Great Moments in Horror Actressing

by Jason Adams

We had intended to use this week's edition of our new "Great Moments in Horror Actressing" series to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Stuart Rosenberg's The Amityville Horror with an ode to Margot Kidder's performance... but then we re-watched The Amityville Horror, and it is so very much worse than we remembered. Not scary, tedious, with cardboard performances; a mere shadow of that decade's many better horror films. I have no idea how it became a hit, and I felt actively bad for Margot while re-watching it.

So in order to make it up to the actress, let's take a look instead at the crown jewel in her horror crown (give or take a Sisters), her hilarious work five years earlier as the deliciously crusty co-ed Barb in Bob Clark's slasher Black Christmas...

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Lunchtime Poll: What would you do with a $2 Million Tip?

by Nathaniel R

On this day 25 years ago It Could Happen to You was released, a romantic comedy in which a cop (Nicolas Cage) wins the lottery and shares half his fortune with a waitress (Bridget Fonda) who he was unable to tip. The original and far superior title was Cop Gives Waitress $2 Million Tip. That year in its rejected honor, my friends and I would jokingly refer to movies by a single sentence plot rather than titles... Streep Goes White Water Rafting, Vampire Brad Feels Guilt, This Bus Is a Bomb! etc -- shut up, it was funny at the time.

In its honor today, what would you do with a $2 million dollar windfall? The catch is that you have to spend half of it on the movies. Would you invest in films, be a patron for an auteur, gift it to a struggling actor, or other? (After the jump, an Oscar-adjacent list for fun)

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White Zombie (1932)

 

Have you ever seen any of the early Bela Lugosi movies? Audiences must have been really freaked out by his eyes because the movies kept pushing that stare as the ultimate in horror (Dracula had arrived the year before). White Zombie was the first feature film about zombies, a genre now so common you forget that there had to be a first. The film, now celebrating its 87th birthday, is streaming on Amazon Prime and since it's only 66 minutes long we decided to zip right through yesterday... 

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Got a question for the podcast?

We're recording tomorrow.

Ask away and Murtada and I will try to answer a handful or two of them... along with a Once Upon a Time in Hollywood discussion. 

Once Upon a Time & The Farewell are wins for adult programming, thank god.

What did you see this weekend? 

Weekend Box Office Estimates July 19th-21st  🔺 = New or Expanding / ★ = Highly Recommended
W I D E	PLATFORM / SPECIALTY TITLES
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood	The Farewell
1 The Lion King  $75 (cum. $350.7) REVIEW	1 🔺 The Farewell $1.5 (cum. $3.6) PERSONAL & UNIVERSAL, INTERVIEW ★
2 🔺 Once Upon a Time in Hollywood $40.3 *NEW* REVIEW  ★	2 Art of Self Defense $311k (cum. $2) REVIEW
3 Spider-Man Far From Home $12.2 (cum. $344.4)  TOM HOLLAND, REVIEW	3 🔺 Maiden $204k (cum. $1.1) REVIEW ★
4 Toy Story 4 $9.8 (cum. $395.6)  PODCAST, REVIEW	4 Super 30 $189k (cum. $2.1)
5 Crawl  $6 (cum. $23.8) REVIEW	5 🔺  Pavarotti $135k (cum. $4.2)

numbers on that chart are pulled from boxofficemojo

Unless you wanna talk about The Lion King (why? it's bad!) the big story this weekend was the strong opening of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Making movies for adults is now an endangered business so we're happy that the film had such a healthy opening, the best ever for a Tarantino picture. (Given the movie's defiantly leisurely pacing, though, we have trouble imagining great word of mouth to keep it going for a long time.) Meanwhile The Farewell continued to do great business, so much so that it entered the regular top ten this weekend despite being at only 135 theaters. Go Lulu Wang and Awkwafina! Next weekend continues the annoying trend of Hollywood refusing to compete with itself with the third straight weekend with only one new wide release: Fast & Furious: Hobbs & Shaw. After that the floodgates open with lots of new films per week as the summer movie season begins to wane.