Two, count ’em, two big monster movie events in Chicago this weekend.
First, as mentioned previously, this is the Saturday the Music Box is running their 4th annual sci-fi marathon. It’s a great line-up: Them!, Bava’s Planet of the Vampires, Dark Star, Flash Gordon (Sam Jones), Q: The Winged Serpent (director Larry Cohen appearing live), Lifeforce and They Live. Info here.
Meanwhile, the guys from Time Tunnel Toys are, unfortunately for me, running their monthly show the same day. For ten bucks you get Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy, The Black Cat (Karloff & Lugosi–a great film), Tower of London (Karloff again) and Invasion of the Saucer Men. Poster and charmingly rough promotional video found here.
Good news for G-Fest, too, this year to be held on the weekend of July 9th. I haven’t attended the actual con in years, but I love the fact that they show movies every year at the gigantic, not to mention historic, Pickwick Theater, which is literally a few hundred yards from where I sit typing this. They haven’t announced their movies yet, but they have said that aside from the normal late movies on that Friday and Saturday, they will be running “Four movies (two double bills) will be shown on Thursday, July 8th, 2010, one pair in the afternoon and one pair in the evening.” So they’ll be offering six monster films on a very big screen this year. What’s better than that?
And, of course, things should be livelier at the con this year than they have been for a long time, what with the recent announcement of a new, American Godzilla movie coming in 2012. I remember how TriStar did everything it could to avoid sending anyone to G-Fest back in the day, which was all but an admission that their film wasn’t designed to please fans of the character. We’ll see if Legendary / Warners try the same thing. I think not; I think they’ll try to court the fans. Anyway, info on the Fest here.
