Video-rental Place of the Damned

OK, so I go over to my friend Michelle's place to watch videos; because she just has a VCR right now, we go to Blockbuster Video to rent a movie. We specifically went to get the original "Village of the Damned"; it was the first scary movie that I watched that I actually enjoyed. (I should point out that I have always been notoriously skittish; one of my first memories was a recurring nightmare I had where the Count from Sesame Street was about to suck my blood. Batman and Spiderman both came into my room to try and save me. [Batman freaked me out because of a read-along record I had. Spiderman wasn't the wise-cracking web-slinger of the comics, but rather the incredibly creepy silent Spiderman that was on The Electric Company. In the dream, the two of them were almost as horrifying to me as the vampire puppet.] The Count killed both of them, and then would be coming up to me when I'd wake up. It was quite cinematic, considering I was 6 when I dreamt it. Up until my late teens and early 20s, I have avoided all horror -- Stephen King, slasher movie sequels, all of it. I now can handle scary stuff, although I am still uneasy with anything overly gory or smacking of cannibalism. I recently watched The Exorcist for the first time and thought it was great, although it really didn't frighten me that much. But I digress...)

Anyways, so we go to Blockbuster, only to find they don't have "Village of the Damned" -- not even the crappy remake with Kirsty Alley. So then I check to see if they have "The Island of Dr. Moreau" -- again, the original -- and again, no go. Eventually we decided to rent "13 Going on 30", because I think Jennifer Garner is the bee's knees. Michelle agreed, although later she admitted she thought it was going to be complete crap. But it wasn't; it was an amiable enough movie, predictable but not so much that you feel like screaming. Garner was perfect -- she sold the conceit quite well. Some of the music used felt wrong -- as a 30 year old, I can attest to the fact that Rick Springfield and Pat Benetar were pretty passe in 1987, and I say that as someone whose MusicMatch jukebox just happens to be playing "Jessie's Girl" as I'm typing this. Completely coincidental, I assure you. 1987 seemed to be all George Michael and U2, and the contemporary Michael Jackson album was not "Thriller", but "Bad". I myself was transitioning from Duran Duran's "Notorious" to The Cure and Echo & the Bunnymen. I do like "Thriller" better than "Bad", of course, and the dance is easier to choreagraph to the former. (BTW, I was actually scared of "Thriller" as well. Both the video and the song. I've recovered, though.) This is splitting hairs, of course. I do appreciate that the leading man still seemed geeky enough to have once been an overweight nerd in high school, rather than casting some absolutely gorgeous guy as the lead. And the young actress playing Jen Garner as a kid did look convincingly similar.

Anyways, I think my point might have been that Blockbuster Video sucks. But maybe you already knew that.

Retro Song (1987): "U Got The Look" by Prince & Sheena Easton.