Thursday, August 11, 2005

Videoplus RIP, sniff sniff...

Let me tell a lit a bit about Videoplus, one of the fine old-style independent video shops that recent closed down out street. It was one of those places that had all the old forgotten 1980s trash I grew up with, like Spacehunter: Adventurers in the Forbiden Zone and The Adventures of Bukaroo Banzai: Across the Eighth Dimension in a special basement. As the picture above shows, the last week involved all videos being sold off for 50p…50p! As ‘HH’, a friend and fellow PhD film geek happily said it was the comparable scenario for the likes of us to being kids in a candy store. It did cause for some awkward moments as I returned again and again and left with straining armfuls of VHS tat. It’s like being the audio-visual version of 78s collectors, it’s the whole VHS experience that counts like Simon Bates saying ‘sexual swear words’ or the priceless trailers for Summer Job and Ski School and the like, not to mention the trailers that all start with “In a world….” As you can see from the list below .

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The Videoplus near me just shut down. I was unfortunately too late to make the best of the 50p sale.

Do you live in Norwich or did they have a secret chain of crappy video shops?

I still remember renting 'The Stuff' from their basement.

Anonymous said...

checking profile...

feeling stoopid...

weirdly i found your blog on a google search for zombies.

Small world

Lorcy said...

I actaully have The Stuff on VHS back in home in Ireland. You did miss some bargains but also miles of shite! Was getting my hopes up there that there would be more Videopluses somewhere, before in twilight zone fashion we were talking of the same place..