That Was The Weekend That Was
Jul. 5th, 2011 11:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
handful_ofdustCanada Day worked out well...we hooked up with two other Surrey Place parents, hung around Queen's Park and went on the free rides, listened to music, ate fairly good food; Cal actually ate an entire hot-dog bun, which I need to keep in mind for the next shopping trip. That same evening, meanwhile, we managed to have dinner with the Serial Diners followed by a night out at Snakes & Lattes, an Annex coffee-house stocked with hundreds of games. I finally learned to play Dominoes, and checked out a game called Quirkle (I think), which was the equivalent of Scrabble played with symbols rather than letters.
Saturday, OTOH, we topped off with a home visit from green_trilobite and moon_custafer--always fun. I made them watch a truly dreadful film called The Magic Sword which may have been one of the first things I ever saw in the theatre--I remembered it had a great evil magician (a slumming, geriatric Basil Rathbone) and this wacky sorceress who kept quoting a rhyme about: "Demons of shame, flesh on the rack...give my boy the power to attack!" What I didn't recall, sadly, was its terrible production values and equally terrible acting, particularly from the two young leads; granted, it has this strange, almost Wynne Jones-ish sense of its own craziness, and it's nicely vicious in places, but you have to cheer for idiots, which never helps. Still: A young and beautiful Maila Nurmi (Vampira), as "the Hag!"
Then I made up for it by showing them Larry Blamire's The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, which remains one of the funniest intentional parodies I've ever seen--it's like a delirious compilation/fantasia on those awful films you'd see at 3:00 PM on a Sunday afternoon, the ones shot in the Hollywood Hills, doubling for everything from Heartland forest to South American jungle to Egyptian desert. Blamire and his friends are completely deadpan and invested in his hilariously bad script, particularly in the case of his wife Jennifer Blaire, who plays "Animala", a sexy dame compiled from four (stock footage) forest animals; silver-haired Blamire himself doubles as both rock-crazy scientist Dr Paul Armstrong and the voice of the titular cranky, narcoleptic bone-bag ("That is your problem! I sleep now."), who seems perfectly capable of controlling people via long-distance telepathy, but not of walking a few steps without losing parts of himself. Oh, it's just utterly cheesy and glorious.
On Sunday, we explored the set of Boris Karloff's Thriller episodes that moon_custafer and green_trilobite passed on to us, starting with their famous adaptation of Robert E. Howard's "Pigeons From Hell", which actually worked better than they'd told me it did...aside from the weird ending, in which the crazy zuvembified woman in the secret room turned out to be not Celia Blassendale but her mulatto half-sister (because--no white woman would be capable of such horrors? Yeah, I dunno). Actually, a lot of Thriller ep.s seem to revolve around scary ladies of a certain age: "A Wig For Miss Devore", for example, in which the wig in question gives you hypnotic beauty and eternal youth at the cost of immediately turning you into a withered part-corpse whose true nature is revealed every time you doff its tresses, or "Parasite Mansion", in which a family of reclusive inbreds thinks they're haunted by a poltergeist, but actually turn out to have been harassed for generations by nutty old "Granny"'s telekinetic powers! See also "La Strega", which features a Goya-esque Sabbat in which the other participants are black-clad modern dancers doing a Bob Fosse routine. It's fun stuff, and oddly addictive, so thanks for that, guys.
Okay, well: Should probably try to rock a few notes, before I have to fall over. Today was the grind from hell, what with me rushing from one appointment to the next, doing five loads of laundry, and having to take Cal to a dentist appointment to get his front tooth smoothed and veneered (he was good, it happened, went well. But I still feel like my back is trying to untwist itself). Tomorrow, being a "free" Wednesday, probably won't be any better. But at least I'm moving forward, right?
Saturday, OTOH, we topped off with a home visit from green_trilobite and moon_custafer--always fun. I made them watch a truly dreadful film called The Magic Sword which may have been one of the first things I ever saw in the theatre--I remembered it had a great evil magician (a slumming, geriatric Basil Rathbone) and this wacky sorceress who kept quoting a rhyme about: "Demons of shame, flesh on the rack...give my boy the power to attack!" What I didn't recall, sadly, was its terrible production values and equally terrible acting, particularly from the two young leads; granted, it has this strange, almost Wynne Jones-ish sense of its own craziness, and it's nicely vicious in places, but you have to cheer for idiots, which never helps. Still: A young and beautiful Maila Nurmi (Vampira), as "the Hag!"
Then I made up for it by showing them Larry Blamire's The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, which remains one of the funniest intentional parodies I've ever seen--it's like a delirious compilation/fantasia on those awful films you'd see at 3:00 PM on a Sunday afternoon, the ones shot in the Hollywood Hills, doubling for everything from Heartland forest to South American jungle to Egyptian desert. Blamire and his friends are completely deadpan and invested in his hilariously bad script, particularly in the case of his wife Jennifer Blaire, who plays "Animala", a sexy dame compiled from four (stock footage) forest animals; silver-haired Blamire himself doubles as both rock-crazy scientist Dr Paul Armstrong and the voice of the titular cranky, narcoleptic bone-bag ("That is your problem! I sleep now."), who seems perfectly capable of controlling people via long-distance telepathy, but not of walking a few steps without losing parts of himself. Oh, it's just utterly cheesy and glorious.
On Sunday, we explored the set of Boris Karloff's Thriller episodes that moon_custafer and green_trilobite passed on to us, starting with their famous adaptation of Robert E. Howard's "Pigeons From Hell", which actually worked better than they'd told me it did...aside from the weird ending, in which the crazy zuvembified woman in the secret room turned out to be not Celia Blassendale but her mulatto half-sister (because--no white woman would be capable of such horrors? Yeah, I dunno). Actually, a lot of Thriller ep.s seem to revolve around scary ladies of a certain age: "A Wig For Miss Devore", for example, in which the wig in question gives you hypnotic beauty and eternal youth at the cost of immediately turning you into a withered part-corpse whose true nature is revealed every time you doff its tresses, or "Parasite Mansion", in which a family of reclusive inbreds thinks they're haunted by a poltergeist, but actually turn out to have been harassed for generations by nutty old "Granny"'s telekinetic powers! See also "La Strega", which features a Goya-esque Sabbat in which the other participants are black-clad modern dancers doing a Bob Fosse routine. It's fun stuff, and oddly addictive, so thanks for that, guys.
Okay, well: Should probably try to rock a few notes, before I have to fall over. Today was the grind from hell, what with me rushing from one appointment to the next, doing five loads of laundry, and having to take Cal to a dentist appointment to get his front tooth smoothed and veneered (he was good, it happened, went well. But I still feel like my back is trying to untwist itself). Tomorrow, being a "free" Wednesday, probably won't be any better. But at least I'm moving forward, right?
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no subject
Date: 2011-07-06 04:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-06 02:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-06 03:52 pm (UTC)Of course, I laughed during Troy too.
"It's a difficult job being a scientist's wife...the wife of a scientist."
no subject
Date: 2011-07-07 01:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-06 09:52 am (UTC)a family of reclusive inbreds thinks they're haunted by a poltergeist, but actually turn out to have been harassed for generations by nutty old "Granny"'s telekinetic powers!
Sort of boils down to the same thing, doesn't it?
no subject
Date: 2011-07-06 02:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-06 02:41 pm (UTC)That sounds hilarious.
The only thing I have on tap - well, besides Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein, is House of Wax with Vincent Price, and featuring Charles Bronson as a mute with sculpting abilities.
no subject
Date: 2011-07-06 03:51 pm (UTC)