Thursday, October 9, 2008

Countdown to Halloween: A Film a Week









Well, we're just a few weeks away from the big night where kids rot their teeth and your shy female coworker dresses up as Slutty Mother Theresa, fishnets and all. Halloween is not just about getting drunk at parties and hitting on 22 year-olds who don't realize you're 40 because you're wearing a pirate shirt and eyeliner. No, it's also about watching scary movies. Preferably, it's about discovering one of your favorite scary movies on cable and passing out on the couch at 1am. But it can be a tease. How many times have we all flipped the dial to AMC and been excited to see Michael Myers stabbing someone but -- "D'oh!" It's Halloween 5, not the original classic John Carpenter film. Should have known from the bad hair on the mask. They just never got it right after Halloween II.

So the Mung Hour is counting down each week until Halloween with a choice horror recommendation you can rent or pray to the DirectTV gods they'll air it this month. (Oh, if you use the word "choice" in a sentence, that 22 year-old chick you're hitting on at the Halloween party will nail you on your real age.)

This week, since we brought him up, John Carpenter's The Thing. There are remakes and then there are REMAKES. Carpenter took the 1951 horror classic and added a good dose of claustrophobia and latex rubber. People forget there was a time when filmmakers used real stage blood instead of CGI (I'm talking to YOU, Zack Snyder). Aided by a first rate cast of men over 35 (unheard of in Hollywood now), Kurt Russell shows us how justified paranoia, confined quarters and a shape-shifting alien can really foul up the workplace, particularly in -32 degree Antarctic weather.

Favorite line: After watching the creature morph from a colleague into a giant venus fly-trap, biting the head off a comrade before getting torched, Donald Moffat turns to his coworkers and says, "I know you gentlemen have been through a lot, but when you find the time, I'd rather not spend the rest of this winter TIED TO THIS FUCKING COUCH!"

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