Road Games (1981), Steven Seagal’s Worst, Columbo on TV

It's 1997. You pop a VHS that contains from-cable-recorded copies of Glimmer Man, Fire Down Below, and On Deadly Ground and watch them in succession until you can't take any more horrendous dialog and fake New York accents...or berets and sleeveless cardigans.

You switch the input back to TV, and after the screen flickers blue for a moment, and then you're 10 minutes into a Columbo TV movie special, so you don't know who did it just like Peter Falk.

Later that night, on the Million Dollar Movie, you resign to insomnia and catch Road Games, a gem from 1981 about a trucker on the barren highways of Australia engaged in a deadly game of cat and mouse — with a super young Jamie Lee Curtis playing his a hitchhiker companion. And you watch the whole, damn, thing — with weird late-night commercials.

You fall asleep to Above the Law on the couch as a form of self flagellation whilst you dreaming of a short, trenchcoated detective chewing on a cheap cigar fighting Rasta gangsters and Keenan Ivory Wayans in a Road Warrior knockoff. It was a time of drastic magic.