Wednesday, March 22, 2017

LetGo app horror VHS found gold!

Hello there Ghouls!  This here article is a little tale of how I came across, what is apparently, the 4th most expensive VHS horror tape from the US according to VHSCollector.com!  In preparation for our 15th issue (preorder here) and my own personal move to Dallas Texas, I had started to sell off some of my excess collection.  While talking to my friend about the toys, records and oddities that I was selling off they suggested and app I had never heard of called LetGo.  I downloaded it just to check it out and I quickly got hooked.  Not to sell mind you, but to get free stuff and find MORE things to add to my collection and to resell.  VHS has been a recent (read 5 years) addition to my collection repertoire and I usually stick to the movies that I can't live without or random cheap movies that I haven't seen yet.

Enter the LetGo app!  While searching I found that lot's of people were selling VHS on the app but not many had any decent horror.  This all changed with a post I had seen on the app selling VHS for $1 a pop and just from the photos I saw a few horror titles that caught my eye.  There is a way to message straight through the app so I messaged the seller and told him I was really only interested in horror and by the end of the next day he had messaged back saying he had 39 horror total and there was a list of titles.  I'd say about 9 of them were ones that I could honestly say I really wanted with a few being duplicates that I could resell.  I messaged him back and advised that I could take them all for a deal if he wanted to work one or just buy the 9 outright.  He messaged back "Honestly at this point I'd let all 39 of them go for $20".  That works out to a little over 50 cents a tape, right on par with Goodwill so I couldn't pass it up!

We met up at a gas station, the thirty nine tapes were divided up into two HEB bags (if you're not from the south/Texas this is an awesome grocery store check it out when you're around) which I loaded into my car.  The same car that was already packed with all my belongings headed up to Dallas later that day.  I took a couple minutes to dig through the bags with my girlfriend and some of the tapes were awesome and some were pretty off the wall and obscure.  The ones I really liked were Motel Hell and this alternate cover of Return of the Living Dead that I hadn't seen.  I was pretty happy with my purchase and started researching some of the tapes online.  Which lead me to eBay and trying to find out how much they were worth.  A search for one of the more obscure tapes, Mama's Home (AKA Captives), lead me to NO eBay results.  I had to turn to the Google.  Below are some links to what I found in my Google search.

First was a listing on VHScollector.com for the tape which listed three people as wanting it and ZERO collections on the site that had the tape.  Which tipped me off that this tape might be rare!

http://vhscollector.com/movie/mamas-home

There was also a blog post about it that, unfortunately, I can't find again about people never seeing a copy of the VHS and only seeing it on a video on YouTube in a serious collectors stash.

Which lead me to this YouTube video:


The reviewer makes many references to the tape being rare, and just about never seeing any on eBay ever.  This is all confirmed by the comments saying that they had seen one or two show up on eBay but they went from $355-$650 and they hadn't seen any go up in years.  Which I found the next link to confirm.

http://vhscollector.com/articles/vhscollectorcoms-top-16-most-valuable-us-horror-vhs-part-2

Apparently it's listed on VHScollector.com as the 4th highest priced US horror VHS.  Not bad for a random horror lot pick up?  I'll list some photos of the tape here.  Also I really had no use for the tape and would much rather invest any proceeds towards more magazine merchandise for you guys!  I made some posts on Facebook and had 3 different people offer me from $400-$500 but I decided to roll the dice and see what eBay could get me.  Currently the tape is at $415 on eBay and you can check on it here!

www.ebay.com/itm/172585965083