The importance of collecting what you like...

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As teased at yesterday, Madera Cinevideo's incredibly awesome Alucarda clamshell arrived yesterday and it illustrates one of my core principles of VHS collecting (or when collecting anything, really). Simply that is to collect what you like. You see, many newcomers to tape collecting are too often wooed by the crazy prices too often seen on eBay or Amazon.

Many times, the truly rare are often stumbled upon purely by chance, knowledge helps in spotting them, and many professed "rare" tapes aren't that hard-to-find. From this, novices get sucked into either paying too much or waging nutty bidding wars over tapes that'll eventually re-appear, perhaps cheaper and in better condition. And it's also always good to remember that the vast majority of tapes are only worth what someone is willing to pay.

These admissions are going to sound insane, but for one I'm not particularly crazy over big boxes. I'm well aware that they're the bee's knees to many collectors; however, they just don't hold that special "something" to me. Even with my first memories of VHS as a child being stumbling over to Thriller Video's "Elvira Presents..." boxes in the video store. I haven't bought or even bid on a big box on eBay...ever. I never throw them on my Watch List because it's a near forgone conclusion they'll go way over the price that I'm willing to pay. Of course, this doesn't mean I'm going to pass up cheap BBs in the wild or online. They just aren't a priority, so if you become engaged in a sweeping auction battle over one, I'm likely not your competitor.

Same goes for horror and cult tapes from Mexico which have seemed to see a huge uptick in interest lately. I just don't get the allure chiefly because distributors had a way of making what's actually a tepid thriller or police procedural into looking like the craziest and goriest movie of all time if judged by the cover art. Many titles are also so obscure that's tough to do research in order to separate the wheat from the chaff.

So I don't have any, until now. This tape isn't necessarily from Mexico, Madera Cinevideo is based in California, but is geared towards Spanish speaking viewers. It's dubbed in Spanish with no subtitles. I couldn't care less though; this tape along with the film is fucking awesome. This wild brew of blood, boobs, bloody boobs, and slashed up nuns on fire also marks an important step in my history of collecting as Mondo Macabro's original British DVD was the first disc I ever imported. So while I've passed up a bunch of valuable big boxes and "Mexploitation" through the years, it's finding tapes like this Alucarda that make me not really care about perceived value and just bask purely in the thrill of collecting.   

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