Some films I purvey here are of such an eclectic variety (a euphemism for bad and forgotten) that it can be difficult sometimes to find a decent poster to represent the film here on the Uranium Café. For example though I tried as hard I could never find a decent poster for The Creeping Terror and for that I am sorry.  Also I often  like to place a foreign poster next the American covers because sometimes the art can be more striking or even outlandish. I have taken to watching more foreign films than I had previously in my movie watching career and while searching for a reasonable poster for Mexican horror film Night of the Bloody Apes I came across a VHS cover for the film that was just simply perfect. And it struck me suddenly how different VHS covers were from DVD covers. I am not here to do a comparison post, that one is better or worse than the other, but they are certainly different in the style and effect they have on the person doing the browsing. In my early video renting days in San Antonio I usually hit the local ma and pa video stores back in the time when the Ron Jeremy style porno was often publicly displayed along side Burt Reynolds movies. The glory days of video before the chain stores like Blockbuster set the mundane standards. Not to say I did not rent some fine features from Blockbuster. But usually the ma and pa store let you take the cover home with the tape, while at Blockbuster you had that drab generic plastic box.

The VHS covers were often explicit and unedited in both the sex and violence departments. They were raw and cheesy and did not try to fluff up the material they were promoting. In particular the horror movie boxes always looked so wicked and cheap at the same time. You absolutely knew what you were renting when you picked up something by Lucio Fulci or Jess Franco. Scenes of Bigfoot or dead cheerleaders never looked better than they did on a big thick VHS cover. So I suddenly have developed an interest in VHS covers and plan on doing a history of them in a few posts. I had a pretty good collection of VHS tapes at one time and the prize being an autographed copy of Jack Hill’s Spider Baby, which I left in the hands of my fellow B-movie enthusiast Matt Gehringer back in Seattle. I have a random selection of covers here that I found at Cover Browser, a cool site with thousands of scans for your erudition. I also have millions of VHS covers from a BT file I recently got in that I am trying to organize alphabetically into folders so I figure out what is what is what. So you can expect more of these in the future.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 at 12:07 pm and is filed under Posters-Covers-Art, Retrology . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.