House of the Devil is a bit of a favorite around the site, so much so that James and I devoted one of our few Spoiler Alert podcasts (Download Here) to it, and it is with great pleasure and excitement that I discovered a few days ago that it would be released today on DVD. And not just DVD but Blu-ray as well. And while I’m not a fan of Blu-ray I have to admit the film should look fabulous in that format.

But in a rather shocking twist, I also found out that House of the Devil can also be purchased on VHS! Oh that’s right, for just a few dollars more you can have your very own VHS copy of this film along with your DVD copy. And unlike Blu-ray I am a huge fan of VHS and this kind of release is sheer brilliance considering the style and tone of the film. Kudos to whomever came up with the idea, you’ve totally sold me.

And now, just when I thought VHS was dead and buried I now have a reason to dust off the old head cleaner and fire up the VHS player. Scha-weet!

Tags: amazon, Blu-ray, DVD, film, House of the Devil, James, podcast, Spoiler Alert!, VHS, vhs copy, vhs player

The always fascinating, yet disturbingly hilarious, Found Footage Festival once again returns to the Twin Cities on December 10th at The Heights Theatre. Their will be two showings, at 7:30 and 9:30, and curators Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher will be present at both screenings. Tickets will be $10 and can be purchased online.

For those that don’t know, the Found Footage Festival is devoted to digging up odd and obscure clips from old VHS tapes that have been found through any manner of ways. This volume’s highlights include:

Still not convinced? Check out these outstanding clips and then try and tell me you aren’t dying to watch this.

I don’t put forth much effort to hide the fact that I love genre films. I do this for several reasons, though primarily it is simply to weed out those who do not like them. I have no problem personally if someone doesn’t enjoy them, far too frequently genre films rarely attempt to cross over and gain new fans, but if someone doesn’t like genre fare I immediately know whether or not we will have somewhat comparable taste in movies. Genre films are the anchor in which all of my film interests are held together by, and I am rather proud of that.

Now my particular kryptonite of which I am powerless to resist are science fiction films. While Star Wars is probably primarily to blame, their certainly were plenty of other science fiction franchises indoctrinating my toddler brain. Since that time, if your film had a hint of futuristic technology, machines dealing with their own developing Artificial Intelligence, or even alien populated cantina bands I have probably already watched the film at one point or another.

Being a child of the 1980’s meant I was able to gorge on these types of films on a weekly basis, as the only genre seemingly more numerous was the one involving one or both of the two Coreys. But as I watched these movies, it became increasingly easy to forget just which movies I had watched as I rocketed through the genre. And all too often, I would watch a film I loved and then lose it to antiquity because I wasn’t making any effort to record which films I loved and which I didn’t.

This is the tale of one such relic, lost to the celluloid aisles, seemingly, forevermore.

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It’s not often that I find fault with Netflix. I’ve been a subscriber and unabashed fan of the service for over three years now and I am typically hard pressed to find something to quibble over when it comes to them. Oh sure there was that stretch of receiving cracked discs that was beyond frustrating, but due to the sheer ridiculous amount of them that occurred (at least six in a matter of just a few months) that I chalked the issue up to an overzealous mail carrier. Plus Netflix was so quick at sending out replacements that it was hard not to be impressed.

But there is one minor quirk that shows up from time to time that still can aggravate me. Since I live in Minneapolis I happen to be near a hub which results in some surprisingly quick turnaround times. Sometimes, too quick.

I’m not very diligent with my queue, and as a result I am often times moving a film into the number one (Ed note: Make it so!) position the day, or the day after, that I return a movie. But with turnaround times that are often less then a day, my number one (Ed note: Make it so!) selection is sometimes skipped because I have added it too late.

Such an incident occurred last week when my number one (Ed note: Make it so!) selection was skipped in favor of my number two selection, which just so happened to be Dario Argento’s Cat o’ Nine Tails.

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Growing up during the Eighties I was a first hand witness to the bitter battle between VHS and Betamax for supremacy of the budding home video market. My family carefully avoided this format war for years, predominantly because of my father’s educated unease with buying anything during the early adoption phase. You see my father is an engineer and he has taken the rational, methodical and utterly boorish position that new technologies should be avoided on early release, to allow the engineers ample time to work the kinks out.

So it was several years after VHS had scored a decisive victory before we finally owned our very own VCR. It was so long after the Beta/VS battle had been decided that not soon after acquiring our VCR that Laserdisc became the new leap forward in technology for home theater enthusiasts. Needless to say, Laserdisc never wrestled away a big enough foothold from VHS for us to ever purchase a player. (more…)