THE HOME VIDEO MAUSOLEUM

THE HOME VIDEO MAUSOLEUM

?By I. Slifkin for The Sound View

Welcome ladies and gentlemen, and boys and girls to The Museum of Video History. We think you are in for a treat that will be both entertaining and educational. Just follow me to the first gallery where we will witness an exhibition of video companies past.???

Let’s start at the very beginning of the home video industry, in the late 1970s, where the competing formats VHS and Beta were at war. At this time, the era is referred to as the VHS/Beta Wars.?

Magnetic Video was the work of industry pioneer Andre Blay who started one of the world’s first duplication companies for cassettes and 8-Track tapes—remember them? His roots in home video began with the direct-market Video Club of America, and Blay orchestrated a groundbreaking deal with 20th?Century Fox, licensing their films for the young home video market.?THE SOUND OF MUSIC,?M*A*S*H,?PATTON,?THE FRENCH CONNECTION?and?THE KING AND I?were just a few in the earliest agreements—longer movies were presented on two separate VHS tapes with high retail prices. For Magnetic Video, Blay also made deals with the Charlie Chaplin Estate, Avco-Embassy, United Artists, ABC Pictures and ITC. Fox eventually bought Blay out, and then morphed Magnetic Video into 20th?Century Fox Video, later teaming with CBS for CBS/Fox Video.?Blay, meanwhile, went on in the industry, involved with such companies as Blay Video, Embassy Home Entertainment and Mackinac Media, He also produced several films by director John Carpenter including?PRINCE OF DARKNESS?and?THEY LIVE.

Next, I direct your attention to the boxes with yellow and blue borders. These are titles from Media Home Entertainment, a very early video supplier launched originally as “Meda Home Entertainment” by “B” movie entrepreneur Charles Band, the man behind Full Moon Entertainment. There were questionable releases in the early days with some music rights issues like?MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR?and?THE ROLLING STONES IN HYDE PARK?. But the company really specialized in genre and cult-like efforts like Band’s own?LASERBLAST,?TOURIST TRAP, the original?HALLOWEEN,?ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13,?THE GROOVE TUBE?and?A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. At one point, Media began distributing classic films from The Nostalgia Merchant enterprise, owned by record producer “Snuff” Garrett. They had films licensed from RKO and Republic Pictures, like?THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME,?MR LUCKY, and John Wayne gems like?SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON?and?FORT APACHE. The company also started a children’s entertainment label called Hi-Tops with a specialty label Fox Hills Video which featured NFL Films, the initial Kathy Smith releases and more. Media Home Entertainment changed hands a few times and eventually went out of business in the early 1990s.

We’re now going to make a brief stop at the exploitation arm of our exhibition. You can call it our “Rogue’s Gallery.”

Let me divert your attention to Paragon Home Video. If it’s schlock you wanted, Paragon had it in spades, specializing in oddball genre pictures and grindhouse-styled releases they unleashed into the world of home video from 1981 to 1985. The company was based in Las Vegas and was part of King of Video, which originally offered Hollywood “B” pictures from the 40s and the 50s.?Among the movies Paragon issued were?THE NAVY VS. THE NIGHT MONSTER?with Mamie Van Doren, the notorious?DR. BUTCHER, M.D.,?NEW YEAR’s EVIL?and?NIGHT OF THE STRANGLER?with Micky Dolenz of The Monkees.

Now, over here is Video Gems, an outfit specializing in schlock cinema, 1970s style. You can tell their stuff by the way they were distinctively packaged in oversized, cushiony, clamshell boxes. This is the company that was the original home of?THE GATES OF HELL,?THE SEVERED ARM,?THE SLIME PEOPLE, as well as Marty Feldman in?SEX WITH A SMILE?and three films featuring the sexy blonde spy named “Ginger” played by Cheri Caffaro. Occasionally, Video Gems would release an off-the-wall effort disguised like a horror film. An example:?THE SECOND COMING OF SUZANNE, a weird 1974 hippie drama with Sondra Locke as a woman believed to be a messiah by an obsessive filmmaker. Richard Dreyfuss and Gene Barry—it was directed by his son-- also starred in this downbeat effort with music by folk troubadour Leonard Cohen (!).

PM Entertainment Group came around later than the others mentioned here, launching sometime in the mid-1980s. They specialized in action films—often starring the likes of former TV stars Todd Bridges, Charlene Tilton, Lorenzo Lamas and, yes, O.J. Simpson. The people behind the company, Joseph Pepin and Richard Merhi, a former pizza restaurant owner, must have had a thing for blood squibs, because most of their low-budget actioners featured lots of plasma squirting all over the place during the plentiful gunplay sequences.

Unicorn Video, presenting their VHS releases in clamshell boxes, had a real hodge-podge of obscure Euro-horror films, drive-in favorites, spaghetti westerns and Blaxploitation goodies, They lasted from mid-1980s through the mid-1990s. Fred Williamson’s?DEATH JOURNEY?and?MEAN JOHNNY BARROWS,?THE WITCH WHO CAME FROM THE SEA?and cult fave Paul Naschy in?THE FURY OF THE WOLFMAN?were among their releases. One of their most curious titles was Larry Buchanan’s?BEYOND THE DOORS (aka DOWN ON US)??— which posited that Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison were killed as part of a government plot.

And now we’re heading back to our main exhibition room, where we have two final exhibits on this tour.?

The Amaray boxes here store samples from Thorn/EMI Home Video, a company that experienced many title changes over the years.

It began life as a British company, formed when Thorn Electrical Industries merged with EMI, an electronics and music enterprise with a history that dated back to the 1930s. Their introduction to the American market in 1981 was actually a spinoff from the United Kingdom-based EMI Videogram. Their initial 14 offerings reflected their eclectic brand and included music programs featuring The Tubes, Queen and April Wine,?CAN’T STOP THE MUSIC?with the Village People, the big-budget Agatha Christie mysteries?DEATH ON THE NILE?and?THE MIRROR CRACK’D,?SCARS OF DRACULA?with Christopher Lee and a documentary on the royal wedding of Prince Prince Charles and Lady Diana. Huge horror video titles such as?DAWN OF THE DEAD?and?EVIL DEAD?followed, as well as licensing agreements for?RAMBO?and?THE TERMINATOR. HBO jumped into the mix in 1984, bringing their own licensed titles and the company became Thorn/EMI/HBO Video. At some point later, a sale to Cannon of the Thorn/EMI titles morphed the company’s name briefly into HBO/CANNON, then simply HBO VIDEO, where the cable company’s features, comedy shows and series landed. Of course, HBO is part of the Warner Brothers family, but that’s a whole other story.

Finally, we come to Vestron Video, a behemoth from 1983 through the mid-1990s, the gold standard when it came to video independents. The studio licensed some Hollywood movies to start off with from Time/Life, including?FORT APACHE: THE BRONX?and?LOVING COUPLES. Over the years Vestron also peddled a steady stream of supreme schlock (BLOODSUCKING FREAKS,?SQUIRM) and lots of imported futuristic action fare to capitalize on their own?MAD MAX?release. The ambitious indie branched into supplemental lines (Lightning Video), and getting into the production of exercise and children’s releases, as well as theatrical films including?EARTH GIRLS ARE EASY?and?DIRTY DANCING, which proved to be their only big hit.

Other signature videocassette offerings included Charles Band-produced titles (TRANCERS,?RE-ANIMATOR), Linda Blair vehicles (SAVAGE STREETS), Ken Russell ventures?(LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM) and such Orion Pictures releases as?PLATOON,?GORKY PARK?and?BEST SELLER. On the music side, Vestron copped the rights to the Michael Jackson smash “THE MAKING OF THRILLER. There were releases with the Nova and National Geographic brand names and in-house how-tos and documentaries as well.?All this and the notorious?CALIGULA, too. The company, started by former HBO executive Austin Furst, shut down in the mid-1990s, and much of their library has been acquired by Lionsgate. Though long gone, their name has resurfaced in recent years with releases from Lionsgate presenting the Vestron Video Collector’s Series, which includes such cherished titles as?CHOPPING MALL?and?BLOOD DINER.?

Well, that ends our tour for today. We hope you enjoyed your journey into home video’s unpredictable and colorful past.

Please exit through the gift shop.?

[Editor’s Notes: The hyperlinks links included in this article are for current versions of the films where we could find them, not necessarily from the original labels that released them which, for the most part, are no longer available. In most cases we could find reissues on Amazon. In some cases, the film(s) were only available to stream so we included those links either to Amazon or another source. Such, we guess, is the life of a film in the mausoleum.]

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