Cult Epics, Home to Classics of Erotic Cinema, Now Streaming

LOS ANGELES—For Nico B., founder of the Cult Epics site, movies were always “my first love.” And not just any movies, but the strange, different and most of all, erotically daring movies that first appeared in the early 1970s in his native Netherlands. Those films were not widely screened in theaters, but Nico — who says that his last name is too difficult for Americans to pronounce — found ways to find those films, beginning as a movie collector as a kid. Since then, his career path led him to Europe’s premier cult video rental store, a distribution company for erotic and other cult films, his Cult Epics site and most recently, an online erotica streaming channel. “I would go to a video store and ask if I could buy a VHS of a movie I loved,” he remembers. “And also, in Amsterdam, there was pirate TV at the time. You could watch porn films, or anything forbidden, at 12 o’clock midnight. If you tune in with your TV and you moved your antenna, you could find things. There were pirates transmitting everything you could think of. Those were crazy times.” So he taped a wide range of erotic films, horror movies and other high weirdness, building his collection that way. It was a short step from there, to turning his passion into a business.  “I found out there were people collecting movies, who loved movies from the day. And they could only see them in arthouse theaters or midnight screenings especially,” he told AVN. “Sometimes on TV, but often cut. Especially in America, films were often cut. Only later on could people get the uncut version. But that already existed in Holland. In Holland there was no censorship. I would see Blue Movie on television when I was 12 years old!” Blue Movie, of course, is Andy Warhol’s groundbreaking 1969 experimental film in which a couple is depicted engaging in various sex acts in between conversations about the Vietnam War and other topical issues of the day, and having lunch. His fervor for collecting films led him, as an adult, to open Cult Videotheek, which soon became Holland’s, and Europe’s, best-known source for “cult” films.  “It was the first rental and sell-through store in Amsterdam,” Nico says. “It was a place where Quentin Tarantino would visit when he was writing Pulp Fiction. Michael Jackson would come to rent all kinds of stuff. Every top artist or rock and roll star would come to our store, because we had everything, uncut, uncensored.” According to a report by The Guardian newspaper, Tarantino was such a fan of the store that he ran up $150 in rental late fees — which he never paid off. “From there I started releasing films in Europe and America, and we got into erotica and adult stuff. I was a big fan of vintage erotica, so I have a whole series of erotica from the 1900s to the 1970s.” Nico also struck up friendships with several directors of erotic films, most notably Radley Metzger, Tinto Brass, and Bunny Yeager, the latter of which was known as Bettie Page’s photographer. As a result, he developed a specialty in films made by those directors. “And also, I released all the films of Bettie Page, including all the bondage films.” From the retail business grew his new label, Cult Epics, which continues today online not only as a source for the films of Nico’s favorite directors and many others. He has also entered the book publishing business, with Cult Epics’ upcoming coffee table book Sylvia Kristel: From Emmanuelle to Chabrol, a lavishly illustrated tribute to the late Dutch actress and model who was best known for her role as the title character in the iconic 1974 erotic classic, Emmanuelle, directed by Just Jaeckin.  She reprised her role in the sequel, Emmanuelle 2, released in the U.S. as Emmanuelle: The Joys of a Woman, which Nico considers an even better film than the original. In fact, asked which films he’d recommend to someone looking for an introduction to ‘70s erotica, he says, “though Emmanuelle 1 is great, you should see it before Part 2 — but Part 2 is a masterpiece. It’s very similarly directed to the first 50 Shades of Gray. You can see the director of 50 Shades of Gray used the same formula.” The Kristel book comes with a four-disc set of the actresses’s lesser-known erotic films, none of which have been released on DVD previously, including Julia (1974), Playing With Fire (1975), Mysteries (1978), and Pastorale 1943 (1978). Julia, Nico says, will also have an online premier on Cult Epics new, online movie channel — another of his company’s new projects. “It’s always been my dreamton have my own erotica movie channel,” he says. “I’ve been trying to get my movies up on Amazon and most of the time I fail because they take it down right away. I thought the only way to show these movies is actually on an adult platform.” Ultimately, he struck a deal with HotMovies.com, an adult video-on-demand site, which will now host Cult Epics as well. “We launched the Erotica Movie Channel on HotMovies about a month ago. Basically, every week we’ll be adding new movies to it. All high-definition transfers, mostly.” Julia will debut on the site in early May, he says. Nico says that he’s also negotiating to release more Metzger films after producing DVD’s of the late director’s 1972 classic Score — loosely based on the Mozart opera Cosi Fan Tutti — as well as Camille 2000 from 1969, and 1970’s The Lickerish Quartet. He’s also working on new, 4K remasterings of several films by the Italian director Tinto Brass.  Brass is perhaps best known for All Ladies Do It, an erotic romp from 1992 of which Nico says, “erotica, nobody made it like that. Tinto Brass was the master of ass. It’s in his name. Where Russ Meyer was the master of breasts. You could say it like that.” Brass is also the source of one of Nico’s favorite quotations — “Pornography is there to give you an erection. Erotica is there to give you emotions.” Images courtesy of Cult Epics