man, what a freakin bummer, Reg. either i'm loony or this was a much more interesting, sweaping, post about a party & camp-out with fireworks and greasy kids stuff & perhaps an epiphany even. now it's gone ~~ another perfectly good ramble wiped-out by it's author, or i'm just lost and looking in the wrong thread. anyways, late last night i replied to it but could not get on the board for some reason. so i'm posting it, even if it's pretty much irrelevant now.
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Picturesque anecdote, Reg, thanks for sharing. Your mention of The Legend of Hell House as a horror film gathering spot for the kids in your hometown is a creepy coincidence. Around the time I was 11-12-13, once a year they held a coed all-nighter camp-out in the YMCA gym, & the film they always showed at midnight was The Legend of Hell House. Almost certainly not a film that would ever be played at a camp-out for little kids today, as the subject matter is probably for a more mature audience, but we appear to have endured it alright. An English made movie, it had the customary slow & meticulous beginning as character & plot development came about in a “we will sell no wine before its time” fashion. So, in a gym full of it, the bulk of us campers, who had not snuck off with a partner to fumble around for first, second & third base in the dark, would begin to settle into sleeping bags & get a little drowsy. There in the gymnasium shadows, the sound of the film projector, the whispers & the mounting terror set the tone for sleeping bags on the edges of the big room to eventually shuffle & condense towards the center as the frights began to kick in with our eyes glued to the screen. Since we’d swum & played basketball, mush-ball, foosball, ping-pong, and jumped on the trampoline all evening, by the time the explosive culmination of harebrained versus evil climaxed & destroyed another cycle of Hell House, we were exhausted & falling asleep in our bags.
All-in-all, it was a goofy but well-acted & effective haunted house/sci-fi flick (I probably should rent it and make sure I’m even close here) full of holes & quirky angst-filled spirits & portend, with weird-sexy on one hand, Roddy McDowall on the other & really not kid appropriate material…but it kinda scared the shit out of us just before falling into sleeping-bag comas…and that was the point, I suppose. Back then in the 70s we were used to dialogue, dialogue, dialogue & fog-machine driven ghoulies that we didn’t really analyze, & we rode our bikes without helmets, & blew off handmade pop can cannons & shoeboxes full of lady fingers (one-by-one or in great bunches) in the front yard, & boot-hopped from the rear bumpers of cars in the winter & played tackle football on the icy street; …we were nuts, & it was good.
The Spaghetti Westerns will forever stand the test of time, Reg.
On a tangent: My son & I enjoyed 1408 recently. Not as much horror as drama with horrific leanings ~~ or “old school” horror. Steven King must have sold his soul for Rock & Roll because Hollywood continues to treat his work with at least a modicum of respect.
