As a kid, I was obsessed with horror and sci-fi. It is the reason I am the fine upstanding fucking NERD that I am now. My sci-fi and horror fix came from a few places, but two stand out.
1. The Horror/Sci-Fi Section at the movie store. My Dad loved movies, so he spent a lot of time in movie stores (Panorama Video in Bloomington stand up!), so I would always tag along. I wandered the aisles looking at awesome VHS movie boxes. Comedy was OK, Drama was LAME, but the Horror and Sci-Fi sections, holy shit I would spend a good hour in there (in Kid Time, thats basically three days), looking at the back of literally EVERY box, reading the plots, looking at the crazy ass pictures and awesome covers. Like this one, because it was nuts (and it was all in relief…the cover was textured!), and the back had a freaky-ass picture of a dude getting a fist rammed down his throat:
2. The Pay-Per-View previews channel. For a few years, Pay-Per-View used to run trailers for all the stuff they had on Pay-Per-View that week on a free channel that everyone would watch. I would watch this channel for hours at a time…and I don’t recall seeing previews for anything BUT horror and sci-fi movies. Maybe I blocked all the others out. Chief among these were the first five Nightmare on Elm Streets, Popcorn, Body Parts, and the craziest of all… Hardware.
Until recently, this movie was impossible to get on DVD. Which is fine with me, because it took me 18 years to get over the horror of the trailer I saw on that channel…channel 10 I think it was.
It wasn’t that it was scary, it was that I didn’t understand what I was seeing. It all looked so wigged-out and nihilistic, and it was horrifying to see something with so little rhyme or reason. Everything was red and bad-ass looking so I was definitely intrigued, but still scared out of my wits. I avoided the movie on VHS until recently when it was finally released on DVD. It was directed by Richard Stanley, who went on to do Dust Devil, which was another post-apocalyptic thing…watched that one with my Dad as a 12 year old. All I remember was that it got really awkward when the first graphic sex scene came on…10 minutes into the movie.
Anyway, I just got Hardware on the Netflix, and I am unbelievably excited to watch it…finally. I’m going to turn this into a quick thing…tracking down the movies that stood out in those aisles, or on that channel, and re-visiting them. I’ll post some reviews here, for whatever they’re worth. I can’t wait.