Taboo becomes the all-time best-selling adult video this month, with its distributor expecting to hit one million copies of the 1980 classic and releasing special boxes to commemorate it.
"We can't keep it in stock," says VCX chief Rudy Sutton. "We're sending out between 75,000-100,000 a year." The special commemorative boxes feature the title in gold lettering and the familiar apple-bite logo.
The landmark film stars Kay Parker and Mike Ranger in a story which focuses on incest, still a touchily daring film subject at any level in 1980 or even today. Parker plays a divorced woman whose insecurities and neuroses thrust her into a sexual relationship with her son. Taboo was the first adult film to focus on incest seriously.
"They buy (this) one over and above anything else, including Debbie Does Dallas," Sutton says. "Every time we even introduce it on a weekly basis, there's five hundred more calls."
Sutton believes the theme and story as well as the sexual depictions make the film so popular almost twenty years since it was made. Taboo has long since given birth to a series chronicling a few generations of incest, but VCX distributes only the original - which is fine by Sutton.
And he's content to keep VCX in a unique niche as the American Movie Classics of adult video. "We stay just with the classics," says Sutton, whose firm also distributes Debbie Does Dallas and The Devil in Miss Jones, among other adult classics. In fact, those are the two best-selling adult films on video behind Taboo.
"We have a niche and we think we have the best niche."
For VCX to produce or distribute a new film, Sutton says, would be very rare. "And we keep getting comments that the older movies are still the best."
But he refuses to comment about today's crop of adult films.
"I don't even observe them," he says. "So I'd be in a very uncomfortable position by adding any comments. They're doing their thing, and of course they're selling a lot on cable and in foreign markets. But our stuff's been out there 25 years and we're still selling it for the foreign markets, too."
