Heads up about those 'director's cuts' on old VHS tapes

I was digging through a box of old tapes I picked up at a flea market in Cleveland last month, and I found a copy of a movie I thought I knew inside and out. Turns out, the bootleg was actually a cam rip from a test screening, which I figured out when I checked the runtime against the official release. The thing had an extra 12 minutes of footage that never made it to the final cut, including a whole subplot that changes the ending. I looked it up online and apparently a bunch of these test screening rips exist from the 90s, but nobody talks about them because they're so hard to find now. The real kicker? The audio was out of sync by about 3 seconds for the first half hour, which made the dialogue sound completely deranged. Has anyone else stumbled on a tape that turned out to be a pre-release version of something?

2 comments

2 Comments

cameron53816d ago

A THREE SECOND audio delay on a test screening rip? That must have been absolutely WILD to sit through, especially if you didn't realize what it was at first. I've heard of these pre-release tapes floating around but never knew the audio was that busted on some of them. That extra subplot changing the whole ending is the kind of thing studios probably buried on purpose.

bens8115d ago

@cameron538 Did the crowd at the test screening just sit there confused for three seconds every time someone spoke? I wonder how many people walked out before they even got to that buried subplot.