Hey, long time no see! I will warn you in advance that this is going to be a LONG post, so be prepared.
I’ve been busy for the whole week. My mom visited from Tuesday until Thursday so we were doing a lot of shopping and stuff. Then yesterday I went to the Science-Fiction marathon, which I’ll go into detail about. First of all, I’ll say that there was a rather interesting group of people, but I did expect more of them to be in costume. The first thing they showed was the prologue and first segment of the Twilight Zone movie. We were in the front row so that we could actually sleep on the floor instead of in the chairs, so it was kind of hard to see the screen, but we managed. After that, we were shown a bunch of trailers (both old and new), movie theatre rule bits (including a Sesame Street one that advised you, “Don’t forget to watch the movie”), ‘50s concession stand commercials, and short films, including the mascot, Duck Dodgers. They showed stuff like this between all the movies (or most of them anyways), and I think I actually enjoyed those more than the movies.
The first actual movie was Gamera 2, but I left right when it started. I walked from the Arena Grand Theatre to the Ohio Theatre to see Aida. It wasn’t that bad of a walk, and it was well worth it. Aida was great. I loved the staging and the story construction, not to mention the songs. I would highly recommend it. I was also excited to find out that Starlight Express and The Lion King are coming next year, although I’d have to make a special trip from home to Columbus to see The Lion King, since it’s in June.
Anyways, I got back to the Arena Grand Theatre in time to see the end of Robot Monster, which is pretty awful, even for a ‘50s B movie. The robot (“Ro-man”) was wearing a gorilla suit with one of those old TVs shaped like diving bells on his head, minus the screen. His equipment had bubbles coming out of it, to give you a sense of the special effects budget. You know, if the audience cheers when the monster kills a human, that’s bad. At least I had this MST3K audience in the theater with me, and they came up with some pretty funny comments. When the robot was tuning his radio (or whatever it was) to contact his commander, someone in the audience shouted, “Can you hear me now?” which got a big laugh (that was a recurring comment in several movies).
The next thing up was the “It’s a Good Life” segment of the Twilight Zone movie, followed by Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It may be an oxymoron to call something a good B movie, but this was. Granted, it was bad, but not painfully bad. It was something you would want to seek out to heckle instead of being forced to watch it (like Robot Monster). The people in this movie had a tendency to leave outside doors open, and the audience picked up on it and kept yelling, “Door!” whenever that happened. Anyways, Kevin McCarthy, the star of the movie, was supposed to be at the marathon, but he had pneumonia, followed by a severe ear infection and was not allowed to fly, so he was unable to attend. However, the guy running the marathon was able to get his friend (Mark Edward Hoyt, the Movie Geek from Comedy Central’s now-defunct Beat the Geeks) to videotape an interview with Kevin McCarthy, and the audience enjoyed it.
Next we were shown more trailers and concession stand ads (I’m not sure how, but the ‘50s ads always made the hot dogs and hamburgers look disgusting), as well as an episode of Captain Marvel (one of those old serials from the ‘30s and ‘40s) and this trippy short film called Spaceboy, which featured an unattractive guy and a 40-something woman whose hair got bigger by the second and who was wearing a flesh-colored body suit covered with large sequins (including some in places where the audience would rather not know). Then we saw Cowboy Bebop the Movie. As far as anime goes, I really only like Spirited Away, Ranma ½, and Inuyasha, but I watched Cowboy Bebop anyways. After that, they ran a slogan contest for Spaceboy. Everyone who entered got a T-shirt unless their slogan was really bad. I got up and called it “David Bowie’s Inspiration.” About half the people didn’t get it, the other half did and cheered, and one person strongly objected to it, but I got a T-shirt for The Hunted. Other slogans included, “Shot after shot of crotch sequins,” “My slutty mom got me an A on my film school final,” "Plastic Surgery Joan Collins on Acid," (that was Marisa's) and “Crap, crap, and more crap.”
The next movie was Beyond Re-Animator, which turned out to be a particularly gory horror movie, so I slept through it. Then Marisa and I saw Superman (By the way, those of you who read the comics: Was Clark Kent’s high school girlfriend originally Lisa or Lana? Marisa says it’s Lisa, but my mom says it was always Lana), which I’d only seen the ending before, so that was somewhat entertaining. After Superman was Killer Klowns from Outer Space, which I slept through, followed by Eight Legged Freaks, which I tried to sleep through, but couldn’t. I had seen it before and hated it, so I didn’t care to see it again. I planned on sleeping, but they decided to turn the volume way up on it, so even though I had music on my headphones at ear-blasting level, I could still hear spiders roaring and David Arquette screaming.
The next movie was X-Men, which I wanted to see (actually, that was the movie I wanted to see the most, even though I’d already seen it. However, since I didn’t sleep at all through Eight Legged Freaks¸ I kept falling asleep during X-Men. Joe (Liz’s boyfriend) was nice enough to wake me up at one point, but I fell asleep again. Marisa was up but couldn’t remember who it was that wanted to watch X-Men (we were in a large group). I also pretty much slept through the final movie, Equilibrium, which everybody loved for some reason. I thought they found some deep meaning to it or something, but they just liked the gunfights, most of which I missed.
Anyways, I’m back now. It’s time to return to reality, since I’ve got finals this week (I go home Saturday). The marathon was fun, and I’m looking forward to next year.
Recent Comments