Crucible Of Terror
Goodtimes Home Video (1971)
I picked this tape up from the VHS wall at the Mahoning Drive-In Theater over the weekend. The first thing that I noticed was the fact that it was released by Goodtimes. This is generally a red flag for tape collectors as they were notorious for putting out a poor quality product, but the Zayre price sticker on the cellophane caught my eye.
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| Standard Speaker - July 28, 1989 |
Zayre's was a discount department store chain that operated in the eastern United States from 1956 to 1990. The Zayre's in my hometown was the west end anchor store in the Laurel Mall from 1973 to 1989. My grandparents usually stopped in this store when they brought me to the mall when I was a kid. That, combined with the fact that Zayre's disappeared when I was nine years old when the chain was purchased by Ames, are the reasons that the store is one of the things that I associate with my childhood in the 80's.
I flipped the Crucible Of Terror box over to read the description of the movie and was surprised to find that the original sales receipt was slipped into the cellophane on the back.
The receipt is from Zayre Store #240. So far, I haven't been able to find out which city had Store #240, but the date of November 28'th, 1987 shows that it was purchased for $5.99 on the day after Thanksgiving. This could possibly have been a gift that someone purchased while they were doing their Black Friday shopping.
The closest Zayre's sales circular that I could find to the date that this movie was purchased was a newspaper insert that went out one week before Halloween, and this tape is listed as one of the items available for sale.
The Crucible Of Terror tape was part of a collection of horror movies that they were selling for $5.99. The other movies named in the circular are Little Shop Of Horrors, Night Of The Living Dead, Horror Express, Alice Sweet Alice, and Psychomania.
The tape played about as well as I could have hoped from a Goodtimes release. Most of their VHS releases that I've come across use as little tape as possible to fit the film in either LP or SLP speed, so there's a ton of static and tracking issues throughout the entire movie. These tapes usually played like crap when they were brand new in the 80's and 90's, so I'm amazed that this copy of Crucible Of Terror that is almost forty years old played as well as it did. I was going to encode it to share, but Flick Vault has already uploaded it with a much sharper picture quality. It's a pretty good movie about a psychotic artist. Click here or click play above to watch it.
