Splatterflix Road Trip Picture Roll

Hello Ghouls and Goblins,

I lost my mind and went to Durham, NC to a weekend-long film horror film festival held at their beautiful Carolina Theater. This is a big complex in the middle of downtown. A classy joint with a full staff of cheerful volunteers. A place you would expect to be hosting all-state orchestra concerts and city commerce conventions, not the putrid degradation and smut of 1980's exploitation cinema. Someone upstairs didn't read their emails and allowed this march of depravity.

But why the six-hour drive from Woodstock, GA? Number One, what's the point of being a grown up if we can't get to do something fun now and then? Number Two,  since I was six years old, I've had an itch unable to be scratched until now. In the summer of 1982, my television was invaded with the constant loop of the Friday the 13th Part 3 trailer that promised terror and horror that would leap out at you from the screen. The early 80s had a wave of cheap 3D genre movies. Parasite and Metalstorm were actual Charlie Band directed movies, released by his Empire label that actually played in theaters, back when there was place in the market for such things. The next year, I was allowed to see Jaws 3D in the theater, it being PG fair, and that was my first memory of seeing a movie and knowing that it was not very good. Plus the 3D gave me a headache. But the F13P3 trailer was my intro to that series, and my imagination was on fire with how scary and nightmarish this movie must be. I had the same feeling the previous year when The Thing trailer played over and over, and feeling crushed when Rated R flashed at the end. Life was cruel. But imagining what these movies would be like was so much better than the real thing, as I learned later once video stores popped up and my trips to see my Dad on the weekends did not come with a concern of what I rented. Finally I got to see what had been forbidden all these years, and for the most part, as we all discover, the movies were pretty bad. When they did live up to the movie you had in your head, like The Thing, it was a miracle.

That's a long ramble, but the point is, even after I taped F13P3 off channel 46, and messed with the color and contrast levels in an attempt to recreate the 3D effect by wearing the red and blue glasses I held on to from when another channel showed Gorilla At Large, I had never seen it in the native 3D. So what was I missing? This movie made A LOT of money back in 82. I really enjoyed it growing up, especially the face of Jason at the end, but because I had never seen it in 3D, in a theater, there was something missing in from my fan life. So when my newsfeed said they were showing an actual 35 mm print in the actual old-school 3D process, not a digitally projected BluRay. I had to go.

My wife covered all adult responsibilities for me for the next 48 hours and I drove to Durham, NC. I stopped only to get more iced coffee, and not ashamed to say, pumpkin lattes because it's Halloween, fool! I got there in 6 hours, checked into the hotel that was connected to the theater. I'm telling you, this arts complex is nice, and designed for legit community events. Charles Band never had it so good. After changing into my Romero Lives t-shirt and grabbing a sandwich, I wandered into a screening of Mr. Bands Parasite, also from 1982.

The movie Parasite, I had tried to watch it before. It is on Amazon Prime, but my first memory of it was seeing the oversized VHS box at Video USA in Jonesboro, GA. It was not until it showed up on Prime that I tried to watch it, getting 10 minutes in and being unable to continue.

Here's the thing, no movie gets the fair attention afforded to it by a theater screening when you digitally stream it at home.  Movies can take time to get their footing, to pull you in. I am guilty of turning on a movie and if the first shot does not show me some sort of deliberate hand in its design, I will flip to something else. That killed off Parasite on my first attempt. But being trapped in a theater, and hearing the 35 mm print going in the background, and the print being faded and pink, and the investment of $9.50 for the ticket, by God I was going to try and enjoy myself.

Parasite is pretty good. It's an Alien knock-off, ran through Mad Max and a Western. Instead of the big bad riding into town on a black horse, he is driving a black Lamborghini. We get no less than three chest burster scenes. The parasite looks like a giant tadpole with a facefull of fangs. The lead hero looks like William Finley of Phantom of the Paradise, not exactly the Brad Pitt of his day. Demi Moore shows up in her first movie role, and she is fine, shining in this one scene where she is coming out of shock after being attacked by the bad guy, but nothing to indicate she would go on to be a big star. More interesting is Cherie Currie from The Runaways plays a post-apocalyptic gang member who gets the parasite knawing on her leg. She is actually pretty good, not much of a part, but you believe she's actually being eaten by a hunk of rubber by her performance. Also of note is the parasite was designed by Stan Winston, a mere four years before winning an Oscar for Aliens. It shows you that with no time, and no money, all "geniuses" are Charles Band.  Parasite makes overall better use of the 3D effect than F13 (blasphemy!) by taking the time to design the shots to have a pronounced foreground, middle, and background. There are a lot of tables with jars of wooden spoons thrust in the foreground, and lots of generic futuristic garbage hanging from the ceiling to give the shots depth. I appreciated the effort and liked the compositions.

F13P3 was next. I barely had a chance to rest my eyes from the weird 3D process before this one started up. The process is better in some ways than the newfangled Avatar process but does create more eyestrain and when the movies really try to poke at you, I saw a double image. So that was no bueno, but in the standard shots, the effect is really neat. Maybe more interesting than the new effect, or maybe more effort was made in these movies to make use of the possibilities, as opposed to today's post-converted cash grabs.

Friday the 13th Part 3, how do I go about this. Movies like this, I have seen countless times. I'm a big F13 head. A big Fango kid. These movies were the ultimate subversion growing up. I don't want to speak badly of it. I can say seeing it in a theater, with a crowd, in 3D, was enough. The crowd enjoyed themselves. I enjoyed myself, but seeing it in this context, the film felt very cynical and unimaginative. Maybe I'm an old man, but the criticisms I used to hear and ignore kept popping up in my head and rang true. No story. No characters. No suspense. The scenes could be played in any order and it would not affect the movie. Things I noticed, Jason is still running in this movie. The locations suffer from moving from the east coast to the west coast. Crystal Lake looks like a mud hole and the forest around it is straggly and sandy, with scrub brushes blowing around.  It doesn't have that dark impenetrable forest from the first 3 movies. Two scenes of people having bowel movements, and in both scenes, they pull up their pants without using toilet paper. WHAT! They deserve to die after that. Jason obviously sexually assaulted the main character in a flashback which makes Jason more reprehensible and is along the lines of the character being a vicious mentally handicapped man in the forest, rather than an unstoppable silent killing machine we eventually got with part 6. People constantly speak out their thoughts in empty rooms, like, "Didn't I close this door?" and "Where is that coming from?" and "Who's out there?" This is the majority of the dialog. This type of writing was fine as a kid, and it is funny now, but as I don't understand my kids enjoying YouTube videos of people playing video games, I can understand how this type of movie may not be everyone's bag.

After the movies, I grabbed a burger (local, farm to table, college town fair), hit the hotel and typed until I passed out. around10pm. I know, I should slow down. Up early and headed home. Here is the roll I took off my phone.

Fear and Loathing at Splatterflix

Durham's Grindhouse

So sleazy!

The Den of Depravity

I used to have this on my wall.

Calling all wierdos!

One of the best words in the English language.

Toast POV.

My sandwich had broccoli on it.

Parasite, without the glasses.

35 mm baby!

There is some sort of prism splitter deviding the image.

The riveted crowd for F13.

The glasses were not the tinted sunglasses from 1982,  but mirrored future glasses!

I'm the one in black.

Post movie socialising. I'm hiding in the bushes.

Inside Bull City Burger, where all the cows are given a mani pedi before being bolted in the skull.

Not my actual car.

The legal document.

Next morning, a donut shop named Rise.

The Rise crowd. I bought everything for the drive home.

Apple Fritter! Durn good.

Proof that the metro Atlanta area is not true south anymore as this was the first place I saw pimento cheese as an option for everything. Even the burger place and the sandwich place had pimento cheese items. I remember my grandmother eating the stuff from the supermarket, and me not liking it. But this homemade stuff was awesome!

I also got this avocado thing, it was great.

Finally, at the NC/SC boarder, there is this creepy abandoned castle that was shut down ten years ago due to breaking the gambling laws. Very Carnival of Souls.

That's it! Hope you enjoyed reading!


FIGHT EVIL
Sam Drog

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