New Budget Videocassette Movies Rate a ($)10

“Fatal Attraction” selling at $9.95?

“Maybe in 1995,” joked Ron Castell, vice president of marketing and merchandising for the huge Erol’s chain, which is based in Washington, D.C. Like all other major movies during their first year or so on home video, “Fatal Attraction” costs $90. As time goes by and the demand drops, so does the price.

You won’t see “Fatal Attraction,” currently the No. 1 rental, at a bargain price anytime soon, but other movies are available at that price.

Media Entertainment recently announced that, starting Aug. 1, it will market 54 titles--both theatrical and non-theatrical--at $9.95. In October the company will introduce 46 more. The list is headed by movies such as “The Amazing Dobermans” and “One Million B.C.”

Goodtimes Video offers a $9.95 line of movies originally released on RCA/Columbia, including “Shamus,” “Mothra,” “Behold a Pale Horse” and “Amsterdam Kill.”

Video Treasures, also big in budget-priced videos, sells for $9.98 movies such as “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” “Sleuth,” “A Force of One,” “Advise and Consent” and the colorized version of “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

“Titles at this price are for the impulse buyer,” explained Janice Whiffen, Media’s senior vice president of marketing. “It’s like buying a record or a music tape. You see it in a store and it’s cheap enough to buy on impulse. You won’t do that with a $90 tape.”

But you won’t find shelves full of budget-priced movies at your local video store--which is geared to renting recent hit movies, not selling $10 movies that are a few years old.

So where are you most likely to find these budget-priced videos?

“We supply the mass merchants (such as K mart, Sears and Target), record stores, drug stores, grocery chains,” said Peter Hyman, president of Video Treasures. “We don’t deal much with the video stores. They’re more interested in rentals.”

Video stores are lukewarm about budget-priced videos for a very basic reason.

“There’s not a lot of money in it for us,” Castell of the Erol’s chain pointed out. “The profit margin is low. There can be some profit in it but you’ve got to sell lots of units. And the budget titles take shelf space that could be occupied by more profitable titles. The $10 videos belong in those mass merchant stores like K mart that work on low profit margins.”

For the video retailer, another problem is the quality of the $10 titles. You’re more likely to find losers such as “Cheerleaders From Hell” or “The Lopsided Monster,” which are undesirable at any price.

“If they were offering ‘Lethal Weapon’ or ‘RoboCop’ at 10 bucks, or great titles that weren’t too old, more video retailers would be interested,” said Castell.

Some video stores steer clear of $10 videos because many are technically inferior. To save money on tape, companies often manufacture these videos at the slowest speed--which often means washed-out colors and muddy images.

But Media Entertainment’s new $10 line, Whiffen insisted, won’t have that problem: “Our titles are all at the standard speed. We can do that because we have our own duplication plant. Other companies selling $9.95 titles don’t. They have to use slow speed to save money, but we don’t.”

Companies such as Goodtimes and Video Treasures selling budget lines get many of their videos from major companies such as RCA/Columbia and MCA, which farm out titles that are a few years past their peak.