FrightFest review – Boutique: To Preserve and Collect

Boutique: To Preserve and Collect

At once a history of the homevideo medium – from the early days of video cassette to 4k discs – and a brisk tour of today’s specialty labels, Ry Levey’s Boutique is the kind of project where it’s hard not to spend great swathes of the film trying to read the spines of the shelfloads of physical media arrayed behind many of the interviewees … or to jot down titles of the many, many off-mainstream movies excerpted which look really interesting (though there are a few items with that disappointing ‘currently unavailable’ tag in the slot where others proudly list a distributor).  It’s a proudly quirky, enthusiastic visit with people who can get passionate about the processes of rescuing film elements from cans stored in barns and speckled with chicken shit (David Gregory of Severin explains this is how he found James Kenelm Clarke’s House on Straw Hill aka Exposé) or undoing the damage done by long-ago projectionists who spliced out frames or used toxic sticky tape to repair breaks.  It notes the centrality of horror, exploitation and action to the boom in restored releases but quickly goes beyond Hammer and Lucio Fulci – which have featured heavily in every phase of homevideo all the way back to rental tapes – to take in the wealth of material passed over until very recently, especially from minority filmmakers.  It’s hard not to be moved by the sheer joy of the distributor who wants to share his discovery of an artistically innovative French gay porn movie …