Caveat Emptor

At Midnight I’ll
Ditch Your Pre-Order

Caveat Emptor -
The Long Road
To Coffin Joe

Caveat emptor is right.

Today’s article is not a review, alas. Make no mistake, it’s both a warning to physical media buyers and collectors everywhere but it also, I think, asks an important question about one of the underlying tent pegs of obtaining the latest releases in a Blu Ray marketplace, which seems to be in the midst of a ‘last chance’ inspired golden age of rarely seen releases being thrust into the UK and US marketplace. This is something of an extended rant, primarily about three specific entities involved in an incident which is the basis of this entry of NUTS4R2. Let’s call them The Good, The Bad and The Ugly... but I will also name them, right now!

So we have The Ugly, being Arrow Films, who have made some mistakes over the years but always (for the most part) try to fix them. Then there’s The Bad, aka the usually very helpful amazon.co.uk, who are usually really good at customer service and a very approachable organisation. I spend a lot of money with them every year... especially at Christmas time and on many birthdays. And then there’s The Good, the hero of the hour if you like, aka diabolikdvd.com... who you will also hear more of a little later.

Okay... so I said this would be a long one but, like a Tarkovsky or Bergman movie, the long lead in always makes for a more powerful ending, right? I hope. Anyway, so what I’m going to do is start with two flashbacks, to give a demonstration to the way two of these companies have behaved in the past.

So, by no means the main villains of this piece but this is relevant I think, lets go back to Fopp Records, some years ago now. I can’t remember exactly when this was but it must have been a year or two before the pandemic. The great Arrow Films... and they are great, despite the constant technical problems they are apparently plagued with and the ‘money for old rope’ nature of some of their re-releases... announced for pre-order a Blu Ray box of Mario Bava films. Now, it’s not got as many films in it as the two US DVD Bava boxes that Anchor Bay released back in the day but, if there’s a director whose films you want to upgrade to Blu Ray then, surely, Bava must fit the bill with his beautiful shot compositions and use of bright colours. So I went to Fopp Records near Covent Garden, put a cash deposit down and pre-ordered the box set. Because a pre-order means you buy a copy in advance so as not to miss out if it sells out right? Or so I have always thought (otherwise what’s the point of them?). So I went to Fopp on the day the set was due to be released only to find that, the sets had sold out before the physical stores could get the copies they ordered. I wasn’t best pleased and, while Arrow themselves had no copies left either, I immediately got on my phone and ordered what turned out to be one of the very last copies Amazon.co.uk had in stock. And, success, it arrived. Job done, by the skin of my teeth. Although I wasn’t very impressed that Fopp (and I’m sure many other retail outlets) had been left in the cold with a queue of disappointed customers who had also pre-ordered the set from them.

Okay, so my takeaway was... maybe if I wanted something this badly, I should just pre-order direct from Arrow and so, this is what I was doing for a time. And it was great because they give reward points every time you shop so I managed to get a few free films off of them too. All was good until the incident that leads me into...

Flashback number two. Sometime during the pandemic lock down, UK location undisclosed...

One day the postman brought me a completely flat-packed, sealed cardboard box... well it wasn’t a box because it was still flat, despite having the cardboard strip to unwrap it still intact. I opened it and, unsurprisingly given the appearance of said object, there was absolutely nothing inside.  I had a few things on order so I emailed a few companies who I thought it could be before, eventually, finding the phone number of the company on the address label via the internet and giving them a call (after a couple of days of attempts they finally answered). I found myself talking to the manager of a packaging and fulfilment centre who told me the package would have come from Arrow films. Okay, so that narrowed it down to one thing at the time, the pre-order of their Yokai Monsters boxed edition (you can find my reviews of the four films here, here, here and here) which I desperately wanted to see as, to the best of my knowledge, they’d not been released in this country before.

So I got onto Arrow who... really did not do well at sorting this out. They said it was nothing to do with them (possibly true given the box was sealed) and eventually suggested I fill a form out at the post office if the postman had stolen an item. Again, it was a sealed, flat  piece of card... so if anything was stolen, it would have been by one of the workers at the distribution centre they were using, surely? It took me to ‘offer’ to write about the whole experience on my blog for Arrow to finally replace (I use the term replace fairly loosely) the Yokai Monsters boxed set. So hoorah but, lesson learned. I never, to my knowledge, ordered anything directly from Arrow films again... despite their rewards points being very enticing.

Okay... bang up to date and now onto the main story. Thanks to those of you who have stuck with me and made it through this far...

Sometime in the third quarter of last year, Arrow announced pre-orders for a complete Coffin Joe Blu Ray set entitled, Inside The Mind Of Coffin Joe. Essentially a more complete and somehow even more beautiful package than the Platform Entertainment DVD box set a decade or so before. So, having learned from my mistaken trust with both Fopp and Arrow, I mistakenly pre-ordered it from Amazon.co.uk (the real villains of this piece) on 29th September 2023, with an expected delivery date of 4th December 2023. And that was that... or so I thought.

The first sign that there would be any trouble was when somebody, it might well have been Arrow themselves, posted on Twitter that one of the films on the third disc in the set was faulty in that the English subtitles cut out after half an hour. Now I’ve had Blu Rays from Arrow before with similar kinds of errors where either something didn’t work or it was the wrong cut or an advertised extra was accidentally left off. And, sure, it’s sloppy quality control but, to their credit, they always followed it up with a general repressing and disc replacement scheme for all those affected by this. Which, to be fair, is what they did this time around. I just figured it would eventually filter through to Amazon and they’d delay the, already significantly delayed delivery date while they waited for a replacement disc.

However, and here’s where things take an almost sinister twist... a few days later, maybe a week, Amazon emailed me to inform me the order had been cancelled completely. No reason was given. Which is crazy right? Like I said earlier, a PRE-order is what you do to guarantee a copy because you think the discs might sell out. It’s an agreement between you and a company that the product will make its way to you. So I did what I usually do... I went on to Amazon to find it in my order history so I could contact them. Here’s the thing though... and I’ve never heard of Amazon doing this before... they didn’t just cancel my order... they erased it. It was actually deleted from my order history completely. I’d never heard of this happening, even when I’ve had the occasional order cancelled. They were just making it as hard as they could for me and the gazillions of other people who had ordered the Coffin Joe box set from them to complain about it.

I didn’t let that deter me... too many important films were on the line... I found a way to eventually bypass it (after all, I still had the order number in my original email) and got them on the phone. I explained to the guy why this had happened and he told me to wait while he found out. His answer was... the order’s been cancelled.  

Not what I asked, I explained, I wanted to know why it’s been cancelled when a pre-order is supposed to be a guarantee, as far as I knew, that the order would eventually be here. I didn’t care how long I had to wait for the product, I didn’t want my order cancelled. There was another long wait while he again talked to his line manager and when he eventually returned it was with the news that... um... my order had been cancelled. What the heck? Again I explained to him that I already knew this and so I enlightened him once more as to what the issue was with Arrow and how I’m sure there would be a replacement disc coming at some point. So he put me on hold again for a while more and talked to his line manager once more and, you know what he said? He said my order had been cancelled. Yup, I said. I am aware. It’s not just been cancelled it’s been erased. Did I need to get a Delorean, go back in time and take actions to stop my order being erased from history? I asked to speak to his manager. Oh certainly sir, was the reply. He transferred the call only for his manager at Amazon to deliberately hang up without saying a word to me, ending both the call and any trust I’d built up with Amazon over the past few decades.

Okay...meanwhile, I’d done some asking around. At a film fair I went to, one supplier hadn’t even received his shipment of Coffin Joe boxes. Another had received his own personal copy but he was still awaiting a replacement disc for their last release which was wrongly pressed, let alone getting a replacement disc for this. And, when I was buying some stuff from Fopp (just so I can write about cool stuff for my lovely readers) I casually asked about the Coffin Joe box to be met with a tirade of... well let’s not say swearing, this is a family blog, but met with a tirade of negative energy against Arrow who have ‘pulled this stuff’ one too many times. Apparently there are a lot more instances of this happening with this company than I realised (and again, to their credit, Arrow always did something about this). It’s fair to say though that the general perception of the company from the people who shift their product for them is not particularly glowing, it turns out.

Okay... enter the hero of the hour... @Diabolikdvd. A brief exchange on the Twitternet with this US based speciality store convinced me to get one of the faulty copies as soon as I could because it was selling out fast and wouldn’t be reissued (it has been reissued and gone on for resale on both Arrow and Amazon, it turns out, but that information was emphatically not what was being said at the time so that’s not Diabolik’s fault). So, having at least being refunded the money from Amazon (I’d purchased those with vouchers so redirected those to grabbing the third volume of Shout Factory’s Shaw Bros boxed sets), I ordered one from Diabolik in the US (for a heck of a lot more money than the UK version, what with all the postage... again, not the fault of the supplier) and it arrived in around a week. Good service and I shall consider ordering from them more than I do already when it comes to new releases, I think.

I won’t dwell on the various claims from FedEx* trying to get taxes for the shipment both before and after they delivered it, when Diabolik had made clear that it was all pre-paid up front as part of the price... I looked on the internet and it seems FedEx have been doing this to a lot to people lately, incorrectly, for whatever reason. So I then put in a claim to Arrow who... after literally four emails worth of toing and froing about their disc replacement scheme and a further follow up last week (by the time you read this blog post) when I queried why some people had received them but I still hadn’t... finally sent me a replacement disc yesterday (again, just under a week before this blog post is published). I haven’t checked this yet... I’m almost afraid to. The replacement disc has the UK certification on it over the same disc artwork as the US version I got but I’m assured by all and sundry that this is only a cosmetic difference and that the content is exactly the same.

So there you are, after six months of stress about this title, I finally have the whole thing. But, I’m understandably, I think, not very happy with Amazon at all about all of this trouble. And so, I’ll leave the reader with the same question I pitched earlier, because I think this is the long term take away from all this... apart from not trusting Amazon again. And it’s this...

Is a pre-order of a physical item supposed to be a way of guaranteeing you get a copy before they sell out? And, if not, then what the heck is the point of having a pre-ordering system anyway, if it doesn’t benefit the customer? Food for thought.

Meanwhile... if you have a multizone Blu Ray player then https://diabolikdvd.com/ is worth investigating, for sure.

 *A few days after writing this, FedEx sent me another letter threatening legal action, for the sake of £22.24 they thought I owed them. I have now, finally, been able to contact FedEx and settled that matter once and for all.