90 Movies in 90 Days: Hardware Wars (1978)

I’m kicking off 2023 by trying to watch and review one movie every day for the first 90 days, all of which will be 90 minutes or less.

Title: Hardware Wars
Release Date: October 16, 1978
Director: Ernie Fosselius
Production Company: Pyramid Films
Summary/Review:

“Filmed on location in space.”

In the late 1970s and early 1980s the idea of amateur film gaining widespread exposure was unheard of.  Videocassettes and home movie cameras were just becoming widely available, while YouTube and TikTok were well in the future.  So, when someone, anyone, made a parody of the biggest movie of all-time, Star Wars, using household appliances, it was pretty special.And to think this was released even before the notorious Star Wars Holiday Special! I remember seeing it on television, probably on a show like TV’s Bloopers & Practical Jokes, and thinking it was hilarious.

Well, over four-decades later it’s not so special.  We’ve been saturated in Star Wars content and Star Wars parody for years, and the jokes just feel stale.  Actually, it surprising how much Hardware Wars just follows the plot of Star Wars straight up, just with a lot of gurning and comedic sound effects.  But the visual gags are still fun.  I laughed at the Country & Western bar and the “tractor beam.”  And the flying irons are memorable enough to get a tribute in Star Wars: The Last Jedi.  It’s probably still funnier than Spaceballs, which I always thought was just kind of pathetic, although I know I’m in the minority.

Rating: ***

New Year’s Blogging

• Book Reviews – I’ve been able to post one book review a week and that seems like a good pace to keep
• Movie Reviews –  The past three years I’ve been working on a lot of movie projects, averaging about 5 movies per week! So I’m going to scale it back a bit. But, I still have a couple of projects:
  • 90 Movies in 90 Days – I’m going to kick off the year watching and reviewing a movie every day for the first three months of 2023.  All the movies will be 90 minutes or less, naturally.
  • 50 Movies, 50 Years – I will be turning 50-years-old this year, so I’m going to watch one movie for each year from 1973 to 2022.  The only requirement is that is a movie I haven’t reviewed before.  Recommendations welcome!
• Music Reviews – I did pretty well at writing a review for a new Album of the Week each week in 2022, but I don’t think I had time to do justice to them (or even listen to them again, in some cases).  So I’m going to nix Album of the Week this year.
  • Song of the Week – I will continue posting one song per week for 2023.
  • Album of the Month – I’ll still post reviews of 1 to 3 albums per month from February to November, with special highlight posts of albums I missed in June and December.
  • 50 Albums, 50 Years – Just like my movie project, I will review one album per year from 1973 to 2022 that I haven’t previously reviewed.  Recommendations appreciated!
• Creative Writing – Something I’ve been wanting to do on this blog is to experiment more with fiction writing.  I know there are a lot of Flash Fiction challenges around so I’m going to try to start with some of those.

Some other projects for 2023 will include the Blogging A-to-Z Challenge in April, a major Music Discovery, and an ongoing TV series review.  So hopefully it will be a good year of blogging!