The Kent M. Beeson of Western Civilization

The Great VHS Reclamation Project of 2009

For a number of reasons (which I’ll likely get to in the future), I’ve decided to seriously cut back on the number of things that I own, and consolidate, if I can, the stuff I have into something smaller and more manageable.  Part of this means taking the 300+ (or whatever it is) DVDs I own, stripping them out of their cases, and putting them in giant binders.  (Why? To get rid of the bookcase.  I only wish I could rip my books into iTunes the way I can my CDs and really free up some space.)

Another part of this means going into the closets and the garage and just junking all the stuff that I seriously am never going to look at again.  One of those things is a box full of VHS tapes, each one with three to five movies on it.  Back in my college days, when I was becoming a cinephile, my mom would tape whatever sounded interesting to me and send it up to me.  At one point, I must’ve had about 150 of those tapes, maybe more.  During one of my many moves, I decided to trash about 2/3rds of them just so I wasn’t hauling them around for the rest of my life.  I don’t remember what my criteria was for saving a tape — since I’m now pretty sure that one of the trashed was a dubbed copy of William Castle’s infamous Shanks, it sure as hell wasn’t about availability — but for whatever reason, the ones I kept were the ones I thought I needed.

Well, the day has come when I don’t need them anymore, at least not in huge, heavy VHS tape form.  I recently got a VCR/DVD combo machine, and am going to transfer all the movies I have left (that aren’t already on Netflix) onto DVD.  (Actually, I’ll probably rip the DVDs and put them on a hard disk and throw the DVDs away, but that’s getting pedantic.)

The only real problem with this plan, so far, is that this VCR is shitty, at least compared to the other one we have.  Movies that play respectably in the old machine look much worse on the new one, and the sound quality is criminal.  Nonetheless, everything must go.  Ideally, all movies everywhere will be available in my lifetime (particularly Shanks), but if not — well, someone somewhere must have better copies of this shit.

So, the real point of this post is to announce that as I dub these movies, I’ll post what they are, and a short review, based on whatever little of it I happen to catch while it’s on.  I can almost guarantee that, unless you’re some kind of nutty, koo-koo super-cinephile, you’ve never heard of a lot of this crap.

Enjoy!