Everyone's Entitled One Good Scare

Just in case you need something to watch this Halloween season, here are some movie recommendations for everyone, from the most devoted horror fan to the biggest scaredy cat among you:

CLASSICS:

HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (1959): 10,000 dollars just to spend the night in Vincent Price's spooky, possibly-haunted, mansion? Count me in! This is really a fun movie! Don't confuse it with the 1999 remake which I have not seen and cannot vouch for.



PSYCHO (1960): If you've never seen it, maybe it's time to experience Alfred Hitchcock's most notorious shocker: the movie that really signaled the beginning of the modern horror film.



WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? (1962): Bette Davis and Joan Crawford as bickering sisters. Bette's jealousy of her once famous little sister Joan has been harvested into sheer madness in this delightfully campy film.




WAIT UNTIL DARK (1967): Audrey Hepburn is a blind woman trying to fend off three criminals in her apartment. It's really quite creepy, thanks to Alan Arkin's performance as the sinister mastermind, Mr. Roat.



NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968)



HALLOWEEN (1978): "You know it's Halloween. I guess everyone's entitled one good scare." Recommended: Watch PSYCHO and then HALLOWEEN and spot all the references (most importantly: Janet Leigh, star of PSYCHO, is the real-life mother of Jamie Lee Curtis, star of HALLOWEEN).



ALIEN (1979): Truly a great "space" movie, where for the first time the genre gave us a heroine (Sigourney Weaver) that kicked major A.



A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984)




80s OBSCURITIES:

THE FOG (1980): John Carpenter's creepy little follow-up to HALLOWEEN, about a town haunted by vengeful spirits on its 100th anniversary. Pretty good!



NIGHT OF THE COMET (1984): Regina and Samantha, two sisters from the Valley, are apparently the last two people on earth when a comet strikes and turns everyone else into dust. But there are a few "survivors" left...they're just not very friendly. A great 80's classic and a clever pastiche of 50s scifi and horror films.



APRIL FOOL'S DAY (1986): Has Muffy St. John invited her college friends to her island estate for a quiet April Fool's Weekend get-together? Or is murder on the itinerary? Beware the 2008 remake!




FOR THE MORE TIMID AMONG YOU:

YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974): Mel Brooks's spoof of Frankenstein. It's a classic, and filmed in glorious black-in-white in the true tradition of Universal monster movies.



MURDER BY DEATH (1976): An eccentric millionaire gathers the world's five greatest detectives at his mansion to taunt them with an unsolvable mystery. It's kind of stupid, but the cast makes it work. Especially if you have read Agatha Christie or seen the Thin Man movies, this is an enjoyable treat. If for no other reason, worth
seeing Alec Guinness portray a blind butler.



CLUE (1985): A delightful "adaptation" of the board game, featuring all the suspects (Colonel Mustard, Miss Scarlet, et. al) gathered at a creepy mansion for a dinner party with murder on the menu.



DRACULA DEAD AND LOVING IT (1995): Mel Brooks returns to the horror genre for his latest spoof, with Leslie Nielson hamming it up as the bumbling Count. Not as sharp or as classic as YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, but still very funny.

Couples Retreat

I enjoyed it. Not a laugh a minute or anything, but very entertaining. Four couples are guests at a resort called Eden, where their specialization is in couples therapy. In an effort to get the group rate, Jason and Cynthia (Jason Bateman and Kristen Bell) coerce their friends into joining them for the weeklong pleasure vacation/therapy session. The other couples are content to enjoy themselves while their friends work out their marriage problems, but it becomes clear that no one's "house" is in order. Couples Retreat is funny and enjoyable but never really peaks comically. Perhaps this is not something it even attempts, and that didn't bother me much. I was intrigued enough to want to know what would develop between the various characters. Where the movie did not succeed was in developing real, adult problems that it was apparently unwilling to really solve (this is supposed to be a comedy, after all), so the resolutions were happy but not necessarily believable in that they happened too fast and somewhat unrealistically. The exceptions were Vince Vaughan and Malin Akerman's characters, who realized (I am paraphrasing): "we don't have a problem. We have LOTS of problems. And maybe that's okay." Couples Retreat may pretend to offer profundity without doing so, and this makes it somewhat more subtle (in spite of the often crude humor that may or may not affect one's enjoyment of the movie).

Vinyl is Forever

Went to Orlando this weekend. Found three sweet vinyl records at a flea market in Sanford with my friend Matt; Including: two BLONDIE albums! I was so excited about my find. I already had one Blondie record courtesy of a friend who found it for a dollar and gave it to me. So today I went to Michaels and bought some nice LP frames and these records are now adorning my somewhat barren walls as artwork. Matt and I both find that the artwork on vinyls tends to be pretty amazing, so I guess this is my new hobby. The third album I got was the first full-length recording by the British band A FLOCK OF SEAGULLS, who scored a hit with the song "I Ran" in 1982 (featured on the album I found). Pretty sweet!

Zombieland

Fantastic! Not my favorite "looking" zombies, but this is certainly one of the most fun zombie flicks in recent years, sort of America's answer to Shaun of the Dead. Woody Harrelson is a bad-ass. Jesse Eisenberg balances out Woody's redneck Dirty Harry persona with his neurotic, witty and insightful take on his new "world," which is--you guessed it--overrun by flesh-eating zombies. And who would have thought a zombie movie would quote All About Eve's famous line ("Faster your seatbelts...")?

New Car Tuesday

Here is a picture of the car I just got (a 1999 Hyndai Sonata). Not the exact same car but this is what it looks like (even the color). Four doors, leather seats, sunroof, CUP HOLDERS. You had me at "vroom vroom!"