Best video shop in soho

[Simon]

Why do you guys do this? It just leads to the places you highlight getting raided.

[bmuk]

maxims is good but a little over-rated. would be nice if they had more recent US vids - for instance i hope they get the films nadia did for hustler and ed powers soon!

there's one called Rainbow up from old compton, on frith or greek, which is very good too. looks like a dodgy one but actually you always get what you pay for.

little amsterdam is a ripoff, avoid.

in general, tho', i'd say kings cross is better, there are three stores - pirate on pentonville road, blue danube on caledonian road, and another one with a string door on york way - which all always give you what you pay for. blue danube only charges ?15 a vid and ?7 or ?8 for exchange, whilst the york way one sometimes will sell you original tapes - this happened to me once when i got a club seventeen tape, i was amazed!

are the police still actively raiding these places, what with R18 restrictions having been relaxed? surely not!

[David J]

I have got 6 or 7 tapes at Little Amsterdam this year, and never been ripped off - maybe they have got better?

Corniche in Frith Street is also good, though I have had occasional problems with tape quality.

[bmuk]

i've been to little amsterdam half a dozen times too but imho it's hit and miss and now i've given up. from the boxes it looks like they have a good range, and the tapes that they actually do have in stock are stored clearly behind the counter. but they will just as gladly go through the door to the right under the pretence of 'looking downstairs' which *always* means they're going to write you a false label on a tape which, though maybe close to what you want, is still the wrong tape.

when this happened again the last time i was in there i tried saying look, maybe you haven't got it in stock, when will you have it back in? but they insisted no, we'll go downstairs, we'll rip you off. i had hoped that if i was polite, friendly, respectful, made clear i'd been there before (i had a tape to exchange) then they wouldn't try to rip me off - but no. so i'm not going back.

there's a similar place down some stairs on the right hand side of the little corridor between brewer street and berwick street, great selection of boxes, slightly worse selection of tapes, sometimes might seem worth taking the risk, probably isn't.

but until more tapes become available in the legit shops, often trying the dodgy shops is the only hope for finding a vid.

[Markie]

The stuff behind the counter is boxes of stuff that's gone out of stock. They actually keep the stock downstairs. They gave me a Ben Dover video with a biro-ed label, but it was the real thing, albeit a third generation copy (at least).

[Tiger]

Oh come on - please. Do you honestly beleive that these shops haven't already been raided! I find it hard to beleive after years of being in the same place that the boys in blue do not know. In fact - I know they have.. Wise up..

[Phil McCavity]

Its usualy the council with trading standards backed up by plod that raids them and they are re-stocked within a couple of hours. The rummour is the guys with licenses stir it up with the council cause they are paying big money and selling licensed copies. These other guys are pirating scanning covers and paying no-one for anything. I have never understood anyone buying pirate tapes I wan't the originals with covers on my shelves so I can view the best quality possible sound and vision and I am sure most of the guys on the forum are the same. Its not really about the money its about the value of the product. Ben suffered most at the start cause everybody and their brother had pirated his stuff quite openly and he had a hard time to stop it. His stuff is so popular in the UK the guys were ordering them from sex shops in Europe even if it was dubbed to German.

Phil McC

[Simon]

The problem is that most of the rip-off places have stock that arrives daily with the guy running the shop that day. If they get raided it doesn't really matter. For the the better places with a good range of stock on site raids are more of a problem. The more they get raided the less availability of older titles etc.

Blue Danube at Kings Cross has recently changed hands. Now mainly DVD and video prices upped to ?20.