Last year, I scored a working VCR at Raleigh’s Cause for Paws thrift store and a major haul of tapes — about 150 or so — off of Craigslist. The first tape I popped in was a sealed copy of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, a movie I am very familiar with as the kind of dork-ass nerd who has written for Star Trek dot com on a few occasions, and I immediately fell in love with the format. Swirling around in my head there’s a parade of vague memories of film critics and directors and actors making salient arguments for upgrading formats like Laserdisc, DVD, and Blu-ray — clearer picture, special features, and more than anything else, films in their intended aspect ratio, not sloppily cropped to fit a CRT’s standard 4:3.
They’re right, of course, and unlike when people make arguments for listening to music on vinyl that sound more like witchcraft than engineering, you don’t need to be especially attuned to your equipment or the condition of your media to experience the difference. Take Wrath of Khan, for instance. In a theater or on disc, it is a widescreen spectacle — not as visually delightful as Star Trek: The Motion Picture, as Wrath of Khan was basically a bottle episode brought to screen after Gene Roddenbery’s attempt to translate his 60s television dreams to the vistas of 70s cinema went over budget, but it is a gorgeous piece of work. When you watch it, you can see an argument for projects like the HD remasters of The Original Series and The Next Generation, to say nothing of projects we’re likely never going to get, like a remastering of Deep Space Nine — these shows belong to the boundless space suggested by Wrath of Khan’s 2.39:1 anamorphic widescreen.
Panned and scanned for VHS, Wrath of Khan feels like a particularly astonishing episode of TOS. Mourn the loss of visual information if you must, but the tight framing around Ricardo Montalban, William Shatner, and Leonard Nimoy felt true to the series, and in making the spaces they occupy smaller to the eye, heightened the claustrophobia of the film’s submarine warfare plot. It wasn’t a better experience, but it made me see a movie I know by heart in a different light, which is a pretty neat trick.
The other reason to advocate for VHS is that it’s fucking cheap. That box of 150 tapes I got? It cost $20. Most of the tapes I’ll be watching for this “project” were purchased for $0.50. Beyond the lack of space, the worst part of my VHS and DVD collection is that there’s so much to choose from that I found myself paralyzed by choice when I actually wanted to watch something last week. There’s a lot of tapes on the stack that are no doubt, slam dunk keepers, favorites that feel right on the format, but I couldn’t just pop in Cruising or a wrestling tape to kick things off, could I? So, otherwise paralyzed by choice, I did the same thing I did when I chose my name: closed my eyes, dipped my hand into a big bucket of (seemingly) well-curated options, and hoped for the best. Instead what I got was The Cannonball Run.
New Additions This Week: A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971) [VHS], A Fistful of Dollars (Sergio Leone, 1964) [VHS] American Splendor (Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini, 2003) [DVD], Bell, Book and Candle (Richard Quine, 1958) [VHS] Exit Wounds (Andrezj Bartkowiak, 2001) [DVD], The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967) [VHS], How High (Jesse Dylan, 2001) [VHS], The Best of Cactus Jack in ECW [VHS], Strangle-Mania [VHS], Starrcade 1993 [VHS]
1. The Cannonball Run (Hal Needham, 1981)
By the time I was of age to see something like The Cannonball Run on a Saturday evening on TBS, cable TV action movie culture had shifted away from Burt Reynolds towards mid-period Sylvester Stallone and Timothy Dalton-era James Bond. The Cannonball Run probably would have slapped in that context — it’s a purposefully loose, inconsequential movie whose impressive car stunts feel timed to hit just as you’re starting to doze off — but it’s 2025, the world is thick with car crash movies I can conjure from the bowels of the internet, and none of them, save maybe The Cannonball Run II, would actively hold me in contempt for wanting to see some sick stunts in quite the same way this film does.
Burt Reynolds, bored out of his skull by the prospect of once again being the pretty face behind the wheel of a fast car, actively looks like he resents being in front of a rolling camera. Hal Needham, a fascinating man who owned the Budweiser Rocket and was a trailblazing stuntman before moving behind the camera, stages incredible action, but there’s not enough of it — I lasted 50 minutes, ejecting the tape after I caught myself thinking “If there’s not a car crash in the next three minutes…” for the third time in 15 minutes. Like, it’s fucking sick when Terry Bradshaw and Mel Tillis jump a stock car into a pool, and the gag of Reynolds and Dom DeLuise landing their biplane on a busy street to load up on beer is inspired, but the dead air between these spots is well and truly dead. With the concept of a coast-to-coast road race providing the suggestion of a plot, everything else about The Cannonball Run happens arbitrarily, the comedy a heady stew of sub-Family Guy reference work, drunk driving, and racism. Truly agonizing.
2. Cold Sweat (Terence Young, 1970)
Like Burt Reynolds, Charles Bronson belongs to a generation of tough guy cinema just before my own. I’ve seen him in plenty of movies, but until I watched The Mechanic last year, I was largely unfamiliar with his game. My mistake — Charles Bronson rules. In 1974, Bronson, then the highest-paid movie star in the world, sat for an interview with Roger Ebert. It’s a fascinating piece, as Ebert tries to plumb the depths of a man who insists that he has none: “I’m only a product like a cake of soap, to be sold as well as possible,” Bronson says of himself.
Terence Young knows how to sell a cake of soap. Before Cold Sweat, he directed three of the first four James Bond movies, creating a template for the cinematic spy that will remain a fixture of action cinema until we stop making movies. He is particularly skilled at identifying hard-to-define qualities in his leading men — Sean Connery’s suaveness, Charles Bronson’s struggle to keep the fire burning in his guts from spilling out and devouring the world. He’s the hero of Cold Sweat, an ex-soldier and ex-con who escaped prison and started a boat rental business in France, where he lives with a wife and a child who know nothing of these exploits until, as it always happens, a figure from his past reemerges to threaten his family.
It’s a familiar pattern, but Cold Sweat was made before there was a pattern, so instead of a kill-em-all revenge thriller on the order of Taken or John Wick, Bronson ends up playing a cat-and-mouse game with his former superior officer (James Mason, cycling through 30 southern accents at once) and his henchmen, who kidnap his wife and child. There’s a straight line to a good time in those elements, but Cold Sweat swerves, as Mason’s character gets shot in the gut and needs a doctor, his surviving henchman wants to kill him, and it’s the kidnapped wife (Liv Ullmann) holding the gun on both men while Bronson races against the clock to save him and free his family.
The location footage is gorgeous, all pristine shores and scenic mountain roads, the sleepiness of the town Bronson has built his quiet little life ratcheting up the anxiety once that quiet is shattered. The big moments are great, but I think the scene that’ll stick with me most is the one that really gets Cold Sweat going, where, after killing a goon and stashing him against the refrigerator, the Martin family is suddenly visited by their neighbors. Bronson plays it cool, Ullmann strikes a sort of dazed panic, trying to entertain while keeping the guests out of the kitchen. She has to open the fridge to get drinks, but struggles with the weight of the body slumped against the door. Cold Sweat continues crescendoing from their, getting weirder (Mason’s Captain Ross) and more thrilling (an extremely good car chase through a winding mountain road) and saving room at the end for a boat explosion. Boat explosions rule, y’all. Blowing up a boat is worth at least one star on a five star scale. I’m not keeping this copy of the tape (it gets real fuzzy here and there), but if I find another one or the DVD, it’ll enter the collection.
3. The Hudsucker Proxy (Joel Coen, 1994)
I don’t remember the last time I saw The Hudsucker Proxy, but I think the fact that I saw it when I was young and grew up in an enlightened society that praises the Joel and Ethan Coen’s comedies as much as their dramas means that I didn’t know it was a flop until the the trailers on this tape began to roll, all of them for desperate-looking DTV comedies that were obscure upon release. That The Hudsucker Proxy failed to this degree is unthinkable to me. It’s not my favorite Coen Brothers effort, but it’s up there, a mile-a-minute marriage of screwball romance and industrial slapstick. Co-written by the Coens and Sam Raimi, The Hudsucker Proxy hits right in the sweet spot between the two, verbally and physically kinetic, whimsical and acidic, timeless by design and in its quality. I knew I was keeping this tape as soon as I saw it on the rack.
4. 3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain (Sean McNamara, 1998)
The way I gasped when I learned that 3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain was directed by the same Sean McNamara who’d later direct Reagan. I’ll never see it, but I admire the chutzpah of a director mostly known for making children’s movies that are either legacy sequels or toy line tie-ins going way out of his comfort zone to make a loving tribute one of the worst human beings in history. In a sense, he was way out of his league. In another, he was the perfect man for the material, having spent his life making movies that weren’t meant to do much more than vaguely remind you of some IP you found tolerable, if not pleasant.
In High Noon at Mega Mountain, those properties are the 3 Ninjas and Hulk Hogan. The former, you may be able to guess, are three white boy ninjas (the greatest of all American myths) none of whom are their original or even second actor though Tum-Tum still likes food. The later is Hulk Hogan, who filmed this in 1996, just after turning heel and forming the new World Order. The 3 Ninjas don’t do much more than scream AY-YAHH every time they throw fists or feet, but Hogan, it seems, is having a real moment as Dave Dragon, a children’s television star whose show gets cancelled because his style of white meat babyface heroics is no longer in style. There’s a scene in this where Dave Dragon takes off his wig and looks at it with a wistfulness for his heyday that’s almost genuine, as if Hogan is working out his emotions about the temporary suspension of Hulkamania.
As exciting as that sounds, the movie fucking sucks. Big shock, I know, but when a gang of cartoon terrorists led by Loni Anderson and Jim Varney take over a theme park, it’s up to the 3 Ninjas, their friend who is a girl, and Dave Dragon to save the park. Wants desperately to be Die Hard and Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers but can’t even rise to the level of 3 Ninjas.
5. Strangle-Mania (Insane Clown Posse, 1996)
Strangle-Mania is something of a rite of passage for a wrestling fan of a certain age. It’s just Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent J riffing over a compilation of Japanese death matches, most notably the 1995 King of the Death Match finals between Terry Funk and Cactus Jack, but for a lot of wrestling fans in the 1990s, it and the World Wrestling Federation’s use of the same footage was a first exposure to the world of death match wrestling. Nothing on the tape is the peak of the form, but there’s a lot of gore and plenty of spectacle — I love the style, this era of it specifically, though the specifics of why are better suited for my other blogs.
Insane Clown Posse’s commentary is dueling shades of Vince McMahon bombast, spoken entirely in the private language of the inside joke. It is, in my humble opinion, vital stuff: for good and ill, it captures what it was like to watch wrestling with other people during the late 90s, or at least what it was like for me to watch wrestling with my friends, all of whom were from Michigan and some of whom were Juggalos. You get into a weird little groove in the way you talk about wrestlers and out blooms a little universe of loving derision. The only thing that approaches it are the occasional clips of Nitro Parties that chewed up time on Monday Nitro.
It’s not for everybody, though! I was cackling like an idiot while ICP kept reaching for ways to call the Headhunters — here christened the Mushroom Boys, Ponderosa and Sweden House (two buffets) — fat (I’m not proud of it, but I’m human), but my partner (who likes death match stuff) justifiably called it quits. We made it through three matches, maybe 30 minutes or so, but it’s a keeper. Justice for the Mushroom Boys!