"I'm so hungry I could eat a hearse."

[randy_byers]

daveon invited me over yesterday for beer, movies, and an excellent home-cooked dinner of Chicken Tikka Jalfreizi, Garlic Nann, Mushroom Bhaji, and something with spinach in it. Utterly delicious, eaten under the watchful eyes of his two Labradors. M. was at a networking gathering for women in business, so she didn't get home until later.

The movies were good goofy fun. First up was Destination Mars (2006), which is a low-budget, probably direct-to-video production from Dark Horse Comics that attempts to mimic the style of low-budget '50s sci-fi movies. It's somewhere in between an homage and a parody. The story is about a fleet of Martian flying saucers who come to Earth after the Martians learn of a planet-destroying weapon developed by an Earth scientist. The movie is very good at what it's trying to do, and the ending is perfect. It opens with a faux featurette about the lives of the cast and crew in the McCarthy era and beyond and about the discovery and restoration of the lone print of the film. At 80 minutes (including the featurette) it does not outlast its welcome.

After bouncing off a collection of sci-fi movie trailers and Vegas in Space (1991) ('The First All-Drag Queen Sci-Fi Musical Ever!'), we moved on to Roger Corman's Little Shop of Horrors (1960), which, no, I had never seen before. What an oddball little movie! I wasn't expecting all the Jewish humor and all the silly verbal humor. "It's a finger of speech!" Lots and lots of semi-vaudevillian shtick, which is both funny and just sort of ... odd. (What is the Jack Nicholson masochist scene doing in this story?) It's never all that interesting visually until the final chase scene across a landscape of old rubber tires. The tone is so close to off that I thought I wasn't going to like it at first, but a subtle silly weirdness got its tendrils in me ...

Anyway, thanks, Dave, for a lovely evening.