Jun 12, 2025

The Things You Own End Up Owning You


Fight Club
Mahoning Drive-In Theater - Lehighton, PA
One of my favorite movies of the 90's played today at the Mahoning Drive-In Theater.  It's a movie that I didn't catch on the big screen during its initial run in theaters, so I'm especially glad to have had the opportunity to see it here.

Show banner designed by Andrew Kern
Show poster designed by Tom Bifulco

It drizzled a little bit when I first pulled onto the lot, but it cleared up and ended up being a very pleasant night.
 

Fight Club has become a controversial movie since it was released in October 1999.  It's been cited as a modern example of toxic masculinity that has inspired several real-world fight clubs and acts of terrorism, but that bullshit never appealed to me.

The line that stuck with me the strongest was something that Brad Pitt said to Edward Norton when they met up at Lou's Tavern for the first time: "The things you own end up owning you".  I was never inspired to take this philosophy to the extreme ends that take place in the movie, but it did help to open my eyes to the fact that a lot of the things that people buy can control their lives.  Buying a new sports car, or a boat, or other expensive luxuries may sound like a good idea, but unless you're wealthy, the hours of labor that you have to put into buying and maintaining them far exceed the hours of enjoyment you'll get from them.  These things are mostly used as a status symbol to show off how successful we think we are to others.  Personally, I don't give a damn if anyone thinks that I'm successful.  I'd rather have the free time to spend however I please than to force myself to grind out every last dollar that I can make to afford the payments on something that I don't care about in the slightest.  I spent five dollars on the ticket to this show, and for that, I got to spend three hours playing movie trivia with friends, two more hours watching one of my favorite films on the big screen, and another two hours enjoying a secret feature that I never got to see on the big screen.  That works out to about 71 cents an hour to live life on my own terms.  Not a bad deal.

Jun 11, 2025

The Wizard Of The Beach


Brian Wilson
1942 - 2025
The legendary songwriter and co-founder of The Beach Boys passed away today.  He was 82 years old.

Brian Wilson was one of the most respected and successful musicians of the 20th century.  I'm far from being an expert on his music (in fact, I still haven't listened to Pet Sounds all the way through; a blind spot that I plan to rectify this weekend), but I've enjoyed what I heard on the radio and in movies over the years, like I Get Around in Flight Of The Navigator, God Only Knows in Boogie Nights, and Wouldn't It Be Nice in 50 First Dates.  If I had to pick a favorite song out of the ones I'm familiar with, it would be the first song on Side B of Surfer Girl.  I first heard it when I was in elementary school and it reminds me of when I lived with my mother and stepfather, neither of whom could ever understand why I'd rather stay in my room and read, or listen to music, or play Nintendo instead of pretending to be Huck Finn on the streets of Nuremberg.
There's a world where I can go and tell my secrets to
In my room
In my room (in my room)

In this world I lock out all my worries and my fears
In my room
In my room (in my room)

Do my dreaming and my scheming
Lie awake and pray
Do my crying and my sighing
Laugh at yesterday

Now it's dark and I'm alone but I won't be afraid
In my room
In my room (in my room)

My Own Beliefs Are In My Song


Sly Stone
1943 - 2025
The lead singer of the iconic funk rock band Sly and the Family Stone passed away on Monday from COPD and other health issues.  He was 82 years old.


Sometimes I'm right and I can be wrong
My own beliefs are in my song
The butcher, the banker, the drummer and then
Makes no difference what group I'm in

I am everyday people

There is a blue one who can't accept the green one
For living with a fat one, trying to be a skinny one
Different strokes for different folks
And so on and so on and scooby-dooby-dooby

We got to live together

I am no better and neither are you
We are the same, whatever we do
You love me, you hate me, you know me and then
You can't figure out the bag I'm in

I am everyday people

There is a long hair that doesn't like the short hair
For being such a rich one that will not help the poor one
Different strokes for different folks
And so on and so on and scooby-dooby-dooby

We got to live together

There is a yellow one that won't accept the black one
That won't accept the red one that won't accept the white one
Different strokes for different folks
And so on and so on and scooby-dooby-dooby

I am everyday people

Jun 10, 2025

The Phantom Of The Drive-In


Sunday night's show at the Mahoning was one of the most memorable experiences that I've ever had watching a movie - a 100th anniversary screening of the 1925 Universal Pictures silent horror classic The Phantom Of The Opera.


As if that isn't cool enough, award winning organist Ian Fraser was in attendance with his theater pipe organ to play a score to the film as it played on the big screen.  It's possible, if not likely, that this was the first time that a silent film has been screened with live organ accompaniment at a drive-in theater.  The music that he performed was based on Lee Erwin's score of Phantom Of The Opera, which Ian blended with music from the 1929 re-release of the film with sound and pieces of music that he wrote on his own.  Additionally, he played music from Faust during the scenes of the movie in which it is being performed on stage.


The film was screened from a restruck 35mm print.  Black and white films always look incredible on the big screen at the Mahoning, but this may be the best one that I've seen yet.


Ian was set up under a tent on the left hand side of the lawn under the big screen, right around the spot where Virgil's trailer used to be.


After the movie, Virgil mentioned that they're already in talks to bring this type of event back next year.  I'd love to see The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari on the big screen with a live score performed on the lot, but I will definitely be in attendance for whichever movie they choose.

Jun 9, 2025

Back To The Dark Side Of The Moon


MST3K Weekend II
Mahoning Drive-In Theater - Lehighton, PA
This weekend was the second annual MST3K event at the Mahoning Drive-In Theater.  This time, Joel Hodgson was accompanied on the lot by season 8-10 host Jonah Ray to meet fans, sign autographs, and take pictures.  In addition, the two hosts were scheduled to perform a live riff on Saturday night for the 1940 Bela Lugosi film The Devil Bat.

Show banner designed by Andrew Kern
Show poster designed by Tom Bifulco

I got the VIP pass last year for the Q&A with Joel Hodgson and got his autograph and took a photo with him in the projection booth, so I passed on the VIP experience this year and spent the pre-show hours hanging out with my friends on the lot.  Gene and Ben were both on the lot on Saturday night, and Zack was there on Friday and Saturday, along with his Tom Servo and Crow robots.


Zack also brought The Sifillis Crew with Soda Olheiser, Smort Smortz, and other characters from his book, along with copies of his Quest-O-Tron board game and Sifillis Starter Kits.
 

There was a costume contest on the lawn that was shown on the big screen before the features on both Friday and Saturday.  The guy who played Torgo from Manos: The Hands Of Fate last year (far right of the photo above) came back and entered the costume contest on Saturday, and once again, he won.


 

The first movie of Friday night was the 1967 South Korean Godzilla knock-off, Yongary: Monster From The Deep.  This was riffed on by Jonah and his robot friends in the ninth episode of Season 11.  The film is about a kaiju named Yongary (pronounced like dungarees, but starting with a Y instead of a D) who is awakened by an earthquake that came as a result of nuclear testing.

The monster Yongary looks and behaves like Godzilla's derpy little cousin.  He spits fire, drinks oil and gasoline, and is prone to fits of dancing when he's not knocking down buildings in search of food.  The movie is very cheesy and a hell of a lot of fun, and Jonah's riff on it was excellent.


The second riffed film of the night was Kevin Connor's 1974 fantasy adventure The Land That Time Forgot, which was also an extremely cheesy movie with a fun Jonah riff.


Prior to the final movie of the night, there was a digital screening of the 1952 Merry Melodies cartoon short, Feed The Kitty.  This is the one where a giant bulldog named Marc Antony adopts a little kitten and he knocks himself silly trying to hide the kitten from his owner.  In 1994, this short was voted as the 36th greatest cartoon of all time by animators.


The last movie of Friday night was a feature length film on 35mm that was selected by Joel, but was shown without any riffing: the 1965 western comedy Cat Ballou.  I was looking forward to seeing this more than any other film this weekend because of the trailer for the film that was shown on the lot in the weeks leading up to this event.


Cat Ballou stars Jane Fonda as the titular character and Lee Marvin in a dual role as Kid Shelleen and Tim Strawn.  Marvin had a breakout performance for which he won Best Actor at the 38th Academy Awards.  It also features Dwayne Hickman, who I remember best for his role as Dobie Gillis.

Nat King Cole and Stubby Kaye appear throughout Cat Ballou as traveling minstrels who perform songs that act as a plot narration.  This was Nat King Cole's final film role, as the singer was diagnosed with lung cancer during the production of this film.  He passed away on February 15th, 1965, four months before Cat Ballou premiered in Los Angeles.

The presence of Stubby Kaye was the main thing that caught my eye when we first saw the trailer.  I first became aware of him from Joe Bob Briggs during his How Rednecks Saved Hollywood show from the first night of the 2021 Jamboree at the Mahoning.  During this show, Joe Bob played Stubby Kaye's song Jubilation T. Cornpone from the 1959 musical Lil' Abner, which has been stuck in my head ever since.  Kaye is probably best known to my generation for his final role as Marvin Acme in the 1989 classic Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

I wish that I could tell you more about Cat Ballou, but I only managed to stay awake for the first half hour.  I'm pretty bummed out about that because I was really looking forward to seeing this, and this is probably going to be the only time that it's screened on 35mm at the Mahoning.  I think that I'm going to have to stock up on some sugar free energy drinks or I'm going to end up dozing off for the third film in every Friday night triple feature.

After the costume contest for Night Two of MST3K Weekend, a man named Matt McGinnis took the mic to introduce Movie Riffing Melee.  I had no idea what he was talking about at first.  I've never heard of Matt McGinnis before, other than seeing his name mentioned as one of the guests that would be on the lot on Saturday night.  I looked him up as I started writing this, and I guess Joel met him at a movie riffing camp that he hosted at a community college in 2012, and he has been working on Joel's tours and as a producer of MST3K on 23 episodes from 2017 to 2022.


Matt explained that the live riff of The Devil Bat was going to be done like a game show that put Joel up against Jonah.  I'm a bit familiar with this format because they did something like this at the MST3K 30th Anniversary Tour that we got to see at the Kirby Center in 2018.  The way it works is that an icon pops up on the bottom left or bottom right corners of the screen, at which point the person assigned to that icon has to riff the film.  If they hit their cue, they're awarded five points.  If they miss it, they deduct five points.

I never really understood the point of this format.  First of all, the icons popping up throughout the film are distracting and they tell the audience when to expect Joel or Jonah to say something.  This pretty much kills the spontaneity of the show.  Imagine watching a comedy film with a big icon of a smiley face popping up at the bottom corner of the picture every time one of the actors said something funny.  Also, the game show aspect really doesn't add anything to the riff.  Nobody really cares which of the two of them win, and they really don't do any smack talk against each other or anything like that, so it just sort of falls flat.  At best, it feels like a regular episode of MST3K with an annoying icon that keeps popping up over the movie to tell you when to laugh.

So, the movie is broken up into three rounds.  Joel and Jonah did the riffing for the first round.  However, after that point, they invited six people from the audience, with three people joining each team, and these audience members did the riffs for the second and third round.  I guess it's a fun experience for those six people and their friends, but it kind of sucks for everybody else.  The selling point of this event was that we were getting to hear a live riff from two of the hosts of MST3K.  This felt kind of like going to see a concert of a band that you love, only to have them play a third of the setlist before handing the instruments and the mic off to a cover band that they noticed in the crowd.

To top all of that off, the audio track in The Devil Bat dropped off at around the 59 minute mark of the movie, right at the start of the climax when Bela Lugosi's character is about to get his comeuppance.  If the folks at the Mahoning put this together, they would get on the mic, apologize for the delay, and figure out a backup to get the rest of the movie on the screen.  The Devil Bat is in the public domain and the entire film is available to stream for free on YouTube, so it wouldn't have been too difficult.  Instead, Matt rewound the file and tried playing it again, and when the audio of the film failed to work the second time, he pretty much just said "Ok, show's over, let's tally up the points" before telling us which team won.  He then came on the radio during intermission to tell us how the movie ended.
 

In short, the whole live riff thing went off about as well as a fart in church.  If they have another MST3K event at the Mahoning next year, I hope they pass on this idea and just show episodes of the show.  Frankly, I would have preferred it if we just got to see The Devil Bat on the big screen without any riffing at all.


At the end of intermission, Rob projected his 35mm print of the 1955 Merry Melodies cartoon One Froggy Evening.  We've seen this a few times over the years at the Mahoning, and it's always a hit.
 

Next up was Jonah's Season 13 riff on the 1992 Jim Wynorski turkey, Munchie.  This movie is about as cheesy as a family comedy can get, and is probably best remembered today as the feature film debut of Jennifer Love Hewitt.  I had never seen the movie before, but it's every bit as terrible as its reputation.  It's the very definition of "so bad, it's good" because you can see that it's a sincere attempt at making a good movie, and it's just so damn unintentionally funny that you can't help but to smile.  Jonah's riff was spot on and very funny.  I'm glad that the night ended on a positive note.


In addition to Jennifer Love Hewitt, the cast of Munchie includes Dom DeLuise as the voice of the titular character, who is probably the worst puppet or animatronic or whatever the hell it is that I've ever seen in a motion picture.  The cast also featured Loni Anderson, Arte Johnson from Laugh In, Buck Flower in a bit role, and an actor named Ace Mask who I'll always remember as Victor Von Helsing in my all time favorite horror comedy, Transylvania Twist.
 

There was a third feature on Saturday night called Destroy All Neighbors.  It's a 2024 movie starring Jonah Ray, but neither my wife or I were all that interested in seeing it, so we headed out during the second intermission to get some extra sleep.


And that's a wrap on the second year of Mystery Science Theater 3000 at the Mahoning Drive-In Theater.  It was fun overall, but I'm probably going to skip this event if they bring it back for 2026.  The pricing for the event is a little excessive compared to the other annual events on the lot.  The general admission tickets were $25, and to put this in comparison, tickets for the upcoming Chiodo Con weekend, which is also a triple feature with three special guests in attendance, are $15.  The VIP tickets for this past weekend were at a level that I didn't even consider getting them.  I might go to one of the nights next year if they show Pod People or if they have a night dedicated to three episodes that I'm particularly interested in.  If not, I'm just going to see what The Gap has going on that weekend.

Jun 8, 2025

That's Not The Right Way To Eat Cantalope


Bring Her Back
A24 (2025)
I've seen a lot of horror movies in my life and think that I have a pretty high threshold for getting creeped out, but... damn!

Jun 7, 2025

Goonies Never Say Die


The Goonies
Liberty Theatre - Astoria, OR  (June 7, 1985)
The greatest children's adventure movie ever made premiered in theaters across the United States forty years ago today.

Jun 6, 2025

Frustrated Incorporated


Let Your Dim Light Shine
Soul Asylum (1995)
The seventh studio album from the Minneapolis alternative rock band Soul Asylum was released thirty years ago today.  The biggest hit on the album was Misery, which always makes me think of Clerks II since it was used for the closing credits.  However, my favorite song from of theirs from this album didn't make the album at all and was released as a track on the maxi-cd single for Misery that was released in the United States and Canada.
Jesus was a hippie
Peace and love was all he was about
That's why they killed him
Cause that shit's something people can't figure out

Now some folks who worship him are the ones
Who would have cheered at the crucifixion
They got no conviction
It doesn't matter if the man was fact or fiction

Nixon was a liar
It's the one thing believed to be true
But Tricky Dick was not a crook
Whatever that means, whatever presidents do

Money can't buy you children
And nothing can bring them back to you
We all make mistakes
We all need someone to look up to

But who're you gonna call your fearless leader?
Who's gonna put your fears to bed?
Cause heroes will never let you down
Just as long as they're dead

Satan is a feeling, deviance it lurks in everyone
Guilty pleasures, mischievous behavior can be fun
No one made you do it, nobody but yourself to blame
It's always at your door and trouble is its name

But who're you gonna call your fearless leader?
Who's gonna put your fears to bed?

Sometimes you gotta pick and choose
Sometimes, no matter what, you lose

Divine was a woman
His private parts said she was a man
Those were his private parts
The parts that he could never understand

But she was an actress
She could be anything that she wanted
Her reality was the very
Thing that she flaunted

But who're you gonna call your fearless leader?
Who's gonna put your fears to bed?
Heroes will never let you down
Just as long as they're dead

But who're you gonna call your fearless leader?
When you run from fear you leave yourself behind
You can't dump your fears on someone else
Cause it's all in your mind

Jun 5, 2025

A Moment Of Realization Is Worth A Thousand Prayers


Natural Born Killers
Mahoning Drive-In Theater - Lehighton, PA
This week's Thursday Thread-Up was one of my favorite movies from when I was a teenager, the 1994 Oliver Stone film based on a screenplay written by Quentin Tarantino, Natural Born Killers.

Show banner designed by Andrew Kern

Ben and I spent most of the pre-show playing chess and Ms. Pac Man.  We're pretty evenly matched at chess with each of us winning two games, but my new goal is to get this Gen-Z dude up to speed on the 80's arcade classics.

While we were playing chess, Jimmy introduced Gene, Ben, and I to his very cool friend Kandiss.  She has a tattoo of a blank easel on her arm, and when Gene asked her about it, she told him that the reason for the blank canvas on the easel is to give her friends and family a place to draw something.  That's one of the coolest ideas for a tattoo that I've heard in a long time.  Gene is an award-winning children's book author and illustrator, so he was happy to contribute this dancing hot dog inspired by the intermission reels at the Mahoning.


Speaking of Gene, the pre-show featured an animated short about a monster at a drive-in theater that he created back in 1990.  He has recently updated it to include the Mahoning Drive-In theater marquee.  It was pretty cool, and I hope to show the entire cartoon on here in the near future.


I didn't catch Natural Born Killers when it premiered in theaters back in 1994, but I rented it shortly after it was released on VHS in 1995.  The movie brilliantly captures who we are as a violent species.  Sometimes that violence is goal-orientated and sometimes it's done just for the sake of violence, but it's been a constant throughout human history.  Even those of us who don't directly commit acts of violence glorify those who do, as long as that violence doesn't directly affect us or anyone that we care about.  It's the reason why serial killers and other criminals nearly always get more attention than their victims or the people who bring them to justice.

Some critics and fans understand this movie.  However, it seems like there are a lot of fans who can't see past the violence, or think that all that the movie has to offer is a criticism of the media.  These people don't get it, and that's fine.  I still don't understand Eraserhead, though I'm hopeful that it starts making sense to me one of these days.  Bottom line is that not every movie is for every person, so I'd be fairly selective in who I'd recommend Natural Born Killers to, but if you're somebody who doesn't see your fellow human beings through a lens of unjustified optimism, this movie is probably going to appeal to you.
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