As has been my tradition for a couple of decades now, on the Friday before Halloween I hold a monster movie marathon. As long as I’ve got children willing to keep going, I’ll keep throwing on titles from my curated list.
Of course, when I began this, my children were all children and lived under my roof. Jason is now gone, and this year Emma is doing a semester abroad in South Korea. So the participants were Sariah and her boyfriend Britain, and Alex and his wife; they brought their toddler and newborn, but the latter two weren’t much interested (I do schedule the scarier programming for later for the wee ones’ benefit; I’m not myself a monster, you know).
In order, then:
The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra (2001) – Larry Blamire’s valentine to 1950’s sci-fi monster movies, or rather, to the viewers who have absorbed the tropes and recognize what’s being parodied. Just like Ghostbusters: Afterlife resonates best with an audience that knows the original Ghostbusters well enough to catch specific camera angles and musical cues, The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra is best appreciated by those who can recognize and appreciate an Ed-Woodian turn of dialogue. This was soundly enjoyed by all viewers — in fact, some declared it to be the best marathon movie of all time.
The Monster Club (1981) – It’s been a good forty years since I had seen this one — when I first saw it, I knew who Vincent Price was, of course, but I didn’t appreciate Jon Carradine’s presence, nor his role as the real-life writer R. Chetwynd-Hayes (on whose book the movie is based). I also had not recognized at the time how cheap the production was — all of the non-headline club denizens are wearing off-the-shelf Halloween makeup or rubber masks — and I certainly didn’t remember how annoying the musical numbers are that are spread between the stories in this anthology feature.
Before this was over, Alex took his his wife and kids home. I did mention that that’s a toddler and a newborn, right? As he said, “We’re so tired all the time that the idea of staying up late on purpose sounds like torture now.”
They Live (1988) – What? There are monsters in it! It qualifies! Although I had forgotten just how long it takes before Rowdy Roddy Piper catches his first glimpse of one of the bug-eyed skullfaces in his ordinary-looking sunglasses — Sariah had already said, “Are you sure this is a Halloween movie?” (I didn’t say, “It was directed by John Carpenter, so of course it qualifies as a Halloween movie!”)
Afterward, Sariah — who’s miles further left than I on the political spectrum — said, “I get the feeling that if it were pitched today, it would be rejected as ‘too woke.'”
Because I didn’t want to start a political debate at midnight after watching three movies back to back, I didn’t say that there were no identity politics or intersectionality in the movie, and despite the modern symptoms of apathy and economic fragmentation being squarely aimed at ’80s Reaganism, the social fragmentation and lack of empathy portrayed have only grown by orders of magnitude in the past forty years, during which the left has had an increasing stranglehold on the media complex. (Also, we’ve just experienced two decades of “too woke” never being a reason for Hollywood not to throw millions at movie-losing spectacles that disdained half of their potential domestic audience.)
I didn’t say any of that, but I thought it real loud.
The Evil Dead (1981) – Another movie that, I realized, I hadn’t seen in four decades. I had forgotten how dark it is; I of course remembered that the slapstick was cranked up to 11 in the sequel, but had not remembered that what replaced with slapstick in the sequel was serious horror. I had also remembered some of the rough elements of the production (the mismatched haircuts between shots, the stark pools of floodlight illuminating the night exteriors), but I had not recognized (being an idiot teenager) just how meticulously planned Sam Raimi’s visual storytelling was, with shot choices that tell the story fare more skillfully than 99% of indie (or even studio) directors.
(My plan is to show a few other “spam in a cabin” movies over the next couple of years before culminating in The Cabin in the Woods.)
And then I won! …By which I mean, I said to Sariah, “Ready for one more?” And she muttered, “No…” (Her boyfriend was already asleep.)
On deck, but not watched, were The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mix-Up Zombies!!?, and An American Werewolf in London (which was an also-ran last year — I’ll have to move it up in the program. But also, by next year I’ll have to make sure that the first movie, and probably the second, are preschooler-friendly monster movies.)