It is a rare occasion that I watch a movie outside the horror genre. I’ve read Fangoria, stopped in at Bloody Disgusting and squealed in delight when I discovered that my digital cable package included free movies from Fearnet. I know the territory well. It isn’t lost on me that the genre has some glaring flaws- namely misogyny and racial stereotyping (or exclusion). But there are a lot of horror films that don’t suffer from that at all.

The only excuse I can offer for my childhood obsession with the film Dream a Little Dream is that it was the 80s and there was LSD in the water supply. I wasn’t a fan of the Coreys (Feldman and Haim) so I think I rented this movie for the first time because it had a bit of a scifi element to it. That element is Jason Robards and Corey Feldman switching bodies in a situation that I could not possibly describe. If you’re craving a night of LOLs, the movie is available for instant viewing on Netflix.

I thought that the name of this show was “Afternoon Special” until I came across the intro on YouTube. I’m amazed I remember it at all, considering it began airing the year I was born and ended when I was six. The only thing I could remember about it was the mannequin coming to life after the store closed. Oddly, I did not recall that the doorman was a puppet.

For those who were not born in the 80s and raised by the accompanying television programs, the show Eerie, Indiana was a bit like The X Files for preteens. Eerie, as the title suggests, is the town in Indiana where the show takes place. And it is a very peculiar town where Bigfoot goes through the trash cans and Tupperware parties get very, very evil. I was in love with Omri Katz for about five years thanks to this show and Hocus Pocus.

I saw an article earlier this week that mentioned that Mayim Bialik had volunteered to be a guest on the television makeover show What Not to Wear. Bialik is most famous for her work as a child actress portraying the younger version of Bette Midler’s character in Beaches and the titular character in the television series Blossom. More impressive is the fact that she has a PhD in neuroscience. But since YouTube didn’t have any snazzy videos of her conducting scientific research, the Blossom intro will have to do.

Howard the Duck is one of the most awesomely, enjoyably bad movies to come out of the 1980s. Amazingly, this was the first Marvel Comic adaptation to receive wide theatrical release in America. It was also produced by George Lucas, which makes the lack of quality even more impressive. But this movie did have a major influence on many of the box office hits we have today. Lucas made Howard because he was heavily in debt after building the Skywalker Ranch. He needed the film to be a hit to get his finances back in order. When it bombed, Steve Jobs offered to help his buddy out by buying Lucas’ new CGI animation division for more than it was worth. That division would become Pixar.

Adam and I share a love of quoting somewhat offbeat movies so a few weeks ago I asked him if he knew where the line “You’re so cool, Brewster” came from. He did but only because of a t shirt he had seen and questioned the wearer about

Yes, the new Star Trek film is a prequel to the original series, but I was bred on Star Trek: The Next Generation. And by “bred” I mean that my father and stepmother belonged to a Star Trek fan club and I attended meetings and a few conventions with them.

The official trailer for Rob Zombie’s reboot sequel H2: Halloween 2 has finally come out. I was somewhat torn in my opinion of the first film of the reboot; I loved the new material (Michael’s childhood) and the fact that Annie survived but thought that the middle part of the film- which imitated the original film heavily- needed some revisioning. I’m also ambivalent about H2.

Tremors was a dark comedy/horror movie released in 1989. Kevin Bacon, Fred Ward, Michael Gross and Reba McEntire all star as residents of a very small (less than 20 residents) and mostly abandoned mining town named Perfection. When Bacon and Ward’s characters decide to make a move to a bigger town nearby, they’re thwarted by finding dead bodies of other residents. Thinking that a murderer is on the loose, the men return to Perfection to warn and team up with the others. Eventually- with much help from a college student that’s in the area studying seismology (and played by Finn Carter)- it is discovered that the killers are Graboids.