About

I ended up with a box of movies and multiple hard drives.

That’s the short version.

They were part of a collection from an estate sale that got broken up and eventually found its way to someone who knew I was into this kind of stuff.  That individual then gave it all to me rather than throwing everything out. There were some discs mixed in (a hundred or so), along with a few notebooks and random pieces of paper from whoever originally put the collection together. 

There are hundreds of movies on the drives. Possibly thousands. I’m still figuring that part out as not everything is labelled in a way that makes sense. It looks like the owner ripped most things themselves and never bothered labelling things conventionally.

And they’re weird.

Not weird in the “I found a cursed VHS tape in an abandoned house” sense. Moreso, movies that somebody, somewhere, decided were worth keeping: Hong Kong action movies. Cheap horror. Martial arts. Exploitation. Vintage adult films from the 70s. Straight-to-video movies nobody remembers. Stuff with titles I recognize but versions I don’t. Stuff where I’m not entirely sure what the actual title is.  This person had a taste for the obscure.

Some of these movies I already know. Some I own.

I started Salvaged Cinema because I thought it would be fun to actually go through all of it.

That’s really it.

I’m not trying to preserve the files themselves. A 480p DVD rip isn’t suddenly historically important because it spent twenty plus years sitting on somebody’s hard drive. A bunch of these movies have since been restored and released on Blu-ray or even 4K. Some are probably easier to find now than they were when these files were made.

I’m more interested in seeing what somebody thought was worth saving.

There’s something fascinating to me about a collection when you don’t know the person who built it, you start noticing patterns. I will never meet this person, but I can get an idea of them through their collection.

So that’s what I’m doing.

I’m cataloging everything as I go and watching as much of it as I can. I’ll write about the movies here. If I find something interesting tucked in with the collection, I’ll probably put that up too. I’m sure I’ll occasionally wander off into movies I own or other things that seem like they belong here.

There isn’t really an end goal.

I have a lot of movies.

I’m going to watch them.

Everything deserves to be watched once.