Frightful Flicks

It's Halloween Time. You can feel it in the air. All those displays of Halloween candy that have been on sale in stores since early August no longer seem out of place. The Christmas merchandise now on sale does, though. (By the way, if you actually bought a bag of  candy in August, with the intention of saving it to distribute on Halloween, would you be able to do so? In our house that sucker would be eaten long before the first day of school, let alone Halloween! We have to buy candy about an hour before the kids come knocking, and even then it's not a certainty there will be any left for the trick and/or treaters!)

Every year at this time, we try to find a spooky film that will fill us with the "Halloween Spirit". We have our traditional favorites, like, "Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein",  and the original "Halloween". This year we also added "Hocus Pocus" to the mix. Not a great film, but it's entertaining, and  Bette Midler is always creepy, of course. A personal favorite of mine is, "Killer Klowns from Outer Space", but that film addresses my own pathologies and isn't everyone's cup o' tea. Perfect Wifey pretty much refuses to watch it again. This is understandable, as she has had to sit through it more times than the director of the film probably did.

Every year,  we try to find a new film to fill us with a fun dose of fear. I thought I had found a winner when I heard about a straight-to-video film called, "Trick 'R Treat". This film received raves from various online wags, so PW and I rented it last week. The film is a comedy/horror anthology set in a small town on Halloween Night. On the surface, it seemed like a winner. It had all  the elements of a perfect creepy movie: A great atmosphere that really captured the feel of a small town on All Hallow's Eve and warnings from the film's  characters  about the perils of not respecting Halloween traditions. Best of all, it featured a creepy little character tying all the stories together: The mysterious, pint-size Trick or Treater, Sam.

Unfortunately, the film was a disappointment. Not a complete failure, but not something I'd rush out to see again, either. The various stories attempted to emulate the tone of the old E.C. Comics, but the stories just weren't interesting, and the payoffs were weak. The character of Sam was a real winner at first, creepy and mysterious with his dirty little  footie pajamas and burlap mask over his big round head. Sam lost all effectiveness though,  when his head was revealed to be a lame ghoulie head. (Oops! I should have preceded that sentence with a SPOILER ALERT! warning. Sorry.) He would have been scarier if the filmmakers kept his appearance a mystery.

PW didn't care for vampires and werewolves being randomly tossed into the mix (Oops, again! SPOILER ALERT!). I think that was the point of that story, though, so I didn't mind. In the end, the film failed to deliver the fun,  scary experience we wanted. We'll have to look for our Halloween scares someplace else.

Maybe Wal-Mart™ is open late.

I Got a Rock...

Am I getting old? The answer, apparently, is a resounding yes. A fact hammered into me last night during a viewing of the holiday classic, "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown", which I watched with Perfect Wife and the 2 kids.

I love this special, as  does everyone, I assumed. I was wrong.

While I watched and marveled at the cool graphics and laughed at all the parts I always laugh at, the kids were bored to  tears. One left halfway through, the other stayed because she had heard my raves and I think she was waiting for something "good" to happen. Or maybe she was humoring me.

When I expressed my disappointment in the kids' reaction to PW, she said that maybe the show was too "old fashioned" for  them. How can that be?! This is PEANUTS for crying out loud! Everyone (I assumed) knows/loves these characters! Their appeal crosses over all generations! Is Shakespeare old fashioned? Is Mozart? Are the  Three Stooges?!

On reflection, I decided, yes. Maybe there is no such thing as "timelessness". Each generation has some cultural icons that they embrace, that the next one rejects, or just doesn't get. This may explain why my Mother could never get me to enjoy "I Married Joan". Someday perhaps, our children may wonder why their kids aren't into "Spongebob" re-runs.

It's sad. One thing is certain. We won't be watching "Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein" this year!