In the mid-2000s, an outfit named 5 Minutes To Live sold hard-to-find titles on DVD-R. Their arrival coincided with when DVDs, players (and DVD-R media too, for that matter) became more affordable for the average consumer, and when movies were restored and upgraded for Digital Versatile Disk: some were never previously on VHS! 5 Minutes To Live “filled the blanks” on a lot of obscurities not legitimately released to DVD at the time.
As per their disclaimer, 5 Minutes To Live “specializes in providing films lost to the public. The titles we sell are some of the best films we feel should be seen by any fan of extraordinary cinema … 5 Minutes to Live operates as a conversion service for fans of hard-to-find movies. Please note we do not sell factory release DVDs. All DVD-Rs are reproductions/conversions from public domain sources. No rights are given or implied.” Not sure what the heck “public domain sources” means, but all right.
Their catalogue ran the gamut of Documondo (Strange Documentaries, Bizarre TV, Educational Films, Lost And Found); Home Grown (Southern Fried Exploitation, 70s Splatter, Forgotten 60s Classics, Rare Film Noir); International (Turkish Remakes, International Art House, Asian Horror, Mod Rock Movies). They also leaned heavily on Andy Kaufman or Herve Villechaize appearances, and had a series of Lost And Found Video Nights, which had lots of found footage, clips, musical performances, which were akin to channel surfing at 4 AM.
Many of these titles below are now legitimately released to DVD, but it’s fun to look back at what 5MTL offered. One can certainly understand the appeal to the midnight movie fan. Of course they were bootlegs, so video quality was often suspect, and sometimes the disks wouldn’t play properly (likely due to cheap DVD-R media). But that was how the dice rolled sometimes.
I wish I could find bigger scans of their artwork, but thanks to the Wayback Machine, their bizarre legacy is preserved for future generations. Remember, these images come from when many still had dial-up, and went for coffee while a gif even at 448 pixels had to load.
Enjoy the gallery below! (Click on any image to open the gallery into a lightbox and navigate with your arrow keys.)
Greg Woods
Greg Woods has been a film enthusiast since his teens, and began his writing "career" at the same time- prolific in capsule reviews of everything he had watched, first on index cards, then those hardcover dollar store black journals, then an old Mac IIsi. He founded The Eclectic Screening Room in 2001, as a portal to share his film love with the world, and find some like-minded enthusiasts along the way. In addition to having worked in the film industry for over two decades, he has been a co-programmer of films at Trash Palace, and a programmer/co-founder of the Toronto Film Noir Syndicate. He has also written for Broken Pencil, CU-Confidential, Micro-Film, and is currently working on his first novel. His secret desire is for someone to interview him for a podcast or a DVD extra.