I had this delusion I was just going to spend most of the day vegetating and alternating between reading Joe Hill’s 20th Century Ghosts and watching movies. Didn’t quite work out, although I did manage to combine a run and The Devil Bat (1941) – one of the few times I was glad the gym has installed individual tv’s on some of the treadmills. I had someone else turn it on, because most people watch CNN at my gym and I didn’t want to take the chance on a random sighting on day 2 of my CNN detox.
Devil Bat is so hilariously bad it was almost dangerous to watch while running. I love the opening sequence, where Mad Scientist Bela works to perfect his species of Giant Devil Bats using electrical manipulation of their glandular processes. He does this when he’s not busy inventing a new aftershave. His conversation with the stock footage bat before he carries the completely unconvincing rubber model into the laboratory is priceless. I mean that literally, it couldn’t have cost anything to produce that scene. And if it did, someone should have been fired. I swear the actual plot of this movie is: Mad Scientist hates his employer, develops a shaving lotion that causes Giant Devil Bats to attack whoever wears it, commits mayhem.
I’d planned to make tonight a triple-feature: The Haunting (1963), Evil Dead and the 1st Halloween, but those best laid plans and all. It’s okay, I’ve already decided that Halloween is going to last through election-day this year so that I have time to get through everything left on the Tivo, finish the Frankenstein marathon, and read the Joe Hill short stories and David J. Skal’s Death Makes a Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween. Both of those books have been sitting on the coffeetable mocking me ever since the start of the 10 day migraine that kept me from reading.
I was so tired tonight that I decided to postpone the movies and watch Halloween episodes from Buffy. I haven’t seen any of them in ages, they’re funny, and they don’t require much attention span. I picked season 2 (where everyone becomes their Halloween costume) after realizing I was too tired to even watch more than one tonight. I never mentioned it here, but I kicked off the 13 Days of Halloween fest with the Halloween episode from the final season of Angel, “Life of the Party.”
I was actually really disappointed with the Halloween movie offerings yesterday and all through the week. Really not so many horror movies as I would have expected, and the 57th running of Poltergeist really doesn’t count. Managed to catch The Terror, love those young Jack Nicholson flicks, but not too much else that was really FUN.
I know! And why was the Family channel running Poltergeist constantly? That seemed like slightly odd programming to me. I also don’t think things like Alien versus Predator count as Halloween movies, so that was really annoying. Blech. I’d hoarded the stuff like the Haunting on DVD, if I’d been relying only on cable I’d have been sadly disappointed.