Thou Shall Not Kill… Except When Violence Demands Revenge VHS Tape

"Thou Shall Not Kill... Except When Violence Demands Revenge" on VHS is a StarMaker Entertainment release from the mid-1980s, a low-budget action-horror hybrid built entirely on the premise the title promises. The film was co-written by Scott Spiegel and Sam Raimi before either name carried the weight it does now, and that Michigan-indie-circle DNA is baked into every frame. This is the tape, the actual physical object from that run, sitting on the shelf at Keep It Classic in Las Vegas.

The mid-80s were peak years for exactly this kind of tape. Regional production companies were cranking out revenge narratives, Vietnam-vet rampage pictures, and cult-adjacent horror-action hybrids by the dozen, and the VHS rental shelf was the distribution engine that made it all viable. StarMaker was operating in that independent home-video space, licensing and distributing titles that the majors wouldn't touch. Spiegel and Raimi came out of the same creative circle that produced "The Evil Dead" and "Crimewave" during this stretch, working with overlapping casts and shooting in Michigan on shoestring budgets. "Thou Shall Not Kill... Except" (sometimes circulated under the shorter title) fit squarely into that catalog not because it was a franchise title but because it was exactly the kind of film that found its audience one rental at a time, late on a Friday, with low expectations and a high reward-to-budget ratio. The film itself runs approximately 84 minutes, which was a practical standard for tape economics of the period.

This copy carries the sleeve artwork that made it recognizable on the shelf: a skull in a red bandana topped with a golden halo, maximalist and totally on-brand for the era. The sleeve is what stops the browser and it did that job in 1985 too. The tape itself is a single-cassette release, which is the expected configuration for a runtime this short. Condition on the case and the tape shell matters at this age. Check the shell corners for stress cracks, and run your thumb along the spine of the sleeve to gauge how much shelf and storage wear it has taken.

OWNER VERIFY: Confirm the production year. The film is associated with 1985 but some prints and releases carried different dates, and the StarMaker tape label itself will show the clearest copyright line.