Video Home Invasion: Introducing MONDO MACABRO!!

Welcome to a long overdue new series from ScreenAnarchy's Video Home Invasion!

I have no really good reason for taking so long between columns. I will only tell you that between reviewing home video releases almost every day, keeping up with Indian film festivals all over the world, and my regular home life, it can be a bit tough to squeeze in this kind of project. However, I do it because I love it, and you guys seem to enjoy it as well. If you're the type who really enjoys finding the best and weirdest that independent home video has to offer, you'll want to strap in, because this time around, we're going after the Granddaddy of all cult video labels, Mondo Macabro!

If there was any label that I had in mind when I pitched this column, it was Mondo Macabro. No other home video label in the world has such a remarkably diverse catalog. So many of their titles could easily have been lost to the passage of time, but have been snatched from the jaws of obscurity and given a spotlight in which to bask. Just about every major film industry in the world is represented in their catalog, along with some crazy industries you probably didn't even know existed. Mondo Macabro truly are the gold standard by which cult home video must be measured.

I asked co-founder, Pete Tombs, about the history of the label a while ago, and this is what he had to say:

I guess that goes a long way back. Probably to the time when I was a kid and used to collect these little 8mm cut down reels of films and dream of having my own library of titles to watch whenever I wanted. So I guess video was a sort of dream come true when it finally arrived. It liberated our viewing habits, opened up a whole world of possibilities and gave us the roots of a developing new perspective on film history.

Through collecting oddball movies on VHS, I met Cathal Tohill. Back in the early 90s, we collaborated on a book called Immoral Tales that was a look at Euro sex/horror movies from the early 60's through to the mid 80s.  The book included the first English language in depth looks at the likes of Jess Franco, Jean Rollin, Jose Larraz etc. The book was published by Titan Books in the UK and St Martin's Press in the US. It had been quite a struggle to find a lot of the films we wrote about in the book. There was a sort if underground network of collectors and traders that were invaluable to us, people who had access to obscure films that had been released on VHS in Greece or Argentina. At about the time the book came out there was a mini revival of interest in the kinds of films we were writing about and some started to appear on legitimate video releases. Together with Peter Salvage who had been one of the founders of the Redemption video label in the UK I started up Pagan Films. I'm quite proud of what we did with Pagan. We were the first company, for example, to release some of the Nikkatsu erotic movies in English subtitled versions - films like Seijun Suzuki's Gate of Flesh and Noboru Tanaka's Watcher in the Attic.

At this point I'd like to interject, only to profess my undying love for the work that Tombs and Tohill did with Immoral Tales. The book in an indispensable reference for anyone with even a passing interest in European horror and genre film during the aforementioned era. To call it comprehensive is to wildly understate the case. Unfortunately, the book is how out of print in the US, but I highly recommend tracking it down if at all possible, I'll throw in a couple of links at the end of this column to help you.  Anyway, back to Pete...

A TV company had expressed interest in acquiring some of the films we released. Andy Starke, who at the time was working in various post production roles in the TV industry, came up with the idea of doing a series of documentaries to accompany the films and UK Channel 4 agreed to commission a series called Eurotika! This was a 12 part look at the general area of what used to be called "Euro Cult" cinema. Through doing the TV shows we got to meet a lot of the actors, directors, and rights owners behind the films.

Throughout this period I was also working on the book Mondo Macabro. This had come about when Paul Woods, a friend of mine in the publishing world, had asked me to look at the possibility of writing a book on Japanese horror films. This was several years before Ringu and its sequels helped to create the boom in "J Horror". Although I'd been to Japan and had seen lots of the classic (and not so classic) genre movies, I was doubtful as to whether I could really write enough to sustain a full book. I began to cast around and see whether  I could do something like Immoral Tales - that's to say, a country by country study of, generally, exploitation movies. In the parts of London where I'd grown up there had been cinemas showing Indian films, Turkish films and martial arts films from Hong Kong so I was aware of there being genre productions from all those countries.Originally I started with the idea of restricting it to Asian countries, but soon cast my net wider. I begin to compile a list and came up with the twelve or so territories that formed the final book.

Again we were lucky enough to get a TV commission to turn this into a series for Channel 4. We were able to travel to a lot of the countries featured and got to know the producers, actors and directors who'd made the films. At the time I was still quite busy with the Pagan and Eurotika video releases, so when Andy suggested the idea of starting up a Mondo Macabro DVD label, I was not so sure. I wasn't convinced there was a big enough market in the UK for such esoterica. Finally I was persuaded that if we distributed in the US as well, we might find a large enough market. And so our first DVD was released there in 2002, a couple of years after we had started in the UK.

This is an interesting place to interject as well. Many of the episodes of Tombs' Mondo Macabro TV series appear as extra material on Mondo Macabro DVDs, and they are fascinating. The Jean Rollin episode of Eurotika! appears as an extra on one of Kino's recent Redemption/Rollin Blu-rays. So, these very valuable mini-documentaries are becoming available little by little.

I also asked Pete some fairly basic questions, I'll admit to not being much of an interviewer, and here are the responses he gave me.

Where do you find these films?

Coming up with a list of titles was (in the early days, anyway) relatively easy. But finding out who owned those titles, let alone who had materials for them, was a lot harder. With Silip, for example, I think it took nearly six years to finally sort! Now it's lot tougher for a whole raft of reasons. For one thing, so much stuff has already been released, both legitimately and via the "grey" market that it's increasingly hard to find anything that isn't already out there in some form or another. But we've still got a pretty long list.

How did you first become interested in south and south east Asian horror/exploitation?

I was lucky to have grown up in the UK at a time when the BBC still showed seasons of world cinema. I saw many of the classic Japanese, Indian - and even Filipino - films on UK TV, believe it or not. Along with Brazilian Cinema Novo, Italian Neo Realism and French New Wave movies. I guess that helped make me aware that there were interesting films that weren't made in the US or the UK. In the cinemas, mostly in what's now called "grind houses" (in the UK we call them "flea pit" cinemas), I saw the likes of the Baby Cart movies, Japanese monster movies, oddball Hong Kong  horrors and martial arts movies, the Blood Island films of Eddie Romero etc etc.

I think a big influence on all of us was the arrival of the Phil Hardy Aurum Encyclopaedias which for the first time really, had relatively in depth coverage of world exploitation movies, including those from India and the Philippines. I also have to big up what for me was an essential and groundbreaking book, Barrie Pattison's Seal of Dracula.

How do you decide what to release?

It's whatever we like, basically. Mondo Macabro is more of a hard-to-define essence or flavour. When I was a music fan I was always attracted to labels like Elektra and Island, where you could more or less blind buy and know you would probably like it. We hope that Mondo is something similar, in a much smaller way, of course.

How hard is it to source prints/transfers for some of the more obscure or frequently cut titles?

A good question. And I guess the answer is - it depends. In some countries, producers look after their films, keeping the negs in climate safe vaults etc. But in poorer, developing world countries those facilities are either expensive or not available. In the Philippines and Indonesia, for example, negatives or even decent prints of many films are no longer available due to storage problems. The further back you go, the worse it gets. In the 60s, 70s and even the 80s, producers were after a fast buck and didn't really consider their films to be worth much after their initial theatrical runs, particularly if those films didn't make money. So negs and prints were often junked wholesale. This certainly happened in Turkey as we were told a number of times.

Occasionally materials do turn up for films that were otherwise thought to be lost. But it's an increasingly rare event. Often, what you are offered is an old analog video master or a very cheaply transferred 4:3 widescreen (if you're lucky) digibeta. We also still get offered one inch masters, which must be at least 20 years old now. If, after much negotiation, the producer actually manages to turn up a negative and (even rarer) it turns out to be usable, the chances of getting them to ship it to the UK are slim. So often you have to find labs in the countries of production and trust them to do the work to the standard required, Not infrequently we have to get them to do it two or even three times to get it right, as it's not usually possible to us to go and watch it being done. So, it can be a bit of a slog. But usually we get there and I think most of our releases have decent to good transfers, given the obscurity of the films. To be fair, though, I have to say that European producers are often just as bad as those from developing countries in terms of not looking after their films, or not seeing the point of preparing decent masters for them.

In this series we will be digging deep into the Mondo Macabro catalog, taking a cinematic trip (in more ways than one) around the world. As I mentioned above, one thing that sets Mondo Macabro apart from all of the other major video labels in the world is the sheer variety of their titles. Because of that, I've decided to split the catalog up by region. We'll have a section on Latin American films, one on South Asian films, East Asian, and, of course, Euro-horror. I'll definitely try to cram as much in as I can.

One of the things that Pete said in this little interview rang perfectly true to me, and that is the blind trust that buyers have in Mondo Macabro. I feel very certain that whatever they release, it'll will be entertaining to me in some way, and I have never felt cheated by a Mondo Macabro release. If you have any questions for Pete Tombs, you can either send them to be at the link below, or leave them in the comments, and I'll be sure to pass them along. Please don't just ask about acquisitions, those questions are complicated and boring. However, if you can come up with something interesting, please feel free to share.

I've been talking with Mondo Macabro's new distributor Danger After Dark, and they've also showed some interest in holding giveaways for ScreenAnarchy readers, which is something I'm really looking forward to!

Tune in next week when we head south of the US border for a look at Latin American horror and genre films from Mondo Macabro!