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Raedon Home Video's library (1987-1990)
Discussion in 'Future NC Requests' started by ryanasaurus0077, Jun 26, 2010.
For those of you unfamiliar with Raedon Home Video, it's an '80s home video company that's notorious for putting out some of the worst direct-to-video movies ever. (I'm only placing this request because I recently got a Raedon tape myself: PROVOKED.) Here's what Mike Malloy has to say about this crap (all Raedon titles are in all caps):
Your head will hurt. Your eyes will sting. Your brain will rot. You will wonder why you ever shoved ALIEN PRIVATE EYE, ROLLERBLADE WARRIORS or any other Raedon Home Video release into your VCR. And more to the point, you will wonder how this Raedon direct-to-video garbage ever got made.
The answer is the 1980s. Or, more specifically, the 1980s video boom. The VCR had created a new, wide-open market -- home video -- for movies. Mom-and-pop video stores, prevalent over chains at the time, were blindly stocking just about anything that was offered up. Cheapjack video labels proliferated -- Vestron, Lightning, Prism, Academy, Transworld, Vidmark, Magnum.
And then there was Raedon Home Video. For those who think they know the definition of amateurish moviemaking, throw out your standards. A typical Raedon release features actors mispronouncing common words, anachronistic period costumes that are 250 years off the mark and love scenes with actors that appear to be entirely unfamiliar with the sex act. This is, of course, in addition to unintelligible dialogue, camera angles and acting. The quality of these movies cannot be understated.
But even if Raedon is guilty of egregious transgressions against the art of cinema, the video label does serve one important function to culture: the story of the '80s video boom can most colorfully be told through the history of this single video distributor.
"In those days, it was kind of like the Wild West," says Bruce G. Hallenbeck, whose 1989 film VAMPYRE was picked up by Raedon. "There were no real fast and hard rules, and everything was kind of being made up as it went along. And you could pretty much release anything."
So this VCR-created boom was good for aspiring '80s filmmakers, maybe not so good for the artistic quality of low-budget cinema.
"It ruined everything," says filmmaker Michael Lang. "It destroyed the B-movie theatrically." Lang worked in several capacities on the 1989 futuristic rockabilly sci-fi Western film DEATH COLLECTOR, a surprisingly tolerable Raedon video release.
Understand, in the 1970s, low-budget exploitation films were experiencing their golden age, playing at drive-ins and grindhouses across the country, giving the world stylish cult faves like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Vanishing Point, Sweet Sweetback's Badasssss Song and Assault on Precinct 13.
Compare those titles against the disposable, what-the-hell-is-this-shit '80s fare offered in the Raedon catalog: PUNK VACATION, GAME OF SURVIVAL, NUDITY REQUIRED, FEELIN' SCREWY -- films that are even worse than their titles might indicate.
Raedon Home Video got into the VHS game in the late '80s, about ten years into that format's existence. By then, many low-budget filmmakers weren't even gunning for theatrical releases for their movies. They were simply hoping to dump their movies into a video release. And Raedon obliged.
Based in Southern California (Northridge then Chatsworth), Raedon often dealt with movie sales companies like Double Helix and Panorama instead of brokering home video deals with the filmmakers themselves. This meant sometimes a director had little contact with the video label distributing his movie.
"The first day I saw the tape in a video store here I was stunned," says Hallenbeck, "because I hadn't been told it was going to be out that soon. About six months after we completed all the post production it was in the stores. At one of the local video stores here, the owner said, 'Hey, your movie's here.' I looked at it and said, 'I'll be damned. My first feature.'"
But Lang had a little more contact with the video label. He got to see Raedon's headquarters.
"It was just a warehouse," he says. "A warehouse with a few offices in the front. And the owner was this big fat guy that looked like Grizzly Adams. He was dressed in a t-shirt and shorts. I wasn't exactly impressed."
But what should one expect from the distributor of movies that are arguably the worst ever made? Even Raedon filmmakers concede that the label's releases are rubbish.
Says Lang, "Raedon was for the filmmakers who were basically inept fools who made inept product which they couldn't sell to anyone else, so they ended up at Raedon. Or Troma. I mean, Troma is the other Raedon of the business. Troma is just smarter, because they made their own movies, and they made trashy movies."
Clearly, the centerpiece of ineptitude in Raedon's catalog is a 1987 film entitled ALIEN PRIVATE EYE. The film may not yet have a Plan 9-type status as a Holy Grail of Bad Cinema, but those who have seen it know the score. A video copy on Half.com recently had the asking price of $69.75.
"It's a piece of shit," says actor Robert Axelrod, who played the villainous Scunge in the film ("I was 'Scunge.' That's a stupid name.").
"I was astonished at the ineptitude," says Michael Jonascu, who worked on the film's sound but didn't want his company's name to appear in the closing credits.
ALIEN PRIVATE EYE is deserving of this derision and more. It stars former Chippendales dancer Nikki Hill (aka Nikki Fastinetti) as Lemro, the eponymous extra-terrestrial gumshoe. The plastic Spock ears let us know he's an alien. The clichéd fedora lets us know he's a private eye. Other than that, Hill just tries to play Lemro as an '80s tough guy ("Yo!") in a performance that makes the viewer sad to be a human being.
"I did [later] see it in a video bin," says Jonascu of ALIEN PRIVATE EYE. "It was like a buck ninety-nine. And I thought, 'You know, I should probably pick this up. It's part of my filmography, for better or worse.' And I didn't. I think that kind of says a lot of it. It was two bucks and I didn't want to shell out the cash for it."
Surprisingly, there is actually a "name" filmmaker who has an early credit in the movie: writer-director Scott Spiegel, who is well known in horror circles for his involvement in the Evil Dead and From Dusk Till Dawn series. Spiegel feels no embarrassment for his minor participation in this sub-sub-competent flick.
"You have to understand," he says. "When I came out here from Detroit, that was still kind of fun. That was cool. Someone was making movies. Let's do it."
In fact, Raedon releases occasionally catch a star on the way up or down. A pre-fame Campbell Scott (Singles, Roger Dodger) appears in AIN'T NO WAY BACK, a bizarre mishmash of Deliverance and Witness. And washed-up stars of yesteryear like Julie Newmar, Troy Donahue and Rory Calhoun each slummed in a Raedon film.
Fortunately, all things -- even the indescribably horrid -- must end. The '80s video boom became the video glut of 1990.
"It was the last time with all those crappy movies being sold, when people were actually buying that stuff," says Lang. "The '80s were an incredible time for that, with the ravenous need for video product. But it got so glutted that by 1990 it just completely collapsed. The floor was like a trap door."
"Buyers were looking for better product, higher quality product," continues Lang. "I think that killed Raedon too. The video store owners had had enough of all this crap. I mean, it worked for a few years, but I think there was just too much of it."
So what lessons were learned? Maybe few. Lang, Hallenbeck and Jonascu say they see a present-day parallel to home video's legitimization of 16mm hack filmmaking of the late '80s.
"A lot of people dove in at that point," says Jonascu. "And I think the thing that is most like that now is that DV has gotten so good that you're starting to see a lot of the same thing happening again."
As for final thoughts on the phenomenon of the '80s video boom, Lang says it most succinctly: "Raedon caught the wave. And then the wave left them. It left everybody."
But Spiegel has the best understanding of the route the era's low-budget filmmaking should have taken.
"Some of that product is so bad, it should have gone direct to audio."
Raedon Home Video's library (1987-1990)
Discussion in 'Future NC Requests' started by ryanasaurus0077, Jun 26, 2010.
For those of you unfamiliar with Raedon Home Video, it's an '80s home video company that's notorious for putting out some of the worst direct-to-video movies ever. (I'm only placing this request because I recently got a Raedon tape myself: PROVOKED.) Here's what Mike Malloy has to say about this crap (all Raedon titles are in all caps):
Your head will hurt. Your eyes will sting. Your brain will rot. You will wonder why you ever shoved ALIEN PRIVATE EYE, ROLLERBLADE WARRIORS or any other Raedon Home Video release into your VCR. And more to the point, you will wonder how this Raedon direct-to-video garbage ever got made.
The answer is the 1980s. Or, more specifically, the 1980s video boom. The VCR had created a new, wide-open market -- home video -- for movies. Mom-and-pop video stores, prevalent over chains at the time, were blindly stocking just about anything that was offered up. Cheapjack video labels proliferated -- Vestron, Lightning, Prism, Academy, Transworld, Vidmark, Magnum.
And then there was Raedon Home Video. For those who think they know the definition of amateurish moviemaking, throw out your standards. A typical Raedon release features actors mispronouncing common words, anachronistic period costumes that are 250 years off the mark and love scenes with actors that appear to be entirely unfamiliar with the sex act. This is, of course, in addition to unintelligible dialogue, camera angles and acting. The quality of these movies cannot be understated.
But even if Raedon is guilty of egregious transgressions against the art of cinema, the video label does serve one important function to culture: the story of the '80s video boom can most colorfully be told through the history of this single video distributor.
"In those days, it was kind of like the Wild West," says Bruce G. Hallenbeck, whose 1989 film VAMPYRE was picked up by Raedon. "There were no real fast and hard rules, and everything was kind of being made up as it went along. And you could pretty much release anything."
So this VCR-created boom was good for aspiring '80s filmmakers, maybe not so good for the artistic quality of low-budget cinema.
"It ruined everything," says filmmaker Michael Lang. "It destroyed the B-movie theatrically." Lang worked in several capacities on the 1989 futuristic rockabilly sci-fi Western film DEATH COLLECTOR, a surprisingly tolerable Raedon video release.
Understand, in the 1970s, low-budget exploitation films were experiencing their golden age, playing at drive-ins and grindhouses across the country, giving the world stylish cult faves like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Vanishing Point, Sweet Sweetback's Badasssss Song and Assault on Precinct 13.
Compare those titles against the disposable, what-the-hell-is-this-shit '80s fare offered in the Raedon catalog: PUNK VACATION, GAME OF SURVIVAL, NUDITY REQUIRED, FEELIN' SCREWY -- films that are even worse than their titles might indicate.
Raedon Home Video got into the VHS game in the late '80s, about ten years into that format's existence. By then, many low-budget filmmakers weren't even gunning for theatrical releases for their movies. They were simply hoping to dump their movies into a video release. And Raedon obliged.
Based in Southern California (Northridge then Chatsworth), Raedon often dealt with movie sales companies like Double Helix and Panorama instead of brokering home video deals with the filmmakers themselves. This meant sometimes a director had little contact with the video label distributing his movie.
"The first day I saw the tape in a video store here I was stunned," says Hallenbeck, "because I hadn't been told it was going to be out that soon. About six months after we completed all the post production it was in the stores. At one of the local video stores here, the owner said, 'Hey, your movie's here.' I looked at it and said, 'I'll be damned. My first feature.'"
But Lang had a little more contact with the video label. He got to see Raedon's headquarters.
"It was just a warehouse," he says. "A warehouse with a few offices in the front. And the owner was this big fat guy that looked like Grizzly Adams. He was dressed in a t-shirt and shorts. I wasn't exactly impressed."
But what should one expect from the distributor of movies that are arguably the worst ever made? Even Raedon filmmakers concede that the label's releases are rubbish.
Says Lang, "Raedon was for the filmmakers who were basically inept fools who made inept product which they couldn't sell to anyone else, so they ended up at Raedon. Or Troma. I mean, Troma is the other Raedon of the business. Troma is just smarter, because they made their own movies, and they made trashy movies."
Clearly, the centerpiece of ineptitude in Raedon's catalog is a 1987 film entitled ALIEN PRIVATE EYE. The film may not yet have a Plan 9-type status as a Holy Grail of Bad Cinema, but those who have seen it know the score. A video copy on Half.com recently had the asking price of $69.75.
"It's a piece of shit," says actor Robert Axelrod, who played the villainous Scunge in the film ("I was 'Scunge.' That's a stupid name.").
"I was astonished at the ineptitude," says Michael Jonascu, who worked on the film's sound but didn't want his company's name to appear in the closing credits.
ALIEN PRIVATE EYE is deserving of this derision and more. It stars former Chippendales dancer Nikki Hill (aka Nikki Fastinetti) as Lemro, the eponymous extra-terrestrial gumshoe. The plastic Spock ears let us know he's an alien. The clichéd fedora lets us know he's a private eye. Other than that, Hill just tries to play Lemro as an '80s tough guy ("Yo!") in a performance that makes the viewer sad to be a human being.
"I did [later] see it in a video bin," says Jonascu of ALIEN PRIVATE EYE. "It was like a buck ninety-nine. And I thought, 'You know, I should probably pick this up. It's part of my filmography, for better or worse.' And I didn't. I think that kind of says a lot of it. It was two bucks and I didn't want to shell out the cash for it."
Surprisingly, there is actually a "name" filmmaker who has an early credit in the movie: writer-director Scott Spiegel, who is well known in horror circles for his involvement in the Evil Dead and From Dusk Till Dawn series. Spiegel feels no embarrassment for his minor participation in this sub-sub-competent flick.
"You have to understand," he says. "When I came out here from Detroit, that was still kind of fun. That was cool. Someone was making movies. Let's do it."
In fact, Raedon releases occasionally catch a star on the way up or down. A pre-fame Campbell Scott (Singles, Roger Dodger) appears in AIN'T NO WAY BACK, a bizarre mishmash of Deliverance and Witness. And washed-up stars of yesteryear like Julie Newmar, Troy Donahue and Rory Calhoun each slummed in a Raedon film.
Fortunately, all things -- even the indescribably horrid -- must end. The '80s video boom became the video glut of 1990.
"It was the last time with all those crappy movies being sold, when people were actually buying that stuff," says Lang. "The '80s were an incredible time for that, with the ravenous need for video product. But it got so glutted that by 1990 it just completely collapsed. The floor was like a trap door."
"Buyers were looking for better product, higher quality product," continues Lang. "I think that killed Raedon too. The video store owners had had enough of all this crap. I mean, it worked for a few years, but I think there was just too much of it."
So what lessons were learned? Maybe few. Lang, Hallenbeck and Jonascu say they see a present-day parallel to home video's legitimization of 16mm hack filmmaking of the late '80s.
"A lot of people dove in at that point," says Jonascu. "And I think the thing that is most like that now is that DV has gotten so good that you're starting to see a lot of the same thing happening again."
As for final thoughts on the phenomenon of the '80s video boom, Lang says it most succinctly: "Raedon caught the wave. And then the wave left them. It left everybody."
But Spiegel has the best understanding of the route the era's low-budget filmmaking should have taken.
"Some of that product is so bad, it should have gone direct to audio."