Remember the days before streaming services were a thing? Yep, basically that: as in people would burrow a rented copy from a friend who paid money to obtain a official copy on DVD from blockbuster then ripping the contents into those blank DVDs (the white ones) meaning they’ve pirated a copy for home use but it’s still a “torrent”. I remember watching a ripped copy of Finding Nemo (or other kids movies from that era) when I was younger.
The same with “lending” a purchased copy from a store a friend has proceeding to rip the DVD content onto a blank DVD having a copy. Then there are CAM’s (pirates using a video camera to record the film upon being shown in theaters) usually they do this around the debut (new releases in cinema) by sneaking a camcorder but the footage is shit (I remember back in 2010, I’ve seen Alice in Wonderland via CAM and it sucked due to bad resolution and audio).
The Dark Knight Rises. I was in middle school, and my someone had told my parents that it was extremely violent. Anyway, my cousin had a pirated copy, so I watched it at his place. We could literally hear people chomping on popcorn, and see moving heads lol.
Ok this is a whole story.
So back in the 90s, my mum’s friend came back from working in Kuwait for a few years.She gave us a bunch of pirated disney movies. These were cams, but camcorders from the 90s. The video quality was terrible, and several had ads all through them for some burger place like their equivalent of burger king. The ads had some guy dressed in Saudi style robes and turban watching his burger get eaten by an invisible genie or something.
One of the films was Beauty and the Beast. Seeing it now, it’s like a whole different movie. As a kid, it was gritty, darkly lit the whole time because of the shitty camera, and because of that it had this severely oppressive horror feel to it. It also didn’t have any ads. As kids, that was one terrifying movie. There was no Disney brightness and joy. Just darkness.
A Serbian Film… don’t watch it. You have been warned.
Yeah, I’ve read the plot summary … that one shall remain unwatched forever.
It’s a bit of a try hard meme film tbh, you’re not missing anything.
Idk man, it definitely made me sick to my stomach multiple times, I heard it was bad before but no one told me the details on why and definitely disturbed me, I think I was in my late teens early twenties when I saw it.
I could see that. I’d been thoroughly prepped on the movie and went in with a pretty cynical, “this was made to ‘shock’ people and is all fake” mindset which definitely colored my interpretation of it.
The Catwoman starring Halle Berry. Not only I found the movie sort of lame, also the quality of it was… Well. Someone went to the cinema and filmed the projection with a hand held camera. The image quality was trash, but the camera moved all the time, occasionally shaking. You got to hear the occasional cough or candy wrap noise from the audience, you got to see people standing up and moving across the camera because they needed a toilet break. You get the idea.
I couldn’t watch more than 10 minutes of it. It was a CAM that you could hear coughs, laughs, people talking to each other.
The full cinema experience at home, for free!
It’s funny how many talk about cam versions burned to disk because that’s my answer too. I found “Toy Story 3” in some bootleg ripped DVD’s long LONG before it was ever made.
I bought it just because I was curious what was on the disk because it couldn’t possibly be what the cover said.
Aaaand… what was it?
I think it turned out to be a buzz lightyear video. But the cover definitely said Toy Story 3.
Now You See Me. I don’t know if it was intentional by the uploader, but it was completely “out of order”. The video played fine, but all of the scenes were mixed up, so we were really confused. It happened on scene cuts though so it wasn’t totally obvious and at first we thought it was just some sort of weird editing technique because of the subject of the movie.
I’ve heard some companies scramble the scenes on their Blurray releases to screw with people trying to rip them, maybe that was the case?
Uploader just ripped and shared without checkingYeah that would make sense with the way the cuts were so seamless.
Sinners, just recently - not bad quality, but stopped in the middle for an advert in Hindi (I assume).
Well, I originally saw both Blair Witch and H20 played from really dark and messy VHS copies of theater recordings… And man, let me tell ya, they were both way better as low quality cams that HD movies!
I intentionally watch bad Horror as cams now, when I can, even decades later… It really adds to the experience!
For this exact reason I got the VHS rips of Alien 1 & 2 off archive.org.
That is going to be a great watch one spooky night.
2025 - after the virus
(It’s free on YouTube!)
It has… nothing. Go watch it. I cringed so much my future kids cringed
Pokémon: The First Movie (1998), which I had downloaded with Kazaa, turned out to be a Pokémon hentai ripoff, which my parents got to before I had a chance to come home from school. I walked in on mom and dad sitting in front of the computer, trying to act intrigued at what they’re watching. Possibly trying to justify why their child is into Pokémon porn. I did my homework and helped doing the dishes that day. Can you believe that?
Weird that I’ve never run into that. Was it a short, normal hentai length, or like a full movie? Did you happen to keep it?
Good question. I don’t remember. :/ Sorry >.<
Oh well, too bad. It probably wasn’t great, but I always get curious when vintage bootleg hentai gets mentioned.
Return of the King [2003] cam Xvid while it was still in theaters. A nearly 3.5-hour film compressed enough to fit on a 700MB CD or two.
Was it 160x120?
Something super tiny like that, yeah. It was nasty! :D
I’ve seem some pretty funny cam records, people that would be filming the top of other people’s heads half of the time, random talking and laughter, cam being dropped or the person not noticing it was now pointed at the front sit instead of the screen… and there was a curious thing when those betting mafias started, they started flooding the internet with a lot of cam records directly from the projection room, so they had good quality as framing goes but audio was shitty, and most of those seem to have come from Russia and they’d have audio and subtitles in random languages and tons of ads, especially 1xbet… but hey, you could watch the latest Marvel or Star Wars movie on the internet same day of release.
Haha memory unlocked, it was the first transformers movie, it started off perfectly, clean picture, good audio, but by the end of it we had been treated to about 6 different versions, form camcorder out of the movie theatre with people moving around, different languages and sub titles, was an experience lol
When I and my sister were kids, dad brought home a pirated VHS of the Sixth Day with Schwarzenegger. CAM quality shit but the worst part is that whoever was pirating the movies was using recycled VHS tapes… Porn VHS tapes, so after the movie ended there were like maybe 10 seconds of static and then just hardcore porn.
