First of all, let me point out that this was not pre-planned. The tapes just have a way of finding me, it’s like we’re connected.

A few months ago my wife and I had purchased a UK quad poster of Scream for my parents’ 30th wedding anniversary. The moment I presented it to my Dad the bug had bitten him and he is now a collector, not to mention a rival, of UK quads. I now look back with regret and wish we’d have bought them a set of steak knives instead.
Since hanging Scream on the wall, he has gone on to purchase the quads of The Monster Squad and Rules of Attraction, two of my favourite movies of all time. You can tell i’m a little bitter about the whole thing. “It was me who showed you the way!”, and various other nonsense I like to shout at him from time to time. Anyway, my Dad needed them framed so I told him where I get all my work done, a local place who if receiving regular business will knock you up a few quad frames for a real bargain. He ordered them a few weeks ago and today we had to go and collect them from town. I took along my framed Mean Machine poster which I needed taking out and replacing with my recently acquired Vanilla Sky quad, I was very excited about having that on wall.

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I search the internet on a daily basis for all sorts of VHS tapes, be them pre-cert or otherwise. The only trouble with purchasing tapes online is the postage costs that are involved. A single tape will cost you somewhere in the region of £2.99 in stamps alone these days. So i’ve decided to only use the net for the tapes on my ‘Most Wanted’ list only and try to collect all others from job lots that come my way.

The latest job lot offer was from a guy who had over 1,000 titles from an old video store that had closed down a while back. I could tell from some of the pictures he had sent me, that the tapes were mostly late 80’s to mid 90’s stuff, an era of film that I have a keen fondness for.

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Since the success of last weeks discovery, I have been going through my collection and ripping out any of the mainstream titles. The sort of titles that you can pick up in any charity shop for around 5-10p each. Boxing them up and placing them into safe storage. While performing this thankless task it had me wondering if I had managed to somehow miss a few obscurities from the shop. After all, I only had time to briefly scan over the many thousands of tapes in attendance, and it was getting late.

So armed with the knowledge of ‘if it looks awful it’s probably awesome’, I made plans to go back. But this time I was taking my Brother-in-law and 80’s guru Simon along with me for extra eye help. On the drive up I gave him a lesson in health and safety VHS hunting. I couldn’t allow him to go through the various pitfalls and tape traps that I had to pass through last week. By the way my cut from last week is steadily turning into a scar, I just hope it’s V shaped. That would make one hell of a story.

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Once every few months I like to visit the local car-boot sales in search of rare VHS tapes, but all you ever seem to find these days are Cinema Club and 4Front re-released titles. The sort of titles that you can find almost anywhere and worthless to any serious collector.
Some great films were re-released under those two labels but i’ve only ever been interested in the original release, mainly pre-cert. If you’re having a good day you might find the odd one obscure tape. But it would appear that these days most people know the true value of VHS, and you only have to do a quick search on ebay to confirm those suspicions. So imagine my delight when I happened upon two market traders with a transit van load of obscure tapes.

I picked up one tape that I knew was rare, and the guy looked at me and told me to pick a few more and then he’d do me an amazing deal, even offering the lot to me for £20. It quickly became apparent that this guy knew nothing about VHS and was just happy to get rid of them all. I grabbed an empty crate and began to fill my basket like the happy shopper I am. I frantically grabbed as many titles as I could but just couldn’t contain the inner excitement, my Wife said I was shaking. I just knew I had to move fast because that particular car-boot is littered with collectors. Maybe they wouldn’t be interested in many of the films but it’s a chance I wasn’t prepared to take.

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