Movie (Pack) Madness

A funny thing happened during my absence from blogging. I wound up buying over 100 movies in one day. This might sound like an incredible extravagance on my part, and a mite difficult to boot. But no, all it involved was stopping at Wal-Mart to pick up anti-freeze.

As I wandered the aisles of what I term Necessary Evil, I found a display dump with a number of those Mill Creek multi-movie packs. I've long considered buying them, but could never justify it. But could I justify $8.99 apiece? Wha--?!? Yep, that's how much these were. So I grabbed a few, and just picked up a couple more today.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, this is a fantastic opportunity for me to watch and own many movies that I would otherwise never have seen. On the other hand, these multi-packs are one of the things that I think has seriously devalued movies in general. If you do the math, 50 movies at $8.99 comes out to something like 18¢ a movie. Or if you figure out how much you are paying "per episode" on the 150 EPISODE CLASSIC SCI-FI TV, it comes to less than a penny per program.

I realize I'm flashing my Old Man Card here, but I can remember a time when I happily paid $8.99 for one LP speed VHS tape of a movie of questionable worth. How long did that Goodtimes Home Video edition of HORROR EXPRESS stay in print? There were a plethora of others, but that one stands out in my memory. Who could have foreseen a day when even being able to buy cheap tapes of bad old movies would pale next to the ability to buy bad old movies in bulk for practically nothing?

Still, my reservations don't change the fact that these collections exist. And since they do, I might as well use them for my own devious purposes. I have already watched a few films that had intrigued me over the years, but which I was probably not going to otherwise buy. Yeah, I've now seen things like MISSION STARDUST, INVISIBLE AVENGER and SANTA CLAUS CONQUERS THE MARTIANS. And the funny thing is that one of my main worries about these discs - that the image would be all blocky - has not not been an issue. I guess/hope that is something that's been cleaned up a bit in more recent years.

I've added a "movie packs" tag here, to denote films I've watched specifically because they were included in these multi-packs. I don't want to overburden the "general nonsense" tag too much, even though it's not entirely useful for finding anything. This way, you can rest assured you able to seek out all the entries in my strange odyssey in movie watching.