With my new career path going from strength to strength, even watching a movie – tape, DVD or otherwise – is becoming harder to do, so actually planning and hosting a VHS screening is almost impossible these days. However, whenever I am asked to do something video related it fills me with too much pride to turn down, and so the first ever Trash: VHS Festival was born.
I say first because this is something we hope to roll out once every four or five months. Truth be told, i’m not thrilled with the name of the event as it suggests the movies are actually bad, which most are definitely not, and it’s a term I don’t agree with much like ‘guilty pleasure’, but it is what it is and we are rolling on.
Continue reading →

The next tape-tastic instalment I have to show the city of Birmingham is Tom Shaw’s VHS only masterpiece from 1984 – The Courier of Death. One of my favourite movies of all time, and one you can only find on videotape, sadly.
Continue reading →

The Mockingbird Theatre in Birmingham is looking like being my spiritual home for the foreseeable future, and the hope is to create a semi-regular VHS club. However, with work this could be a problem.
The next treat, and I do mean treat, that I had install for the good people of Birmingham is the 1984 oddity Furious. This movie blew my mind when I caught it a few years back, and I was even fortunate enough to screen it at The Prince Charles Cinema in London as part of the Martial Arts All-nighter. You can’t seem to shake what goes down in the relatively short run time for months afterwards, even years. Furious stays with you, lying dormant.
Continue reading →

Incredibly fortunate to be asked back for a third year to screen at Shock & Gore Festival at the Electric Cinema. Although Nightmare Maker is now released on DVD under the title Butcher Baker, Nightmare Maker, it is still a movie I have been trying to screen for a number of years, but always unsuccessfully so, until this year. And so when the opportunity presented itself I couldn’t turn it down, and thankfully it went down a storm.
Continue reading →

I was asked by the wonderful guys at Derby Film Festival to be a part of their VHS celebration, marking their first ever film festival at the Quad cinema, Derby.
As they had already programmed in the fantastic Rewind This! documentary to play beforehand, I wanted to select a movie that complimented it, and I could think of no better candidate than the Canadian exploitation classic Siege (aka Self Defense).

Continue reading →