The Watchdog Barks
WELCOME to VW #114, the third week of our three-issues- in-four-weeks experiment. I’m glad to report that the first two
weeks went according to plan, except that Donna and I saw almost nothing of each other except the backs of our heads, despite living and working in the same house. I loathe this side-effect of our schedule, especially knowing that the entire undertaking is geared to make her even less available while she’s finishing up the Bava book, but at least this old house has its share of distractions. It is, in fact, especially rich in them at the
moment because, at the outset of last week, I took possession of the former video collection of my late friend Alan Upchurch, following the death of his twin brother Mark some months ago. Mark’s passion was always comics, but when Alan died and Mark inherited the videos, he became as infatuated with European horror and fantasy films as Alan ever was. Alan was a world traveller and, in addition to having the expected domestic pre-records and off-air re- cordings, he managed to collect dozens of rare PAL and SECAM pre-records. A number of these titles, even some very obscure ones, have since come out on DVD—Ptushko’s VIY, for ex- ample—but with their clamshell packaging, these old tapes seem too unique, too much a part of the history of these movies, to let go. Alan loved Barbara Steele and his collection re- flects this: there’s a French pre-record of Anto- nio Margheriti’s THE LONG HAIR OF DEATH, La Sorcière Sanglante, with cover art ripped- off from the original Italian poster art for Mario Bava’s BLACK SUNDAY; obscurities like the Kenneth More remake of THE 39 STEPS (which I haven’t seen since I was a kid) and the Italian- made I Soldi; and an off-air recording of HON- EYMOON WITH A STRANGER, with the label marked in Alan’s tiny handwriting, “Babs en- ters at 672”—the VHS time-count of where the movie became interesting for him. Many issues ago, in VW #78, I wrote a lengthy article about Mel Welles’ LADY FRANKENSTEIN in which I
revealed that a version 15 minutes longer than the American cut was released on video in Swe- den; now I know that it was also released this way in France—alas, dubbed into French (only the Swedish tape is in English with subtitles). As you can imagine, going through these
boxes has been both an exhilarating and mel- ancholy process. Every box yielded amazing discoveries, but every one of those discoveries represents something I can no longer discuss with Alan or Mark. Two French copies of MILL OF THE STONE WOMEN? How do they differ? I guess I’ll have to watch them and find out. Which of these eight different copies of THE HORRIBLE DR. HICHCOCK is definitive? I’ll have to watch them and see, too. Why, out of these hundreds of tapes, did they own only two HK Kung Fu movies and why did they acquire these two in particular? Maybe watching them will tell me, and maybe I’ll never know. One, awkwardly titled STORY IN TEMPLE RED LILY, occupies a clamshell box bearing the piquant pitch: “Wit- ness Morbid Executions.” Maybe they bought it simply to display that absurd box. Another melancholic aspect of this inherit-
ance is looking at this collection and noting how it is not only finite in size but finite in time: it’s all on VHS. Alan died before the introduction of DVD, and when I play one of these tapes— like a horribly pan&scanned pre-record of Umberto Lenzi’s CITY OF THE WALKING DEAD, with lots of two-shots of half-a-head talking to half-a-head or no head at all—it shows me what home video was like during Alan’s lifetime and I am forcefully reminded of the circumstances that prompted VIDEO WATCHDOG’s existence. And when I find a tape like Lightning Video’s THE HOUSE OF THE YELLOW CARPET, an Ital- ian horror film I’ve never heard of, and discover what an amazing work it is, I am similarly re- minded of why “Tapes From the Attic” needs to resurface in these pages from time to time. You can look forward to that happening
again in the near future, because I’ve been tak- ing notes on what I’ve been watching—before I haul it upstairs to the attic.
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Tim Lucas 3
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