Thursday, May 19

The Price to Enter the QuadeaD Zone?

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Here's an incredibly scarce tape that ended on eBay last week while creating a stir in collector circles. Chester N. Turner is primarily "known" to a small niche of obsessive trash aficionados for 1984's Black Devil Doll from Hell. Several years later, Turner unleashed his anthology, Tales from the Quadead Zone, in '87 onto an unsuspecting world and then simply vanished from the illustrious landscape of bargain basement genre filmmaking.

Both of his shot-on-video features are tremendously awful spectacles, but they're also strangely ahead of their time. As self-produced examples of African American Horror, Turner crafted both in a decade in which "black horror" was basically non-existent since blaxploitation's heyday and its belated resurrection with the excellent Tales from the Hood in 1995.

That doesn't save Turner's productions from unintentional, almost otherworldly hilarity. The real story here is how rare the tapes of these two are. Black Devil Doll... is quite rare, but Quadead Zone's tape is like finding an albino hermaphrodite quad-amputee who runs marathons on pirate peg legs.

Both were produced in small quantities by Turner and presumably distributed around rental joints in the filmmaker's area (like Tim Ritter's early projects), making them even harder-to-find. The price this go-around for what might be the rarest North American VHS after 36 bids? $660. The Thrifty Peanut and their $1.99 sticker never even knew what hit them...      

5 comments:

Anthony1138 said...

WOW! That's one hell of a profit for the seller, assuming they only paid $1.99 for it.

Noe, what I'd really like to know is what the hell a Quadead Zone is.

Jack J said...

About Chester N. Turner: One of the Lewis brothers who made the (kind of) remake BLACK DEVIL DOLL was on Dvdmaniacs forum and he talked about how they had tried to find Turner for a long time, and when they finally got in touch with his family they learnt that he had died in a car crash in the 1990s. :(

Armando H. said...

As rare as it is, It ain't worth it. The movie is shit. Seriously. If you really want it though, look for it at a thrift store, garage sale, etc. Don't go buying it on ebay.

Craig Edwards said...

Yeah, how about that? I know the seller - he was pretty happy when it went that big...but then the STARTING bid was $550! More power to him - and now you can bet I've got my eye out for another copy of this should it turn up. Also, if anyone wants to check out the flick - it was up in sections at YouTube last week.

Aaron said...

TALES FROM THE QUADEAD ZONE is one of the most amazing... uh... things I have ever seen in my life. Even though it's supposedly coming out on DVD, if I were a collector and had the cash to blow, I'd seriously consider paying that much for it. But I guess part of the fun is actually going out and hunting for something as rare as this instead of just buying it on EBay.

...do you dare tread upon the staircase?

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