If there’s one thing that I miss most about the old days of video tape trading, it’s those strange encounters with collections that contained tapes that were the VHS equivalent of a white label LP. It was awesome but you could never tell exactly what it is. The trader told you it was Dawn of the Dead but you’d never seen this version of Dawn of the Dead. First of all it had German titles, some scenes were subtitled in Spanish, Danish and what may have been Thai. Video quality was all over the map from scene to scene and it ran nearly three hours long containing scenes you had never seen before. This was often a composite cut made by some obsessed fan, the earliest instance of a Fanedit.
Fanedits aren’t just fun, they’re necessary. My opinion of the usual Hollywood output, particularly when it comes to horror, is pretty low because they’re lazy and out of touch. The horror fan community hungry for everything horror typically reacts by adjusting their expectations and we shouldn’t have to do that. An all or nothing approach is bullshit. So here comes Retrohorror Remix, just one of the many outfits that specialize in the modern fanedit. Easy to us editing software and cheap media has ushered in a golden age of fanedits and video mixtapes. But rather than dish out another recut of The Matrix Revolutions or Star Wars: Episode 1, Retrohorror Remix is hitting you with drastically reduced versions of movies that have moments of brilliance buried deep beneath shocking amounts of filler. The end result is a much leaner experience. Often times the film is greatly improved, the context of certain elements are changed. Like those misleading trailer recuts you used to see (Home Alone as a horror film, The Shining as a feel-good father/son movie), some fanedits go so far as to rearrange entire scenes and recut dialog to make an entirely different movie out of 90 minutes of existing footage. Bored with shitty Hollywood remakes? Check out these remakes. They’re entirely better.
I bring this up because the head of the horror fanedit pack, the aforementioned Retrohorror Remix has been turning out composite cuts lately rather than slimmed down classics. Today marks the release of their Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3: Leatherface composite cut and you really ought to have a look. They take the existing director’s cut which is sourced from a workprint and intercut it with DVD sourced footage to make the best version of Jeff Burr’s original pre-MPAA cut of the movie available. Coming soon from Retrohorror Remix: Fear: Faces of Death 3 composite cut.
Oh, and their logo is completely sweet, too. It reeks of video store, 1984. http://www.freewebs.com/retrohorrorremix/
