According to Letterboxd I’ve seen 1,529 movies, which is almost certainly an undercount. If you sort by popularity you’ll see the usual suspects: Pulp Fiction, Knives Out, 2001, Dune, The Godfather, Star Wars…what’s more interesting is what’s at the bottom of the list. Things like Rockets Galore, the indifferent 1958 sequel to Whiskey Galore, which I saw on VHS on loan from Central Michigan University’s library some time in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Or Happy Birthday, Türke!, which I watched in German class back in undergraduate. Probably a German VHS tape, who even knows? Or Screaming Dead, a bad vaguely softcore horror film with Erin Brown that was a staple of the on-demand service in the house I shared with a bunch of folks out of college in 2005.
Some movies you wonder how you ever watched them. Take The Dark Side of the Moon, a 1990 film which plays like a weird mashup of Alien, Ghost Ship, and every bad Bermuda Triangle movie. I caught it on Netflix streaming in 2012, somehow. It didn’t get a non-VHS release, that I know of, until 2019. I won’t call anything with 1.2K watches on Letterboxd obscure, but it’s still pretty hard to come by. I don’t know that I’ve ever met someone in person who’s heard of it, let alone seen it.
Monstrosity, also known as The Atomic Brain, is a trickier case. As with many harder-to-find movies, it has a complex production history. The version available on Amazon Prime streaming was colorized, badly, over the wishes of the original director, and the transfer looks terrible. Ben Solovey obtained the 35mm negative and successfully kickstarted a 4K restoration. I bought one of the final Blu-ray copies from him off eBay, and I think only a few hundred were made. It’s still not a great movie, but the 4K transfer is night-and-day superior to what’s on Amazon streaming. Gold, a somewhat controversial Roger Moore actioner that was shot in South Africa in 1974, suffers from the same issue.
Sometimes a movie lives in legal limbo for years over rights issues, to the point of becoming samizdat. The excellent 1980 PBS production of The Lathe of Heaven was one such case, before finally getting a DVD release in 2000. I first saw it at a friend’s house in the late 1990s, on a well-loved VHS tape recording. Get Crazy, the legendary Allan Arkush musical comedy from 1983, had no legal home video release beyond a 1984 VHS tape. Kino Lorber finally cleared up the rights issues and did a Blu-ray release in 2021 (which I pre-ordered immediately). Before then, various VHS transfers floated around on YouTube and that’s how I saw it the first time.
Then you have movies which have one or more releases, but those releases don’t include audiences’ preferred cut. The most infamous case is the original three Star Wars movies. It’s not possible to buy the original theatrical cut in high definition. If that’s what you want, you have to fall back on the “Despecialized Edition”, a fan-made work. The quality is extremely high, though as a derivative work of a copyrighted film of questionable legal provenance. It’s a sort of limbo: Lucasfilm is obviously aware and hasn’t made trouble over it, the creators don’t court trouble by seeking money, and for my part, I’ve paid for the original trilogy in various formats several times over.
Another case is Irwin Allen’s terrible When Time Ran Out…Think The Towering Inferno, but with a volcano and a remote island resort. Paul Newman was forced into it for contractual reasons, and allegedly used the money to seed Newman’s Own. The original running time was 121 minutes. It was cut to 104 minutes for the international release; a 144-minute release was shown on US television and included on some VHS tapes. There is no Blu-ray release and all DVD releases are of the 104-minute version. Unavailable are various character-building scenes, plus most of the cock-fighting subplot involving Alex Karras. At some point, somehow, I saw the 121-minute version, and I’d like to see it again.
Many issues come together with Ship of Monsters (La nave de los monstruos), a Mexican comedy science fiction film from 1960. It stars Eulalio González, a/k/a “Piporro”, a Mexican singer-songwriter, actor, and comedian, as a cowboy who gets mixed up with some invaders from another planet. It would not be entirely inaccurate to describe them as Venusian vampire vixens, though this movie is family-friendly, and hilarious. There are some DVDs floating around, Spanish-language only, and for subtitles you’re relying on various fan subs. It’s worth it, but you’ll have to make an effort, and I doubt anyone just stumbles on this one.
Writing about Best Worst Movie I dwelled on a negative aspect of B-movie fandom. Here I wanted to write about a more positive aspect–people working to preserve art, and the fun in knowing that you’ve experienced something rare and unusual.