My 1st Video Mixtape

I'm from the U.K.  Wales to be precise.  I was born in 1976 and can remember the media "Moral Panic" over the Video Nasty debacle back in 1984.  It fascinated me.

I was already a fan of horror through books like "The Hamlyn Book of Horror" and abridged versions of horror classics for children (Dracula, Frankenstein and Edgar Allen Poe).

As I grew older and watched TV shows like "The Son of the Extremely Strange Film Show", the excellent film series "Moviedrome" and started to read horror film magazine "Fangoria", my fascination increased for the so called Video Nasty.  I desperately wanted to see these films.  I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Were these films as horrifying and as disturbing as we were being told?

Skip forward to 1992.  The only Video Nasty I had managed to get my hands on was "The Exorcist" (which was banned in the UK until 1998).  I was a drummer in a band and we auditioned for a new bass player (the previous one had tried to hi-jack a public transport bus to take him to "Monsters of Rock"....he ended up in jail).  Turned out the new guy was a horror film fanatic and owned most of the banned films I had been searching for.

One of these videos was called "Fillet O' Flesh".

"Fillet O' Flesh" was a video mixtape comprising of gory scenes from banned horror films as well as uncut scenes from films that were available, but only in their censored format.  It was the 1st time I saw the "eye ball" shot in "Zombie Flesh Eaters" (or "Zombi" if your from across the pond) and it scared the living shit out of me.

It was a 5th or 6th generation VHS copy, so all the gore and effects looked completely real.  It included the decapitation scene from "Nightmare in a Damaged Brain" and the electric drill to the head from "Driller Killer".  The "Fillet O' Flesh" titles on the video were very blocky, like BBC computer graphics, and it was obvious that it had been put together by someone with a home video editing suite.  It looked like it was made in the 1980's and, I can only speculate, that it was created after 1984 by a fan of horror and gore.

Has anyone else ever seen or heard of this?  I am aware there were other gore video mixtapes circulating at this time on the black market (If anyone stumbles across this blog then please email me any info you have).

So...that was my 1st video mixtape.  What was yours?