It certainly was more satisfying back in the 80's, to walk past shelves of battered VHS boxes, renting movies nobody heard of, sitting and watching the combination of battered film, lo-fi video, and dubbed voices. With no internet, it felt like these movies came from outer space and you were the only person that knew them, until you tell a friend.
@@videoboneyard3682 Indeed. I have the "Strong Uncut" Video Nasty tape of Zombie Flesh-Eaters and it has a great, gritty and under-mastered feel to it. Don't get me wrong - to see it completely re-mastered on blu ray is also fantastic!
@@joshfulcifan1015 I don't remember what the early 80's American tape looked like, but they had a 90's "grey market" version that was ROUGH, with a bad "Zombie 2 : The Dead Are Among Us" title card, slapped over the original. The same distributor put out a tape of The Gates Of Hell that quickly became one of my favorites. It was letterboxed and from an incredibly beat up print. It was mesmerizing to watch.
Yeah, I remember that "Zombie 2" tape and I also once owned the Creature Features vhs of Fulci's "Gates Of Hell" when I was a kid. It was really cool seeing all that raw gritty PQ, so I guess you should see these films in 2 options - old vhs and remastered dvd / blu ray. I will say again that 2 of my most rare titles in my collection are Fulci's Zombie Flesh -Eaters and the fully Uncut Australian vhs of Romano Scavolini's Nightmare. Us horror lovers can never get tired of this stuff.
@@joshfulcifan1015 Years ago, a friend of mine snagged a big box version of Nightmare that was being sold for ridiculously low price at a local rental. I never really got into collecting tapes for collecting's sake, so there was a lot of rare tapes I missed because of already having a better copy. One I did get that's kind of rare, is a circa 1980 The Hills Have Eyes from an early imprint of Lightning Video. The tape inside was really thick, so it plays and looks great. I like it because the disc versions always cut a few important visuals to make it widescreen, though the Arrow Blu does try to fix it with a little up and down scanning.
I've always pretty much preferred this version of "Hell of the Living Dead", it was my very first time watching it! I rented it from a Blockbuster Video (of all places) and I believe it was the Vestron Video release. As much as I like the crisp/clear remastered version, I don't like how slightly higher pitched the audio sounds. Less terrifying that way. Btw, my very first viewing of "Fulci's Zombie", was the early 90s shoddy re-release from "Edde Entertainment/T-Z Video", which had the orange oozing title card, stuck over the original title card. That release scared me so much as a pre-teen! Especially how the zombie faces looked even closer, since the picture was cropped! Anyway, I wish I had a digital copy of "Night of the Zombies" for my tablet, so I can watch while on break from work!
Question does anyone remember and was around the time when Mattei's film was released in the States as Night of the Zombies and got to see it in their local movie theaters back in 83, did the picture quality look like this, the grainy dark VHS (of course it wouldn't be VHS) look on the big screen or was the picture was nice and clear somewhat similar to the 2002 Anchor Bay "Hell of the Living Dead" dvd remastered picture quality? Obviously there was no digital picture quality around that time but I wasn't born yet so I'm curious to how films looked on the big screen back then. Makes us wonder if that original US 1983 theatrical film print still exist somewhere in some film laboratory with old archives of movie history.
It looked pretty "eh". Not as dark and grainy as the VHS, but not as good as the later DVD......I would say it was closer to the DVD than the VHS, though, because you could see all the action clearly. The company that released this and GATES OF HELL to theaters were reportedly affiliated with the Mafia and wouldn't have spent much money on making 35mm prints, nor were Vestron very diligent with video transfers of certain titles.
@@rjvoorhees8786 You're welcome. Another problem I forgot to mention is that many theaters would turn down the brightness of projector bulbs in order to save money replacing them. So even if a 35mm print came from a quality laboratory, it would sometimes look like shit anyway because they weren't putting enough light behind it. If a print came from a shit laboratory (and most East Coast labs were shit, still using machines from the 50's well into the 80's) like NIGHT OF THE ZOMBIES did then a bad projection would have made it unwatchable. But I do remember seeing it on the screen and then seeing it on VHS and being annoyed that it was so much darker on VHS, so it must have been shown properly.
@@zippymufo9765 Very interesting. I guess it depends what theater you were at back then. Now we got these big digital movie theaters now, I bet it would play great if it was released today.
@@rjvoorhees8786 That is one good thing about the digital age, and that's technical expectations of quality. Back in the 80's and even 90's how you experienced a film could be so random and variable. I admit there was a charm to that era of seeing films at shitty drive-ins and discovering stuff at the video store, but I don't think it was as truly charming as people want to believe. Nostalgia is always positive.
Hell of the living dead, night of the zombies, VIRUS, Zombie creeping flesh, damn so many titles
Zombie movies need that old grainy, non-HD audio and video. It's much scarier than the clear, 4k or 1080 movies
It certainly was more satisfying back in the 80's, to walk past shelves of battered VHS boxes, renting movies nobody heard of, sitting and watching the combination of battered film, lo-fi video, and dubbed voices. With no internet, it felt like these movies came from outer space and you were the only person that knew them, until you tell a friend.
@@videoboneyard3682 Indeed. I have the "Strong Uncut" Video Nasty tape of Zombie Flesh-Eaters and it has a great, gritty and under-mastered feel to it. Don't get me wrong - to see it completely re-mastered on blu ray is also fantastic!
@@joshfulcifan1015 I don't remember what the early 80's American tape looked like, but they had a 90's "grey market" version that was ROUGH, with a bad "Zombie 2 : The Dead Are Among Us" title card, slapped over the original.
The same distributor put out a tape of The Gates Of Hell that quickly became one of my favorites. It was letterboxed and from an incredibly beat up print. It was mesmerizing to watch.
Yeah, I remember that "Zombie 2" tape and I also once owned the Creature Features vhs of Fulci's "Gates Of Hell" when I was a kid. It was really cool seeing all that raw gritty PQ, so I guess you should see these films in 2 options - old vhs and remastered dvd / blu ray. I will say again that 2 of my most rare titles in my collection are Fulci's Zombie Flesh -Eaters and the fully Uncut Australian vhs of Romano Scavolini's Nightmare. Us horror lovers can never get tired of this stuff.
@@joshfulcifan1015 Years ago, a friend of mine snagged a big box version of Nightmare that was being sold for ridiculously low price at a local rental.
I never really got into collecting tapes for collecting's sake, so there was a lot of rare tapes I missed because of already having a better copy. One I did get that's kind of rare, is a circa 1980 The Hills Have Eyes from an early imprint of Lightning Video. The tape inside was really thick, so it plays and looks great. I like it because the disc versions always cut a few important visuals to make it widescreen, though the Arrow Blu does try to fix it with a little up and down scanning.
I've always pretty much preferred this version of "Hell of the Living Dead", it was my very first time watching it! I rented it from a Blockbuster Video (of all places) and I believe it was the Vestron Video release. As much as I like the crisp/clear remastered version, I don't like how slightly higher pitched the audio sounds. Less terrifying that way. Btw, my very first viewing of "Fulci's Zombie", was the early 90s shoddy re-release from "Edde Entertainment/T-Z Video", which had the orange oozing title card, stuck over the original title card. That release scared me so much as a pre-teen! Especially how the zombie faces looked even closer, since the picture was cropped! Anyway, I wish I had a digital copy of "Night of the Zombies" for my tablet, so I can watch while on break from work!
I have this movie as Hell of the living dead
Question does anyone remember and was around the time when Mattei's film was released in the States as Night of the Zombies and got to see it in their local movie theaters back in 83, did the picture quality look like this, the grainy dark VHS (of course it wouldn't be VHS) look on the big screen or was the picture was nice and clear somewhat similar to the 2002 Anchor Bay "Hell of the Living Dead" dvd remastered picture quality? Obviously there was no digital picture quality around that time but I wasn't born yet so I'm curious to how films looked on the big screen back then. Makes us wonder if that original US 1983 theatrical film print still exist somewhere in some film laboratory with old archives of movie history.
It looked pretty "eh". Not as dark and grainy as the VHS, but not as good as the later DVD......I would say it was closer to the DVD than the VHS, though, because you could see all the action clearly. The company that released this and GATES OF HELL to theaters were reportedly affiliated with the Mafia and wouldn't have spent much money on making 35mm prints, nor were Vestron very diligent with video transfers of certain titles.
@@zippymufo9765 Wow, interesting stuff. Thanks for letting me know, man always appreciate hearing about classic movie stuff! 👍
@@rjvoorhees8786 You're welcome. Another problem I forgot to mention is that many theaters would turn down the brightness of projector bulbs in order to save money replacing them. So even if a 35mm print came from a quality laboratory, it would sometimes look like shit anyway because they weren't putting enough light behind it. If a print came from a shit laboratory (and most East Coast labs were shit, still using machines from the 50's well into the 80's) like NIGHT OF THE ZOMBIES did then a bad projection would have made it unwatchable. But I do remember seeing it on the screen and then seeing it on VHS and being annoyed that it was so much darker on VHS, so it must have been shown properly.
@@zippymufo9765 Very interesting. I guess it depends what theater you were at back then. Now we got these big digital movie theaters now, I bet it would play great if it was released today.
@@rjvoorhees8786 That is one good thing about the digital age, and that's technical expectations of quality. Back in the 80's and even 90's how you experienced a film could be so random and variable. I admit there was a charm to that era of seeing films at shitty drive-ins and discovering stuff at the video store, but I don't think it was as truly charming as people want to believe. Nostalgia is always positive.