Wednesday, May 11, 2011

A DRUG CALLED VHS

"Christened in blood. Raised in sin. She's sweet sixteen. Let the party begin."

There are dark days when the stupidity of others is so fantastic that I am must fight the overwhelming urge to drug people and then drop a cinder block on their fucking faces while they're passed out. Today was particularly black, and my jaw was really grinding as I made way to my mail box. My mood lightened a bit when I saw there was a package that could only be a tape waiting for me. After a few snips and a couple ginger rips, my mood melted away as I held in my hands a VCI copy of the 1977 supernatural horror flick "Ruby," starring Piper Laurie.

I was first made aware of this film through an old VHS copy of "Kingdom of the Spiders," which contained a block of odd ball seventies horror trailers, including "The Demon," "The Night Visitor," and several others. For years, I would show these trailers to friends and even tack them onto Drive-In style VHS mixes for friends. In fact, that block of ads was probably one of the strongest motivators behind my interest in collecting tapes since at the time a lot of that stuff hadn't yet been released on DVD. Every time I'd buy a vintage tape, it would yield several more trailers for stuff I'd never heard of, which I'd then go track down, watch, and wind up adoring. And of course, there were also more trailers that fed into the cycle.




The following trailer is for a film titled "The Captive Female" (1974), but my tape also included a far more outrageous ad for the same film, only with the title "Scream Bloody Murder." It also opens with the same narrator, introducing Matthew as a "quiet boy. A nice boy. With only one ambition in life. To commit BRUTAL MURDER." The ad concludes by stating that it's the first film to be labeled "GORENOGRAPHY," and ends with a graphic that says "COMING TOO SOON."


The trailer for "Ruby" was on there, too, and I absolutely went nuts for the tagline.


I have not seen this film in years, and for some reason had never bothered to seek out a copy until very recently. This is an ex-rental, so the box is a little chewed up, but the tape itself is in great shape -- one of those old jobs that's so heavy you could probably drop a bird with it at twelve paces. Super happy to have this one, and I'm now drinking out of joy rather than anger! Yay!

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