In leiu of the traditional “Mutant Meetup” (which took place in Pennsylvania, Memphis, and the last two years in Vegas), Joe Bob and Darcy had a one night “Halloween Spooktacular” at the Texas theater in Dallas from dusk till dawn.
The first year in Vegas was the most hardcore: Friday and Saturday we stayed up till around 3-4AM and Sunday night didn’t finish till dawn Monday morning, so a single night of movie madness without a lot of pre-movie mingling time was a little bit of a disappointment. (I guess the very fist year, in the rapidly forming swamps of Pennsylvania, was the most hardcore, with rain and essentially mandatory camping.)
Still, your humble correspondent was grateful to have another year with the premiere Drive-In Movie Critic of Grapevine, Texas, and the indefatigable “Darcy The Mail Girl,” who is the reason this and the last meetup happened at all.
Cool theater. It seemed to be surrounded by a mix of pawn shops and dollar stores, and expensive fancy boutique restaurants.
I’ve seen The Tingler (1959) relatively recently and my opinion of it from that viewing has not changed. It’s audacious, funny, creepy, genuinely unsettling when the poor mute woman is being terrorized to death, and it survives the snickers that its very name causes, at least in a crowd of reasonably intoxicated mutants.
Seriously. It’s night impossible not to snicker when someone says, “Did you find the tingler?”
It was more fun than before because the crowd was basically unleashed, yet at the same time there’s a fair amount of respect that goes along with the Joe Bob crowd. These are people who love Street Trash and who can both argue something to the mattresses without getting upset.
As a bonus, my chair was wired up with an actual “tingler”—a very mild electrical vibrator, I think it was. Cute. Might have even startled me but I spotted it and it was more refreshing than shocking.
The show was preceded (I think, event order is kind of blurry a week later) by a sort campy, schlocky magic/vaudeville act—basically the classic kind of bit you’d expect from a show like this. We’d also have three burlesque dancers and a costume contest.
We were off to a great start: The Tingler is a movie which encourages audience participation without descending into camp or meta-humor. Unlike the films to follow.
It also features the first on-screen acid trip, courtesy of Vincent Price.