VHS Reborn

When I was, oh, ten or eleven years old, DVD first begun gaining prominence. But it was a long way off from total domination, and I still remember how wary I was of the new technology. Sure enough, I eventually became endeared to the format, and for the following 13 years I scarcely touched a VHS tape.

That all changed tonight. I picked up a 3 pack of blank VHs at the corner store (yes, they still have them there. Probably 'cause I live in an old people neighborhood). And I'm in the middle of 2 & 1/2 hours of VHS recording right now.

Two things inspired me to get back in the VHS game, each on opposite ends of the TV specturm: one on the lowest level of local public access, and the other on a unique high-end cable channel (which we just happen to randomly get, conveniently enough).

The first is Unsealed: Alien Files, a show that airs, flanked by infomercials, on the local network that took over years ago when the WB ceased to exist (The CW occupying UPN's slot at #22). It's not just the best and creepeist alien show currently airing, it's the only top-notch paranormal doc show that's been on in half a decade or more. It's beyond obvious a show like this will never be out on DVD or iTunes. And since I missed my chance so many years ago to capture the previous paranormal classics like Beyond Bizarre and Real Scary Stories, for future Halloween viewings I need to have Unsealed in my video repetoire.

The other is Palladia, a video music channel better than MTV or VH1 ever has been, even when they were great in the 1990s. A Viacom network (like VH1 and MTV), it reairs great music content from its sister stations like MTV Unplugged and VH1 Storytellers (often full versions *not* shown on their original networks!), but it also airs literally dozens of concerts you can't legally acquire anywhere else. It plays all the biggest festivals (Bonnaroo, Isle of Wight, Download, etc. etc.) and an almost ironically ideal mix of my two favorite genres, pretty much everything the channel plays is either classic rock or modern pop!

It's a fucking amazing station and I couldn't let it sit idly by any longer. After catching a badass Tom Petty set at some festival or another, and discovering that it isn't and will never, ever be released on DVD, I knew I had to get some tapes and record some of this amazing material. Sure enough, right after Unsealed tonight (conveniently not playing at the same time), Palladia is airing highlights from a festival from 2009 featuring... Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, and TAYLOR SWIFT. What a stroke of luck that I even have this channel.

Long story short, I'll probably have to go out and buy more VHS tapes in a couple of days. Three isn't going to last very long. And if I was so inclined, I could even record the movies from On Demand. The current stock includes such excellent films as Liam Neeson's 1998 non-musical Les Miserables, Mammoth featuring Michelle Williams and written/directed by Lukas Moodysson of Fucking Amal, and the much acclaimed horror-romance Let Me In featuring Chloe Moretz.

Hole. E. Shit: Dinosaur Found Footage

Chalk this one up to poor research.

One downside to the typical found footage tradition of titling films with generic, non-descript names is that, you can't tell what the film is about based on the title. [REC], Home Movie, The Wicksboro Incident, Chronicle, Atrocious, Cloverfield, all of the best found footage films have titles which tell you absolutely nothing about the movie other than perhaps that it is indeed a found footage film. Even "Paranormal Activity" could have just as easily been about aliens or telekinesis or cryptids, and frankly that's what they should have done -- each sequel should have been a stand-alone film about a different paranormal phenomenon. Heck, Oren Peli's unreleased Area 51 movie could have been one of the sequels. But I digress.

I'm not saying it's wrong, I understand why they do the titles like that: giving it a simple, generic title like "Tape 123" or "Filmed" makes it seem more real and less contrived, as if this is just some tape somebody has somewhere rather than a big hollywood movie. It's a strategy that ties in perfectly with the attributes of found footage, I can't begrudge them for it. But this'll teach me a lesson about judging books by their covers!

Over October there were about a hundred scary movies I wanted to watch, which means I had to whittle the list down to a watchable number. Many films were nixed because they simply didn't interest me quite as much as the films that won out. But others were nixed simply because they were difficult to acquire. One of these was The Dinosaur Project, a found footage film. Since I adore both dinosaurs and found footage, I desperately wanted to watch this, but with my lack of net savvy, I simply couldn't find a download file, and it's not available officially in the US.

Little did I know, little did I know... The whole time there was a movie with the same plot, that looks even better than The Dinosaur Project, and it was on Netflix streaming the whole time!

The film is called Area 407 and I've glanced over it on Netflix a million times. It's often recommended to me, but here's the thing... It looks like a generic, SyFy Channel piece of shit, from the name and the cover image. Here's the other thing, it always shows up in my searches when I'm looking for alien movies. Area 407, Area 51, I thought for sure it was some mediocre SyFy or Asylum level piece of unwatchable crap about typical aliens.

I didn't even know Area 407 was a found footage movie, or that it was about dinosaurs!

I stumbled upon this fact this morning. So now I'm very excited about getting to see this movie. I'm not foolhardy enough to assume it will be a masterpiece, but judging by trailers of the two, it looks better than The Dinosaur Project, and it definitely has potential. I'l be watching it tonight, expect a review on my horror blog shortly.

This isn't even the first time a crappy, generic-as-living-fuck title turned me away from a film. I had little to no intention of watching "The House of the Devil" or "The Cabin in the Woods" until I became repeatedly bombarded with the fact that these were considered some of the finest horror films of the last 20 years. Lucky I watched them, because they became two of my favorite films of all-time! In those cases the genericness of the title is also intended, but for different reasons than found footage.

Does this mean I have to watch every two-bit, generic-looking, obviously-awful-looking movie on Netflix? Just in case it's the next [REC] or The House of the Devil?? I guess so.