Last year, I made a resolution to watch 50 movies made before 1950. It was a fun and illuminating exercise, but I never really settled on a plan for this year (though I have noticed that my viewing has loosely gravitated towards something along the lines of a catch up on 1950-2000) because it’s not like I always want to have some formal project or something. However, one thing that I thought might be interesting was to watch a bunch of movies made in the year of my birth: 1978. I’ve been further prompted along by film writer Catherine Stebbins’ recent release of her Top 10 by Year for 1978, which is an interesting project (she’s also made a fancy shmancy ‘zine that’s available for purchase). At the end of this, I won’t be releasing a zine on etsy or anything, but maybe I can do something akin to the standard end of the year Kaedrin Movie Awards and Top 10 posts I’ve been doing for the past decade or so.
Obviously, I’ve already seen quite a few films from 1978 (as of right now 32, though some of those are included below because I only watched them recently), but there are tons of movies I have yet to see or maybe should revisit. So here’s the current watchlist, broken out into small categories, because why not?
- Martial Arts – Game of Death, Drunken Master, Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow
- Music/Musical – Grease, The Last Waltz
- Arthouse Auteurs – Days of Heaven, Autumn Sonata
- Crime & Punishment – Midnight Express, Blue Collar, The Boys from Brazil, Straight Time, The Silent Partner
- Horror Auteurs – The Fury, Someone’s Watching Me!
- The Six Weeks of Halloween – Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!, Damien: Omen II, It Lives Again, Eyes of Laura Mars, Long Weekend, Faces of Death, The Evil, The Mafu Cage
- Mystery – Death on the Nile, Coma, The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting
- Girl Power – Girlfriends, I Wanna Hold Your Hand
- Fantasy and Science Fiction – Heaven Can Wait, The Lord of the Rings, Message from Space
- Italian Trash – Starcrash, The Inglorious Bastards, Slave of the Cannibal God
- Exploitation – Death Force
- Killer Bees – The Swarm, The Bees
Alright, now that we’re finding killer bee movies, let’s just leave it at that. I will most likely not get to all of the above and will probably watch something not on the list at some point as well. As of now, no concrete timeline on this either, but it’s a safe bet that I won’t finish up until Spring at the earliest… But this is all good enough for now. Look for a quick update soon, but then we hit the Six Weeks of Halloween, which will certainly have some 1978 stuff, but lots more (as per usual)…