The New Batch

My latest haul of VHS tapes has some promise. I am beginning to spend a bit more on them than I used to, as I've gotten more interested in acquiring more interesting titles as opposed to readily available ones (which are cheap and unremarkable, by and large). This set of tapes amounts to five at the cost of nearly eleven dollars. In the past eleven dollars might have yielded me eleven tapes, but it's still a fair price for movies that are mostly unproven entities.

One of the tapes, "Death Wish 4: The Crackdown", I have seen. It's one of the lesser entries in the series, but it basically delivers. Another Charles Bronson film, "Messenger Of Death", I hope lives up to that minimal standard. I'm fairly confident. Those Cannon films were all about the same, and I have a few of their Bronson films already. "Kinjite" was not so bad, and "Assassination was not great, but I gave it a pass anyway.

The rest of the tapes are less established. There's "Penitentiary 3", which is not the only sequel from a film franchise you never heard of that I own. There's also "Nightmare At 43 Hillcrest". I didn't investigate it much before pulling the trigger, but it turns out to be some kind of early 70s TV movie, and I have high hopes for it. I'm not so sanguine about "The Maddening", which of all these tapes show the most what an inveterate junkie I am. It's a mid-90s Burt Reynolds thriller that also features Angie Dickinson and Mia Sara.

Those five films join something like thirty tapes that I have yet to watch. It's always my ambition to get ahead a little on that backlog, but that intention always goes out the window the moment I get near some tapes at a bookstore or anyplace else. I love to collect them, and my desire to actually watch them can hardly even stay without shouting distance. Perhaps I'll finally even those impulses up when there are no more tapes out there to buy.