Dr. Phibes Rises Again and other Halloween Stuff

Ah the joys of managing to ignore the siren call of getting all costumed up and hitting the bars to celebrate Halloween. Don't get me wrong - I'm all about the Halloween; it's like my sacred holiday, like Easter for Christians, like Christmas for Capitalists, like, well, like Memorial Day for those who have been longing to liberate their closets full of white shoes. Or something. I venerate and adore Halloween, but I'm a stickler for tradition, and it's on a Monday this year. So people are trying to celebrate it tonight, or, okay, looking at the clock, last night. It won't do. I just can't get worked up about getting dressed up on the 29th of October, sorry. No. It must be the 31st, and even my unemployed dissolute self is not wastrel enough to go forth becostumed and drunken into a Monday night. Monday night is sacred for doomed resolutions, hangover cures, and closet cleaning. Or possibly Quizzo.

So on this Saturday night I stayed home. My friend D came over and between us we killed a 12 pack of PBR and watched, with M, Uzumaki, a very, very weird Japanese B-rated horror film, in which a medium sized town is terrorized by, (wait for it) spirals! yes, spirals, ooooooh; and then one of my eternal favorites, Dr. Phibes Rises Again, which I recorded, complete with commercials, off Baltimore's Channel 54 at some point in the last 15 years. Some point at which women's hair was still rather big, but commercials were still recognizable. I might be deeply sick, and in fact I probably am, but I think there is nothing in cinematic history to compare to Vulnavia gliding in gauze from one carefully realized 1970s dream of an Egypt inspired Art Deco nightmare to another, complete with insanely complex ways of murdering people, clockwork musicians and Vincent Price's voiceover. Too brilliant. And Uzumaki, in which I'm never quite sure what is weird and spooky and what is, well, just Japanese, is great too.

It was lovely. We made a fire, which discouraged Jackson, who had spent the entire day digging out the fireplace and baying up the chimney, and ate chicken burritos, and watched bizarre semi horror flicks. A sulked for a while and then got a phone call which magically transmogrified her in about 15 minutes from sullen 22 year old hungover waitress to Glamourous Gangster Moll and sashayed out the door. Good for her. Thank god I got to stay home.