Dr. X will build a creature

[sovay]

And because I have not watched nearly enough movies this year, in a little over half an hour I am meeting rushthatspeaks and derspatchel at the Somerville Theatre for a sci-fi/horror noon-to-midnight marathon. Starts with silent film and progresses decade by decade until we run out of Saturday sometime in the '90's. I cannot tell you how much I am looking forward to seeing The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) on a big screen. Or The Invisible Man (1933). Or The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984). I've never seen Tremors (1990), or even heard of Dr. Cyclops (1940). And there's always time for Roddy McDowall, Yul Brynner, and Robby the Robot. (And one film to run out on to find dinner. This is important.)

I am looking forward.

Comments

[liquidmorpheme.livejournal.com]

Tremors hold a gleeful place in my heart. I wish you merry times with it.
--

c i r o

[lauradi7.livejournal.com]

The wrong danged rec room.

[liquidmorpheme.livejournal.com]

INDEED.

[sovay]

Tremors hold a gleeful place in my heart. I wish you merry times with it.

I loved it. It was a monster movie where nobody has to be an idiot for the plot to work and the deaths are not moral judgments and people successfully pull together without being symbols of anything and every time I expected a cliché of the genre, Tremors sidestepped it. The little girl with her pogo stick doesn't get eaten as a sentimental shocker (and her mother doesn't get eaten trying to save her), the jerkass teenager doesn't get eaten as a comeuppance, the survivalists don't sacrifice themselves heroically for the rest of the group. The character who's a scientist is a real scientist, but she doesn't have all the answers, because her field's geology, not "underground goddamn monsters." The information she deduces about them—their numbers, their sensitivity to sound—goes straight into the common fund, from which everyone elaborates some plan or theory. Seriously, I think this movie had the largest percentage of survivors of any film of this type I've seen, and it was wonderful. The conventional ending would just have been Valentine, Earl, and Rhonda. Nope.

(Also, the most un-exploitative panty shot I've ever seen in a horror movie. Getting Rhonda out of her jeans saves her life, and as soon as Valentine has finished bandaging the barbed-wire cuts on her legs, she puts on a new pair of pants. It's not used as a romantic or a sexual moment; he doesn't even double-take at seeing her half-naked. She almost died in the same way as one of the linemen and she doesn't; that's what matters. It was really refreshing.)

Around the time the second monster made its appearance, rushthatspeaks leaned over and said on one side of me, "What these people have is a Shai-Hulud problem," moments before derspatchel said on the other, "Motherfucking wormsign," and I was pleased with the people in my life.