Yet Another Set Of Movies

It's another day, and another couple of movies have been dispatched. On this occasion, I ran into no shortage of tape problems. Several movies that I watched or attempted to watch had problems. One turned out to be very probably a PAL tape, which doesn't stop an American VCR from trying to handle it, but does stop the player from handling it properly. Other tapes had their own problems, forcing me to change VCRs or to abandon them altogether and finish the moving streaming from the Internet (which is a terrible betrayal on my part).

The first film I watched was the Michael J. Fox classic "Teen Wolf". I'd never seen it. I enjoyed it an awful lot for a number of reasons. One thing I enjoyed was that it was a basically small story. It's about one kid who turns out to be a werewolf, his father, and his school friends. It never involves the authorities beyond a couple of school officials, and the scope never expands beyond typical high schooler problems. I liked that. I also liked that everyone actually gets over the werewolf thing fast and starts exploring something new. We've seen people freak out over a monster in their midst before, and this film actually looks for something else to do.

The second film was "First Spaceship On Venus". I was fascinated by the idea of a scifi film from behind the Iron Curtain. There are plenty of those, I guess, but this was one from East Germany. The novelty of that wore off fast. This was a movie with no real B story outside of a past romance between two characters that never revives. The plot, in a nutshell, has a multinational crew of astronauts headed for Venus after some kind of recording from there is found on Earth. It's discovered that the Venusians were plotting an invasion, but now are all dead. That's a spoiler I guess, but you won't care. I'm sparing you. They see no Venusians, there's no actual threat, and yet somehow several of the crew still manage to be killed before the ship returns with a boring lesson about not using nuclear weapons.

I sought to cap off the night with one of my shorter tapes, but found tragically that my Australian "how to play cricket" tape was, as I said above, not compatible with my players. I settled for rewatching an old instructional tape about several Nintendo games. As a boy it seemed amazing, but today it's evident how cheesy it was, and how ineffective it actually was at conveying any useful knowledge about the games it covers. So much for this night of movies.