Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Happy Halloween! Sheila Frankenstein - Von Helsing!



Hi!  I'm Sheila Frankenstein!


this happened.

Happy Halloween! Monster Mash!

You are now legally allowed to play this song until midnight, and then it needs to go back in the vault for another year.





Happy Halloween! The Fonz!


The Fonz in costume

Happy Halloween! Lee & Cushing!


If you have to ask, you may Google it.

Happy Halloween! Vincent Price!


It would simply be bad form to celebrate Halloween without a nod to Mr. Price.

Halloween! Garth Marenghi's Darkplace!

If you've never watched Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, I cannot recommend this BBC show highly enough.

Here's the first episode.



Halloween! Mickey Mouse in "The Haunted House"!




Back when Mickey was still scrappy and not afraid to throw a punch.

Happy Halloween! Paul Lynde!


Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Obviously, I don't need to tell you about the horrible storm and its aftermath

Holy cats, y'all.  I confess that I thought the storm, Hurricane Sandy, was going to be the bajillionth false alarm the 24-hour news cycle mutants had thrown at us in the past few years.  Keep in mind, I'm the guy who refused to leave the house for most of a Saturday because I thought I was going to see a tsunami hit Hawaii and then it was just some mildly choppy waves.  That was a tremendous let down.

In retrospect, that probably doesn't make me sound like a good person, and I probably could have kept that to myself.

But Sandy was and is all too real.  I don't need to tell you that.

I am a little disappointed that somehow Disney buying Star Wars seems like bigger news than the potential weather-related damage to our economy, infrastructure and political system, but: priorities, I guess.

Signal Watches: For Your Height Only

So.

How do you make a Bond-knock-off better?  You cast a homunculus of an action star who the audience will adore.  I am, of course, speaking of Tom Cruise in all four Mission Impossible movies, but that's not what we watched this weekend.

Saturday night Doug was here, and that meant he came with media fit to seer the brain.  In our case, it was the 1981 spy thriller For Your Height Only, starring internationally renowned superstar, Weng Weng.



For years The Alamo Drafthouse has shown clips of this film as part of their pre-show, enough so that I knew exactly what this movie was when it started.  And, frankly, if they don't show some of this before SkyFall, I'll be shocked.

I've now watched this movie, and I could not tell you what it was about.  Golden banana thieves?  Evil bakers?  Kidnappers?

Everything about this movie holds together a bit like when you're in college and you watch a movie while drinking and try to remember the plot later.  I was stone cold sober, and yet trying to hold the movie in my mind is like waking from a sweaty fever dream wrapped in pool of prescription medicated hallucinations.

I do know the characters were snappy dressers.

only bad guys would so brazenly mix stripes and patterns