We’re one week away from our next night and we want your help to decided what we close the show with! Take a look at the 4 tapes in the picture above, we want you to vote for the one you like the most, we’ll then watch it and edit it down and close the show with it. Leave a comment below, or let us know on twitter or facebook!
Yes we’ve managed to get our hands on quite an incredible Trailer Tape haul, a huge collection of 59 vintage trailer tapes all from the 1980s and early 1990s, but just where did they all come from?
Well they’re all from one closed down video store from somewhere in the UK, a local small store that had closed 5-years ago, simply locking the door and walking off after having been there since the early 1980s. One smart video collector managed to contact the owner and agreed to purchase everything in the store in one go, including all the odd trailer and promo tapes from behind the counter, which is where we came in.
A few ebay deals later and we’d managed to buy every single trailer and promo tape from the store via the very helpful collector, so we’re now the owners of this huge batch of vintage store tapes! We’ve been collecting these sort of tapes for years as they’re a treasure trove of unseen trailers, video company promos and anything else unexpected which can turn up on them, but we’ve never see a collection this large come along in one go like this, so we didn’t waste any time in snapping it up.
What’s in it? Well it’s a total mixture of very rare trailer tapes from all sorts of video companies, along with a few promo films and probably rarest of all 3 video store training tapes, designed to help you set up your video store! We’ve never seen anything like those before and we can’t wait to screen them for you, but you’ll have to wait until January 2016 to watch them with us, because that’s going to be Video Store Night at the Duke, mark it in your diary now!
Eric Stoltz is cool and James Spader does karate (badly) in this obscure short film from 1988, if you’re an 80s fiend it’s well worth 30-minutes of your time.
Terence Stamp stars in this ultra-obscure French Sci-Fi film from 1975 as an actor called Terence Stamp who’s put into multiple different dangerous situations each broadcast for an audience to see, their reaction to his fear results in him either being sent into the past or into the future. The film was directed by Jerôme Laperrousaz, who seems to have mostly directed documentaries.
More proof that if you wait long enough and dig deep enough you can end up finding the thing you really want to see. HU-MAN has been one of our most sought after films for many years, we really didn’t know much about it but the few stills and basic synopsis that exist from it made it sound like a true tantalising treat and we hoped one day to finally get to see it.
Well that day is now here, as thanks to some unknown person, a VHS recording of the full film has been unearthed and shared with the world. We don’t know where this originated from or who actually found it, but the important thing is that it’s now out there and we can all finally see it. At least we can see it in French without subtitles as that’s how it exists right now, but the fan subbers are working on it as we speak and hopefully the subs will be available shortly.
In the meantime I’ve watched the start of the film and it looks great, the screengrabs on this page are all taken from the first 5-minutes of the film, which should give you an idea of the fractured style that the film is aiming for. This VHS version runs 85-minutes in total.
Now the film hasn’t been lost, just un-viewable for many years. The BFI screened 25-minutes of HU-MAN back in 2013 as part of their Terence Stamp season, they only screened 25-minutes as their print is in very bad condition and that’s all they’d been able to afford to restore. So a print has existed, it’s just in very bad shape and someone would have to stump up a big dose of cash to make it look good again. Read an in-depth report on the BFI screening here.
But for now we can see this fairly decent VHS transfer and finally enjoy this long unseen Terence Stamp obscurity!
Terence Stamp talking to Mark Cousins about the film back in 1998
The Duke Mitchell Film Club 