By Casey Campbell

July has been a pretty sweet month, all things considered. I started this experiment, What’s Streaming? and What’s Playing?, and it’s been a fairly successful venture (for me personally). It’s nice to get back to writing more consistently, and it’s always fun to watch movies. But enough about that, I bought a shit ton of good stuff this month.

Barnes and Noble has a biannual sale on their Criterion Collection discs, usually during July and November. I haven’t been collecting long, and simply don’t have the money to buy things outside of necessities—so in lieu of normal thoughtful gifts, I’ve been requesting B&N gift cards for holidays and my recent birthday. I got eleven Criterion discs/sets in the past month. Some turned out to be really difficult to find.

My white whales were the recently released Bruce Lee set, containing five of his best films (the entire set was a blind buy for me, and I’m excited to dig into it), and the Karel Zeman set, with three Jules Verne inspired films (seen Invention for Destruction and loved it).

Blind buys include Häxan, Easy Rider, Vampyr, the second film in the Lady Snowblood set, most of War and Peace, and until recently, Do The Right Thing.

I also grabbed a few Arrow Video and Scream Factory releases.

None of these were blind buys. I’ve seen them all and enjoyed them quite a bit. Arrow is great for offering the original art on the back of the slip cover so you can choose either the new or old versions to present. One of these movies is more well known as The Mutilator, but it was originally released as Fall Break (Blood Rage was originally released as the boring Slasher). I have the Fall Break side out because of the song at the beginning of the film by the same name. It’s so strange and out of place and never ceases to make me laugh.

So yeah, won’t be buying movies for a while but this has been fun. Happy watching!