I have Zombies for children

I think that in the best way possible, kids can be your favorite wind-up toy. All you have to do is just turn the little key in their back, wind 'em up, let 'em go and then just sit back and enjoy the entertainment. I think that this principle works both ways; you can program your kids to be awful little buggers, too, under certain influences. I choose to use my powers for good.
You might have read once or twice about my love for horror movies. I've seen a few in my time. There are a bunch of zombie movies that i find particularly entertaining, mostly because they are actually kinda funny, the Return of the Living Dead series. I don't watch them often, but like most of the horror movies I watch, they stick with me. These movies are filled with slow-moving undead in search for human grey matter. Yep, that's right, brains. It's not just that they are looking for brains, it's that they actually chant the words, "brains! brains!" while they are stalking after their victims.
Now imagine for a moment my two sweet kids, both under the age of three and less than three feet tall. Imagine us out in public somewhere, in a mall, at church, in a restaurant. Picture me telling my daughter quietly, "Go eat your brother's brains." Can you imagine what happens next?
After I wind her up, Big Sis will raise her arms up over her head and run after Little Bubba yelling, "Brains! Brains! I'm going to eat your brains!" My boy will run away from her, giggles pealing out of him in this nervous, high-pitched way. When she catches up to him she will actually grab him by his shoulders, put her face against the back of his head and make a "num num num" sound while she pretends to, ...um, ...well, eat his brains.
Now the best part. It's as if fandom for horror flicks is genetic!
My boy will now turn around and chase Big Sis around yelling "Brains!" until he catches her. It's as if he actually knows that once a zombie eats your brains, you become a zombie too! He's so smart. I'm so proud.
The payoff is looking around the room to see who is watching this all unfold. Some people have actually no idea. Maybe they are just trying not to notice. Others will stare wide-eyed, with half of a smile until they see me smiling. Those are the ones who really enjoy it.
The best part is that the kids are completely enjoying themselves. They are not putting on a show for me at all -- they are just playing with each other in one of the many ways they know how.

Why I watch these movies, and Why I don't go spelunking

The long awaited film, "The Descent," finally arrived from Netflix today. The same night where the mother-in-law offers to take the kids for the evening to give me the the Wonderful Wife a night to ourselves.
After a dinner of wings at an establishment called Buffalo Wild Wing, a place which pales in comparison to my favorite wing joint, Wild Wing Cafe, we decided to head back home to watch an episode or two of "24: Day 5". When we got there we realized that my other Netflix pick showed up as well, the horror flick. I figured that I would have to watch it solo, in the dark quiet of the late night in my office above the garage after WW had gone to bed.
On my way to my comfy chair, I jokingly suggested that we could watch "The Descent" instead of boring old "24", and she said, "Sure."
Wha?
Huh?
Did she just...
"It's been over three years since I watched anything scary," she adds. Upon becoming pregnant with Kid A, she quickly grew a distaste for anything violent or tense on TV, and absolutely refused to watch any kind of thriller or horror movie. Over 36 months later, she has decided that tonight was the night to jump back into the ring.
"Are you sure?" I asked.
"Yeah, sure, it sounds good."
And it was.
This was one of those horror movies which makes you feel uncomfortable from the moment it starts. You don't know exactly why, but things just aren't right. Ok, someone dies right in the beginning of the movie, but from a car accident and not by any supernatural means. Ok, it was particularly shocking, and even a bit gruesome, but it wasn't the scary part of the movie. It served it's purpose for the story, and helped to set a disquieting mood for the rest of the film.
The protagonists of this particular story are a group of six girls who decide that instead of enjoying a weekend of basejumping, mountain climbing, white water rafting or any other of nature's thrills, the best way for them to spend their free time was exploring some underground caves. Boy, were they wrong.
They should have asked me what to do. I never would have sent them into that cave. Why? Because of the monsters, of course.
There was a good hour spent in this movie heightening the tension by following the girls through narrow, dark cave tunnels, each leading to another series of tunnels further underground, even darker than before. They are forced to push on after a (well named) cave-in blocks their known exit. It was just after one of the girls falls and breaks her leg that you see the first of the monsters. Not so creepy at first. Hard to see in the dark. But you know it's there. And the girls can't escape.
And I can't move from my chair.
And I am so uncomfortable.
And my poor wife is enduring this along with me because she loves me.
And she can't move either.
Normally I watch these movies alone and I can pause to take breaks whenever I feel too much pressure. I avert my eyes or press pause and breathe deep before continuing with the movie.
Not tonight. Not with my wife with me. Not if I am going to make it though this thing. We press on, taking only one bathroom break during the first hour.
And that's when all heck breaks loose. Thirty minutes follow of terror, on screen and off.
No, I didn't scream like a girl and embarrass myself. I may have jumped a few times and clutched at my heart for fear that it had stopped, but I didn't yelp or cry out once.
By the time it was over my entire upper body was numb from holding my muscles tense for the last 30 minutes. Yikes that was gross. Ugh, that was scary.
At the end of the movie, my WW jumps up from the sofa, grabs the "24: Day 5" DVD and replaces "The Descent" in the player.
"I don't understand why you watch these movies," she says. Same reason I don't go spelunking. It's all because of the monsters. And now I've seen the proof.

That was no horror movie.

At best, Resident Evil 2 is an action flick that happens to have scary looking undead marching around eating people.
Ok, that's a little gross, but it really wasn't scary. In fact the undead are almost funny in how they are depicted. Comic lumbering masses, who are constantly rising from the dead. Silly.
Oh well. I'll have to look forward to whatever is next on my Netflix list. Maybe a little "Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter"? Perhaps.

It's Horror night!

Tonight I'll be watching "Resident Evil 2". I watched the first one, and it was as much cool sci-fi as it was a thriller. Not quite a horror movie, but it was shocking in a few places.
This one picks up right where the last one leaves off and should explain a little more from the first movie.
Best part? Milla Jovovich, of course! Ok, and the crazy undead creatures that prowl after her. So cool.
I'll give you an update once i am finished with it.

I am so freaked out

(continued from the previous article where I talked about my latest horror flick)
I'll just call this my "therapy entry", because after watching that freakshow of a movie I will need some serious cooldown time.
Not so much scary as shocking and gory. Actually, it was a lot less scary than I anticipated. Instead it was just wierd. I did expect the people affected by years of toxic radiation to look deformed and mutilated but I didn't expect them to be so dang violent.
Let's just say that this movie overused the pickaxe.

My WW wouldn't consider watching this movie, naturally. She was scared by the movie poster. We have discussed it and we decided that movies that fall under the "thriller" genre will be acceptable for the two of us to watch together. The Skeleton Key is one that she has in mind; sounds good to me.

The Hills Have Eyes

I'm doing it again.
Horror movies late at night.
Actually, this was completely by accident. I had originally wanted to reorder my queue so that I had some other new release in my queue. Instead, I didn't get around to it and I left this one as the next movie to be sent.
The Hills Have Eyes. A 2006 remake of a 1977 Wes Craven classic horror flick. I never saw the original. The tag-line for this movie is "The lucky ones died first..."
Oh yes.
There will be no sleep tonight.
Actually, I know better. This movie is already not going to be as scary as the last one for one simple reason. I recognize almost all the actors. The father of the vacationers is Monk's boss, the mother is Kathleen Quindlan, who has been in movies and television since before the original was even made, and one of the daughters is playing the pregnant girl on "Lost". There are others who look familiar.
If I can recognize these people from other movies, I can suspend my disbelief a little better than when I don't recognize anyone.
Small consolation there. I have heard that this movie is tense, graphic and very scary.
More to come...

I can't stop watching horror movies.

I don't know why I do this to myself.
I have a Netflix account. It is fantastic. I go online, pick out a bunch of movies I want to watch and then they ration them out to me a few at a time. My Wonderful Wife and I share the account, and we each have our own queue. She picks out all the girlie movies she wants and then I have the responsibility for choosing movies that we both would watch in between the ones that only I would be crazy enough to view.
Once every couple of months I queue up a horror flick. Normally it isn't the old fashioned movies, although I have given myself a history lesson now and again. Usually it is the cutting edge of mainstream horror films; the scariest, the grossest, the most tension-giving films you can't even imagine.
I love the rush, the thrill, the adrenaline of being scared by these movies.
But they scare me so much that it is a torture for me to watch them.
Take tonight's fare: "Hostel", a movie about American back-packers travelling Europe, lured by the promise of easy women to a particular, off-the-map, hostel where tourists are captured and used as torture victims for rich deviants. It's gory, it's scary and it's a complete stress-fest.
This movie is only 94 minutes long, but i have been watching it for over three hours. I take breaks to read up on the latest baseball scores, play a video game, write this blog. I need the breaks or I would cry myself to sleep later. I still might.
Normally, after watching one of these movies, I turn on all the lights on the way back to my bedroom. I turn on the one ahead of me before going back and turning off the ones behind me. I normally check all the doors to be sure that they are all locked. Tonight I forgot. On my way to sleep I try to distract myself from everything I just saw, normally without much luck. I sit awake, scrutinizing every sound in the entire house.
An hour ago, Little Bubba stirred himself awake. As a reflex, I paused the movie, went down the hall, entered his (dark) room and closed the door behind me so I can soothe him without bothering anyone else. As he fell back asleep, I realized how dark it was in the room. I realized how dark it was in the hall. I realized how little I wanted to open the door to leave his room.
Silly, right? If the movies bother me so much, why do I watch them?
I have no idea.
I can't help myself.
My wife just shakes her head at me. There is no way she will watch with me.
I actually only have one friend who will go see horror flicks in the theater with me: Darryl. We saw "The Village", "Saw" and some Dragon movie that wasn't really a horror film. Ok, "The Village" wasn't that scary either. But it was supposed to be. Darryl is the only one crazy enough to see these movies with me.
I still have no idea why I do it.
I am sickened by the gore, I am frightened by the shocks, I am upset by how tense the movies are.
I keep renting them.
I have about 10 minutes left in this movie. Probably not much left that will scare me, but I still needed a break to diffuse this stress I was feeling.
I'll do it again. I have fifty different horror movies in my Netflix queue, all just waiting their turn. I won't get to all of them. I'll see a lot of them.
My mother wouldn't let me watch horror films when I was a kid. I never saw any of the classics: Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, The Omen, Amityville Horror, Evil Dead, etc. I did see Poltergeist, and it scared the pants of me. There was a birthday sleepover I went to as a kid and (I remember this distinctly) I spent most of the night in the kitchen with the kid's mother while everyone else watched "The Thing" in the living room. I knew that if I watched it, my mom would be very disappointed.
Now I know she doesn't really care. Well, I'm sure as she is reading this she is shaking her head at me just like my Wonderful Wife does, but that's okay. I have seen most of those old classics now -- I have caught myself up on the essentials.
In high school I went to the movies often. I remember seeing two horror movies in particular: "Serpent and the Rainbow" and "Prince of Darkness". Those two were enough that I didn't watch horror movies very often after that.
In college I watched the Hellraiser series. Nightmare central, my dorm room.
So what's the other movie I have? The one that is "wife approved"? "The Producers", starring Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick. We watched the first 20 minutes of it and it was so awful that I couldn't put myself through another two hours of it. The songs were silly, the acting was over-done, and the jokes were barely funny. I normally like Mel Brooks, but I couldn't handle this. My wife checked out ten minutes earlier than I did, reaching for her book.
So I put on "Hostel" instead.
Three hours later I am tired, and I can't wait to go to bed, but I am so nervous that I am not looking forward to it.
I can't stop watching horror movies.