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When I was a kid, I loved all those old Disney movies.  I'm not talking about the animated ones with princesses and dwarves, I'm talking about the ones about Medfield College and Dexter Riley.  These movies starred a very young (and very smoking hot) Kurt Russell as the precocious Dexter.  He drove a dune buggy.  He wore mod 60s clothes.  He and his friends always dabbled in science due to their great admiration for Professor Quigley, and Dexter always managed to screw up the science to accidentally give himself some sort of super power.  And this super power would inevitably screw things up for the Dean Wiggins, the Dean of Medfield College, and/or A.J. Arno, the local sorta-seedy wealthy businessman played by Cesar Romero.

In "Now You See Him, Now You Don't," Dexter accidentally invented an invisibility spray potion.  In "The Strongest Man in the World," Dexter accidentally discovers a new chemical, that when mixed with cereal, gives you superhuman strength.  And, in "The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes" which is the point of today's post and the movie I just finished watching, Dexter tries to replace a burnt-out actuator in the ENIAC-sized computer that A.J. Arno donated to Medfield, and in doing so, managed to electrocute himself which somehow transferred all the computer's computational abilities into Dexter's brain.

I am going to skip all other details of the plot, and focus solely on the scene where Dean Wiggins and Professor Quigley take Dexter to the doctor after they start to realize that his intelligence skyrocketed overnight.

First, they check Dexter's eyes:



And when they look in Dexter's eyes with the scope, they see this:



Then they take an x-ray of Dexter's brain:



And the x-ray of Dexter's brain shows this:




And my favorite part of this other than how completely ludicrous this is....is the fact that my little 8 year old mind must have thought this seemed totally plausible.

So if you know me, you probably know I'm mildly obsessed with the show "Dallas" and that I'm constantly renting it off Netflix, and then locking myself in my house for 6 hours chunks of time because I can't stop watching it until the DVD is over.  It's awesome because that show was built on the cliffhanger principle, but with DVD technology, I can totally thwart that and watch the next episode seconds later.  (Except the end of season 3 when J.R. got shot.  I made myself wait the whole summer before I rented season 4, just so I would have to wait in intense agony like everyone else did that summer of 1980 or whenever that was.)

One of the problems with watching "Dallas" is that nothing is really ever going to surprise me.  I know most of the big plot points just from being alive when this was on.  And Wikipedia certainly doesn't help when I try to look up a certain actor and my eyes accidentally see a line that says, "And Miss Ellie marries Clayton Farlow in season 7..."

Speaking of season 7, I just finishing the last DVD of that set, which ends like this:



And even though I already totally knew that Bobby gets shot, and I totally knew it was in season 7, and I totally knew that this was the last episode of season 7....as I was sitting here in my house in my quiet neighborhood with all the windows open, and I screamed out "BOBBBBBBBYYYYYYYYY!!!" as if someone had just shot him in my own arms.  Maybe I should take a little hiatus, I might be getting a little too into it.  Again.

I'm not entirely sure how it happened, but I never saw "The Blues Brothers" ever in my life.  Jackie called me randomly today during work, informing me that it was playing for one night only (tonight!) at the Metro.  I didn't have anything better to do...and she chatted it up quite a bit, insisting it was the best movie ever made, surpassing even "The Princess Bride," "The Outsiders," and "Look Who's Talking."

Oh my goodness, I had no idea how epic a film that was!!  I really thought it was just a dumb SNL movie filmed in a bunch of bars.  I didn't know there was a plot, or a record amount of car chases.  And crashes!  I will admit that I was laughing a lot, and sometimes dancing, and sometimes squealing in my seat with delight.  But of all the things to be excited about or impressed with...what impressed me most were the cameos.  And I'm not talking about John Candy or Steven Spielberg or the captain from "21 Jump Street."  That's not what I freaked out about.  I freaked out...

....about the massive number of cameos of people with bit parts on "Dallas"!!!  Okay, not massive.  But two!

Dallas Cameo #1: Walt Driscoll

In the scene where Jake and Elwood crash the fancy restaurant where their old trumpet player is working, I knew I was supposed to keep my eyes peeled for Pee Wee Herman.  I was not expecting to see the former chairman of the Office of Land Management, Walt Driscoll! 



I just finished the series of episodes where Walt succumbed to JR's bribes and granted him those oil variances, and then had to skip the country, then wound up being JR's conduit to illegally sell oil to the embargoed Cuba.  Then when JR double-crossed him, Walt later went on to try to murder JR via vehicular manslaughter only to accidentally ram into the JR's Mercedes when Sue Ellen was driving it drunk.  And Lucy's boyfriend (and Ray Krebb's cousin) Mickey was in the car trying to save Sue Ellen, and was injured the most severely out of everyone
and will probably be paraplegic (haven't gotten to that resolution yet, Season 8 is coming soon) and the guilt ate Walt up so bad that he committed suicide.

Dallas Cameo #2: Carl Daggett

Just as I was remarking that Bob's Country Bunker reminded me a whole lot of Porky's, suddenly Carl Daggett shows up as the leader of the Good Ole Boys band!



Carl, as you may remember, was instrumental in helping Bobby sway the opinion of George Hicks, who was the only man in the state who could rescind the aforementioned oil variances that Driscoll granted to JR.  You see, Carl ran a stable of very fine and willing ladies, one of whom they used as bait to blackmail Hicks.

Some completely unrelated, yet fascinating trivia on the actor who portrayed Carl Daggett:

Charles gave up a lucrative career as a professional squaredancer to move to Hollywood.

Rick Marshall.  Will.  Holly.  A routine expedition. 

Those were as much a part of my childhood and glasses and braces!  And I recently learned that they're re-making it into a Hollywood movie, starring none other than Will Farrell as Rick Marshall!  I love me a throwback movie, assuming it's done well (i.e. not Dukes of Hazzard).  I love me some Will Farrell, there hasn't been much he's done that I haven't approved of (i.e. not Bewitched).  I also love the challenge of casting a movie even though nobody asked me, so the second I heard about this I set about to selecting a pack of sleestaks on behalf of the filmmakers:

• Venus Williams
• Will Arnett
• Sasha Baron Cohen

All were selected for their tall, lanky builds and/or abilities to hiss.

Matt has been trying to convince me to cast Jennifer Aniston, purely so one of the sleestaks can have a Rachel™ haircut.  I violently disagreed until I heard that filming was going on today down in Pike Place Market for one of Jenn's latest movies...which I thought would be a great opportunity to approach her to gauge her interest in portraying a sleestak.  Or kidnap her and force her to play a sleestak.  Well, here: just look at the IM conversation between me and Matt and marvel at the relevance of our avatars:



Matt posted this on his livejournal, and one of his buddies had the idea that's even MORE genius than the Land of the Lost remake....SLEESTAKS IN SEATTLE!!

I was recently alerted to the existence of a man called Jon Mikl Thor, who is (all at once) a bodybuilder, rock legend, filmmaker, stunt man, van enthusiast, and Viking poser.  He made a film in the 1970s that was a fictional account of his band AND a horror flick, all at once.  The "plot" goes something like so:

• The band goes to a farmhouse in the remote countryside of Canada to record their sophomore album and rehearse for their upcoming tour.
  
  
• The number of people staying at the farmhouse is conveniently an even number, with an equal number of boys and girls.  It follows that every person is matched with another person and has a sex scene.  Thor's is in the shower with a redhead and a very cheap, very low-pressured shower head.
  
  
• One by one, band members and girlfriends start to disappear and/or be murdered.  No one is terribly concerned by this.
  
  
• The culprit seems to be these little cute muppet wads of flesh.  Each has a tuft of hair, one eyeball, and two fingers on each hand.  These are apparently shapeshifters, because sometimes they take the shape of the people staying in the house.  Or starfish.  And then kill.
  
  
• Then suddenly...Thor's hair is teased up to epic proportions and his redhead girlfriend turns into Satan and they have a battle in the barn.  I recommend you forward to the 5:20 mark, where Satan starts to fling starfish at Thor, and they "stick" to Thor in form of him "catching" them and holding them to his body:

• Thor wins the battle, and suddenly the movie ends with a tightly cropped shot of a house, and then pulls away, then fades out.  It definitely gave a sense of closure except for the fact that...that was the first time that particular house was shown in the movie.

Before finding success as a heavy metal superstar, Jon Mikl Thor used to be a strongman whose favorite trick was blowing up hot water bottles until they popped.  Why he didn't do THAT to battle Satan, I'll never understand.

I'm not sure how it happened, but I managed to go 30.5 years without seeing Poltergeist.  (Or technically 25 years since it came out in 1982.)  I finally saw it last night in the comfort of a spooky creaky building, where you could hear neighbors whispering in the adjacent units.

I love me some scary movies, and usually they're as scary as I let them be.  I decided to let this one scare me bad, so I spent of lot of it bundled up in my hoodie, hiding under a pillow, letting myself get freaked out.  But there was one nagging detail that kept me from fully surrendering myself to the fear....

And that detail is that Dr. Lesh, the lead old-lady paranormal expert who came to help them, looks exactly like Dorothy Michaels from Tootsie:

 

So when I got scared, I would just start thinking of Dr. Lesh breathily appealing to Dr. Ambruster about how she was a damned fine hospital administrator, and it just ruined everything.

Halloween is coming up.  So in preparation, it's time to start watching a bunch of horror flicks.  I rented the 1950's original version of "The Bad Seed" starring Patty McCormack because John Waters told me to.  It's about a little girl named Rhoda who is inherently evil from birth, and by age 8 has already murdered 3 people.  But she's all sweet and cute and deceptive about it.

I don't usually get into old black and white movies, preferring films that are a little more contemporary with things like 3D zombies, car chases, and rollerskates.  But there is something to be said for these older movies where the actual story and the writing is what's important, not the special effects or camera angles or soundtracks.  And my word....they talked so different in the 50s, has it really changed that much??  There were times when the characters sounded positively British!  And they kept throwing out vocabulary words that I had never legitimately heard used out of people's mouths:

• Excelsior - I thought this was an exclamatory word, like "Excellent!"  No.  Excelsior was old timey packing fluff that they must have used before the age of styrofoam packing peanuts or airsacs.  It's basically a big bird's nest.  It just looks like straw, and maybe some cloth fibers and maybe some sawdust.  It's also highly flammable.  So my advice is that if you use excelsior to create a little bed that you nap on beside the incinerator, which in turn is in a cellar that locks from the outside only, do NOT piss Rhoda off.
  
  
• Adroit - Rhoda's mother accused her of "being very adroit at lying," and I had to get the damn dictionary out.  I could tell it meant "good" or "skilled," but I had to make sure it didn't have some etymological relation to "android."  It doesn't.
  
  
• Well, I'll be a middle-aged mongoloid from Memphis - This is not in the dictionary.  Dude, I can't even believe that this was actually in the movie!  I could feel John Waters smiling when I heard this line.
  
  
• Hortense - This is not a vocabulary word, but an actual lady's name?!  Seriously, Hortense?

So you should watch this a yearn for a time more innocent, when little girls would still curtsy before they killed you.

I rented "The Omen" a few months ago off Netflix, and it was so creepy-good.  I wouldn't watch it past sundown because my Catholic fear would have gone too haywire if it was dark out, because that's Satan o'clock.  If you haven't ever read the trivia regarding all the weird, spooky things that happened during filming, you should definitely read the trivia regarding all the weird, spooky things that happened during filming.

After watching it, I immediately went to add Omens II and III to my queue, and was ever so sad to see that they weren't available.  But I was dorking around on my new digital cable TV, and happened upon a button on my remote that said "On Demand" and I have about 100 free on-demand movies I can watch literally on demand whenever I want, and I was so so so excited to see that Omen II was on the list!

Impressions:

• It amuses me endlessly to see the fashions of teenagers in the 70s, and see how seamlessly they would be able to walk the streets of today.
• Okay.  Fact check.  Damien's father (Gregory Peck) in the first one was an American ambassador in Europe, right?  I can't remember if he had an accent or not...but I vaguely remember that baby Damien did have a British accent.  But Damien was only five (or six?) in the first one, and killed his parents.  In the beginning of the second one we learn that he was sent to live with his father's American brother, IN America.  And the second movie takes place when Damien is twelve (or thirteen?).  Yet...Damien has a British accent.  If he had been living in America from ages 5-12, wouldn't his accent have faded?
• If you were born of a jackal, wouldn't you have fur?  Or was the jackal just a surrogate womb?  Or am I not giving Satan enough credit here for his various options for outputting his spawn?
• Deaths were very inventive.  Especially the uncle one, totally didn't see that coming.
• It ended exactly the same, with Damien staring evilly into the camera.  But an evil five-year-old staring into the camera is infinitely creepier than an evil twelve-year-old.  Or maybe just all twelve-year-olds are evil, so it made less of an impression on me?

All in all, I give it 3 out of 5 stars.  Or pentagrams.  Whatever.