The Death of the Drive-in to the Death of VHS... to the Internet.

It is with slight trepidation that I link to things like this but it gave me a lot of happiness this week and almost seemed too good to be true. Cultrarare (as in Cult + Ultra Rare) is a website devoted to sharing full length exploitation pictures that were released on VHS back in the medium's infancy when videos were contained in colossal puffy cases and, unless you were a millionaire, you had to rent a VCR to view your movie. The webmaster seems to have been a devotee of some small town goldmine of a video store and cleaned up when they either went out of business or when they did the switchover to DVD. All the films on his site are easy to download and the legalities of it all are more or less legit, not so much because all the titles are in the public domain, but because the majority were released by low-budget outfits to begin with and nobody cared about most of the films when they were released let alone three decades later.

Several hard to find films that I've been searching for are here. Country music exploitation like Nasvhille Girl (1976) and the rare Peter Fonda/Jerry Reed trucker film High Ballin' (1978) were highlights for me as were the plethora of pictures belonging to odd genres like that of "wild packs of dogs attack" and some "Bigfoot exploitation."

The site also features plenty of rare 1970s television movies, some super obscure Russ Meyer and a behind the scenes VHS tape of the 1980 Cannes Film Festival with Dudley Moore. The forgotten mom and pop video store of the internet is yours to explore here.

*Note that it can take some time for a film to download (it does for me anyway), so your best bet is to download several at the same time to make it worth your while as it takes an equal amount of time to download fifteen at once as it would to download one. Right click on the "Download Now" bar for the movie you wish to have and save it to your computer as opposed to double clicking on the same spot.

Comments

you forgot to mention it doesn't work on macs

[Listener Kliph]

I only have a mac. Works on mine. Right click the DOWNLOAD NOW bar - save to yer desktop.

[WmMBerger]

What an amazing resource! Thanks for sharing this.

[EH]

Cultrarare is an amazing site, thanks for the tip WFMU!

[K]

Thanks, Kliph. Many of these titles are surely still under copyright; but apparently corporate america has a little more to worry about now so... Try Bad Ronald; a favorite from the afternoon tv horror genre.

[Dale]

NOBODY owns Andy Warhol's "Bad"? Even the estate (I'm assuming there is such a thing) of Andy Warhol?

[Dale]

I'm just skimming through the titles (just up to 'C') but I see a movie called "Crowhaven Farm." from 1970 with Hope Lange. This was an ABC Movie of the Week when I was a kid and I vividly remember the ending. Kliph, do you know of any Movie of the Week database? We all remember Trilogy of Terror, which was a MofW, but I'll bet there's TONS of others that would be a gas to re-screen.

[fatty jubbo]

weee! a version of BAD! my favorite movie! yea- this one definitely needs the DVD treatment if possible.

I was hoping a bizarre piece of shit horror movie called "My Brother Carl has Bad Dreams" would pop up. I haven't been able to find anything about it since plucking it from the video shelf years ago.

[Jaylefus]

Fantastic. They have Devil's Triangle, a documentary on the Bermuda triangle, narrated by Vincent Price with music by King Crimson!

[Krys O.]

Wikipedia on The Movie of the Week:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_Movie_of_the_Week

TVIV:

http://tviv.org/ABC_Movie_of_the_Week

Don't the townspeople levitate in Crowhaven Farm? That caused nightmares for my pubescent brain.

[Krys O.]

And an ebook ABC Movie of the Week Companion:

http://www.diesel-ebooks.com/cgi-bin/item/0595802990/The-ABC-Movie-of-the-Week-Companion-eBook.html

[K]

BTW Kliph, I found myself limited to two concurrent connections and a bandwidth cap at 180KBPS. So I could browse the library, and have one download going at full speed, or not browse and have two downloads at half the speed. This is set at the server, and should be the same for Mac or PC. Are you really getting multiple downloads?

@ Jaylefus: Great Pick!

[Listener Kliph]

Yes, I downloaded eight simultaneously on Thursday and another ten on friday. It does take a while (I did it just before I went to bed and had them download while I was sleeping) - it appears to have taken about two hours to complete downloading that amount. So, yes it did take a while to download them but a small price to pay for what i'm getting. The main reason I went with simultaneous downloads was also because I live in fear of all that stuff being pulled from the net before I have the chance to capitalize on em.

[Capt]

OMG! They have "Drive-In"! I remember NBC screening this one back in the late 1970s.

Various subplots abound in this one centered at a Texas drive-in. The flick showing on the big screen? "Disaster '76" which lampoons the disaster genres of the 1970s brilliantly.

[James]

I have fond memories of watching some of the films being discussed here (Bad Ronald, Crowhaven Farm, Trilogy of Terror) on TBS back in the late 80's and early 90's, late at night on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Back then, TBS and USA on cable delievered the goods for weekend cult movie programming, and TBS specialized in running 70's made-for-TV gems. Another one I remember fondly is Horror at 37,000 Feet, with William Shatner and Buddy Ebsen (among others) trapped on an airplane haunted by a demon. It's not on cultarare (yet, anyway). Dang.

[Krys O.]

James, that's a Twilight Zone episode that you're thinking of called Nightmare at 20,000 Feet with William Shatner from 1963 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0734600/. No Buddy Ebsen.

[Krys O.]

Damn, there is a Horror at 37,000 Feet and it looks awful. Shatner plays a drunken priest. Neat.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068715/plotsummary

But it's no Gargoyles. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068622/

[James]

Krys - the scary thing is, I think I watched Horror at 37,000 Feet before I saw the Twilight Zone episode. One thing I strongly remember is the absolutely garish-looking suit worn by Ebsen. And the cheap looking set.

And I remember seeing Gargoyles on TBS late night, as well!

[Zelmo]

And who can forget "Terror at 44,700 Feet" or "Ghastliness at 54,829 Feet"?

[K]

oops. Looks like we exceeded his monthly bandwidth. Next pile on 1st of january.

[owltopus]

they put a password block on it...damn it!

[Listener Kliph]

No I think K is right, that is a temporary block having to do with bandwith.

[andy]

if you don't a mind smallish file and converting it from flv to avi (i tried it, it works out fine), horror at 37,000 feet can be had here:
http://onlinecliptv.com/list/video/2366/The-Horror-at-37,000-Feet-(1973)

[Jones()]

Having just finished a class in intellectual property, I can assure you that all the movies on the site are still under copyright. But as another commenter pointed out, it looks like corporate America has bigger things to deal with at the moment. Eventually, they'll get around to it, but until then, grab these while the site is still around.

I suggest _Curse of the Scarecrow_ -- which I'm downloading right now. I saw it when I was ten years old -- scared the crap out of me. But that might've been because I had (coincidentally) made a paper mache mask in art class that looked very much like the mask that the scarecrow wears in the film -- and for some inexplicable reason, I hung it right next to my bed. For about three months after seeing that film, that mask scared me to death every night when I went to bed.

Oh yeah, _Don't Be Afraid of the Dark_ is a good one to pick up too.

take care

---Jones()

[K]

Don't see "Curse of the Scarecrow" on this site; direct link please? I concur with "Don't be afraid of the dark", another movie that I remember watching as a kid that still holds up well ( as did my tout, "Bad Ronald" ). While the copyrights exist in perpetuity ( well not really, but they might as well ) ownership is another matter. Due to the immense pressure of merger and acquisition, it can be entirely unclear _who_ owns these movies now. It's quite likely that the current owners _aren't even aware_ that they own some of these titles. I know how crazy that sounds, but it's a lot more common than you might think. That is what makes the whole issue of IP so vexing.