October

Overall, summer is my favorite time of the year. I love the hot weather, cookouts, sleeping with the windows open, long daylight hours, my birthday is in August, etc. However, my favorite month of the year is October. October has pro and college football, the baseball playoffs, the leaves changing and, most importantly of all… HALLOWEEN! (side note – I refuse to include that apostrophe between the two e’s that has been showing up more and more lately. This isn’t a case of reverting to the non-anglicized spelling of something in order to respect the culture of an existing people. Halloween is derived from a Celtic Pagan festival. Are there a lot of Celtic Pagans around these days embracing their cultural history? NO. So that apostrophe can suck it.)

Halloween is my favorite holiday. I love everything about it – dressing up, passing out candy to trick ‘r’ treaters, carving pumpkins, haunted houses and scary movies. I LOVE scary movies; although they don’t scare me (the only time I was ever really scared by a movie was the Exorcist – watching that move when I was 12 by myself with no lights on wasn’t the brightest idea). I love all kinds of horror/scary movies – campy, gory, suspenseful and even the bad ones. I always take time off from work at Halloween to stage my own personal horror movie marathon (yes, I am 13). This year, Halloween falls on a Saturday, so college football will interfere with my laying on the couch and watching movies. As a result, I have decided to both designate the 30th (and probably the night before) as my movie day and also to try and watch movies throughout the month (I meant to start at the beginning, but it has been a busy month, which also is to blame for my lack of blog posts).

The first movie up is one that I have always wanted to see, but it has managed to elude me until now – Plan 9 From Outer Space. Yes, the film universally renowned as The Worst Movie Ever Made. And, oh my, does it live up to its reputation. The acting is terrible. I mean, terrible as in they could probably go get the cast of the local high school production of Our Town, they would look like the cast of Mad Men compared to the chumps in Plan 9. Even the greatest screenwriters in Hollywood would have a difficult time coming up with dialog that would sound natural being delivered by these hacks. Unfortunately (or I guess fortunately for fans of terrible-in-a-good way movies), those screenwriters are nowhere to be found for this flick. It is usually stated that voiceover narration or extended exposition in a movie are the signs of a lazy screenwriter. The first 10 minutes of this movie are ALL narration, and the last 15 minutes are almost all exposition, so that should give you some hint of what you are in for with this movie. However, if you love bad movies, you owe it to yourself to see this one. It was time well spent.

I will be posting blog posts on my other movie-watching experiences throughout the month…