Bloody Birthday!
Tonight’s movie is Bloody Birthday, from 1981. With a title like that, I suppose I don’t need to tell you the genre.
Even if you’ve never seen Bloody Birthday, the name should ring a bell, if only because of the film’s notoriously memorable VHS box.
Gonna borrow IMDB’s plot synopsis for this one:
Three children were born to the high of a total eclipse of the sun. Ten years later, they begin to kill gruesomely the people around them, even their family members.
I’m not sure if that’s completely grammatical, but whatever. Expect gore and mayhem. Put the kids to bed before you click play.
Mortal Kombat Endings!
I only have a spare minute tonight, so here’s something easy and random. Mortal Kombat endings! They’re the best part of the pizza.
All endings from Mortal Kombat:
All endings from Mortal Kombat II:
You know you’re gonna watch them.
Droids: The Great Heep!
If you’re old like me, you may remember how Star Wars paved way for both the Ewoks and Droids cartoons on Saturday mornings.
In the case of Droids, the show actually ended with an ABC prime time special — an hourlong mini-movie called The Great Heep, which aired on Saturday, June 7th, 1986.
I was pretty much born a Star Wars addict, so nothing was gonna keep me from watching this. Incredibly, though I’ve only seen The Great Heep that one time, I can still remember the basics: Something about a giant evil droid that acted as a mobile prison camp for other captive droids.
(I’m probably off on the particulars, but something in that area.)
If you’re a Star Wars fan and you’ve never seen the old Saturday morning cartoons, they’re worth a watch, even if only for curiosity’s sake. Both Droids and Ewoks also inspired their own dedicated lines of Kenner action figures, which had the neat byproduct of extending the shelf life of the regular Kenner Star Wars figures by a good two years!
Yet More Tales from the Darkside!
Happy spooky Sunday! Have some more Tales from the Darkside!
In the first season episode, Answer Me, a woman is driven mad by the ceaseless ringing of her neighbor’s phone. I’ll say no more, but this one gets weird. 😯
…and then from the second season, here’s Ursa Minor, which is easily among the most famous episodes of the series. It’s about an evil teddy bear, after all!
As with most Tales from the Darkside episodes, the stories were secondary to their atmospheres. Imagine being 9 or 10, up late, alone, in the dark, and with this creepy show on your bedroom television. That was my experience, and I’ll probably spend the rest of my life trying to recreate that old mix of excitement and dread.
