Confessions of a VHS Rental Junkie @fullmoonhorror @RealCharlesBand

Hello, my name is Packy and I am a recovering VHS rental junkie, and also Head Llama on this blog. This is my story:

If you were born after 1997, there’s a good chance that you probably haven’t ever watched a movie on VHS. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, it just means that you weren’t around for the home video revolution. You see, VHS tapes were the fast widely accepted form of video playback ever. You could buy just about anything on VHS, from your favorite big screen movies to the animated Disney classics. Born in 1976, I beat the VHS tape to the market by a year. By the time I knew anything about anything I knew that if I put a VHS tape in the player I could watch Tron or Black Hole (2 of my absolute favorite movies, even to this day). As the VHS tape grew in popularity, so too did the emergence of the Video Rental market, led primarily by Blockbuster Video and Hollywood Video. In these wonderful stores you could pay a small fee to rent a VHS tape for a few days. Most video rental shops were fairly large and carried a large selection of tapes, from the biggest blockbuster popcorn flicks to the bizarre straight to video oddities like Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death. You could rent just about anything: drama, comedy, action, sci-fi, fantasy, animated, musicals, documentaries, skin flicks, literally everything. VHS rental was truly a beautiful thing.

I was always drawn to the more bizarre side of the VHS rental shop. Why rent Die Hard again when I could try out strange oddities like Tape Heads or Trancers? Certainly I enjoyed the popular movies of the time, but I saw most of them in the theaters. I was drawn to the strange little beauties that were well off the beaten path, most of them made by Full Moon Features. I’ve never been able to put my finger on why I loved these little low budget indie darlings. I just did. I loved everything about them, the stop motion animation, the campy dialogue, the babes, the monsters, the thrill, the wildly different stories, all of this and more. In many ways, I’ve drawn mountains of inspiration from the b-movies that I have rented over the years. All of them, whether good or bad, left an impression in my mind and gave my brain fuel to think of my own bizarre ideas for stories, which gave birth to such characters as Bob (click to read a Bob tale), Diabetic Dracula (click here to read a Diabetic Dracula tale), and The Cataloguers of Time (click here to read a TCOT tale). Bottom line, I was addicted to video rental and I rented some truly messed up movies. Here’s a montage of some of the types of films that I am talking about, as put together by the Full Moon Trailers YouTube Channel:

The sad news is that video rental doesn’t exist anymore, at least not like it used to. Sure you can go online and rent movies, or get them On Demand from your video provider of choice. It’s not the same. There was something magical about walking down the aisles at a VHS rental shop that you can’t get from an online shop. At the brick and mortar store you would run into people who were looking for bizarre movies too, and you would strike up a conversation about the crazy movies you each had seen. Sometimes friendships were born from these discussions. Also, when you went to the rental shop, each movie had beautiful box art with a full multi-paragraph description as well as multiple high quality photos. Nowadays, you’re lucky when browsing online to get a movie poster, a one paragraph description, and a movie trailer. For awhile after the video rental market collapse in the early 2000s, I wandered the video void aimlessly. Netflix helped, but only so far. The good news is that Full Moon Features has created a streaming service: Full Moon Streaming. It hosts a wide variety of their films both old and new, as well as episodic content and behind the scenes videos. It’s a one stop spot for all things Full Moon. If you want hundreds of hours of entertainment for just $6.99 a month, I highly recommend checking it out.

This entire month I have focused my blog on the wonderfully bizarre films made by Full Moon Features. If you’d like a brief rundown of what Full Moon Features is all about, read my post from the first of the month: here. TL;DR – Full Moon Features makes wildly creative low budget films for the home video market, and have been doing so for 28 years. In appreciation of the countless hours that their films have provided for me, I wrote up a whole smattering of reviews for a small sampling of their catalog (which is well over 200 films). Please take a gander through the list below and read a few reviews, also come back tomorrow for one more very special post meant especially for Charles Band (the creator of Full Moon Features) and all of the talented folks over at Full Moon Features.

The review for Trancers is up! Read it here!

The review for Arcade is up! Read it here!

The review for Bad Channels is up! Read it here!

The review for Unlucky Charms is up! Read it here!

The review for Dollman is up! Read it here!

The review for Meridian is up! Read it here!

The review for Demonic Toys is up! Read it here!

The review for Trancers II is up! Read it here!

The review for Trancers – City Of Lost Angels is up Read it here!

The review for The Dead Want Women is up! Read it here!

The review for Head of the Family is up! Read it here!

The review for Evil Bong is up! Read it here!

The review for Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death is up! Read it here!

The review for Trophy Heads: Episode One is up! Read it here!

The review for Subspecies is up! Read it here!

The review for Doctor Mordrid is up! Read it here!

The review for Killjoy is up! Read it here!

The review for Dollman Vs Demonic Toys is up! Read it here!