And you thought she was awesome in Wild At Heart...So no, we don't have a date yet for the Sci-Fi Marathon. And no, we don't have any official film titles to announce. But you know what we do have? Each other. Not to wax all peace, love and popcorn on y'all, but sometimes amidst the bitching and moaning...er, I mean spirited debating that goes on here, we sometimes tend to forget that this cinematic thing of ours has birthed many a good friendship...or acquaintanceship....or passing nod at 3am to that guy who always seems to wander around in front of the screen. And after all, aren't those connections, no matter how casual they may be, the main reasons we keep coming back? If the crowd was populated with legions of unrelenting jackasses, we wouldn't even be on this board right now, right?
But it's not just the bonds that we've established at the Marathons that cement our continuing collective passion. It's the memories that many of us have shared together. Some of you have detailed stories about the quality of the pretzels at the Drexel North, some vividly recall the crowd reaction to
Don't Ask, Don't Tell at the Arena Grand, and privileged few of us will never forget Pickerington teenagers diving off the stage during the screening of
Alice Cooper's Welcome to My Nightmare at the Marcus Cinema complex (see Tim, I'm still lookin' out for ya!)
And so, this thread. In the past, I've tried to milk this general topic in various focus areas to various effects. But this time, I'm throwing the...um...milking doors(?) wide open. Here's where you can share your specific memories about your time at the Science Fiction and Horror Marathons. They can be epic or microcosmic, so long as you recount them with some detail and paint a vivid picture of why said memories hold such a special place in your noggin.
This past weekend, I had one of my more notable Marathon memories altered by the power of Netflix Instant. Yes, last Friday night, for the first time since 1993, I checked out the Roger Corman-produced
Jurrasic Park ripoff
Carnosaur.
Let me set the stage. As some of you know, I missed out on the glory days of the Drexel North Marathons. I had known about these glorious events since their inception, but I was only eleven years old in 1988 (when I first saw the SF2-plugging cover of HOOT) and figured that I could never attend. Years later, after the Marathons were an indispensable part of my life, my mom let slip that she and my dad would gladly have allowed one of my sisters to take me when I was younger. AGH!
But in any case, I finally attended my first Marathon with the 1993 edition of It Came From the Drexel North. To say I was hooked would be an understatement. From my first entrance into the North's auditorium, a beach ball being bounced between loyal Marathoids in sight, I knew that I had found the home I never knew I was looking for. The summer after that Marathon, I couldn't stop thinking about attending the Horror Marathon that fall. I endlessly pored over the old issues of HOOT that I had saved to glean at least some second-hand experience of the past Marathons. I had dreams about the Drexel North! Yes, folks, I had discovered that the Marathons were my gateway drug into a whole new addictive experience.
And so, that fall, my cohorts and I attended the 6th Annual Night of the Living Drexel. For a veteran AIP/Universal/Amicus horror fiend like me, it served as a graduate course into the hard stuff, with my first viewings of
The Shining,
The Exorcist,
Evil Dead 2 and
Army of Darkness,
Halloween and
Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But we're not here to talk about them. No, I want to get back to the dinoriffic flick that's the focus of this whole sense memory exercise.
In the weeks leading up to the Marathon, Bruce had been teasing the possible premieres on the Marathon hotline (remember that?)
Return of the Living Dead 3 was already confirmed for its U.S. premiere, but Guillermo del Toro's
Cronos was still unconfirmed. In the days before the event, word came down that
Cronos was out, but that
Carnosaur was now in. I was disappointed (for my money, Mexican vampires are way sexier than dinosaurs), but still interested in what promised to be an ultra-gory thrill ride.
The good news, as most of you know, is that the Drexel ultimately managed to secure what was billed as the second ever public screening of
Cronos (not sure how much truth is in that statement, but hey...) The bad news for 16-year old me?
Carnosaur turned out to be much less than a relentless thrill ride and much more of a murky, low budget talkfest. Near the end of the film, my friend Josh and I stood in the aisleway and booed the rolling credits. So case closed, right?
Well, not quite. Because as I watched
Carnosaur on Netflix last weekend, I realized that this is a fun low budget flick, part of a dying breed of indy B-flicks that had enough financing and panache to decently ape their big budget brethren while still providing the cheap thrills that their target audience was after. The theme of environmental panic that runs throughout is still timely, as well as the stabs at the burgeoning field of genetic food engineering. The dinosaur kills firmly adhere to the school of less is more, but there's enough gore and grue to still satisfy. And hey, it features Diane Ladd in a star turn as the mad geneticist behind the whole shebang and a grim, somewhat nihilistic ending lifted from a far more serious film.
In 1993, did I think that someday I'd be writing a tribute to the goofy charms of
Carnosaur? No. But here it is, my friends. Hope that it serves as a fitting kickoff for your memories.
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