We have a group of us at the library where I work, the Movie Group, who have for over ten years (!) now gotten together on a monthly basis to watch some film that we pick via rotation. About four years ago we started doing a side Halloween party thing, which is now in that nice “we’re setting traditions” sort of thing. The Halloween party is somewhat different from the Movie Group, in that we bring in somewhat more people and I get to run it every year (so far), rather than by rotation. Over the years I’ve introduced people to Mad Love, Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare and Zombie Lake.
Last year we started (by accident) another great tradition. I was kind of broke last year, and so begged off from buying people a ton of stuff—candy, Halloween toys, etc.—like I usually do. Back in the beginning I bought all the regulars those personalized-by-name cloth treat baskets from Lillian Vernon—luckily there were enough types (bat, witch, ghost, etc., that everyone hot a different basket), and now am up to eight of those, so filling all of them and buying geegaws and stuff can add up. (I often buy stuff right after Halloween when it’s on sale, and stow it away for a year for the next party.)
Anyway, last year I was sufficiently impoverished that I again explained I’d be largely taking the year off from buying all that stuff (although I did buy a more moderate amount). Being a swell bunch, everyone else cheerfully volunteered to buy candy, and we threw it into a big pile (people of course tried to find weird candies, which was great), and then everyone dived in and grabbed their favored treats. This proved so popular that even though this year I went back to my old spending ways, we still went with the candy pile. It was GIGANTIC this year; a mountain, really, instead of a pile. And as amazed as I was by the size of it, I was even more amazed that it was completely cleared up and stowed in the various treat baskets and overflowing vessels of other sorts in about five minutes, tops. It was a hilarious frenzy.
Pizza hijinx pretty much ordained the film line-up. I had brought a variety of stuff so that I had options, although the fact that we had a kid on hand this year (and were much the better for it) kind of knocked out a lot of stuff. However, the pizza (waaaay too much pizza was ordered; they should have listened to me, because years of overbuying for B-Fest has given me a sharp sense of how much ‘za is enough) arrived very, very late, and we didn’t get the first video in until after 10:30—I didn’t even realize how late we started until somebody mentioned it this morning—a good two hours later than I had hoped. This meant any slim hopes for three films were blown.
In any case, the five full pizzas did eventually get there, including three obscenely long ‘stadium sized’ pies, big oblong things that arrived in oblong, double-long boxes. Of those, only the gigantic bacon pizza was completely annihilated, which gave me a moment of pride. I introduced the bacon pizza to our crowd, and was glad to see it had been embraced. My family ate it back in the days when nobody even sold it (we have to make our own bacon), and those rare places listing on their menus were in fact selling Canadian bacon pizza, which is entirely different. Anyway, it seems to be gaining in popularity; the secret to a good one is to (duh) pre-cook the bacon so that it’s crisp. Some places just lay raw bacon on there and let it bake in the oven. No good.
After that it was candy time. I handed out Halloween paper bags full of treats and geegaws to get things going, including individually wrapped Halloween themed rubber ducks (vampires, mummies, witches, etc.). I also divided up those 24 discs containing a 100 horror movies I started reviewing earlier in the month, but barely plowed through. They were largely sucky movies, but bundles of the DVDs still made nice stocking stuffers, I thought.
Then the grand Candy Mountain was constructed and decimated, as described above.
And so, finally, it was time for the movies. Actually, my first selection wasn’t a film at all, but a TV episode. I’d been sitting on this for nearly a year, following the release of a ‘best of’ set of the old TV show Route 66. This particular episode, “Lizard’s Leg And Owlet’s Wing,” was something I’d been reading about since I was a kid, but had never gotten to see. It co-starred Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney, Jr., so you can see why I was excited. Meanwhile, a few of the other guys were also big old horror movie buffs, so I knew they’d like to see the thing, too.
The show started VERY promisingly, as the program’s two heroes* this week obtained jobs at nowhere else than the O’Hare Inn outside Chicago, right where our groups lives. However, the episode proved very weird, with bizarre conversations that made no sense to anybody and really bad comic banter between the two leads.
[*Route 66 covers the adventures of two young hipsters—back in the days when hipsters were college-educated white guys in sports coats traveling the country in convertibles and looking for danger, adventure and romance—not necessarily in that order. One of the two is Marvin Miller, who later played the older, barely more straight-laced patrol cop on the Jack Webb-produced Adam-12.]The pair gets jobs as convention liaisons at the O’Hare Inn. One gets to assists a gaggle of (sorta) beautiful secretaries having a meeting, the other ends up grousing because he’s stuck with a small group supposedly doing an environmental sort of thing. However, this is a cover for Lorre, Karloff and Chaney to meet. They have the chance to a (fake, sadly) TV show or something, but are arguing over whether old-school horror has any relevance anymore. Chaney and Lorre believe so, but resident egghead Karloff believes otherwise. This then mirrors the beliefs of the Karloff character in the future film Targets to a weird extent.
Anyway, much wackiness ensues, and when the horror guys are offscreen, it’s pretty painful and, as noted, often downright incomprehensible. Luckily, by the end Karloff has appeared in his Frankenstein Monster make-up, Chaney is seen as Quasimodo (played by his dad, actually, not himself), the Wolf Man and the Mummy, while Lorre gets the dubious honor of causing swathes of the secretaries to scream and faint just from looking at his hangdog but supposedly sinister mug.
For those of us not so invested in the old guys, it must have been pretty painful, although things were at least somewhat saved by not one by two instances of a literally jaw-dropping use of the slide whistle to accompany a few supposedly wacky moments. Pretty much all of us were like, “REALLY?! A SLIDE WHISTLE?!”
After that, I wasn’t sure I could sell another old black and white movie, so (sadly) From Hell It Came stayed in the bad. Instead, I decided to show 1977’s The Car. (I film I saw as a kid at the venerable Pickwick Theater, about fifty yards from where I am currently typing this.) This proved much more popular, as it provided an entertaining mix of camp and some actually interesting stunts and other decent elements.
The Car itself is pretty sweet, although its so exaggerated that sometimes it just looks cartoony. It was designed by George Barris, who also fabricated the Adam West Batmobile, among a zillion other classic cars. (Ertl made a 1/18 scale model version of this a long time ago, but you’d have to lay out big bucks for one now. Too bad, because it looks really cool.)
The Car is basically a desert-set version of Jaws with a demonic auto instead of a shark. Everyone seemed to enjoy the film quite a bit, especially one keep prop that drew fascinated attention from all of us (and several other people on the Internets). I failed, sadly, to get a screenshot of the amazing painting of James Brolin before I returned the DVD, but here’s one I lifted from an amusing review of the film. The numbers indicate the various design elements of the indicated room that the reviewer was cheerfully appalled by.
Anyway, some people had to leave during the film because it was running so late, although I was very surprised to learn that it was going on 2:00 AM when we finally broke up. Still it was a great night, and I am only sorry that I must now wait an entire year to do it again.
Next Halloween event: Seeing Hitchcock’s The Birds at The Portage Theater.
