At the beginning of December I was alerted to a very interesting auction on ebay. This particular auction was for a box of random VHS tapes, or as the seller so colourfully described as “LUCKY DIP A BOX OF MYSTERY VHS VIDEO TAPES, WHATS INSIDE THE BOX???”.
When two words like ‘mystery’ and ‘tapes’ are thrown together into a listing that only comprises of capital letters, well, you can imagine how fast my heart was beating.
The little VHS fairy appeared on my right shoulder telling me that the box would be filled with nothing more than Jane Fonda workout tapes, and on the left shoulder the devil himself appeared and planted the seed in my brain that maybe this seller knew nothing about rare tapes. And maybe, just maybe the box had the potential to be a Video Nasties dream haul. My mind was made. I placed my bid.
I purchased the tapes two weeks before Christmas and asked my wife if she would wrap each tape individually, that way I would have 25 mysteries as opposed to just one, and she reluctantly agreed.
Unfortunately the tapes didn’t arrive in time for the big day, or even in December at all, prompting me to leave the following feedback on the sellers page – “The biggest mystery was the delivery date.”
On January 11th the tapes finally arrived, and I wasn’t exactly in the greatest of moods when the doorbell rang either, so instead of getting excited I simply ripped the box apart. What fell out were nothing more than mainstream sell thru releases and simply bad films in general. The fairy was right!
I found it slightly amusing that the rarest tape among the bunch was a pre-cert Shakin’ Stevens video. Had it have been delivered on time, I might have found it all a little more worthwhile. Never again.
Good or bad, I promised to share my finds from the mystery box.
The original ebay link can be found here.
Well damn, that is just one unlucky box of crap right there. Did they all go straight into the dumpster filed under “learning experience”?
Most definitely!I knew exactly what I was in for from the outset, I just thought it would be a fun thing to open on Christmas morning. Sadly it wasn’t to be.
Ah the random ebay grabbags! I’ve picked up two of my rarest ps1 games from those… Along with dozens of my poorest ones.Hey fella, spotted the projector, what is your system set-up? I’m currently running my £4 vhs/dvd deck into my projector via the yellow rca and as we usually watch downloads on it via hdmi using my PS3 the picture is noticably worse, by a long way. Any advice? Svhs? Upgrade the vhs player?Ta, Mark
Really enjoying reading through your blog, kudos to you for efforts in building your library. I am not a collector myself but being a lover of the 80’s and 90’s non mainstream films some of your collection brings back great memories.One such memory may make you laugh, basically I have been searching for the title of Street Knight for about 15 years! Why you ask? Well I used to set the VHS to record a movie on Sky like anyone but what I loved doing was watching the movies that were randomly recorded after the main title i.e. Robocop followed by Flesh Gordon lol.Anyway, this one evening I had set Running Man to record; sometime after that my older brother came home and decided to have a flick through the channels settled on the playboy 10 minute preview lol then returned to sky movies which in turn recorded Street Knight with the beginning missing then on top of that the tape ran out just before the credits rolled!! So I labeled the tape Running Man – Blind Fury – Andy’s Porn – The fighting film with the long haired man armed with a spanner!! I only watched the film once and always wondered until now what it was called your site plugged that gap, so thanks :-)Although I think my title was better 😛