Image – Page 2 – The Duke Mitchell Film Club

Back in March of this year I was up in Birmingham to visit the Video Palace pop-up rental store that had been put together for one weekend by the great VIVA VHS aka the video king Dale.

This trip back to celebrate the past glories of the video store was so well put together and so much fun to look through that it was completely worth the day trip up there to check it out.

One funny thing on the day was that Dale had been given a mystery box of blank VHS tapes by someone who’d just walked in and donated them. So Dale just wrote FREE on the box and let people help themselves, which is where things got interesting for me as I decided to look through everything in the box and try and find the oldest looking tape in there. None of the tapes had anything written on them so you had no idea of what was on them, digging right to the bottom I found one very interesting looking tape, one that looked much older than anything else in the box.

This very 1980s looking Ferguson Videostar tape really stood out form the rest as it looked in great condition and was a very rare 60-minute tape which you don’t see very often. So that was the one tape I decided to take on the day.

Now fast forward to November and the time was right to watch this tape and find out just what was on it! So what did I find…?

A 1984 TV recording of the Torvill And Dean TV special Path To Perfection, with the original adverts in it! OK maybe not the most exciting find, but it’s still fun to watch a 31-year old TV recording and it’s those adverts that really make it more interesting. One thing to note is that in this hour long TV show there’s only one advert break, if this was on TV now there’d be at least 3 or 4 advert breaks plus those annoying sponsorship idents to deal with as well, so things sure have changed.

Here’s a look at the documentary, it’s from a Central TV recording:

And here’s my Top 5 Adverts from the tape, all from 1984, which I just uploaded to YouTube this week:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Nedj8_AjM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsFUEZL50W4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJmRizP15eg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4mk5az34hA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QylFdh_wIh4

Today we’re taking a look at two very different trailers for the same film: The Carrier (1988)

This fairly obscure horror feature follows a mysterious and deadly infection that breaks out in a small American town. An infection that can be on anything: your chair, your book, your bed. Touch it with your flesh and you’ll be instantly infected and start to melt away right there and then.

How do the townsfolk deal with this? Besides going completely insane and resorting to extreme violence they realise they need another living being to check things for them, what do they choose to use? CATS!

Yes cats become the number one commodity as the town splits into violent warlike tribes, all bent on surviving this horrific infection their town is suffering.

Which leads us to the film’s original USA trailer, which is a cat-tastic overload of people shouting about their four-legged feline friends. Sample lines include:

“Go out there and get me cats!”

“Get the children and cats inside.”

“Cats or death!”

“Cats are what you need!”

This makes for a highly entertaining trailer as if you watch it cold for the first time you have no idea what they’re talking about. It sold us totally on it and for once the actual film itself just about lives up to the craziness of the trailer. Watch the original trailer packed with CATS here:

Which leads us to this alternative trailer which we found on a VHS tape recently, of which there’s not a single mention of CATS! It’s like the person who cut this trailer said “Oh we’re not having any of that cat weirdness in this version!”

Here’s our NO CATS version of the trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZL7s_j0jeec

Take a watch of both versions – which do you prefer? With CATS or without CATS!