Signed up inadvertently for Amazon Prime for another month this January. For a sci-fi and monster buff like me I was excited to have a slew of new films to watch.
Not so. Many of the free films are dross. Stuffed with teenagers trapped in tunnels, trapped in asylums and trapped in a modern genre that appears to be indifferent to its quality.
I have come to realise that I'm an old grump who is irrelevant to today's movie makers really. It really is a young people's world.
Don't get me wrong, there are many great films on Prime but you have to pay on top of the monthly fee to watch them. I do already pay a fee.
For someone watching the pennies like me I like films I don't have to pay for but I can't watch trash either.
After starting two movies on Prime I had to abandon them and switch to You Tube, where countless public domain B-movies reside free from the 1950's.
I am currently watching The Night Caller From Outer Space starring John Saxon. Black and white, it actually stars ADULTS! No teenagers anywhere! Yay! It concerns the finding of a round object that falls from space from which steps .... something.
I'm only a third of the way through so I shall watch the rest over a beer later tonight.
How do you watch movies and what do you watch?
At risk of this turning into a total grump-in, i'm very much with you on that. We have a Netflix account, which is littered with inane, mindless trash punctuated with the odd two year old 'blockbuster'. NF do create their own material, which is heavily touted and variable in quality. The recent releases of 'Bird Box' and 'You' are riding high in popularity, but having tried the former, I was really dismayed with the story and total lack of any real monsters. NF's recent series 'Altered Carbon' was excellent, however, a cross between Neuromancer and Blade Runner with superb fx and storyline. Usually though, I will buy a blu-ray version of a film I want and watch that on my playstation. Secondary markets for optical media mean that you can pick up a film for less than a tenner. When all else fails, I resort to BBC Iplayer or recently YoutTube to watch old episodes of The Owl Service! Terrestrial tv is abysmal, with entire channels devoted to repeats of Harry Potter, Fast and Furious and other dross such as 70's crime or mindless docudramas. I'd rather pick fluff out of my navel.
ReplyDeleteI do find stuff to watch on Prime, but it takes some looking. The streaming services push content that they want you to watch and it's a bit of a trick getting around that.
ReplyDeleteBut a LOT of those movies, especially on Prime, ARE crap... they're there because they were sold to Amazon for pennies. Even kids who are watching with one eye on their cell phones will turn up their nose at that garbage.
I watch second hand DVDs (charity shop) when I can find anything decent, or Youtube/DailyMotion/Internet Archive, rarely anything on terrestrial telly except the news -we keep wondering whether to get rid of the TV.
ReplyDeleteWhile there are a limited number of cinema releases that appeal, as I am living in the provinces, film entry (with my loyalty card) is about £4 a go -so I can even walk out of films I don't like and not feel too cheated!