Vinegar Syndrome and Their Partner Labels

[yoloswegmaster]

Maybe It's Love (Kani)

I suppose this confirms that Kani now have a deal with Shaw Bros. Maybe they will pick up some of the titles that I've been requesting on here.

[swo17]

There were like 400 LE copies of Hundreds of Beavers left half an hour ago but now they're all gone

[TechnicolorAcid]

There were like 400 LE copies of Hundreds of Beavers left half an hour ago but now they're all gone

Those damn beavers!

[jazzo]

Some advice from my provincial government on dealing with them:

https://www.ontario.ca/page/preventing- ... ts-beavers

Alls I can say is, The Orders (Les Ordres) from CIP this month looks to be la sortie média physique de la putain d'année!

[beamish14]

Les Ordres is absolutely massive from Canadian International. You’d be hard-pressed to find a top 10 Canadian features of all time list that doesn’t include it

[beamish14]

Kuso does feature a cockroach coming out of George Clinton’s anus. I highly recommend it

[CSM126]

Well, okay. I said I was done after Goodbar, The Keep and feardotcom but Candy Mountain is a dear favorite of mine and I am glad to retire my Republic VHS*, so yeah I snagged it.

*Although I will always have a soft spot for that garishly pastel cover.

[Bunuel]

I don't know anything about John Schnall, but that trailer sold me on it. Always down for some weirdo animation.

[andyli]

Is Candy Mountain going to feature the botched 2K restoration people talked about earlier on this forum?

[kekid]

I am out of the loop on "Looking for Mr. Goodbar 4K." Is it sold out already?
When I clicked on the link I was sent by VS I got Oops message.

[domino harvey]

They’re only selling partner releases for the rest of the month

[yoloswegmaster]

VS announced that they will be releasing Trey Parker's Cannibal! The Musical, hours after a label in the UK called Refuse Films had announced their release. Interestingly, they emailed Diabolik, Grindhouse, and Orbit to tell them not to import and stock the latter release.

The guy who runs Grindhouse confirmed in this video (starting from the 39 minute mark) that because of this hullabaloo, VS/OCN created a new policy that if a third-party retailer were to stock a competing release of a title that VS released/are releasing, then they won't be selling the LE titles to the retailers. Starting from now, it looks like Grindhouse won't be stocking any of the LE releases from VS (and I'm presuming the same for the partner labels). He also pointed out how it was a bit hypocritical for VS to ask them to not stock the Eureka release of Tank Girl but allow them to stock the Umbrella release simply because they are one of the partner labels.

[domino harvey]

I understand if Orbit et al can’t financially afford to tell Vinegar Syndrome to fuck off, but I hope they all do

[dwk]

Some more from Mike from Grindhouse (posts from the Vinegar Syndrome thread at Blu-ray.com's forum)

OK, so some clarification on some things from last night's live show.

OCN is the wholesale distributor for VS and their partner labels. OCN gives smaller retailers access to the VS and partner labels products at wholesale pricing. This is usually 50% off MSRP - not what VS is selling them for. Within the past few years that 50% pricing has dropped to 40-45% for limited editions. This seems small but it makes it very difficult to make any money especially when VS does such a good job at direct to consumer sales.

The reason for standing up to this new rule of theirs is the fact that - Cannibal The Musical for example - I currently have 120 pre-orders for the Refuse release. I have NEVER sold 120 pre-orders for ANY VS title. Ever. They also limit the amount of product we can order through OCN. So there would never be a title I could pre-sell 120 copies of. In fact, For Cannibal, the pre-order wasn't made available to the retailers until a day and a half after the announcement of all the titles. It was almost sold out by the time I placed my order (which they cancelled). If I followed their rules and didn't carry the Refuse release I would have lost a considerable amount sales on the import and still only gotten about 30 of the VS LE to sell.

TLDR: VS is hard to sell for us and imports are a large % of our business

The wholesale site has limits of 30 per title.

I WISH we made that much on each title. Usually our profit margin (selling at the regular prices VS sells them for) is about $6 for a slipcover version and maybe $10 for a box release. Sometimes our profit margin was as little as $3 selling them at the regular VS pricing.

[ryannichols7]

I am obviously late to this, but I (no surprise!) heavily enjoyed Mike's rant a lot, and his posts since. he had me until he started trashing 4K, but otherwise I'm glad to stand with him against this evil empire. I was glad to see the tide on the other forum turn a little bit after previously, the devotees there sided with VS over the Cannibal! The Musical case. I'm thankful people are starting to come around and not see VS as this struggling little company. they're clearly in this to continue to do all the wrong things...

I understand if Orbit et al can’t financially afford to tell Vinegar Syndrome to fuck off, but I hope they all do

I hope Orbit joins Grindhouse on this one. Marc's comments before kinda implied he's in agreement, but I don't want to take words out of his mouth at all. I love that Mike specifically called out the Tank Girl release and their hypocrisy with Umbrella, and let alone mentioning they support "film lovers" and the Indie stores or whatever, but you don't see them refusing to sell their products on Amazon even though I can easily import just about any disc I want to through Amazon...who VS will send pallets of standard editions to, when all is said and done.

I feel like Orbit do better business selling VS titles, they do get a fair amount of LE's after the fact - I picked up Speaking Parts there after it was cleared off the VS website quickly, for example. but I can't imagine the margins are high enough versus carrying the Second Run edition of Interrogation, for example

[Matt]

Judging from the latest Orbit newsletter, it seems like they might have worked out a little quid-pro-quo deal with VS. They seem to be getting a fair number of the LE releases to stock and a 30% off sale for the last half of December (while VS titles are otherwise unavailable direct). I honestly can't blame these small operations for doing what makes sense for them. I like supporting Orbit because they ship quickly and with good packaging and usually carry everything that I want.

[criterionsnob]

I received the corrected Green Fish Blu-ray in my latest VS order.

[What A Disgrace]

It's not mentioned anywhere I can find, but Sexmission comes with liner notes by Tomasz Kolankiewicz.

[DJBillyMac]

Kani said on Instagram that they are doing a release of Lav Diaz's Batang West Side in 2025.

[beamish14]

Kani said on Instagram that they are doing a release of Lav Diaz's Batang West Side in 2025.

I’ll gladly double dip after already owning the German Filmmuseum disc. Unbelievable film

[CSM126]

I regret to confirm that the transfer of Candy Mountain is appalling. Someone somewhere in the restoration or encoding process had no idea what to do with the color black. True blacks are reduced to blobs of pale green/blue pixels. Reminds me of playing with photoshop and cranking up the contrast on a dark image until it glows with pixel rings. Bright scenes are… okay. Relatively speaking. But really this looks hardly any better than Blaq Out’s French DVD transfer and that is one of the worst discs I own. So is this. I think the VHS might be better (in spite of the lower resolution), although my VCR recently quit on me so I can’t fire it up for a comparison right now.

[hearthesilence]

Wow. I already posted about the DCP that I saw at MoMA (credited to Film Movement and advertised as a "new digital restoration") and how it was disappointing with a video look to it, but I'm stunned that the Blu-ray looks that much worse. When I went home after the screening, I looked at the VHS rip I had and still concluded the DCP was a big improvement over that, but IMHO that said more about the low quality of VHS.

[swo17]

True blacks are reduced to blobs of pale green/blue pixels.

Can you provide the timecode for a section you find particularly egregious?

[CSM126]

True blacks are reduced to blobs of pale green/blue pixels.

Can you provide the timecode for a section you find particularly egregious?

I think the worst is from 40:10-41:35. Julius’s black jacket, the shadowy corners of the room and the darkness outside the windows are all pixelated, with blue blobs dancing around. None of it is actually black. Just horrendous. But I’d also point out:

7:43-8:26 (the left side of the screen should be shadowy but is full of pixelation and the kid’s jacket is almost glowing from some weird glitch)

18:00-18:28 (the dark interior of the van is a blue pixel mess all around their heads)

34:58-35:27 (Julius’ black leather jacket is lacking detail and has that weird pale blue pixel glow, especially on the left edge of the screen)

38:25-38:51 (the screen is supposed to be mostly black but again is riddled with shifting blobs of pixels and that pale coloration)

40:05-40:08 (why is that black dog blue?)


“Video” is probably the best way to describe the least-offensive parts of this transfer. It’s obviously scrubbed and rather unpleasant, but the black crush or whatever you call this artifacting is the biggest crime. It’s all over the damn movie with few exceptions (the scene at the end where Elmore is starting a trash can fire looks okay to me, but big whoop by that point).

Oh, and as further proof of how little respect these folks had for the movie, they couldn’t even spell Harris Yulin’s name correctly on the slip cover. This is the work of people who don’t care.

[swo17]

So I had watched this yesterday and thought it basically looked fine. I revisited the moments you cited and am not really seeing those issues on my setup (Sony Bravia OLED & Oppo UDP-203). Maybe a little at 38:25, but it didn't distract me while watching.

On the other side of things, I'm one of those people that can't play Mr. Goodbar