Culling the collection

As I noted in my recent posts, watching more streamed content has taken some of the pressure off my urge to buy physical media, but while it’s helped me to save some money (and spared me the irritation of buying a few things not worth the price) it doesn’t scratch the deep-rooted itch to possess something new. That urge to collect is something I’ve had all my life, beginning with plastic model kits when I was very young, expanding to include books and then vinyl records as I got a bit older and morphing into other media as things evolved. With movies, it was a matter of “collecting” experiences when access was out of my individual control – at the height of my theatre-going back in the ’70s and ’80s, I’d see maybe three-hundred movies a year, going five or six times a week, supplemented by others on television. I actually resisted home video for a long time as I was so attached to seeing movies on the big screen, but as the quality of the theatre experience declined with multiplexing I began to collect movies on VHS in the early ’90s, branching out to laserdisc later in the decade. And then DVD arrived and there was no turning back – actually owning movies assumed an imperative I was powerless to resist.

Which is why, now that I’m retired and spending more time at home I’ve been feeling the oppressive weight of my collection, which long ago exceeded available shelf space. They’re piled everywhere, many still in their shrink wrap as I’ve never had time to watch them all. This echoes my earlier experience with books, which I’d buy in large numbers only to have quite a few sitting on the shelf unread sometimes for decades. I’d always mean to get around to them, but time is limited. Of course, it takes longer to read a book than to watch a movie, but then I’ve bought far more movies than books in the past three decades.

So in recent months there’s been a growing conflict between the compulsion to collect and the desire to lighten the load. Getting into streaming has created a crack and I’ve begun to widen it. To my surprise, this has proved to be a bit easier than expected. Over a few weeks, I went through all the shelves systematically and pulled out disks I felt certain I’d never want to watch again (even knowing that one day that feeling might change, but also aware that many of them would be accessible through streaming if I did change my mind), and even some which I’d never watched but now had no interest in – in some cases wondering why I’d ordered them in the first place.

On that first pass, I removed just over three-hundred DVDs, including a number of box sets (I doubt I’ll ever want to watch Charlie Chaplin again – I find his cloying need for adoration really off-putting despite his talent for physical comedy, much preferring Buster Keaton, most of whose work I now have on Blu-ray; nor am I likely to want to go back to D.W. Griffith), as well as over two-hundred-and-sixty Blu-rays. I have eight full banker’s boxes stacked in a corner right now. Which raises another question: what to do with them? I have no interest in setting up an on-line store and working to make money off them, but I’m also reluctant to drop them off at a thrift store, which seems only a step above tossing them into the dumpster behind my building. I wasn’t surprised to find that the Winnipeg Public Library and the Universities don’t want donations of physical media – they have limited space and no time or resources to sift through and evaluate anything they receive.

I’ve previously mentioned a small local store where I occasionally trade in a few movies, but I was doubtful that the owner would be interested in the kind of volume I was trying to get rid of. Still, I sorted out about forty-five of what I considered the best and took them in one day. He was willing to take a look and after a while came over to where I was browsing and offered what seemed like an absurdly high trade-in value – about double what I had expected. So I continued to browse, gathering an assortment of disks which added up to roughly what he’d offered.

This seemed pretty promising because in the past few years he has been importing more releases from England, Australia and the States. Although the prices on these are pretty high (he has to recoup shipping and import charges on top of his retail mark-up), many reflect the kind of things I was myself ordering from overseas … more importantly, because I was being given credit, I could consider them to be essentially free. So that day, having brought in forty-five Blu-rays, I walked out of the store with sixteen brand new releases from Arrow, Imprint, Umbrella, 88Films, Eureka, Kino Lorber…

Even better, having mentioned what I was doing to reduce my collection, he said he’d be willing to take a look at more – in fact, though he initially told me I could come in maybe once a week, as he checked out my selections he said I could actually come in any time. As I was leaving the store, I saw something which I hadn’t noticed before – a rather expensive Umbrella limited edition of Nacho Vigalondo’s Timecrimes (2007). Over the next couple of days this preyed on my mind; because of the price I suspected it might still be there for a while, but I’d been caught out before when I missed buying a copy of Arrow’s three-disk limited edition of Dario Argento’s Deep Red (1975), which had already gone out of print, because I waited too long to think it over.

Having checked, and found out that this edition of Timecrimes was already out of print, the pressure compelled me to return to the store with another bag full of Blu-rays. Luckily Timecrimes was still there (and I probably would never have paid that price in cash) and he again gave me a very generous credit for what I’d brought in. So I combed the shelves again, though this time I actually wasn’t able to reach the limit of the credit – and walked out with eleven more Blu-rays plus $90 in cash. In the space of three days, I’d acquired a hefty number of new movies for my collection which objectively did represent a reduction in the overall number (in balance down about sixty-five), giving me a big dopamine rush in the process. In fact, this represented an “expenditure” far in excess of my previous buying habits.

I also discovered that the store does a little business in laserdiscs, so I spent an afternoon digging boxes out of storage and cataloguing what remains of that collection. Though there are only two-hundred-and-thirty and their value is low, they could net me a few more desirable import Blu-rays. So rather than seeing this culling of the collection as a kind of painful amputation, it instead could satisfy my need to acquire new disks for the rest of the year, further suppressing my compulsion to place orders on-line.

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So what have these trade-ins netted me?

From Umbrella, in addition to Timecrimes, Na Hong-jin’s The Chaser (2008), made some years before The Wailing (2016), which was one of the best of the new wave of Korean dark thrillers; plus limited editions of Ian Barry’s The Chain Reaction (1980), a modest but effective thriller about nuclear waste and corporate malfeasance, Ti West’s The House of the Devil (2009), Nick Kozakis’ Godless: The Eastfield Exorcism (2022), and Robert Harmon’s The Hitcher (1986), a rather nasty thriller starring Rutger Hauer as an avatar of unmotivated evil, counterbalanced with a charming documentary portrait of the actor, Blond, Blue Eyes (2006).

From Arrow, Panedomium (2023) by a visual artist named Quarxx – I don’t know much about it (a vision of Purgatory), but a fellow customer at the store recommended it; Lo Wei’s New Fist of Fury (1976), an early starring role for Jackie Chan; The Threat (1966), an early thriller from Kinji Fukasaku; A Certain Killer/A Killer’s Key (both 1967), a double feature from Kazuo Mori starring Raizô Ichikawa as a hitman; Play it Cool (1970), a Yasuzo Masumura movie previously unreleased on video outside Japan; and Ataru Oikawa’s Manga-based J-horror Tomie (1998).

From Eureka, four Chinese martial arts releases with a total of nine features – Patrick Tam’s The Sword (1980), Lo Wei’s A Man Called Tiger (1973), Horrible History containing four historical epics by Chang Cheh, and Super Spies and Secret Lies with a trio of post-Bond contemporary action movies by Chang Cheh and Lo Wei.

From Radiance, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Allonsanfàn (1974), a historical drama starring Marcello Mastroianni made a few years before the brothers had an international hit with Padre Padrone (1977); Tai Kato’s Eighteen Years in Prison (1967), made between By a Man’s Face Shall You Know Him (1966) and I, the Executioner (1968), both just released in a set by Film Movement; The Shape of Night (1964), a highly-regarded feature about a country woman forced into prostitution by her yakuza boyfriend, made by Noboru Nakamura, a director I’m unfamiliar with; Goodbye & Amen (1977), a thriller by Damiano Damiani; and the three-disk Daiei Gothic, a box set of early ’60s Japanese ghost stories.

From Kino Lorber, Jeff Lieberman’s regional low-budget horror Squirm (1976), which makes up for a lot of dramatic weaknesses with some really unsettling moments involving voracious bloodworms; Michael Anderson’s mini-series adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1980), which I’ve never seen; Arthur Ripley’s The Chase (1946), a film noir he made before taking up a television career, from which he only emerged once more to make the Robert Mitchum moonshine noir Thunder Road (1958); Dwain Esper’s bizarre exploitation horror movie Maniac (1934); and Arthur Penn’s Target (1985), which I picked up on the day Gene Hackman’s death was announced – obviously there would’ve been better ways to mark the occasion as this turned out to be a major misfire for both Penn and Hackman, a dull international thriller which puts its emphases in all the wrong places.

From Imprint, Akira Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala (1975), Zhang Yimou’s Hero (2002), and Theodore J. Flicker’s The President’s Analyst (1967), about which more later.

From Criterion, the Blu-ray of John M. Stahl’s Leave Her to Heaven (1945) and the new dual-format edition of Kazuki Omori’s Godzilla vs Biollante (1989).

And from 88Films, Ivan Lai’s The Blue Jean Monster (1991), an uneasy mix of Hong Kong crime/action, fantasy and comedy, and the dual-format limited edition of Umberto Lenzi’s Eyeball (1975).

I also picked up Hammer’s absurdly elaborate (and pricey) five-disk dual-format edition of Brian Clemens’ Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter (1974), Mark Duplass and Patrick Brice’s Creep (2014) from Second Sight, and a couple of used disks – Walter Summers’ The Human Monster (1939) starring Bela Lugosi and the Chinese sci-fi movie The Wandering Earth II (2023) by Frant Gwo, a prequel to his The Wandering Earth (2019), which I’ll have to stream.