COPYRIGHT FOR FEATURED IMAGE ABOVE: Francesco Francavilla, ©2010. Check out his awesome blog, Pulp Sunday, right here. If you’re the author and want the image removed, please contact us and the webmaster (me) will take it down. Also, your art is pretty goddamned cool and I’d buy a giant print of that Headless Horseman art if I had any disposable income.

ANYWHERE that says, “Halloween is our Christmas” gets our business. Maybe we’ll even check out the TV show.   I’ve got to watch the Tim Burton flick, but not unless it’s daylight out.

[Tim Burton rave/rant/geek-out ahead, warning.] Remember when any Tim Burton movie automatically would be worth standing in line in the rain to buy advance tickets or for a sneak preview (which we actually did for Batman in 1989–the one line that was closest to a campout , with my best friend at the time–Ed Wood, and Mars Attacks)?  Add up the number of times I’ve sat through all three, especially the latter two–mostly with the ‘other half’ of Horror Boom, my husband–all three of them and it’s over three figures. And I’m not apologizing for that, goddammit! Ever! Mars Attacks had me practically levitating in my theater seat! That’s got tons of the coolest fucking things I’ve ever seen! Ed Wood is genius, and may have tanked at the box office, but my husband and I, along with the rest of the crowd at the midnight showing we waited three hours standing in on-off drizzling rain, roared through the whole thing!  Some people who were big fans of Ed Wood Jr. shouted out lines of dialogue (“You see? Your stupid, stupid minds! Stupid!” and Lugosi’s “Bevare… take care… bevare” among others). Have you ever been to a movie premiere where no-one had seen even a clip from the movie and yelled out lines of dialogue correctly? Maybe a few who are as big of movie geeks  cinephiles as we are (who are reading this right now), but it’s something that hasn’t happened much with the general public!  I watched my copy of Mars Attacks! on the horrible historical afternoon of 9/11 just to get my mind off it for even five minutes, and it worked for the whole running time, which is even more of a compliment to the movie when you consider that it features scenes of famous landmarks being attacked …probably because a flying saucer with 50s-style Martians was much more cheerful and campy an attack! What, are some hipsters going to make fun of me? Fine! OK, I don’t even know who I’m yelling at anymore here, or why, that’s how pumped up those get me. Ever since the Planet of the Apes remake, it’s been hit-or-miss.  I tried to like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory sitting there in the theater the Friday it opened, I really did, I didn’t even bother reading a review, thinking at the time Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka, how could this possibly go wrong?  I barely, barely made it through Alice in Wonderland, and that was for free on premium cable. AND I  tried (unsuccessfully) not to reach for my device to play Angry Birds. Dark Shadows? CGI everywhere… I own a coffee table book on Mars Attacks! and back in the mid-90s, Burton wanted the Martians to be a combination of animatronics and stop-motion, but finally had to very grudgingly cave when the studio insisted on CGI.  He’s capable of being the Tim Burton everyone (of a certain age) fell in love with, but Frankenweenie seems like the exception, not the rule. Same with The Corpse Bride, the last Burton movie to give me a genuine smile. What the hell happened? [end of rant/rave regarding Tim Burton]

OK, I wandered a bit there, but it’s just such a drag you can’t count on him anymore. Instead I’ll enjoy the great movies over and over… starting with Sleepy Hollow.

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