Exploited Cinema

It's official, the boutique blu-ray market has legitimately become a luxury for rich people. Historians will claim it has always been that way, ever since the days when Criterion came along and flaunted their overpriced DVDs with fancy designs to pretentious cinenphiles. Ripping off trustafarians is all well and good, but this eventually spilled over to genre specialist labels like Arrow and Vinegar Syndrome and affected common riff-raff  such as myself. Who would have thought a film like an out of print copy of Hell Comes to Frogtown (1988) would be some highly desirable title by boutique blu-ray enthusiasts? The answer: it's because of the cardboard slip cover. Idiots are buying this shit for the fancy packaging.

Of course, your average genre movie fan wanting to pick up a particular title not only has to contend with rich enthusiasts and blind buyers suffering from FOMO, but scalpers, too. It's getting to the point where I wouldn't be surprised if some savvy heads will wind up using bots like the sneaker and GPU market (not since the crypto crash) to cop that limited edition that sells out overnight.

Here's the obligatory bit where I go into a song and dance about physical media being the only true preservation of film and censorship has now become more prevalent amongst streaming sites. A world without Blu-Rays and DVDs is a world where we're one step closer to reciting our favourite films like the book people from Fahrenheit 451 (1966).

Now, my own hands are hardly clean, since I too copped that Second Sight Dawn of the Dead 4K limited edition, just like everyone else back in the day, but even I know this farce has gone too far. We've reached the point where it has become increasingly elitist and insular and will predictably lead to less films being discovered by the masses. That's just as detrimental as the various streaming sites tampering with the cinema from the past, in my opinion.