Movie nights were a bigger deal in my youth

There was a time—eons ago—when watching a movie at home on television was a big deal to me.

In the 1970s, it meant that one of our four channels had a “movie night” that came around about once a week or the occasional Sunday afternoon Burt Reynolds flick on one of those Columbus TV stations.

By the early 1980s, it meant that we got one of those free weekends of HBO that my dad hated. He didn’t like that a lot of these movies had dirty words—sometimes right in the middle of the afternoon—but they were no worse than what I’d hear all week long in the junior high school boys bathroom, home to the filthiest words and humans on the planet. Besides, they didn’t have commercials. You could sit there and watch an entire bad movie without that old lady yelling “Where’s the beef?!” as she gets run over by a pitcher of Kool-Aid crashing through a wall while carrying a frying pan of eggs that had something to do with drugs.

Then came the glory days of the VCR in the mid-1980s. These movies also had no commercials—only 12 previews before the film started and some warning about how the FBI would burn your house down and kidnap your dog if you made any unauthorized copies of the VHS tape. (Today, I think it’s legal, but Kash Patel may give you the side eye.)

Not only were there no commercials, but you got to pick any movie you wanted to see—so long as no one beat you to the video rental store to claim it first, which they almost always did where I grew up. In the early days, we only had a couple of tiny local video rental places with very limited selections. If you didn’t get there by 5 p.m., you’d be left to choose between some silly movie like “Casablanca” or the store owner’s wedding video. (I assume the honeymoon video was in the back room they wouldn’t let me go into.)

As we grew, so did the selection, but not our tastes. When I was about 12, my best friend and I would peruse the few aisles of my hometown of Oglethorpe’s lone rental place in search of horror movies. We were too stupid to seek out classic or thoughtful scary movies. Instead, we were looking for the goriest boxes with blood-splattered, big-bosomed women on the front and a title like “Revenge of the Chainsaw Zombie Brain Eaters 4.” And they were far stupider than they sounded.

But because we invested so much time just searching for a movie or three, by golly, we were gonna sit in front of that TV for six hours and suffer through it. What else were we gonna sit in front of the TV and do for six hours? Play “Pitfall” on the Atari? That’s ridiculous. We did that the day before.

Today, though, we’ve got all kinds of streaming services and can watch almost anything anytime and don’t even have to rewind. Kids don’t even have to wait until Thanksgiving to watch “The Wizard of Oz.” And potheads don’t even have to wait until Thanksgiving to watch “The Wizard of Oz” while listening to Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” album to see if they are in sync. (Spoiler alert: They are not—unless you’re very high, then, yes, totally.)

Of course, now that it’s so easy to watch movies at home with Netflix, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Disney, etc., we watch fewer movies. I am more selective, however. I loathe the thought of sitting through two hours of a bad movie. Fortunately, it usually takes my wife about two hours to watch trailers and finally pick a movie, which means that it’s too late to start a movie, and we can go to bed.

My wife is picky when it comes to most things, but she’ll see a trailer and say, “That looks good.” Duh. All trailers look good. So did the box for “Revenge of the Chainsaw Zombie Brain Eaters 4.” I check the reviews, which causes her to roll her eyes even more than when I’m picking out something “decent” to wear outside the house.

“If the reviewers hate a movie, I usually like it,” is what she’ll say. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, that’s not true. We’ll suffer through her choice—usually something like “Twilight of the Prada-Wearing Tuscan Sun”—and she’ll say, “That was all right.” Meanwhile, I’m picking my gouged-out eyeballs off the floor.

“Those are grapes!” you idiot.

“Oh, whew.”

Thankfully, she’s picked out the last nine movies, so it’s just eleven more until I get to pick one.

I wonder if they’ve made “Revenge of the Chainsaw Zombie Brain Eaters 5” yet.