One of the highlights from our Early April Fools’ Special this year was the trailer to ‘They Killed My Cat’, a low budget martial arts action film from Canadian director/star Elliot Scott. Now if you enjoyed the trailer what you should take a look at is the feature length documentary about Elliot and his filmmaking empire, ‘Kung Fu Elliot’, it’s a fascinating film, but there’s a lot more to it then you think at first. We’re not going to spoil anything for you, but let’s just say that things go off in a very unexpected director and there’s more to this documentary than just covering filmmaking. Do track it down as it’s a very revealing documentary and highly entertaining.
Below are the trailers for Kung Fu Elliot, They Killed My Cat and various other Elliot Scott related videos.
So Saturday morning found me on the train from London heading up to Birmingham to check out the UK’s newest video rental store, well sadly one that was only going to open for 4-days. And it was that exact reason, its short life span, that made me want to going and check it out for myself.
The other deciding factor was that it was being put together by the King Of Video himself, the always amazing @VivaVHS, yes the one man champion of video, Dale, was creating his own video rental store for one weekend only, in conjunction with Scalarama, DVD Bang and the Flatpack Film Festival, so a meeting of great minds.
A short walk from the station found me walking straight into the wrong building which was a typical bad start for a day out, but I soon found the right and you know what? It was so great. Dale had done such a good job of putting the place together, there was a huge selection of his own personal tapes to browse through, all set our rental store style. Plus they had tapes for sale, which is a rare thing to see now as video tapes seem to have nearly all vanished from any shops , also there was a huge projector screen playing tapes and several smaller TVs you could watch tapes on as well.
Dale is one of the friendliest guys you can meet and seemed to be totally in his element welcoming people who were dropping in, showing them around and being the best possible champion for the VHS format.
For me it was simply great to loose myself in browsing the tapes, and for a short while I could remember what it was like back in the day when you could spend hours scouring the shelves of video stores looking for something tempting, interesting and unknown.
It was a so worth going up there for the day just to be around all those amazing tapes and films, I also picked up a big haul of VHS as well from the sales tables, we’ll be using those later in the year for one of our DukeFest events. I’d love to be able to put on an event like this in London, so maybe one day we’ll bring the Video Palace to London and throw in some special Duke events as well, it could well happen!
Thanks so much to everyone who braved coming along last night, it was so great to have such a packed room for all those wild films. Next up for The Duke come and join us at The Prince Charles Cinema on Thursday 9 April for our screening of The Samurai. Plus we’ll be back at Phoenix Artist Club on Monday 27 April with a very special night as The Duke is teaming up with the amazing Aorta Burst Film Club to bring you a double-header night of film mayhem! Full details on that one very soon….
We’re just one week away from our Early April Fools’ Special, join us for a night of the worst that we can find. Our main film is the truly terrible Mountain Fury, we can’t wait to share this with you. Here’s the sleeve, please note that nothing featured on the sleeve actually happens in the film, that’s how weird it is!
The Duke Mitchell Film Club 