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The 7th annual Sydney Underground Film Festival, which runs this year on September 5-8 at the Factory Theatre, opens with a real bang when they will screen cult filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s latest cinematic odyssey, The Dance of Reality. This is Jodorowsky’s first film in over twenty years and is an imaginative and playful quasi-autobiography.

The rest of the four-day celebration is packed with more film oddities and excursions into surreal and transgressive territory. One particular highlight that is not to be missed is Don Swaynos’ incredibly crowd-pleasing comedy Pictures of Superheroes, about a slacker cleaning woman’s descent into an absurd world she can’t escape. Read the Underground Film Journal’s review of Pictures of Superheroes here.

Other twisted fiction films screening include Drew Tobias’s sick and twisted See You Next Tuesday, Cody Calahan’s apocalyptic Antisocial and Lloyd Kaufman’s highly-anticipated sequel Return to Nuke ‘Em High: Vol.

I wistfully recall the days when there were video stores all over St. Louis, shops carrying all manner of sleazy eurohorror, kung fu flicks, anime, and softcore sex romps, but those establishments are all long-shuttered. All the St. Louis-area Mom and Pop video stores seemd to have folded around the same time – the late ‘90s. They sold off their stock to collectors like myself who turned around and sold them on ebay for a decent profit. DVDs came along and then Blu-ray and it looked like VHS taped were both gone and forgotten. Then a funny thing happened. Like vinyl to music collectors, movie buffs began to wax nostalgic for those old VHS tapes, especially the ones in the jumbo, oversized boxes or the clamshell-style cartons with lurid artwork, much of it created especially for that video’s release. Outfits like Unicorn and Super Video, and Wizard Video, Camp Video,...

As the movie industry heads the way of the digital download, one of our oldest friends - the VHS tape - is becoming more and more collectible. Some people even get a bit obsessive about their collecting. Such is the case with Adjust Your Tracking: The Untold Story of the VHS Collector.

From the Press Release

Adjust Your Tracking: The Untold Story of the VHS Collector is a feature-length documentary directed by Dan Kinem and Levi Peretic that sheds light on the growing VHS culture and the community of collectors that still cherish what many refer to as a "dead format." It is a passion project made by true lovers of the format for not only people who love VHS, but also for people who can remember having to rewind a movie before they could watch it and for people who remember the glorious days of going to the video...