Horror Marathon at the Coolidge Corner Theater

When we first got to the Coolidge, they were wrapping up their zombie prom dance. There wasn’t all that many ghouls on stage just a few weirdos looking sheepish like at an 8^th grade dance. Not really too interested in it, we went back downstairs to get good seats for the horror marathon. When we got down there, we were told that the first two movies were going to be shown in the smaller and not nearly as good theater upstairs. I was fucking pissed. I asked why and the person working said she didn’t even know. So we trudged back upstairs to the crap theater only to find all the good seats were gone. We ended up sitting front row and to the left. They were terrible, terrible seats. One of the guys who worked there got up on stage and explained that due to how many tickets they sold, they were going to move the whole marathon back downstairs. Thank fucking god. So we went downstairs a little early and snagged some pretty good seats and settled in waiting for Prom Night. Prom Night was pretty good. Definitely a movie that was enhanced by a theater experience, Prom Night is pretty standard slasher fare. There are lots of cheesy lines of dialogue and goofy acting that the audience was laughing their asses off over. As far as gore goes, Prom Night was pretty tame and it usually cut away before any of the gruesomeness. There was one pretty nice dance floor decapitation. While I enjoyed it in the theater, there wasn’t anything there that elevated it above a Friday the 13^th even. The next movie was Pumpkinhead. This one I really enjoyed. It was directed by Stan Winston with incredible monster designs. Unlike most horror movies, Pumpkinhead doesn’t try to build tension around what the monster might look like; rather it shows him almost from the get go, so the audience can appreciate the incredible design. Pumpkinhead had a fairly creepy plot about a father dealing with the death of his son, who unwisely invokes a vengeance demon in his grief. Winston creates a creepy atmosphere throughout, as Lance Henrikson navigates through woods, graveyards and abandoned churches in an attempt to stop the demon. Next up was Demons, a movie I was really looking forward to seeing. Basically, an audience of movie goers are watching a movie about demons attacking when demons start attacking the theater- pretty simple stuff. Thankfully, the movie was loaded with gore. It also was pretty funny too and not just in a bad translation Italian horror way. There were great one liners throughout. Also, there were actually some pretty awesome and over the top characters like a pimp and his two whores. They tried to play The Howling next, but there was something wrong with the print and every voice just sounded like a guttural groan. Unfortunately, they didn’t let it play like this and just scrapped it for the next movie. I would have loved to have seen the werewolf sex scene with distorted audio. Instead of The Howling, we got Tarantino and Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn. Part crime movie, part vampire slaughter fest, From Dusk Till Dawn is a solid little horror entry. It felt like a true B-movie and not as schlocky or played for laughs as Planet Terror. Finally, they played the other movie I was really looking forward to From Beyond. With the same director and actor as Re-Animator, I had some high hopes for From Beyond. It wasn’t what I expected at all though. I did like it, but it was just incredibly weird- a Videodrome S&M kind of weird, a genitilia shaped brainstem kind of weird, a glob of human putty like flesh kind of weird. Most of the people I went with slept through this movie. A poor choice for the last film of the night with its slowish kind of pacing. They showed one more movie instead of The Howling some weird sort of Japanese pink film with nudity prevalent all over the opening credits. It looked pretty interesting but it was a projection, and very late, and subtitled. So we just said fuck it and took off.