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CPL593H
Oct 28, 2009

I know what you did last summer, and frankly I am displeased.

Boinks posted:

I saw a tape at the thrift store yesterday marked Super Bowl 2002 and almost bought it just to see if it was anything else

I found an unlabeled video tape in a thrift store some years back and I considered buying it for the same reason. It probably was something mundane like an NYPD Blue rerun.

Iron Crowned posted:

What was really on the tape?

A ghost that fucks up your poo poo a week later or a gross old people sex tape. I'd probably rather deal with the ghost.

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Origami Dali
Jan 7, 2005

Get ready to fuck!
You fucker's fucker!
You fucker!
Unlabeled vhs tapes in thrift stores/pawn shops are my weakness. Well, one of them.

Iron Crowned
May 6, 2003

by Hand Knit

Origami Dali posted:

Unlabeled vhs tapes in thrift stores/pawn shops are my weakness. Well, one of them.

I've constantly considered finding an old VCR, because these things just seem amazing to me. Even if it turns out to be an old episode of NYPD Blue, you're going to get a slew of old commercials. I can't help it there are channels on YouTube that are just blocks of old commercials from these kind of tapes, and they're like catnip to me.

feedmyleg
Dec 25, 2004
If you're interested in that sort of thing, eBay has tons of VHS tapes sold as blanks. Many sellers specify whether they were recorded with commercials or not, though many seem not to know what's on the tapes at all. You can get whole lots of tapes for very cheap.

I got lucky and found a horror nerd's collection that he was getting rid of after transferring to DVD. There were all sorts of weird gems in there.

Casimir Radon
Aug 2, 2008


Iron Crowned posted:

What was really on the tape?
It was what it said it was. But he was a creep and a lazy rear end in a top hat so we thought it was prudent to make sure. This was a guy who got caught after he downloaded porn on a government laptop.

caligulamprey
Jan 23, 2007

It never stops.

I once picked up an unlabeled VHS that was on top of a dumpster took it home and enjoyed three uninterrupted hours of Mama’s Family. Truly it was a blessed day.

EDIT: one of my favorite street finds was a copy of Damon Packard’s Reflections of Evil. He pressed up a couple thousand DVDs (professional, not even DVDRs) and just scattered stacks of them all over Los Angeles. Should have taken the entire stack that was sitting in a phone booth, but I politely just took the one.

caligulamprey fucked around with this message at 15:31 on Sep 3, 2019

Origami Dali
Jan 7, 2005

Get ready to fuck!
You fucker's fucker!
You fucker!
I used to record movies all the time as a kid, but I was so OCD that I real-time edited out the commercials. Wish I hadn't.

I have a tape I made of a 1992 Halloween night showing of NOES5, NOTLD, and Magic, complete with commercials. I haven't watched it in 20 years, I should check that out in October.

TheScott2K
Oct 26, 2003

I'm just saying, there's a nonzero chance Trump has a really toad penis.

Origami Dali posted:

I used to record movies all the time as a kid, but I was so OCD that I real-time edited out the commercials. Wish I hadn't.

When I was a kid I made myself a VHS copy of Back to the Future by finding its next airing in TV Guide, dutifully pausing the recording at ad breaks, and then printed out labels using a white background JPEG of the BTTF logo. That was my copy until the DVDs finally came out in 2002.

Iron Crowned
May 6, 2003

by Hand Knit

caligulamprey posted:

I once picked up an unlabeled VHS that was on top of a dumpster took it home and enjoyed three uninterrupted hours of Mama’s Family. Truly it was a blessed day.

Mama's Family owns, it's back to back with the Jeffersons on MeTV at weeknights, so I usually watch it when I'm home.

caligulamprey posted:

EDIT: one of my favorite street finds was a copy of Damon Packard’s Reflections of Evil. He pressed up a couple thousand DVDs (professional, not even DVDRs) and just scattered stacks of them all over Los Angeles. Should have taken the entire stack that was sitting in a phone booth, but I politely just took the one.

At least per a recent episode of the Podcast Junk Food Dinner that movie is borderline unwatchable, but apparently that was just how Damon Packard distributed it. It's a pretty interesting way to get your movie out there even if it's probably due to some mental illness.

Casimir Radon
Aug 2, 2008


Deep Discount is having a Criterion sale. Should I blind buy The Wages of Fear? I loved Sorcerer.

caligulamprey
Jan 23, 2007

It never stops.

Iron Crowned posted:

At least per a recent episode of the Podcast Junk Food Dinner that movie is borderline unwatchable
It's probably the most realistic portrayal of Los Angeles next to Crank: High Voltage I've ever seen, which is also borderline unwatchable on a whole.

Los Angeles that is. Not Crank: High Voltage. Crank: High Voltage is a masterpiece.

Egbert Souse
Nov 6, 2008

Casimir Radon posted:

Deep Discount is having a Criterion sale. Should I blind buy The Wages of Fear? I loved Sorcerer.

If you're Region B capable, the semi-recent BFI edition is from a newer restoration. Otherwise, it's a fine disc for a fantastic movie. I recall it being one of their early Blu-rays.

Clouzot's Diabolique and Le Verite are essential, too.

Nate RFB
Jan 17, 2005

Clapping Larry
I have a very specific problem that keeps me from universally loving Wages of Fear that I'd rather not even vaguely describe if you're going into it fresh, but it is otherwise a fantastic thriller that had me on the edge of my seat throughout and is one I would recommend.

Cloks
Feb 1, 2013

by Azathoth

Nate RFB posted:

I have a very specific problem that keeps me from universally loving Wages of Fear that I'd rather not even vaguely describe if you're going into it fresh, but it is otherwise a fantastic thriller that had me on the edge of my seat throughout and is one I would recommend.

Well now I'm curious. I've seen it, could you spoiler the problem?

Nate RFB
Jan 17, 2005

Clapping Larry

Cloks posted:

Well now I'm curious. I've seen it, could you spoiler the problem?
The ending is just really goofy. I'd call it straight up comedic even, which is a big whiplash after the grim tenseness of the rest of the film.

Origami Dali
Jan 7, 2005

Get ready to fuck!
You fucker's fucker!
You fucker!
I blind bought The Wages of Fear years ago, and ended up liking it quite a bit more than Sorcerer, so I say go for it.

Maxwell Lord
Dec 12, 2008

I am drowning.
There is no sign of land.
You are coming down with me, hand in unlovable hand.

And I hope you die.

I hope we both die.


:smith:

Grimey Drawer

Nate RFB posted:

The ending is just really goofy. I'd call it straight up comedic even, which is a big whiplash after the grim tenseness of the rest of the film.

The book (which really needs an English language reprint, I think it hasn’t had one since before Sorcerer which had its own novelisation) explains this a little better- the idea is, fear got him through the journey, now he’s no longer afraid, so he makes a mistake and crashes and dies.

Maxwell Lord
Dec 12, 2008

I am drowning.
There is no sign of land.
You are coming down with me, hand in unlovable hand.

And I hope you die.

I hope we both die.


:smith:

Grimey Drawer
As for cheap weird VHS tapes I actually managed to find one at Half Price Books that had the very first, unaired, half hour Buffy pilot plus a lot of B roll from the first few episodes.

CPL593H
Oct 28, 2009

I know what you did last summer, and frankly I am displeased.

Maxwell Lord posted:

As for cheap weird VHS tapes I actually managed to find one at Half Price Books that had the very first, unaired, half hour Buffy pilot plus a lot of B roll from the first few episodes.

When I was a kid my aunt was banging some guy who worked on Cops and she had a bunch of tapes of raw footage from that show but she never let me and my cousin watch them. I still wonder what they must have been like.

I AM GRANDO
Aug 20, 2006

CPL593H posted:

When I was a kid my aunt was banging some guy who worked on Cops and she had a bunch of tapes of raw footage from that show but she never let me and my cousin watch them. I still wonder what they must have been like.

Guessing tons of extrajudicial murder interspersed with mustachioed white guys screaming “STOP RESISTING!”

CPL593H
Oct 28, 2009

I know what you did last summer, and frankly I am displeased.

Antifa Turkeesian posted:

Guessing tons of extrajudicial murder interspersed with mustachioed white guys screaming “STOP RESISTING!”

You're probably right, but as a kid I just figured it was all the swearing and nudity they censored on the broadcast.

Casimir Radon
Aug 2, 2008


When I was a kid I was convinced that network tv showed porn if you could only stay up late enough.

You know what was really on that late? Carson Daly, and he was horrible.

CPL593H
Oct 28, 2009

I know what you did last summer, and frankly I am displeased.

Casimir Radon posted:

When I was a kid I was convinced that network tv showed porn if you could only stay up late enough.

You know what was really on that late? Carson Daly, and he was horrible.

Network tv didn't but if you had movie channels it was a buffet of softcore porn or just HBO specials about what kind of fetishes old people have.

EL BROMANCE
Jun 10, 2006

COWABUNGA DUDES!
🥷🐢😬



Given that UK TV pretty much did on some channels (I’m looking at you, early days of Five), I can only imagine what mainland Europe would show.

CPL593H
Oct 28, 2009

I know what you did last summer, and frankly I am displeased.
In America you can see all kinds of shootings and stabbings and people being gored on tv. But we can't show a titty because that would traumatize children forever.

Casimir Radon
Aug 2, 2008


Watching Maury hoping to see nudity was worse than actually seeing nudity.

caligulamprey
Jan 23, 2007

It never stops.

TV Guide used to have its back half dedicated to one-sentence summaries for all the movies playing on cable, including the rating and the various reasons why it got the rating. It was just a matter of highlighting the word “nudity.”

Man, the pre-internet era. I don’t miss it, mostly.

CPL593H
Oct 28, 2009

I know what you did last summer, and frankly I am displeased.

caligulamprey posted:

TV Guide used to have its back half dedicated to one-sentence summaries for all the movies playing on cable, including the rating and the various reasons why it got the rating. It was just a matter of highlighting the word “nudity.”

Man, the pre-internet era. I don’t miss it, mostly.

Remember when everyone was watching the scrambled porn channel because occasionally you could see half of the picture for about two seconds?

Iron Crowned
May 6, 2003

by Hand Knit

CPL593H posted:

Network tv didn't but if you had movie channels it was a buffet of softcore porn or just HBO specials about what kind of fetishes old people have.

If you lived close enough to Canada to get a signal, after a certain hour they'd show movies late at night that were uncensored, but the few times I managed to stay up that late, it would be the equivalent of the scene in Titanic.

CPL593H posted:

Remember when everyone was watching the scrambled porn channel because occasionally you could see half of the picture for about two seconds?

We had the PPV channel SPICE, and at like 1 am on Sunday nights there was a free broadcast. That was like catnip to me and my other 14 year old friends when we figured it out, even if the few times I managed to do it, it was just footage of some blonde jet-skiing topless.

One time one of my friends was watching scramblevision and there was a scene where the dude's dick apparently disappears and he says "where'd my pee-pee go!" which of course became one of our catch phrases (it also included miming looking down in dismay)

TheScott2K
Oct 26, 2003

I'm just saying, there's a nonzero chance Trump has a really toad penis.
I got an early PCI NTSC capture card and using a program called dscaler you could apply filters to it in real time, as long as that was all your computer was doing. Like, it took up everything. Keyboard inputs had multi-second lag. Anyway, apparently applying an invert filter counteracted the color inversion that was part of the PPV scrambling. You'd still have the geometry distortion, but color wise there were the nips.

Egbert Souse
Nov 6, 2008

Network UK has delayed the Monty Python's Flying Circus Blu-ray because they found some more deleted footage, including...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5G-pyZbmNqI

CPL593H
Oct 28, 2009

I know what you did last summer, and frankly I am displeased.

TheScott2K posted:

I got an early PCI NTSC capture card and using a program called dscaler you could apply filters to it in real time, as long as that was all your computer was doing. Like, it took up everything. Keyboard inputs had multi-second lag. Anyway, apparently applying an invert filter counteracted the color inversion that was part of the PPV scrambling. You'd still have the geometry distortion, but color wise there were the nips.

That sounds like a lot of work when at the time you could just buy an illegal cable box from a guy in a bar for 50 bucks and get every channel.

TheScott2K
Oct 26, 2003

I'm just saying, there's a nonzero chance Trump has a really toad penis.

CPL593H posted:

That sounds like a lot of work when at the time you could just buy an illegal cable box from a guy in a bar for 50 bucks and get every channel.

I was 15 and did not have access to bars

CPL593H
Oct 28, 2009

I know what you did last summer, and frankly I am displeased.

TheScott2K posted:

I was 15 and did not have access to bars

The bar thing was a kind of joke example, but basically what I'm saying is that in the 90s those things were everywhere. When I was ten or eleven years old I had to go to an older cousin's apartment after school for a while and she had the bootleg cable box and it ruled. I watched a bunch of movies there but my favorite thing was watching reruns of the Incredible Hulk on the Sci-Fi channel because at that time it was some sort of premium channel. Occasionally the cable companies would send out some signal that would brick them but then everyone would just go buy a new one. It only stopped being a thing once digital cable caught on. I always thought it would be cool to have one but my dad was way too honest to ever buy one.

I AM GRANDO
Aug 20, 2006

Iron Crowned posted:

If you lived close enough to Canada to get a signal, after a certain hour they'd show movies late at night that were uncensored, but the few times I managed to stay up that late, it would be the equivalent of the scene in Titanic.


We had the PPV channel SPICE, and at like 1 am on Sunday nights there was a free broadcast. That was like catnip to me and my other 14 year old friends when we figured it out, even if the few times I managed to do it, it was just footage of some blonde jet-skiing topless.

One time one of my friends was watching scramblevision and there was a scene where the dude's dick apparently disappears and he says "where'd my pee-pee go!" which of course became one of our catch phrases (it also included miming looking down in dismay)

Exotica always ran on CBC once a summer. Maybe it still does for all I know. I think it was just boobs and a depressing story.

Iron Crowned
May 6, 2003

by Hand Knit

CPL593H posted:

The bar thing was a kind of joke example, but basically what I'm saying is that in the 90s those things were everywhere. When I was ten or eleven years old I had to go to an older cousin's apartment after school for a while and she had the bootleg cable box and it ruled. I watched a bunch of movies there but my favorite thing was watching reruns of the Incredible Hulk on the Sci-Fi channel because at that time it was some sort of premium channel. Occasionally the cable companies would send out some signal that would brick them but then everyone would just go buy a new one. It only stopped being a thing once digital cable caught on. I always thought it would be cool to have one but my dad was way too honest to ever buy one.

Speaking of, my family was an early adopter for DirecTV. Back in those days you had to buy all the equipment and then set it up yourself, pointing that dish was a hellish experience in the pacific northwest. You had to point it for just south of Texas, and our line of sight was nearly blocked by trees.

We had cable right before that, and bumped it down to the local channels only tier. The cable company never actually sent anyone out to put the filter on, so we continued to get basic cable for free and my parents never said poo poo. They never would have gone for a bootleg cable box.

EL BROMANCE
Jun 10, 2006

COWABUNGA DUDES!
🥷🐢😬



Ah, the amount of taped off satellite tapes in my VHS collection that had a few minutes of scrambled picture because the "known" info was that they would send out pulses to kill the pirate cards at certain times, so you'd have to take the card out so it didn't have to be rewritten.

Always preferred the old OTA pay service in the UK where once you had a card, you just updated the hex values in a settings page each month for the new decryption key. All the PPV movies that were labelled as having macrovision simply didn't, and you got a great channel selection without anything more than a $10 card. Just had to know someone with a writer for the first time. From what I've read, it was all an inside job run by News Corp - https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-17494723

zer0spunk
Nov 6, 2000

devil never even lived

EL BROMANCE posted:

Ah, the amount of taped off satellite tapes in my VHS collection that had a few minutes of scrambled picture because the "known" info was that they would send out pulses to kill the pirate cards at certain times, so you'd have to take the card out so it didn't have to be rewritten.

Always preferred the old OTA pay service in the UK where once you had a card, you just updated the hex values in a settings page each month for the new decryption key. All the PPV movies that were labelled as having macrovision simply didn't, and you got a great channel selection without anything more than a $10 card. Just had to know someone with a writer for the first time. From what I've read, it was all an inside job run by News Corp - https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-17494723

I had a black box in highschool. It seemed cool at first, but my parents already had some dumb extensive expensive cable package so it basically unlocked PPV movies that I didn't really care enough about to watch since it was never anything other then bad big budget stuff and then the crappier cable movie channels like starz and cinemax east/west/latino that no one wanted in the first place. The porn part of it was also really strange and not at all a draw..somehow porn ppv was censored in a round about way..they couldn't ever show any actual penetration, they couldn't show most sex acts, etc etc. You'd get these strange shot for spice versions of porn movies where the actors would do takes where one persons head blocks the actual act from the camera's perspective austin powers style..as a strange art piece it kinda worked but I don't know who was spending money on that and getting off to it when the internet freely existed at the same time..I always wanted to know what the rationale there was..Like some weird corporate meeting where they decided the porn channels could exist but dicks could never be shown entering vaginas...talk about weird american repression personified: spice channel

It was always the first question anyone had when they found out about the box too. And then you'd get to crush their dreams by explaining. And also question what they thought would happen, were they planning on inviting themselves over to watch it with me? ask me to tape it for them? I don't think anyone ever thought that far ahead of the initial FREE PORN flashing light in their brain

e: i didn't care about boxing ppv or wrestling ppv at all, so I guess that was where it was the most popular. I pretty much wasted the 100 or whatever bucks it cost me, but I was lucky enough that the one I got was legit and not just a shell with a brick inside or something

e: also the big scare was the cable co could send out some sort of signal that would fry the box..which happened exactly 0 times. what did happen though was slowly they'd switch over channels to digital only and then eventually everything became cableCARD..i'd wager descramblers were a big reason

zer0spunk fucked around with this message at 19:35 on Sep 6, 2019

Casimir Radon
Aug 2, 2008


That's called "softcore", it's pretty lame.

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zer0spunk
Nov 6, 2000

devil never even lived

Casimir Radon posted:

That's called "softcore", it's pretty lame.

Hey, I grew up with red shoe diaries and all those shannon whatsherface nonsense "thrillers"..If you asked who here has seen that movie with anna nicole smith and the skyscaper (possibly named..skyscraper?) I'd shamefully raise a hand.

These were like next level. Actual hardcore porn movies, but alt takes with these random censorship rules. Like female oral sex could be shown (though obviously faked or just like mimed since who can really tell) but male oral sex couldn't..stuff like that. Like if you named a big studio porn movie from the 90s I can bet you they shot a version for spice and channels like it where they fake everything in comical rear end ways...it's surreal honestly. I think I remember seeing a doc where they sort of explained that companies like disney untimely owned these porn channels way up on the branching subsidiaries so that was conceit..which is still a mindfuck if you think about it. It was like airplane edits of hardcore porn or something.

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