Friday, October 17, 2014

JMShearer's Movie Shelf: The First Three Movies

Well, with winter approaching, now's as good a time as any to get this started.

A few weeks ago, I said I'd been meaning to sit down and watch some of the old VHS tapes I've had around for years and do reviews of them that I'd post here and a few other places. Since then, I've been a little busy with a few other things, but now that they've been taken care of, at least for the time being, I may as well get started.

At least initially, I'm going to include something in this series that I've been doing with the stuff I post to That Guy With The Glasses pretty much the entire time I've been doing so. I'll pick out two or three movies to watch and write a post where I say what they are and tell a little bit about them, based in part on what it says on the back of the box. When I've made it through one group, I'll do it again with another two or three.

So, the first three, in no particular order, are:

  • Saturn 3: Farrah Fawcett and Kirk Douglas deal with romance and killer robots on a far-away space outpost in this 1980 sci-fi flick. It's got an R rating from back when such things actually sort of meant something, so it will be interesting to see what I'm getting myself into with this one.
  • Dreamscape: There's something familiar about this one, and I'm not sure I can place exactly what it is. I've seen, well, enough movies to have some idea of the kinds of roles that Dennis Quaid, Max Von Sydow, and Christopher Plummer wind up in. Maybe I'll know why this movie seems familiar once I see what they do with the power to enter other people's dreams in this 1984 movie.
  • Brainstorm: This is a 1983 movie where Christopher Walken and Natalie Wood use a computer to do pretty the same thing that Dennis Quaid and Max Von Sydow used telepathy to do in Dreamscape. In this case, though, they're transplanting memories from one person to others.

You'll probably note that as this series goes on, I'll be doing mostly sci-fi and fantasy, with some comedy and drama thrown in from time to time for good measure. There's a good reason for that. About five, maybe six years ago, an Internet buddy of mine needed some money, and since I actually had some to spare at the time, I bought a box or two of the VHS tapes he was offering, and I chose the ones I did specifically because they were labeled as sci-fi and comedy. I'm a fan of those genres, after all.

Since things have changed since then, I'm not planning on holding on to many of them for long after I watch them. There are, of course, a few that I actually want to keep, as they are what one might call standards that every sci-fi fan should probably have. There are a few more that I'm not sure I'll be able to do anything with for one reason or another, if only because they've been sitting for so long.

As for the rest, well, there are other movie buffs in my family that might like some of the ones I don't intend to keep. I'll give them first dibs on those tapes before I take them down to Last Stop CD Shop to see what I can get for them.

With all that out of the way, the first review might be coming up in the next couple days. See you then, folks!

No comments:

Post a Comment