I discovered the other night it's a bit difficult getting to sleep with John Carpenter's Halloween theme quietly running through your head. I decided this after a double feature of G.I. Joe the Rise of Cobra, and Halloween 2 or II... well whatever it is officially, the 9th Halloween movie, which to some would sort of make it Halloween Nein. That combination is enough to give anybody nightmares of being pursued through some deserted lonly place by a spectrish, barechested, drooling Marlon Wayans... you'd think the most upsetting thing from that double header it would be the long series of brutal murders, or maybe a redhead named Rachel (merging a few images from my dark past), but mostly it's just Marlon wayans as a male love interest that made me squirm in my seat.
I wish I could follow Rob Zombie's vision of how he wanted to improve on one of the modern horror icons, but in so many remakes a director must always blow your mind by taking whatever was iconic about the original and turning it upside down and inside out, and then deny that he just sort of missed the point. And then I think drop half his own story to get the project completed on time, which in this case was a couple months early, so the DVD would be out by Halloween... somehow that fills me with sadness to think of actual movie theaters as an increasingly pointless marketing exercise. I hesitate to analyze further, because I still have this vivid memory of over-analyzing certain vaginal images in the original remake (???) and being accused of mockery by the girl who'd invited me over to watch it. (Oddly when I tell that story nobody has a problem imagining that I would find esoteric sexual detail in that film worth over-analyzing, but they don't believe a girl would invite me over to watch it.)
A couple days ago the power went out in my apartment, and with John Carpenter's pesky electronic melody playing in my head yet again, I tried to find a flashlight with sufficient batteries to allow me to take a slightly less creepy shower (I really miss having a bathroom with a window sometimes) and headed down for the garage. In between dim pools of light, I found several strangers huddled around the lowered garage door, faced with a lock and key they couldn't reach. As we discussed the problem, the general irritation of living in a construction site for several months and the lack of help from our mysteriously buttoned down management office, we started to discover hidden connections between ourselves, like maybe we'd met somewhere before. All perfectly normal, until I managed to get the key down and it didn't fit the lock on the automatic door release.
So there we were, several strangers who weren't really strangers, huddled in the lonely dark facing a lock and key that didn't match when I realized I'd seen this all before, and I quickly turned around looking for a puppet on a tricycle announcing he'd like to play a game. Could this all be some perverse marketing stunt to promote Saw VI, a movie that looks like such a bad idea even I won't see it? Eventually we were able to find a lock that the key fit and get a door open, but it required that one person remain under the door holding it open so others could drive through, which was about as lame a puzzle as I'd expect from Jigsaw at this point in the exhausted franchise... although I do have to wonder why a guy who's been dead for the past two movies is still popping up in this one (and he's not the only one with a dead character and a dead career that's inexplicably back in action).
In true Saw fashion though, everybody abandoned me when I went to replace the key and get my car, even the guy I found alone in the dark on the way back and directed towards freedom (thanks a lot, jackass...) so I remained trapped in the garage. With Puddleglum and the CHUDs. As to how I escaped that is a tale for another day, but don't worry, I'll make up something terrifying and sensational, crammed with sizzling gypsies. Maybe Nicholas Cage can put on 30 pounds and play me in the movie, although that will sadly ensure it is never distributed in Hong Kong (too hard to dub into Cantonese).
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