05:53 am
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Retrofantasma the Decade
Friday ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) maegwynn and I were going to the monthly Retrofantasma double feature of classic / schlock horror at the Carolina. She decided that since I went to Piedmont Thursday night without her (after the Black Mirror art panel at the Nasher while she was off at her weekly knitting group [1]) that I was taking her to dinner there before Retro. I checked the website to see they had updated their daily menu and they were not serving the crispy duck and cranberry confit with sweet potato and bacon hash I had had on Thursday. Sigh. But Friday's menu looks good too. On the way I called ovrclokd and thebroomecloset who surprisingly were free to meet us for dinner at Piedmont (they love the place and introduced us to it).
We arrive at Piedmont - to discover they are closed for the evening for a private party on short notice. Arrrgh. This happened to me the last time I met ovrclokd and thebroomecloset for dinner there before the Laurie Anderson show in September. CURSED! CURSES! So we regroup and go to Anotherthyme which I don't think I've eaten at for over five years, perhaps ten. As we enter I see signs indicating they are closing at 7 for a private party, continuing the theme for the evening. Great food, start to catch up with our dinner partners, make plans to catch up more shortly, then M and I dash off to the Carolina.
New Retrofantasma film clips reel in order to mark the tenth anniversary of this series, consisting of mostly new selection of clips from classic horror and fantasy films (the lich mandarin from _Big Trouble In Little China_ stayed in from the original, but the clip from _The Manitou_ is gone. Same soundtrack, being the cover version of "Science Fiction Double Feature" from _Rocky Horror_ done by Me First and the Gimme Gimmes. My remarks from the last screening about the damned volume for the opening promo reel seem to have fallen on deaf ears (sour laugh), but I have earplugs on me as always (not specifically for the Retro reel, I always carry earplugs). Lots of raffle giveaways including a set of paper zombie shooting targets from ZombieTargets.Net that I had purchased over the summer figuring they'd make nice halloween decorations if nothing else came to mind, and did not use all of them. (I still have some left.)
Second Retro commemorative reel of clips from as many of the sixty-seven films they've screened in ten years they could squeeze in to 3.5 minutes, with the music being some piece from a non-horror movie that sounded familiar but I was not personally able to identify. I've probably seen the movie the music was from, and it's less obscure than, say, _The Mouse That Roared_, but I couldn't identify it. Whole slew of old trailers including the grindhouse i won't call it a classic _Cannibal Ferox_, and a Godfather ripoff called _Massacre Mafia Style_ that was clearly where Tarantino got the Samuel L Jackson and John Travolta characters from for _Pulp Fiction_.
Then Lucio Fulci's _The Beyond_, giallo horror film featuring an abandoned hotel in (ostensibly) Lousiana that was built over one of the seven gates to Hell that are scattered across the face of the Earth, and abandoned after the townspeople murdered an occultist and painter in the hotel they thought was trying to open the gate (he kept insisting he was trying to help them, but the fools, they never listen! Ahem. Excuse me.) Central to this film in which the dead rise up, walk the Earth, and shamble towards the living (mostly in a head-down, peculiarly passive-aggressive way) is the Book of Eibon, a fictional book of occult lore created by Clark Ashton Smith for HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos story cycle, said Book of Eibon being akin to the FOR THE LAST TIME EQUALLY FICTIONAL Necronomicon [2].
In an unfortunate piece of timing the theatre furnace broke just as the film began and we all froze during the screening. The repairman arrived about the end of the film and I was certain the problem would be repaired expeditiously, we were cold enough that none of us (me, maegwynn, base10, 8fungus & C.) were willing to stay for the second feature (a 1981 knockoff of the first _Friday the 13th_ movie, featuring garden shears) titled _The Burning_ unless there was actual kindling involved [3]. M and I headed home with the car heater on full blast the entire way back to Raleigh, or Rlaeigh as I keep mistyping it. I live in R'lyeh? No one is surprised. (What I am surprised is that I *didn't* recognize the gentleman I passed on the highway yesterday with a custom license plate bearing the text IA! F'TAGN.)
Fell asleep at midnight which is early for me on a weeknight, woke up at 4:30am and decided to write this now. Hope I sleep again soon, I have much I want to do on Saturday.
[1] I used to go to a friend's and game on Thursdays. Then they moved gaming to not-Thursdays and it became less convenient for me.
[2] I note that this month the "Simon" edition of the Necronomicon, being the version of that fictional book that was released in a paperback edition in the 1970s [4] is being released in a new Fourth Edition.
[3] Although a story about a stage theatrical production ending in a fire in the first volume of his _Books of Blood_ collection came to mind at that image. I didn't reflexively check the exits though because I'd already done that earlier.
[4] I recall, perhaps wrongly because I am not going to get up and find my copy to check, that Alan Dean Foster mocked that paperback by mentioning it in his Lovecraft pastiche and parody "Some Notes Concerning a Green Box". The copy of the Necronomicon in the 1970 version of The Dunwich Horror [5] that M and I watched this week was a decently large and impressive hardcover. Maybe I'll find a copy of _Unasssprechlichen Kulten_ at the Library Book Sale if I make it there.
[5] Starring Sandra Dee (?!) and Dean Stockwell. Stockwell in an interview stated he doesn't remember much about making that film because he was too stoned the entire production, and his eyes looking into infinity throughout the film support that statement.
Tags: carolina theatre, durham, film, film08, retrofantasma
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