All Dressed Up With No Place to Go

As Meat Loaf put it in, I think, the last cut on Bat Out of Hell. Actually, I look so awful at this point that you could dress me up all the hell you want and it wouldn’t help. I’d still look like a cross between a six-foot sun dried tomato and an undernourished Gypsy guitar slinger.


Anyway. What is your dream double feature? Hypothetically, of course. Let’s say, you’ve got the house to yourself on a Saturday night and you feel like watching an evening’s worth of movies. What titles would you choose to watch back-to-back?


Back when my folks first got cable for the TV in the cottage in Pompton Lakes New Jersey, various movie channels ran suites of mostly B-level stuff pretty much around the clock. I got hooked on one combination that used to come up pretty frequently: Rollerball (the original, with James Caan and John Houseman) followed by Death Race 2000 (the original with Sylvester Stallone and David Carradine). Awesome battle between low-budget, but well-plotted and surprisingly philosophical sci fi adventure films.


Saturday night I was exhausted and cranky (see why at http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/). Knew I was gonna have trouble sleeping. So Molly and I slipped out to Best Buy on the way to the grocery store. Picked up Salt with Angelina Jolie and The King’s Speech. But the real prize was a made-to-be double header of Predators (the new one where they’re kidnapped to a big game park planet in a slight twist on Richard Connell’s short story Most Dangerous Game) and Battle Los Angeles. Jesse, Colin and I had seen Predators in the theater, and I remember it being pretty sucky. I don’t know what was wrong with me. It’s a great cheesy sci fi thriller, no questions asked. As is Battle Los Angeles. Both have a surprising depth of plot and decent character development, with Battle LA taking the character prize in the head-to-head.

But hell, you don’t watch movies like this for the subtlety of the characters, the acting, the motivation, or even the story line. You watch it for the dark battle scenes of aliens of various shapes, sizes and threat levels get gunned down by the good guys from Spaceship Earth. 


And for that purpose, this double feature is right up there with the best. Move over, Stallone and Caan. New dogs are movin’ in.


Thanks for stoppin’ by. I have new material up at all 4 blog sites this week, so don’t miss http://docviper.livejournal.com/ , http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/ , and http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ . See y’all next week, same time, same blog stations!!!