One of my favourite things to do as a young lad in the 90's was to head on over to the local video store and peruse the aisles for something interesting. As much as I love being able to download or stream almost any movie you can imagine, part of the fun of the video store was looking at the box covers and wondering what the actual movie would be like. Nine out of ten times, box covers were bold-faced lies.
Let's take a look at some of the strange video box covers which always intrigued me.
The first cover is of a movie called Saturn 3.
The only thing I could think whenever I saw this was that for such a cool looking box, the robot sure didn't seem that awesome. It's head is basically a desk lamp. I'm sure I ended up seeing this movie on TV late one night, and if I'm remembering it correctly, the crazy german man was scarier than the robot.
The next movie was either called I Want You or Zone Troopers.
I was never really sure which was the title, or if it was one long name. Either way, the little alien who looks kind of like an angry version of Mickey Mouse seemed to be challenging me to rent this movie. "Come on" he said. "You know this movie isn't going to be any good. Look how little thought went into the cover". I seemed to agree, because I have no idea what this is even about.
Another box that didn't seem to give any ideas of what the movie was actually about was From Beyond.
I wanted to see this because the guy on the box reminded me of Freddy Krueger, and I was a huge Elm Street fan. Of course if you walked three steps over, you could rent the actual Nightmare on Elm Street. That's a big reason why I never watched From Beyond.
A movie I did watch though, was called Deathstalker.
Being a D&D nerd, I was very familiar with Boris Vallejo art. The promise of seeing someone who looks just like He-Man fighting a ten foot tall ogre holding a scantily clad girl was too exciting to pass up. Getting home and popping the cassette into the machine helped bring me back to reality.
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| Our hero, looking completely clueless. |
Basically, my mom let me rent a soft-core porn movie. Oh Boris, how did you sell your amazing artwork for this?
The next three movies seemed to have some strange connection with children or family heritage being horrifying.
The first box for XTRO had an awesome looking sharp-toothed monster standing in front of a chubby little kid scowling. Who is Tony? Is that his dad behind him? Or scarier still, is the monster Tony and the kid dad?
The next was called The Kindred. From what I could tell, it was about a little alien who lived in a baby bottle. Again, we learn the kid's name. This time it's Anthony. And he didn't ask to be brought into this world. The box was intriguing and spooky, but I can't get behind an alien baby name Anthony.
The last baby-centric movie was Prophecy. Again, a creepy picture. This might be cool to watch on a Halloween weekend. Who is "she"? Is it that thing in the sack? Is that a baby chicken in a clear egg? Or is that a womb? So many questions that were never answered.
The last movie box I'll talk about was for a movie called Evilspeak.
To be honest, I can't believe I never rented this one. I always liked computers. The box is all techno meets the devil. That dude in the middle looks insane, and his neck is really flexible. Maybe this movie held too many evil secrets to ever been revealed.
Looking back, I've become intrigued. I may try to watch these and see what they were actually about.
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