I rented long before purchasing VHS tapes due to their prohibitive price points in the early 80s...

But my first VHS purchase was a compiltion tape called HORRIBLE HORROR, which was hosted by Zacherly. I still have it and it was the first time I was exposed to SPIDER BABY!

I purchased this in 1986...for around 20 bucks...

So, what was your first VHS purchase, when did you purchase and - for extra bonus points - what'd it cost?

PD tapes of KILLERS FROM SPACE and GODZILLA VS MEGALON. $1 each. And a big box of Junior Mints. All three consumed in one sitting. Take that, allowance!

Corman's THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM at a convention. Watching it I realized what vicious panning does to a movie. So I waited for a letterbox and now I'm waiting for anamorphic.

The original clam-shell Thorn-EMI version of DAWN OF THE DEAD. I drove 34 miles to buy it (on a school night) :) ... and it cost me around $80.00!

Monty Python's Life Of Brian, in a big clamshell with rather enjoyable cover art I've not seen since, purchased probably sometime around '84 or '85. I passed owning it again on DVD, even though I still love it and think it is one of the very best comedies ever. See ya again on Blu-Ray, Brian.

GOLDFINGER, probably about 1987, when I was 10 or 11. It was $19.99 and I remember my father saying, "Why buy it for $20 when you can rent it for $3? You'll have to watch it seven times to break even!" I still haven't upgraded to the DVD, so whenever I feel like seeing it again I pull out the tape...though I still haven't broken even. :lol:

I have to make something of an educated guess here, as I started out with laserdiscs (the first of those being a used copy of BRAINSTORM). Given that it would be something which never made it to LD over the course of the years...I figure it's those tapes of RIPPING YARNS sequestered away on the side shelves of my entertainment center, their sleeves faded nearly white by a few decades of exposure to daylight coming through the windows.

I think it was the VIDEO REWIND collection of Rolling Stones videos hosted by Bill Wyman. It would have been about 1984 or so. I still have it, but haven't watched it in awhile. I know the video box is marked up, because I wrote my old VCR's counter marks on it as a sort of index, so I could fast-forward to each video.

A public-domain, EP-speed, sourced-from-a-battered-16mm print version of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. I hope the powers that be allow a properly 35mm film restoration version of this classic to be done, but alas I doubt that will happen anytime soon...

Vincent

Two westerns: BLAZING SADDLES and CHISUM.

HCH

I know it was in the mid-eighties and that it was Night of the Living Dead, but I have no recollection what company it was.

The price probably wasn't good, though... I recently picked up a pre-pack VHS of Maniac Cop at a thrift store (fifty cents!) and the original price on the sleeve was $79.95...

... and folks today complain about the cost of a Criterion disc.

My first purchases were with very small mail order companies. The first two titles I got were THE YOUNG GRADUATES (1971) and a two-hour compilation of horror/sci-fi/fantasy previews, both from a company called Thunderbird Films. There was also a guy in the very early eighties whose name may have been Barry Kaufman, and whose mail order company may have been called something like All Horror Video. True to that name, he sold only horror titles on VHS. I purchased THE WITCHMAKER (1969) from him. It was faded color and P&S, but the film was quite rare at that time.

The World of Video 2000 cassette of John Carpenter's DARK STAR (way back in 1980), which was missing one scene. I later taped a complete (and better quality) version off the BBC, recording it over the top of the WoV release.

My first VHS purchase was for several PD VHS titles @ $9.99 a pop, probably from Video Treasures in the early 80s. THE 39 STEPS, THINGS TO COME, Fleischer's SUPERMAN cartoons were among them.
My first full-priced VHS purchase was probably NTA's BETTY BOOP 60th ANNIVERSARY COLLECTION (primarily to get a copy of BIMBO'S INITIATION)
I think that cost about $50.

I'm thinking it was public domain tapes of THE GENERAL and THE GOLD RUSH, beat-up prints with library music that didn't fit the on-screen action.

I think that the first major studio VHS that I purchased was Paramount's MEDIUM COOL, circa 1982. It retailed for around $49.95, if memory serves. That version had the Wild Man Fischer tune "Merry Go Round" that later led to a lawsuit won by Fischer. When the film was released on laserdisc and reissued on VHS several years ago, the Fischer song was replaced by a comparatively lame performance of "Sweet Georgia Brown" (which is also the case with the DVD).

A used copy of BLUE VELVET from Blockbuster in '89. Can't recall the exact price but it was cheap, under 10 bucks.

BLACK SUNDAY from Sinister Cinema. Very quickly followed by KILL BABY KILL, THE HORRIBLE DR. HICHCOCK and SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE DEADLY NECKLACE.

I believe the first one was a gift from my aunt, an EP Goodtimes release of Curtis Harrington's 1975 telefilm The Dead Don't Die. It was written by Robert Bloch. The cast includes George Hamilton, Ray Milland, Ralph Meeker, Joan Blondell, and Reggie Nalder (so creepy as Barlow in Salem's Lot). This was probably around 1986 or '87 and I was too young to appreciate the film's impressive cast and crew. I do recall not enjoying the film very much and don't remember what happened to the tape.

A few years later, I purchased my first VHS tapes on my own. IIRC, an advance copy of Roy Frumkes' Document of the Dead (at a NYC Fangoria Weekend of Horrors, maybe 1989), an irritatingly re-scored Fast Times at Ridgemont High from MCA/Universal, or a double-cassette PD Night of the Living Dead (the second tape might have been a colorized version, but I can't recall exactly).

Other early purchases were made from the many now defunct used outlets in NYC and NJ where one could always unearth some rare video treasure.

My very first VHS purchase was Spike Lee's DO THE RIGHT THING (at the price of $19.99) which I had just seen less than 2 months before at a local theatre (the Showtime Dearborn,which suddenly closed down over a year ago). I asked my then-boyfriend to please get it for me, because we'd both enjoyed the film so much (I remember we both went to see some other lame movie, and then snuck into another part of the theatre to see DTRT--- the audience,who were clearly loving it, was cracking up and laughing and being much more live/animated than in the other film. I got it at a mall in a record store, in which I asked the cashier if she'd heard of Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols fame,and she said yeah, she had a huge poster of him at her house. I'm thinking, "That is SO disgusting," because I'd also seen SID AND NANCY, another favorite of mine (which I think might have been my 2nd or 3rd VHS purchase ever, now that I think about it--that was the beginning of me going through my fun punk rock/alternative phase :)

July 1981 at the long gone Video Movie House in Toronto, I bought Beta pre-records of ANIMAL HOUSE, 1941, and THE BLUES BROTHERS at the astronomical price of C$85 each for the first two and C$110 for the third. I definitely got my money's worth out of those tapes, though, as they were played endlessly over the next year.

I remember that day distinctly because John Candy was in the store buying tapes, but I was too much of a cowardly 16 year old to ask him to autograph my copies of 1941 and TBB.

I can't remember... but even before that, I bought SHADOWMAN and MILL OF THE STONE WOMEN on Beta!

Barry Kaufman, mentioned by John Black, was the publisher of a pretty nifty fanzine called DEMONIQUE -- the first place I ever saw Paul Naschy movies seriously reviewed. His fourth issue had an article by one Donald Relizzo about Andy Milligan's films that was fairly well written but not so well researched... he claimed THE MAN WITH TWO HEADS was about a doctor who actually grew a second head!

My first VHS purchase was NOSFERATU, early 1985 I think, on the ancient Film Classics label from Kartes Video Communications...remember them? And I had nothing to play it on when I bought it. I still have it, and always will. But before that we had RCA Selectavision CED videodiscs, and the first title we got was 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA.

Hard to remember, but for some reason the one that really sticks out is A Clockwork Orange, but I actually think before that I bought a Motley Crue Dr. Feelgood video collection.

Hard to remember, but for some reason the one that really sticks out is A Clockwork Orange, but I actually think before that I bought a Motley Crue Dr. Feelgood video collection.

His fourth issue had an article by one Donald Relizzo about Andy Milligan's films that was fairly well written but not so well researched... he claimed THE MAN WITH TWO HEADS was about a doctor who actually grew a second head!

Well, he saw the poster at any rate!

I already wrote in another thread that my first two VHS purchases were MY FAVORITE YEAR and THAT CHAMPIONSHIP SEASON. What came after is grayer to me but as an employee of Best Video in Hamden, CT, I got videos at cost, so I duly plunked down my earnings on prerecords of YOJIMBO and SANJURO that I still have. I duped far more movies than I bought outright and my video collection didn't really start to grow until the Universal monster movies started coming out in 1991, after I'd relocated to Manhattan. Because I double shelved my cassettes, my then-wife really didn't notice how big my video collection was becoming and by the time it reached out-of-control proportions she was out the door. But my videos and I were happy.