wouldn’t normally have bought and which perhaps a little too often have proved disappointing. If there were four new titles and three interested me, I’d order the bundle and take the extra, less-interesting one as well, even though the discount didn’t really amount to much of a saving. And sometimes, they’d sweeten the offer with bonus swag – t-shirts, pins, figurines, comics based on the new releases. A lot of these companies, announcing three or four new titles per month, offered a discount if you ordered everything. These, a simple marketing technique, quickly got their claws in me.
With the back catalogues ransacked, monthly announcements of new releases became significant events – I began placing more and more pre-orders, sometimes several months ahead.Īnd then there were the bundles. But with the lockdown starting in March of last year, the visits to local stores became virtually non-existent and the on-line shopping became increasingly compulsive. Then a couple of years ago, I began to visit other sites more often – Indicator, Severin, and then a bit later Vinegar Syndrome – looking through their back catalogues and placing occasional orders.
There were a few websites I would check regularly for new releases – Criterion, the BFI, Arrow – and that would keep me busy. It used to be a matter of browsing in a local store (there’s really only one left within easy reach of where I live) or glancing at on-line review sites for suggestions. My disk buying has evolved quickly over the past year. In Anson Williams’ All-American Murder (1991) Detective Decker (Christopher Walken), an unorthodox cop, hunts a campus killer