Todd’s Movie Blog

I have had a really bad weekend, my beloved gray tabby Nyoka took a turn for the worse this week. Fluid was draining into her abdomen and it turned out to be caused by a tumor. With her age and her other medical problems, we decided it was best to have her put to sleep Saturday. She literally died in my arms. I’m having a tough time coping right now, I feel exhausted and restless at the same time. Spent the rest of the day sipping whiskey and watching episode after episode of the old Gil Gerard Buck Rogers show.

She’d been with me for most of my adult life. She found us during our first year of marriage, a feisty and curious four month old kitten all eyes, ears, and tail. Erika wanted to call her Smokey or Dusty due to her gray tiger stripe markings. But early on she jumped on my head from on top of our entertainment center and it reminded me of the way Dave Sharpe looked doubling Kay Aldridge in Perils of Nyoka when she would dive down from a boulder onto one of Cassib’s warriors. From that day on she was my jungle queen.

We had a lot of good years together, sitting on the couch watching serials, though I know she was more interested in trying to steal popcorn out of my bowl than what was happening on the TV screen. I still remember our first Christmas when she dismantled our Christmas tree and spread it all over the living room. It was hard to get mad at her, she looked so proud sitting in the middle of it. She could charm anyone, I remember going on vacation and having to board her for a week. When I went to pick her back up, I found her sitting on the owner’s desk. She had charmed the owner of the kennel into let her out of her cage and run free in the office for the entire week. She would greet all visitors to our house, and sit by them to make them feel welcome, we always called her our ambassador.

Last night I had trouble sleeping, it was the first time in sixteen years she wasn’t laying on my chest in our bed, going through our usual routine of a specific number of ear scratches and chin rubs, then a quick sniff of the air coming out of the release valve on my bi-pap mask before she settled into her spot next to my knees and went to sleep. It’s actually difficult to type right now because she’s nt on my desk, draped over my left arm and half the keyboard, with her head right on top of my hand enjoying a chin massage from my knuckles as I type. She was my closest friend and I will miss her terribly.

As I did last year I am making up a list of movies not traditionally thought of for viewing on Halloween.  This post will deal with films made mostly in the last thirty years.  Other posts this month will deal with classic movies from Hollywood’s Golden Age, TV show episodes, and children TV show episodes.  I am only going to deal with twenty titles all together, five per post.  My alternative film choices in alphabetical order are:

Batman (1989)–Tim Burton’s summer blockbuster hit from the end of the eighties, is a dark comedy/ noirish nightmare with Michael Keaton’s enigmatic Dark Knight facing off against Jack Nicholson’s over the top deranged and disfigured Joker who is poisoning the entier population of Gotham through their cosmetics in a city that looks like Dante’s Inferno erupted from Hell and just kept going.

High Plains Drifter (1973)–Clint Eastwood brings his popular man With No Name personae into the seventies with this spooky, unsettling western. Eastwood rides into a town that allows him carte blanche in return for facing down three gunfighters who are getting out of prison soon. As Eastwood turns the citizens lives into a living hell, there is a dawning notion that he may actually be the ghost of the sheriff the towns people let get killed by the gunmen years ago and has come back to punish them for it.

Hot Fuzz (2007)–After Simon Pegg and friends laid waste to the zombie horror movie with Shaun of the Dead (2004), they decided to do the same for the buddy cop film.  Pegg plays the top cop in London who gets sent to a literally crime free village because he is making the rest of the force look bad.  Once there he starts to notice an alarming number of “accidental” deaths.  Investigating the seemingly idyllic village’s lack of crime leads to a conspiracy that is unbelievably horrific and  ridiculously petty at the same time, ending with Pegg and his buddy Nick Frost having to shoot it out with everyone from the police chief to the parish priest.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)–Spielberg and Lucas take everyone’s favorite maverick archaeologist into the 1950’s as Indy braves McCarthyist FBI agents while trying to rescue his former lover Marion in the jungles of South America from Russian agents after a supernatural power associated with an ancient crystal skull, eventually discovering a flying saucer full of aliens, and a son he never knew he had.

Shoot to Kill (1988)–Sidney Poitier’s heralded return to film after an almost ten year hiatus. He plays an FBI agent on the trail of an unknown killer hiding among a group of mountain hikers.  When his identity is revealed, the criminal kills the rest of the group, takes the guide hostage and it becomes a race against time toward the Canadian border.