Bait And Switch

As I believe I wrote, I have been buying up VHS tapes. They are all of a charmingly low grade, or at least I expect they are. I can't exactly articulate my formula, but they are ideally from the golden age of the format, and I just feel it when I'm holding the right sort. I've gather a good number of them, and I'm trying to watch them so that it's a less cut and dried case of hoarding. So far I've watched a couple.

The most recent one was alleged by the box to be a thriller starring Pierce Brosnan and Ron Silver. That looked bad enough. The tape's label bore out the contention made by the box, and so I started watching. It felt wrong from the beginning. It was too poor of quality even for those stars as of the early 90s (which is when the film was supposed to have been made). I thought that maybe they had been less prominent than the box made out, which is common enough when an actor only becomes famous later.

As it turned out, it was not the film promised by the box at all. In fact, it was a movie which was sometimes distributed by the same title, but which was a rather different film. It was made later, but was evidently a lower-budgeted and worse film even than I had expected. I decided that this was, in a manner of speaking, a blessing in disguise. As I said, I don't pick these movies because I expect them to be good.

I admit that I was disappointed to be denied those actors, but the charming cheapness and loopiness of this film won me over. I don't generally enjoy having the bait and switch played on me, but in this case I saw it as part of what I love about old VHS tapes. They can do something that current movies on subsequent formats do seldom if ever: they can truly surprise you. Well, this film about a plot by a Cuban general to subvert a trade agreement by using subdermal computer chips that transform anyone into a mindless soldier did just that.