Random Happenstance

"This is why I have to schedule out six hours to watch a ninety-minute movie."


Although it occured to me when I was putting the pictures up, with his ever-present bag of salty snacks, and his I'm-not-doing-squat attitude, Nightcrawler seems to be heading into the territory Toyfare's Mego Spidey. Still, Nightcrawler is more apt to be guilted into things.

I still haven't seen Damnation Alley: I found it on YouTube, but then my speaker quit working on the computer. Here's the scene Kurt mentions, though:

I've only half-watched it, but the "Landmaster" interior looks like a nicer motor home. Wikipedia mentions the film, and without so much as calling it craptacular, points out some of the problems it ran into: held up an inordinate amount of time in post-production, it was beat to the punch by another science-fiction film...The writeup on writer Roger Zelazny sites it's influence, including the classic Judge Dredd epic, "The Cursed Earth," the first Dredd stories I read.

While I wasn't in the circus as a kid, when I was younger I usually rented movies with the same crew of friends every weekend. My folks were always kind of strict on the R-rated movies, so this was the easiest way to see them; but sometimes, if I was gone for a weekend, they'd rent movies without me. That next week back at the video store was never fun.
ME: (pulling a display box of the shelf) Hey, this looks good.
ANY ONE OF MY FRIENDS: (glances at it) Yeah, we watched that. It was awesome.
ME: So, could we--
MY FRIENDS: Nah, man, we're not getting that.

It was friggin' years before I saw Aliens, for pete's sake. Pretty sure it's why I've never seen any of the Phantasm movies, either. Dang.

On the other hand, that sets up a great story about my dad. He was a principal at a junior high for a mess of years, including when me and then my sister were in junior high. But in grade school, sometimes I would ride into school in the morning with him, which meant I'd be there way too early, so I'd hang out and read or do homework in his office before heading off to my school across the street.

So, one Sunday night, Alien was on TV. I'm almost positive it was on ABC, since their announcer really sold it with a very ominous voiceover. My love of science-fiction, monsters, and so forth was already cemented by that age, so I was dying to stay up and see it; but there's no way my folks would let me stay up that late on a school night.

That next morning, I asked my dad how if he watched it. This is almost twenty years later, but I can remember this almost verbatim: "Oh, it wasn't that great. There's these astronauts or miners or whatever, and they find this weird spaceship. One of them gets this thing stuck on his face, but then he's ok, but then a monster explodes out of his chest during dinner. And they're trying to kill the monster, and one of the astronauts turned out to be a robot...it wasn't that great." I don't know exactly where in there I had to bite down on my fist to keep from screaming...sadly, it was years before I finally got to see it for myself, and I'm pretty sure I saw Spaceballs before then as well...