 Capitalism is awesome.
My friend Nick dropped me off a boxset of old horror movies that he got at Walmart. Eight movies, weighing in at well over ten hours, bought brand new for a mere five dollars. Five dollars... canadian. That's the movie equivalent of canned peas -- It don't taste good, but sometimes a man's damn well gotta eat.
On the other hand, capitalism can breed lies and deceit, such as the claim that these movies are "horror classics". After watching one, I already take serious issue with that statement.
Being pressed for time that day (possibly a lie), Stefan and I decided to jump twenty minutes into the film. We were greeted by an old man screaming. Things looked promising.
I'm actually a firm believer in skipping the first twenty minutes of movies. If you catch a movie on tv and you missed the first few scenes, good. Watch it anyway. It'll be better. Anything important that you need to know will be repeated eventually, and the film will be transformed from a painfully obvious exercise in tedium to a moderately intertaining mystery. You will find it only slightly harder to put together all the details of exactly what's going on, but your brain will thank you for the workout.
Though in this case, we managed to piece together the plot in approximately 8 seconds. Some girl got killed by a werewolf, the sherriff had to solve the case, and he didn't suspect a werewolf. It takes them an hour to establish that, and then 14 minutes to track down and kill the werewolf. And it was a woman who kills the werewolf. A woman. Come on.
But as with all b-movies, there was an upside: The drunken sherriff. Man, was he drunk. He was so drunk that he was barely comprehendable. At one point he was talking to a word-slurring, backwoods, overall wearing hillbilly, and the hillbilly was still easier to decipher. That sherriff was second only to Joe Don Baker himself. He was so drunk that others became drunk just by walking past him while he was sweating.
The sherriff was also extremely hairy in the chest region, which leads me to another notable aspect of the film: Everyone in it was clearly a werewolf. The sherriff, the guy who turns out to be the werewolf, the sister of the guy who turns out to be the werewolf, the doctor, children in the street, everybody. Everyone in that town could credibly have been suspected as a werewolf. Why there were no sequels, I'll never know. They coulda made fifty. Everybody in town could have gotten a turn being the werewolf. And then they coulda sold them at Walmart and made a sweet thirty bucks.
This movie took place in the south. Deep in the deepest, most southerly region of the south. The houses, the fences, the cars, they were all white. Really white. So white that every fifteen minutes Stefan would mutter "So white..." and it cracked me up every time.
Q: How much whiter than this could a movie be?
A: None. None more white.
Lastly, I would like to address the issue of indestructible clothing. I don't know where to get it, but people in the south have it, and I want it. When the werewolf guy transformed into a snarling, furry man-beast, his fashionable slacks remained completely untorn. When he spent the better part of the night romping around in the woods, his stylish shirt remained spotless. When he was set on fire in a giant, burning barn, he escaped with clothes that weren't even singed! In fact, they looked better than before!
Since the answer to these "southern clothes" is a closely guarded secret, all I can do is roll down to Texas and strip a man naked in the street. Then I'll call him a faggot and the local drunken sherriff will nod sagely and allow me to beat him down. Because it's better in the south. Snow makes a man weak. It's not nearly white enough.
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