Well, times change, eras end and life goes on - but for many of us lucky souls/poor fools (delete where applicable) who grew up in the 80's we have our memories. Pot Noodles, Stock/Aitken & Waterman, The Smiths, Phonecards, Betamax videos.... and Vipco.
Yes. Vipco. The name today brings smiles, smirks, knowing looks of contempt (in the realisation that the person who said the word 'Vipco' is, in fact, a prat). However, excluding the latter DVD days of the
'Digitally Remastered Screamtime Collection' (which meant putting a VHS on a disc), we easily forget how Vipco were once one of the greatest horror labels in the UK.
Just the original cover of
The Driller Killer (that notorious sleeve that caused white foam to dribble from the mouths of Ferman & Whitehouse) should be enough to get Vipco permanently ensconsed in the Video Hall Of Fame. However they also gave us THAT cover for
Zombie Flesh Eaters (hired by many a young teen including moi - several times), plus
Shogun Assassin,
The Bogey Man,
The Deadly Spawn and oh so many others. They also entertained us with lesser known horrors such as
The Nesting and
Massacre Mansion, as well as the British-filmed gem
The Legacy.
Did Rex Harrison ever adorn the cover of a Vipco VHS? He certainly did with
A Time To Die. How about the legendary trumping epic
King Frat, a young Chevy Chase in
The Groove Tube or Caroline Munro getting all galactic in
Starcrash. Barbara Bach met some hideous creatures (excluding hubby Ringo) in
Island Of Mutations. A young Helen Mirren showed her long good fridays in
Hussy. Kung Fu fans were (sort of) treated to titles such as
Big Boss 2 and
Breaker Breaker, and action fans could see Telly Savalas snarling his way through
The Diamond Mercenaries (though keeping his sunglasses on at all times) plus Lee Majors pretending to be Gary Cooper in
High Noon Part II (Coop didn't appear owing to his being slightly dead at the time).
Where else could you get a label that released titles such as
Hot Sex In Bangkok and an Italian kiddie cartoon of
The Three Musketeers? Vipco of course. Ah they were glorious times.
Then came DVD - and Vipco went a bit on the tits-up side. Although they gave us rare & uncut titles on DVD (
The Beyond,
Death Trap,
The Last Hunter and, of course
The Burning) the DVD age was not for them really. Mainly owing to a slight misunderstanding as to what
Digitally Mastered really meant.
However in the days of the 80's they were among the greatest. Let's not forget that.
VIPCO - Gone but not forgotten.