For today, I got

A Gun for Jennifer
Cruel Britannia
Who Killed Teddy Bear

Last one wasn't on my radar at all, but then I saw "grimy" and "NYC" in the description and before I knew it it was in my cart.

Day 7:

Demonville Terror & free copy of Black Cat 1&2. Only 1 freebie per order so I am going to have to wait on the pogs.

I think you mean Devonsville Terror, and that's a favorite of mine even if I'm not quite sure what's happening all the time. I'll just say that I think the timing of the lead actress's appearance in the film is significant.

I keep looking at Two Undercover Angels, but I'm probably just going with Sex & Broadcasting, the New Jersey radio station doc

Opp, you are right. My brain couldn’t even see that it wasn’t Demon until you said something. Blind buy for me, saw the production year and subject matter and it seemed up my alley.

I think you'll dig it. I always like those film that depict the way people accused of witchcraft were treated in colonial America, and this transports it to a contemporary setting. Plus you have the always great Donald Pleasance (I'm still not sure how he figures into the story here, but what they hey, you get Donald Pleasance into your little low budget movie you just do it) and Paul Willson, best known as a Cheers barfly and one of "the Bobs" from Office Space. Worthy addition to a collection, especially at 13 clams

I got that movie (Devonsvile Terror) from a previous sale as well. Think it was around the same price

Im also looking at the Franco set for today

I realize that I won’t sell Paff on it because I recall his dislike of ‘older’ Polish women when it was offered in last year’s January sale , but at $13.13 the Polish sci-fi comedy SEXMISSION might be worth padding an order for folks willing to go off the well-worn VS path. I took a chance on it back then, even noting in this thread that I rarely keep many of these ‘Eastern Bloc’ fantasy movies (my Deaf Crocodile purchases run about 60-40 against, even though they’re all worth watching at least once). I finally watched it a couple of months ago and thought it was very well-made and even fairly lavish considering the dire economic conditions in the country at the time, and generally as clever as a film made under a repressive regime could be (and shhh, don’t tell Paff, but despite the pics on the VS listing many of the Polish women in it are decidedly not old, and often naked). I was surprised to learn, both in the supplements and online, that it’s considered one of the more important films of that era, and was certainly a huge hit domestically and in many countries in the communist Bloc despite being a fairly bald-faced takedown of totalitarianism. The story behind that seems to be that either the iron-fisted censors didn’t pick up on it or they felt they could let it pass to make themselves look more ‘modern’ and tolerant because on the surface it plays like a simple battle-of-the-sexes lark. But audiences across the Bloc apparently knew exactly what it was saying and embraced it because such opportunities were decidedly rare. Meanwhile, feminist critics in the west often completely misread it. So far I’ve leaned toward keeping it.

I always enjoy reading their hints of what's to come...

Quote:

And now for what you’ve all been waiting for: hints for what’s left to come in 2026!

Saw those in today’s email. After the decidedly underwhelming new releases offered this week (none of which prompted much excitement or discussion over in the VS thread in HD talk) I suspect anything might be more exciting in the months ahead. I have to admit I’ve grown a bit wary of announcements of “early” pictures by “iconic” or “controversial” or “iconoclastic” filmmakers. Invariably those tags came later and for works that earned them such repute. Many of these ‘early’ films are usually distinct signifiers of burgeoning, wholly unique, even boundary-pushing talents, but they’ve often been relegated to low-budget or even public domain DVD labels for equally justifiable reasons. I often think of how the early works of Brian DePalma, for example, have been bargain bin fodder for years. Even Something Weird distributed a couple of his earliest ones for ages. I can still give props to VS for restoring this kind of stuff for physical, streaming, and posterity, but as others have noted in the VS threads here on occasion, sometimes the hyperbole can be overstated. The January new releases kinda speak to that (solely in my opinion, of course), but as always I’ll cross my fingers for what’s ahead.

Haha, I'll have to think about it in that context and decide if I want it. You're making me sound like a horrible person for my dismissal of the film, I'm just saying if I'm gonna watch a sex comedy with a lot of nudity, I'd hope the people on screen are at least attractive. And that films with a lot of nudity are very rarely, shall we say, plot driven or socially relevant. To quote an actress from the great unseen movie The Farmer's Daughters, "Oh, come on, RJ. Nobody's comin' to see this film for the plot. They're comin' to see tits and ass."

I just need one more $30 purchase to get my points. The deal finder in me is very torn. Do I get Mind Benders and Devonshire Terror or Vice Academy 1-6 which isn’t on sale?
I’m really iffy on horror/comedy so Mind Benders worries me and I keep seeing comparisons to Surf 2 which i absolutely hated.
I have two hours to decide.

Seriously, that's not a hard decision at all, Toddster. DevonsVILLE Terror. If you have any affinity at all for 80s horror, it's a must own.

ETA: And I just noticed your location. Despite allegedly being set somewhere in New England, the film was shot all in Wisconsin.

Sold!

also I do love the fact that more than one person fucked the name up.

No worries! You’re not a horrible person, of course, and you’re hardly the only one to harbour apprehensions about one country’s cinema or another! I think that it was just such an out-of-left-field and remarkably honest comment last year that it caught a couple of us by surprise, in an amusing way. Even you thought it sounded a bit harsh at the time. The grey-text portion of my previous comment above was jokey, though, I can assure you!

For what it’s worth, I do think there are some attractive naked women in the film who are not shown in VS pictures.

However, I do think that the nudity (which can range from fleeting to copious) in these communist bloc films in particular can be appreciated within a different context, and that in most cases I’ve seen so far where nudity is present, the films are likely to still be more plot-driven and socially relevant than most of their American counterparts. It’s still exploitation of a sort for sure, but it often serves purposes beyond titillation even if one’s opinion of the films will all be down to personal taste in the end. So if a viewer just wants some skin, well, this movie has a fair amount, but it doesn’t feel exploitative in the ‘American’ sense with those added layers of sleaze we’ve become privy to both in front of and behind the camera. Much of it is presented matter-of-factly in SEXMISSION because casual nudity in a future world comprised entirely of women would probably be akin to the way men in our ‘real’ world are often perfectly comfortable (too comfortable for my own personal tastes) being shirtless around each other, and sometimes even less depending on the situation (women, too, of course).

Beyond that, 40 years of hindsight certainly demonstrate that the filmmakers were making a much more pointed yet stealthily deployed statement about the absurdist realities of life under authoritarian rule. The superficial ‘war of the sexes’ aspect, including the nudity, seems to have been largely a smokescreen to get the film past censors who were probably hunting for more overt forms of protest or dissent. The censors seemed to have interpreted the film as a satire of a then-unimaginable society run by women instead of of seeing that the women’s society was a reflection of the totalitarian government running, and ruining, the country.

Keep in mind that if you end up buying this and hating it, I will claim that my account here was hijacked and I never wrote these words.

I see the VICE ACADEMY set is just above 1000 copies, which suggests it should survive until at least one sale, so it’s probably good that you (presumably?) held off on it for now. And I agree with the other folks here that DEVILSTOWN HORROR is a decent hidden gem for the price.

I'll probably check out Sexmission one of these days. I didn't buy it at the sale, but I saw there were still over 2000 copies left with slip, it'll certainly appear at another sale later this year.

And yeah, I admit I was a bit judgemental about it based on appearance, which was a exceptionally low budget sci-fi sex comedy, and most of the women in the VS screenshots weren't all that attractive. But, as Brian tells us, there are other actresses in the movie not in those screenshots that I'd find more pleasing to the eye. And more importantly, that there is some strong social and political commentary in the movie, though I admit to knowing little about Poland in the mid-80s. Those two things make it something I'll consider in the future, but it's too late now for this sale.

Hey I probably knew about as much as you when I bought it last January. I knew the place had a communist authoritarian government back in that era, and that’s about it. I think my experience with Polish cinema was basically the THREE COLORS TRILOGY and THE DEKALOG, both of which appeared near or after the fall of the Soviet Union (which no one apparently told Putin about). I may have seen a few other bloc-era Polish films from the period over the last 20 years or so but nothing that I could recall for comparison. And most of the broader Soviet sci-fi I’ve seen was either Russian or German, and much more strait laced. The movie did prompt some googling afterward to see if I was interpreting it properly, but that should be common with a lot of old foreign films. I did lean toward it being both anti-authoritarian and anti-feminist, so I definitely read something into it as a westerner that wasn’t actually there for the original audience.

Totally agree that it’ll be around for another sale, probably several. If nothing else, it can be a cheap add-on for folks collecting points toward freebies or whatnot. Definitely not something to pay more for than it was this time around.

Is anyone picking up any Love Massacre items?

The shirt isn’t really working for me like the Tammy & The T-Rex valentine shirt.

Seems like Debbie Does Dallas is the big news?

I didn't see anything on the VS page that interested me, and I'm not opening Melusine till I get home from work.