Spent 90 minutes trying to pause a VHS tape from 1988 at a thrift store last Saturday

I was digging through a bin of old VHS tapes at a Goodwill in Sacramento and spotted this horror movie called "The Zombie that Ate Seattle." The cover looked SO CHEESY I knew it had to be in my bad movie collection. I got it home and my VCR ate the tape for a solid 20 minutes before I could even get it to play. Then the movie was so terribly made that the whole plot was just people running in circles for an hour and a half, I couldn't stop laughing. Has anyone else bought a bad movie from a thrift store that took forever to get working?

2 comments

2 Comments

lee.diana22d ago

I used to think these old, beat up VHS tapes from thrift stores were a waste of time and money. But a couple years back I found a copy of "The Mangler" that had been sitting in some garage for decades, and after cleaning the heads on my VCR for an hour it finally played. That whole experience changed my mind about these things. It cracked me up too, the movie was so over the top and the sound was warped from the aging tape, making it even funnier. Now I get excited for that kind of hunt, you never know what gems you will find.

nathan_barnes21d ago

Gotta say I see where you're coming from but I'm not sold on it. Ain't nobody got time for cleaning VCR heads for an hour just to watch a blurry movie that's gonna make you laugh anyway. The hunt is fun, sure, but at some point it's just a bad tape, not a gem.