My Copy of Terror in Beverly Hills (1989)

Back when I wrote about a movie called Cruel World, I wrote about how my dad buys almost every movie that he sees at a yard sale.  That tendency has not changed one bit.  If he goes to a yard sale and sees a DVD for a dollar, he will buy it.  It doesn’t matter what movie it is.  If we already have it, he’ll still buy it.  If he thinks someone will like it, he’ll buy it.  Hell, he’ll even buy a movie that nobody will like because it’s cheap and he knows that I will give anything a chance.  Everyone knows my movie watching habits.  He’s no different.

My dad’s mentality of buying anything that he comes across has led to some interesting discoveries, as well as some entries in the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  Thanks to his hoarder-like nature, I own Cruel World, a movie that I covered last October.  I also have a copy of Going Overboard, which I watched earlier this year.  And then there is this week’s addition to the Sunday “Bad” Movies, a film titled Terror in Beverly Hills.

Terror in Beverly Hills stars Frank Stallone as karate sensei Hack Stone.  When Hack’s former soldier friend takes the president’s daughter hostage, it is up to Hack to save her.  There are gun fights, fist fights, car chases, and emotional beats meant to entertain.  Do they?  Not really.  That is, until the final fifteen minutes or so, which are fun to watch.

What I really want to discuss is something about my copy of Terror in Beverly Hills.  It’s something that is not as prominent in the present time, due to the growth of the digital market.  With movies being featured online in places like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and YouTube, there is not as much need for physical copies of movies.  This isn’t even taking into consideration the concept of pirating movies.  And that’s much more relevant to this discussion than Netflix anyway.  That’s because it is a digital version of what I want to discuss.  The copy of Terror in Beverly Hills that my dad bought at a yard sale is a bootleg copy.

My first memory of media bootlegging actually comes from the audio world.  This isn’t my personal experience just what comes to mind as the first instance of bootlegging.  In the 1980s, audio cassettes became the main format of music releases.  People would buy the tapes and use them to listen to music in their homes.  You know, like a CD or an mp3, but before those existed.  There were cassette players in homes, in cars, and there were Walkmans that people would use like iPods when they wanted to listen to music while walking.  The industry also produced small recording devices that people would take to concerts so they could record their favourite musicians live and listen back to what they had experienced in person.  When people decided to sell their experiences, it was the birth of the bootleg industry.

The movie industry also got a healthy dose of bootlegging when VHS hit the market.  After a while of high priced videos for people to watch at home, the concept of a VCR recording device and a blank tape came around.  People would copy the movies that they had rented to their own tapes to watch over and over.  They would record movies off of television.  They would sell some of these recorded versions to make a quick buck.  Movie bootlegging was born.

This tradition of recording and selling continued when the movie industry moved on from VHS to DVD.  Blank discs made it even easier for video transfers.  The quality of the transfer could be altered to fit more or less onto a disc.  The size of the discs were much less than that of the VHS copies that came before.  It was both easier to fill the discs and easier to store the discs which made the bootlegging industry blossom farther than it had before.

I remember going to a flea market once.  It was a big flea market.  By big, I mean humongous.  You could walk around the place for an entire day and still not see everything.  This flea market was the size of an amusement park.  It had everything.  I’m not going to list everything off, lest I sound like Stefon from Saturday Night Live without the cool human fire hydrants and that kind of stuff.  I will say that there was a guy with a ginormous display of DVDs, and I’d say that a good 50% of the movies were bootlegs.  I can tell you that bootlegging was a big industry within flea markets.

The bootlegging industry subsided with the rise of the internet.  As the internet became more popular and sites like KickassTorrents and ThePirateBay came to the forefront, bootlegging began to dissipate.  People were learning how to get the movies they wanted without having to pay someone to find the movies for them.  The people could go to YouTube and look up movies such as Chopper Chicks in Zombietown and find the whole thing up there to stream.  The rise of online piracy was the downfall of hard copy bootlegging.

There is still a small market out there for cheap hard copies of movies and it can lead to some interesting bootleg discoveries.  I’ve certainly discovered some movies thanks to bootlegs.  Terror in Beverly Hills was one of the discoveries.  Did I like it?  Not so much.  But I am glad to have found out that it exists and I am glad to have seen it.  If there is one good thing about bootleg copies it is the discovery factor.

I have some notes to put in here at the end:

• I mentioned two other movies that I’ve covered that were bought at yard sales.  They were Cruel World and Going Overboard.
• I also mentioned Chopper Chicks in Zombietown.
• If you have any suggestions of movies that you want me to watch that I will cover for the Sunday “Bad” Movies, tell me on Twitter.  Or comment below.  I’m still waiting for the first comment on the new blog.  Will it be you?