Double Shot Of Movies Hot

Last night there was my latest big "VHS Vault" movie watching night. I enjoy those an awful lot, as people are inclined to enjoy presiding over something they like in the company of their friends. I like being able to share things with people, but at the same time to experience them for the first time just as they do. That's how I do it. I go out and find the movies, but then I see the ones I earmark for movie nights only on the appointed date. I feel that's important.

Last night I picked two movies that aren't exactly like many that I grant this honor to. I have a fair number of TV movies and straight to video movies of relatively recent vintage in my collection, but I prefer older movies (falling in or near the 1980s) that received a theatrical release generally for movie nights. These two both (I think) violate those conditions, but I went with them because they seemed like the two best options that I could pair together at the time.

The first was "Modern Vampires". It has a pretty solid cast (starting with Casper Van Dien, but improving with Kim Cattrall, Rod Steiger, Udo Kier, Craig Ferguson and Natasha Lyonne, among others). It's typically not a good sign when so many big names fill out the cast of a movie that you've never heard of. That means it's so bad that there's no amount of combined star power that can overcome it domestically. They just maybe be able to make it fly overseas, where God knows most things seem to, This one is so crazy that it beats that rule.

To break down the plot concisely, we're in a universe where vampires run rampant and basically live in the open. Even so, no one seems to recognize them for what they are. Professor Van Helsing, here with origins in Nazi Germany (though he is Viennese), contracts a gang of street thugs to help him hunt down the vampires. It goes about as you would think it does, and telling you any more would be doing you a real disservice.

The second was "Dream House". It's an evidently Canadian-made film, with Timothy Busfield of "Thirtysomething" and "Revenge Of The Nerds" as the lead. He is the head of a company (or a significant cog in it) that is involved in computers and robotics. He moves his family into a house controlled by a self-aware computer called Helen, who is aided by spiderbots that clean and a knife-wielding dishwasher as an enforcer. For the money they spent, this one came out pretty nicely if you ask me.

The night was a success on the whole, though I gather people liked the former film better than the latter. I guess that figures. Modern Vampires practically ODs on delectable insanity and is awash in nudity. A detail like that loses meaning when you're watching a VHS tape as ragged as this one was, but that just adds to the excitement as one's imagination can be allowed to run wild. This will, in any case, be a happy night to remember as I plan next month.