Night of the Living Dead Memories

Happy Halloween everyone!

My memories of seeing Night of the Living Dead for the first time made the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.

There's a Living Dead Festival going on in Evans City, PA tonight - wish we could be there! Maybe next year...

Annual Zombie Walk in Monroeville...

They've been doing this as a fundraiser in the mall for quite a few years now. Here are some cool QuickTime VR images that you can navigate around - both surrounded by zombies in the mall as well as at the Evans City Cemetery.

Spooked!

I won a contest! Go figure.

Ryan Schifrin, the son of one of my favorite composers, Lalo Schifrin, developed a comic book based on one of his ideas called SPOOKS. It's about a government agency responsible for hunting down and killing supernatural creatures. Fun stuff.

Aint-it-cool-news sponsored a contest to win an autographed collection as well as the comic soundtrack CD by Lalo Schifrin himself. I had forgotten I had entered, so was quite surprised to find out that I was one of the five winners selected.

You can read the questions and my responses here.

Shaken, not stirred...

Everyone had a great time at our James Bond double feature tonight. Both films looked and sounded great in High Definition.

We also ran trailers for next weekend's day-long Halloween Spooktacular. While seating will be prioritized for the kids in attendance, we are opening it up to our regulars as well. We think most of the family traffic will be there for the earlier shows, so there should be plenty of seating in the evening if not all day.

Here's the schedule (you'll notice that things get a little more intense as the day goes on):

Mad Monster Party
The Ghost and Mr. Chicken
Poltergeist
The Haunting (1963)
The Frighteners

Remember to mark your calendars for the Saturday after Thanksgiving when we watch two of the greatest films of all time - The Godfather and The Godfather Part II. Even with just those two films, it's a mini-marathon, and we hope you'll join us to watch them on the big screen.

Here are some pictures of our Bond Day display:

If not the lead lined refrigerator...

This has some profanity so it's not for the kiddies, but it documents the behind the scenes discussions on the set of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull where they debate alternatives to the refrigerator escape from the nuclear blast...

Slaughtered Lamb 1st Anniversary

While we've been screening features since the projector was installed on September 15, 2007, we didn't have our first official movie party, hereby christening the Slaughtered Lamb Cinema, until November 24, 2007, when we screened Mel Brooks Blazing Saddles to a rowdy crowd of attendees.

Our anniversary falls right around our post-Thanksgiving Godfather party this year, which will be the official one-year celebration. Somewhere around there, we plan to finally get around to screening the film to which we owe our namesake, John Landis' classic An American Werewolf in London. We may bump American Gothic for a week to squeeze this in - if you're interested in being present for that, let me know and I'll keep you posted as we firm up the calendar.

Thanks for your support throughout the 2007-2008 season. We've got plenty more in store for next year!

John & Vonna

Picture if you will... Wednesdays in 2009...

American Gothic is on track to take us through the end of 2008 as far as our Wednesday TV nights go at the Slaughtered Lamb Cinema. Once again, I find myself looking ahead to figure out possible follow up programming, and like Martin Luther King, Jr., I have a dream.

In 1959, one of the best and brightest television writers of all time premiered a new program that would change the face of television forever. That man was Rod Serling, and the program was of course, The Twilight Zone.


The show ran for 5 seasons, and 156 episodes. Most were 1/2 hour shows - season 4 represented a brief foray into 1 hour episodes. By my calculations, it would take approximately 44 weeks to watch the entire series, assuming we watched four 1/2 hour episodes or two 1 hour episodes in a night. I'd suggest that we watch the shows in chronological order - beginning with an unofficial pilot for the series - a show titled The Time Element. It ranks right up there with the best of The Twilight Zone.

We're exploring several options - such as starting with a weekend marathon, to knock out a big chunk of episodes, running each season with something different in between each season, etc. If you're interested in getting in on the action, let us know what sounds like fun to you.

And the winner is... Thunderball!

Our second feature on Bond night on 10/25 has been set - it will be Thunderball. Thanks to everyone who voted!

If you're interested in the torrid history of Thunderball and the court case that contributed to Ian Fleming's early death, I highly recommend the book The Battle for Bond by Robert Sellers. It's available through Amazon.

We'll start with Thunderball at 6:30pm Saturday night, and follow up with Casino Royale at 9pm.

Hope to see you all next Saturday!

John & Vonna

Don't forget to Vote!

The first round of Votes for our 10/25 Bond-a-thon are in.

The final ballot includes Thunderball representing Sean Connery, George Lazenby's single outing as Bond in On Her Majesty's Secret Service made the final cut, as did Roger Moore's debut effort Live and Let Die and Pierce Brosnan's with Goldeneye.

The current plan will be to watch the top TWO vote getters before Daniel Craig in Casino Royale, so get your vote in before the poll closes!

Bond. James Bond.

With All Day of the Dead behind us, we look forward to our 10/25 James Bond party. In anticipation of the release of Quantum of Solace, we'll be screening the Daniel Craig version of Casino Royale in High Definition. We've not yet decided if we'll be watching one or two other Bonds - that, and which films we watch, will be up to you.

We're going to do two weeks of polls. This week, you'll have your chance to vote for your favorite film of each Bond actor: Sean Connery, Roger Moore, Pierce Brosnan, and the others (sorry - Mr.'s Lazenby, Dalton and Niven will go head to head in this first round). We'll then vote between the top picks in each of those categories, and plan to watch the top (or top two) vote getters.

Look for those in the sidebar, and get your votes in early!