After I got off work on Valentine’s Day, we went out to the Alamo for a third time to see My Bloody Valentine, because I am nothing if not romantic. And to my surprise, although I saw the remake some years back, this is a movie I’d never seen before.

The plot is as follows: Twenty years ago, some miners were trapped in a collapse in the Canadian mining town of Valentine’s Bluffs, because everyone was busy at the annual big deal Valentine’s Day dance and forgot to check methane levels I think? One of the miners survived, went crazy, and killed a bunch of people the next year at the same party. So they’ve never held that party since, but hey, it’s been twenty years and there’s a new generation of horny post-teens who would rather drink and party than honor the dead of the past, and even the old people are thinking, hey, it might be nice to get back to what made our town great. Only, there’s a note from Harry Warden (the insane killer miner in the gas mask) saying, “Hey, bitches, you hold a party, I go back to killing everyone, just like old times!”

After the movies takes ten minutes or so to establish that summary, it commences to being an ’80s horror movie, so I think more or less you know what’s up from here. Important differences, though: the teens are actually grown-ass adults instead of being teens, with jobs (mostly down the mine) and actual relationships. I mean, they’re barely more than teens, but the difference shows, what with adult conversations that extend further than the “which of us will bang next?” you might get from, say, Friday the 13th. Then again, the prankster jerk is just as much of a teenager as ever, so maybe the differences aren’t as vast as all that after all. And there are certainly plot holes wide enough to drive a mine cart through.

Like I said, I think you know what’s up from here. Ultimately, I think I liked the remake better? But I appreciate that someone behind the camera wanted to make a serious movie that happened to include an insane murder miner instead of a horror movie. Not all dreams can come true, of course, but effort matters.

I would ask why all my favorite movie stories happen at the Alamo Drafthouse, but I know why: because it’s the kind of place that builds good industry relationships, and so it gets all the cool stuff that is mostly reserved for the red carpet premiere set. I am jealous of this lack in Dallas, but I do get to go to Austin now and again and relive the awesome all over again. In this particular case, I watched a movie called The House of the Devil, which is presently only in release in New York, Los Angeles, and one screen in Austin. Not that this was carpety or star-studded, or that it even particularly had stars[1], but I still appreciate on some level the exclusivity.

What we’ve got here is your basic 80s Satanic cult flick, in which a girl takes a babysitting job on the night of a lunar eclipse, only the situation keeps getting weirder and spookier and tenser. Generally good stuff, and it was definitely made as solid homage to the genre, with every detail spot on down to the film stock quality. And it was good. It just… I feel like I watched a movie someone made in the early 1980s. As that was the apparent goal, I must admit that they nailed it; they did[2]. But somehow, I feel like the 25 years that have elapsed since then requires some kind of advancement in the state of the art. Not the film, or the special effects (of which there were almost none beyond the ones based on violence), but the plot. Like, maybe a modern twist, some hint that this was not in fact an old reel someone dug up, but an actual new movie? I liked it, don’t get me wrong. The slavish devotion to nostalgia just made it feel empty.

[1] The biggest name was a pre-credits cameo by Dee Wallace.
[2] Seriously, the only detail that felt wrong during the opening credits was that the release date Roman numerals started with MM instead of MCM.

On Monday, I spent most of the day driving around Austin digging through a few of its Half-Price Bookses, wishing I had an excuse to drop by the Alamo Drafthouse, failing to find any new Hawaiian / hipster button shirts for work, and just generally enjoying the rhythm of the town. Even over-trafficked as it is these days, if you don’t get on 35 you at least get to look at all the Austin people and landmarks while you’re stuck in your car not going anywhere. In addition to all that, though, everything was covered by a dense layer of fog all day. I mean, not the kind where the visibility is measured in feet, but probably the kind where it’s measured in hundreds of feet. When you add up all of these factors, it becomes clear that my viewing of the latest Stephen King adaptation, The Mist, was not so much a decision as it was inescapable fate.

Before the movie, though, I have to write another love letter to my favorite movie theater. I mean, sure, other places serve food. But do other places serve you food with names like Maximum Overdog? (See, ’cause it’s a hot dog with fancy chili on top, and it’s named after a different Stephen King movie! And this is only one example; there are multiple movie title puns spanning multiple genres. You can use theme as a deciding factor in your menu choices!) And if there’s another theater that not only shows a loop of hysterical trailers for old movies from the ’60s and ’70s that nobody has ever heard of, carefully selected to match whatever movie is coming on, but also finds old interview footage related to the filmmakers or writers or possibly stars of that movie, I have never heard of this theater. When it’s the Alamo, you show up early, and it’s only fractionally for the chance at good seats. Time after time, they provide the best theater experience going, and my soul dies a tiny bit when I remember that people who live north of Austin can’t just decide to go there at whim. Especially when I remember that those people include me.

Anyway, though, then I watched the movie. While out shopping after a big storm, people are surprised to see a heavy mist rolling in, reducing visibility to just a few feet. And just ahead of it, other people are running toward their cars in terror, while one man makes for the supermarket, shouting, “There’s something in the mist, and it killed [some local guy]!” As you can see, this is the kind of premise that can pretty much go anywhere. The places that it does go include an invasion of scary poisonous and/or flesh-rending monsters, government conspiracies, and religious fanaticism for starters. Mostly, though, it demonstrates over and over again the horror that comes to pass when a group of normal people collectively has more fear than they have hope. This is not much of an ‘up’ message, I admit, but it’s portrayed with incredible effectiveness, and that’s a pretty cool thing to see a movie do.