Kolchak: The Night Stalker: They Are, They Have Been, They Will Be...

Received these wonderful, untouched VHS tapes in the mail Saturday. Got them for the price of postage. All twenty episodes of one of my favorite television shows of all time: Kolchak: The Night Stalker. Plus the televions movies that preceded the television show, The Night Stalker, and The Night Strangler. 

I decided to start my watching party tonight with "They Are, They Have Been, They Will Be...", and episode that aired on September 27, 1974. It's about aliens, but it's also intermingled with a story of Kolchak desperately trying to finish his reportig so he can get to the Cubs' World Series game, which he has tickets for.

Few television characters, maybe even only Hawkeye Pierce, are more beloved to me than Carl Kolchak. It is a shame there were only twenty episodes, but it's also a mini miracle there were twenty episodes. The special effects are never much more than comical, and intentionally so, but it all works in ways movies that have spent 100 million dollars on special effects never did. 

Dan Curtis, of Dark Shadows, had either produced or directed the two television movies that preceded the series, but was neither producer or director of any of the television episodes. 

It may take me several months to get through these with fantasy football season upon us, but hopefully I'll have time.  Pin It

The Halloween III Of Outsider Poetry

I resisted the urge to buy a VHS copy of the original MCA Rainbow release of Halloween III and the 1987 re-release. It was a nice deal, and I'd really like these tapes, but they fall into an odd category as far as collecting or just having to watch. They're not collectible grade, per se, but they're too expensive to feel good about putting into a VCR I bought for $4.99 at Goodwill.

                Halloween 3, the only good Halloween movie.


Also, I'm never sure why anyone who talks about Halloween III has to explain that Michael Myers is not in the movie. For me it's the best Halloween movie of the series. Actually, it's the only one I've ever seen, or will see, because slasher movies don't appeal to me in the least.

This afternoon I'm trying to do a self-install of my ATT equipment so I can switch my internet over from Comcast, which I am ambivalent about because Comcast is one of the few services in my life that actually works for me, but they insist on charging me too much, and trying to creep that charge up to nearly $100/month every time I take my eyes off them. Still waiting for the lights to go green on my ATT router.

Jenny gave me a cone-shaped vacuum, and when I look at it charging it looks like a witch's hat.

I have two different brands of computers, and they have the delete button in different places, which causes me more trouble than it should any rational person who is able to adjust to his surroundings.

I have watched The Beast Must Die over twenty times in September, and I still can't tell you who the werewolf is. Last night I watched All the Colors of the Dark and Daughters of Satan and found both entertaining with the sound off. 

I organized all my outsider poems for the next book last week. It turns out I've only written about 75 poems in ten years. Most of them I didn't consider very good.

Several of my wide receivers in fantasy football have turned up lame this week. You never have enough wide receivers in fantasy football these days. I went with the wide receivers in early rounds strategy, and still they are dropping like flies and I get beaten by Marvin Jones. 

That's the way it is.

Pin It

Porky's II: The Next Day

I spent the first three hours of my birthday watching Porky's and Porky's II: The Next Day on VHS. Had a few Tab Colas, and a sleeve of snack-size Milky Way bars. It's hard for me to understand why these two movies have been relegated to the cultural dustbin of sleezy teenage comedies that became such a category in the 1980's. These might have been early examples of that supposed genre, but they certainly aren't encapsulated by it, and anyone who dismisses them as such is doing the movies, and themselves as a viewer, an injustice. Granted, the raunch flows freely, and is done deftly in these movies. But it's never the central focus of what is happening. These are movies about a time (the late 50's) and a place (Southern Florida) that the writers grew up in and knew very well. There's nothing generic, unlike most teenage sex comedies, about the place, the time, or the characters. These are teenagers who talk and think about sex because, that's what teenagers do. But they do other things. They encounter serious issues such as racism, anti-Semitic rednecks, sexism, and censorship in a place that was very much pre-civil rights. The language is salty and authentic. They say in what my opinion teenagers might have said at that time in that place. So, to see the movie dismissed by so many reviewers and remembered by many others for a few scenes that are funny, and iconic, but not representative of the movies altogether. I love these two movies.

Porky's and Porky's II: The Next Day on splendid VHS

Pin It