BLEEDING SKULL! VIDEO and MONDO VIDEO to Unleash SOV Obscurity SCARY TALES via Limited Edition VHS on MAY 11th! Exclusive Interview with the BS!V Crew, Trailer, Stills and Order Info!
The rewind-inclined tag team of Bleeding Skull! Video and Mondo have certainly had their fair share of fantasic contributions to the fresh VHS movement over the past couple of years. Re-animations of obscure outsider cinema titles like CARDS OF DEATH, THE SOULTANGLER, RUN COYOTE RUN and most recently, the raging weirdfest that is NIGHT FEEDER (which sold out in an astounding 20 minutes) have given trash cinema aficionados reason to exchange some righteous high-fives. Fast forward to the here and now, and the BS!V / Mondo combo are back readied with another underground shot-on-video skullcrusher, this time offering the first-ever official release for the Baltimore-made indie horror flick SCARY TALES, carefully re-constructed from the original S-VHS sources in order to provide most mind-melting experience possible. SCARY TALES will be getting a DVD and VOD release, but voracious Videovores will be glad to know that this bad boy will be ready to roll into your VCR come noon on Wednesday, May 11th. Read on, my fellow Videonauts, and hang loose with Zack, Joe and Annie as they prepare to re-animate yet another chunk of trash video insanity...
The all-new artwork that will adorn the Limited Edition VHS of SCARY TALES from BLEEDING SKULL! VIDEO! One question: where'd you get those nails did?
Why did you guys decide to go after SCARY TALES? For the uninitiated, what can Tapeheads expect from this flick? ZACK: Weirdly and stupidly, SCARY TALES never had an official release before, but I ended up with a “gray-market” version a couple years ago when I bought a stack of other stuff. I was immediately floored by the cover art, which was basically a Halloween store ghoul prop hanging armless against a blue background. It’s the purest thing you’ll ever see. So imagine how excited I was when the movie exceeded everything I’d hoped for. I mean, it’s just a complete distillation of the reasons we all love watching things like this; a camcorder catalogue of demons and bursting eyeballs and monsters and fighting and frowning drunks, all shot by these incredible Baltimore dads in the early ‘90s. It’s magical. I’ve always had this theory that Baltimore and Minneapolis are the two most blue collar, unpretentious major cities in America. SCARY TALES proves that Baltimore is king.
The original art for the unofficial VHS release of SCARY TALES. FIREBALL REAPER RULES ALL.
When you were tracking down the rights to release this bad boy, did you get to work directly with the directors Doug Ulrich and Al Darago? How was that experience? Joe: Yeah, we worked directly with Doug on this release. And he was great! Especially considering that we made him dig around his attic more than once to find the master tapes. He was a great sport. The original version of SCARY TALES only saw the light of day as the rough-looking bootleg that Zack mentioned. Doug no longer has the original master that was used to make that boot. So we ended up meticulously piecing together the movie from Doug’s original S-VHS masters, while using the bootleg as a guide. It took three months and over one-hundred hours. But SCARY TALES has never looked or sounded better. What I’m trying to say is that we made it to Level 21.
A still courtesy of BLEEDING SKULL! VIDEO. That dude looks horny. I couldn't help myself.
Can you give us some specs on the release? How many copies of the VHS are you doing? Big box this time? Clamshell? Any groovy extras? JOE: There will be one-hundred copies of the tape available. It’s a clamshell, like NIGHT FEEDER. We’re stoked about the extras!! SCARY TALES includes more extras than any Bleeding Skull! Video release to date. They appear on the tape and DVD. My favorite extra is a live local access TV appearance from 1994 with Doug and Al. It’s such a magical and pure snapshot of Doug’s passion for D.I.Y. horror filmmaking.
Another production still from the BLEEDING SKULL! VIDEO archives. Das a nice machete, man.
I know NIGHT FEEDER sold out super-fast last time and there were some grumbles from collectors who missed out. Can you tell us why you pressed so little, and how you’re applying that experience to this release? ZACK: Oof. I’ll be honest: That was more or less a mistake. For NIGHT FEEDER, we pressed the amount that equaled the total number of tapes that our previous two releases had sold in their entire first month. We figured that would meet the demand, y’know? Plus NIGHT FEEDER was also our first DVD release, which we figured would pull some people away from buying the VHS. But when the tapes went on sale, we were shocked that they sold out in under 20 minutes. We still don’t know exactly why that happened, aside from the fact that the cover is one of the greatest works of art in mutant baby history. Anyway, for SCARY TALES, we’re going to make an even hundred tapes, and spread the word in advance among the VHS community as best we can to let people know when these tapes are available, so they don’t instead get picked up by eBay speculators, etc. Those are turd people. When and where will SCARY TALES be available? JOE: SCARY TALES will be available on DVD, VHS, and VOD on May 11th at noon from MONDOTEES.COM or BLEEDINGSKULLVIDEO.COM. What’s next for the Skull? More ultimate analog obscurity excavation, man?! Dang, we hope so. ANNIE: Last year we did a Kickstarter to finish James Bryan’s lost horror film JUNGLE TRAP, which had been sitting quietly in Jim’s barn for over 20 years. We got funded (Thank you, friends!) and now Joe and I are working on the soundtrack. It’s an absurd, unfair amount of fun on every level. I’ve watched this movie about 1,847.25 times while doing the music, and I can honestly say that it doesn’t get old, probably because of all the shrunken heads. And the man with a chicken. We’re also starting to develop another book! We’ve been doing research and collecting tapes and going down rabbit holes, wormholes, black holes, and all other holes to find gems that are considered either “not for civilians” or “really not for civilians.” You guys should totally make stickers for your releases that say, “NOT FOR CIVILIANS.” Anything else you wanna shout out to all the Tapeheads here in Lunchmeat Land? ANNIE: As Chris says in THE LAST SLUMBER PARTY, “Let’s munch out!”Yo, over here in Lunchmeat Land, we VHSteady got the munchies, man! Too true, dude, too true. But that ain’t nothing a heaping helping of nuggets and some choice dippin’ sauces can’t fix. Mmmmm. Nuggets. The dribble on my lip and our obsession with perpetual VHSnacking aside, BS!V is rearin' and ready to bend your trash-cinema-lovin’ brain with SCARY TALES, so mark your calendars for May 11th for a rewind reminder to groove on over to the Official Bleeding Skull! Video website and score your slab of this limited edition VHS re-animation. Just don’t forget those nuggets, man.
Groove and Groove and Gim'me That Ketchup and Cookies.
Josh Schafer