Saturday the 14th!
I’m like three seconds away from melting into goo. I think this will be my sleepytime movie:
Get a load of Saturday the 14th, a 1981 horror spoof that’s become a bit of a cult classic. Though the film was released in theaters, it feels so much more like a made-for-TV movie. (That’s a plus, in my book.)
It’s cheesy as hell and I don’t know if even one single joke actually lands, but I still love it. I don’t know if I’d go so far to say that Saturday the 14th was made for kids, but it was certainly safe enough for kids. This despite the fact that the movie does feature some decent creature effects. (In what’s arguably its most famous scene, a pretty cool spoof on Gill-man attacks a girl in a tub.)
Here’s some old promo art, which’ll whet your appetite a whole lot more than that junky thumbnail from the YouTube video:
Enjoy the movie!
If I can’t fall asleep, let’s all go to 7-Eleven and mix every Slurpee flavor.
Favorite Spooky TV Commercials?
Today’s “main site” article went up way late, so if you darted here without noticing it, go watch all of the original commercial breaks from the 1985 CBS premiere of Garfield’s Halloween Adventure.
Huge dose of nostalgia in that one. (And well-timed, since we just had that whole After Dark discussion about Garf!)
That article inspired tonight’s survey, too:
What are your favorite spooky TV commercials of all time?
They don’t necessarily have to be Halloween commercials, but let’s at least exclude stuff like horror movie TV spots. I mean real commercials for stupid things, like chocolate and toys and video games and Tilex.
Feel free to include links to YouTube if your lovelies are on there.
I’m too fried to commit to any answers right now, but once I have dinner (at midnight) and go stare at the moon, I’ll add mine to the comments. For now I will only state that this one will probably make the cut:
The Sunkist Spooky Fruit ad, which I covered back in 2012 and still think about regularly.
I want to live in that world. I don’t care if it hurts.
The Making of Elm Street 4!
Here’s The Making of A Nightmare on Elm Street 4, a pretty famous behind-the-scenes doc from 1988. While it was eventually released on video, I’m pretty sure that it actually aired on television, too. (Wasn’t it MTV, come to think of it?)
The much longer and much more recent Never Sleep Again documentary is still the standard, but if I’m not mistaken, it actually borrowed some footage from this earlier special.
You don’t need to be an Elm Street nut to appreciate this one. Seeing how inventive they had to be to pull off such ridiculous stunts is just too cool, and it’ll make you yearn for the golden era of practical effects that much more.
I’m mostly tossing this up because it’s the perfect thing to watch late at night on a quiet weekday, but I think we can add a few survey questions, too:
1) Early impressions of Freddy Krueger? Were you a fan… or were you too scared to be one?
2) What’s your favorite Elm Street flick, and why?
3) Outside of Freddy, who is your favorite character from any Elm Street movie?
Oh, and here are some older Dino Drac articles with a Freddy Krueger focus, in case you’re rather read stuff than watch stuff!
Freddy Newspaper Clippings | Obscure NOES Playset | Weird NOES Merchandise | Dream Warriors Tribute
Tales from the Darkside.
I’m a broken record with this, but MY GOD do I love Tales from the Darkside.
It’s hard to get new people into the series, since it was so damn slow and admittedly hit-or-miss. If you didn’t grow up with TFTD and you’re more able to stay objective, it’s just “another one of those anthology shows,” and I guess it is less exciting than, say, Tales from the Crypt.
For people like me, though, Tales from the Darkside was a quiet introduction to horror. I have such fond memories of watching it late at night in my childhood bedroom. Just me, a bag of Wise’s Crazy Calypso chips, and crazy spooky shit on my half-broken television.
…and here’s my favorite episode, Anniversary Dinner.
Many TFTD fanatics rate it as one of the worst, but it’s among the few that I can recall experiencing as a child with crystal clarity.
I wouldn’t say that I was scared of it (it’s one of the least scary TFTD episodes, frankly), but I think it captured the show’s central theme — that there’s a darker underside to the sunny world we’re all living in — as well as any other episode.
Questions for tonight:
1) Were you a fan of Tales from the Darkside? Any favorite episodes?
2) If not TFTD, were you into any of the other horror/sci-fi anthology shows? (For the record, I may have not religiously watched all of them, but I did love all of them, from Tales from the Crypt to The Outer Limits and beyond.)
