Monday, November 3, 2008

Oh yeah? Well, I’m not scared either!

So, this past weekend was Halloween weekend. Normally I would be dressing up as a flapper or as a goth girl or as Miss Hannigan in a sadly misguided outfit that ended up looking more like a prostitute dressed as a secretary (don't ask), and then heading to Harrisburg for another of my friend Melissa's legendary costume parties. But, alas, Melissa took herself and her party-planning skills to Arizona, so I decided to just watch a terrifying movie instead.

My first choice was Alfred Hitchcock's 1944 classic Jack The Ripper tale, "The Lodger." It arrived from Netflix just in time for my Halloween fright fest. Unfortunately, what arrived was actually the much tamer, much lamer 1927 silent movie version of The Lodger. Ooh, witness in terror how the wicked man wearing way too much eyeliner and rouge creeps up on the young girl as obnoxious nickelodeon music floods the speakers! Maybe he's eerily whispering to her that she has no escape, but we won't know that until the dialogue card flashes up. Whatever!

No problem, I thought. I'll move on to my back-up choice: the Italian thriller, "I'm Not Scared." Take a gander at Netflix's plot summary for this:

Michele, a 10-year-old boy growing up in a southern Italian village, discovers another youngster, Filippo, chained up inside a small hole dug in the yard of an abandoned house. Michele soon learns from watching the news that the boy has been kidnapped... and things take an even darker turn when a mysterious couple shows up claiming to be the boy's parents.

Creepy, no?

No. No, it was not creepy at all. There was no mysterious couple claiming to be the child's parents. I don't know if the people at Netflix were watching this movie and then accidentally switched to "Annie" and just didn't realize it or what. Yeah, there's a kidnapped boy and yeah, the other boy finds him, but they spend most of the film playing in wheat fields. The movie was billed as a thriller, but the title is apt: They're not scared and you won't be either.

In the end, the creepiest thing about my Halloween was the spooky music and fake fog at my neighbors’ house as they handed out candy. Maybe next year.

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