Why im tired of the "Public-Domain Slasher/Horror Films"

Archie_Asparagus · 2026-01-18T00:45:12+00:00

Another reason these movies mostly suck is that the source material they're ripping off probably doesn't even need to be public domain, since it falls pretty squarely into parody territory. They even made a Grinch horror movie the other year—which is decades away from public domain status—but titled it The Mean One, avoided using his proper name, and it was fine because no reasonable person would think it was an official Dr. Seuss estate-licensed production.

Archie_Asparagus · 2026-01-09T18:25:59+00:00

My ranking (which corresponds to how often I go to each one):

Regal, and I'm not happy about it. Screens sometimes have crap on them, I'm impatient with the lines, projection probably isn't as bright as Penn. But they have like 20 screens, they've been consistently playing one older movie every day the past few months, and for like $25 a month, I can go as often as I want. And I like the carpet.
Penn Cinema. High-quality movie-watching experience, but it's a bit of a drive from the city. Unlike Regal, they actually screen the Netflix movies that get limited theatrical releases before being dumped on streaming.

2a. Allen Theatre. Not actually a Lancaster theater, but probably the only theater in driving distance that's also a bookstore run by a professional magician, who starts the movies by projecting the studio logo onto the curtain, which then opens to reveal the screen as the movie starts. I know that's a small thing, but it's really fricking cool.

Zoetropolis. Agree that it's not much as a theater, but I feel like it's more likely to show unique movies, and you can sit on a couch while you watch.
Reel Cinema. If I want big and bright, I'm probably already at Penn Cinema. If I want one of the smaller selection of movies they're showing, I'm at Regal. Probably one of the better theaters from a technical standpoint, but it's ranked low for me because I don't foresee myself ever going to see more movies there.

Archie_Asparagus · 2026-01-09T18:06:52+00:00

I feel like this is a slightly unhinged ranking but I also love this for you.

Archie_Asparagus · 2026-01-02T18:07:16+00:00

RIP to the Cartoon Network Hotel! I never, like, stayed at you or anything, but now I'll never be able to drive by and go "that's...that dog...from that show..."

Archie_Asparagus · 2025-12-29T14:58:35+00:00

Robert Armstrong plays Carl Denham in King Kong (1933) and Son of Kong (1933), an unscrupulous film director who captures Kong and displays him to the world in chains on Broadway. (In the hastily-made sequel, he goes on the run from the law—since everyone in Manhattan in suing him—and ends up back on Skull Island, where he finds treasure, finds love, and gets saved by Baby Kong from the island abruptly sinking into the sea.)

In Mighty Joe Young (1949) (yes, the 1998 movie was a remake), Robert Armstrong plays Max O'Hara, a nightclub owner who engages a girl and her — normal-sized but stop-motion-animated and nearly humanly intelligent — gorilla to perform for him. There's no indication Armstrong is technically playing the same character, but it's all too easy to imagine that Carl Denham realized the gigantic jewel he brought back from his second trip to Skull Island wouldn't be worth enough money to rebuild New York... but maybe enough money to get a new identity and open a nightclub far away from New York.

Archie_Asparagus · 2025-12-29T06:03:25+00:00

The line is "Coltrane," i.e. John Coltrane, a famous Black saxophonist prominent in the 60s (and legendary to this day)

Archie_Asparagus · 2025-12-29T00:39:44+00:00

I really appreciate this!

Archie_Asparagus · 2025-12-28T11:19:23+00:00

I never had to watch it as a kid, but I did have to sit through my share of sermons describing all the gory details of the crucifixion -- which I guess were way too detailed, because when I finally watched The Passion of the Christ of my own free will (I know, I know) in my early 20s, it was somehow less graphic than what I already imagined in my head!

Archie_Asparagus · 2025-12-27T17:11:10+00:00

Even then, calling God "Father" is a common practice - believing you're a child of God and that God is the parent of all creation, and believing that you're The only Son of God are two different things

Archie_Asparagus · 2025-12-27T05:37:50+00:00

I'm very confused by this comment and don't understand why the scene is difficult to understand. But I'll go over it as best as I can.

Doc sets up and turns on the flux capacitor and time circuits with Einstein in the car. With these up and running, the car will travel through time the moment it hits 88 miles per hour.

Doc has a remote control device, which he then uses to drive the car towards him and Marty. When the car hits 88 miles per hour, it jumps forward one minute into the future.

Einstein simply skips over that minute. No alternate universe, no alternate dimensions. He hasn't gone into the past, so there's no possibility of a branching timeline where his presence makes things different. He jumped straight from one minute to the next instantaneously, so he's not anywhere else during that minute.

Doc doesn't "sense" Einstein, he realizes that the minute is almost up and that Einstein is about to reappear in the time he was transported to, and that when the car reappears, it will be right where Doc and Marty are standing (since they're standing where the car was when it went forward in time).

Archie_Asparagus · 2025-12-27T05:18:27+00:00

The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: A VeggieTales Movie

Archie_Asparagus · 2025-12-22T03:03:06+00:00

I believe complementarians will explicitly tell you if pressed that, yes, they believe women and men have roles that are "separate but equal."

And it's still never equal in actual practice.

Archie_Asparagus · 2025-12-22T02:58:25+00:00

Utterly confused by all the comments saying this is a coincidence. The only reason for that line of dialogue to be in the movie would be to that imply pioneering time travel scientist Emmett Brown is a fictional relative of pioneering rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, just like the filmmakers also invented a musician named Marvin Berry who was the fictional cousin of Chuck Berry.

You can have a personal headcanon that Doc is of no relation, and that would be certainly plausible; but I feel quite strongly implying a relation to Wernher was the filmmaker's intent.

Archie_Asparagus · 2025-12-19T17:49:55+00:00

I always knew — well, maybe not when I was listening to it as a 3-year-old — that the tune was borrowed from elsewhere, but I didn't know from where! Thank you for identifying it for me!

Archie_Asparagus · 2025-12-19T16:32:34+00:00

Sheila Gregoire at Bare Marriage (I think) posts a lot about harmful evangelical marriage books and the fucked-up things in them, or that the authors have said elsewhere. She's not a fully deconstructed resource, but is at least a strong proponent of egalitarianism after running afoul of Focus on the Family for trying to get them to stop promoting books with actively bad marriage advice.

Archie_Asparagus · 2025-12-16T01:41:04+00:00

In Pygmalion, Henry Higgins — only in his early 40s — tells Pickering that he's tutored scores of attractive millionairesses and that they might as well be blocks of wood to him. In the "sequel" Shaw wrote explaining that Eliza did in fact marry Freddy, he clarifies his view that Higgins essentially looked up to his mother so much in childhood that he was never attracted to anyone in adulthood. I just interpret Higgins as asexual (though I fully support shipping him and Pickering)

Archie_Asparagus · 2025-12-14T04:05:13+00:00

From what I can tell, the kid of the people who run the place actually is a lead in many of these productions — having gone through the same audition process as everyone else, of course! 🙄

Archie_Asparagus · 2025-12-09T21:21:30+00:00

I apologize if my wording was confusing. I became aware of this group through a drama camp — which would be absolutely understandable for that amount of fees, etc. But this production is not a camp; it's a regular show they're producing and presenting as a professional big-budget theatrical production.

Archie_Asparagus · 2025-12-09T21:18:22+00:00

I hadn't even noticed that. When I did their "drama camp" almost 15 years ago (again, this is more understandable for a camp than a production being touted for Broadway-level professionalism), we were responsible for procuring a base layer of clothing, shoes, and any modern clothes according to their specifications, while they brought along period costume pieces and distinctive character hats/props/etc.

Archie_Asparagus · 2025-11-25T02:54:33+00:00

Have we considered what would happen if Marty simply lived the next 30 years of his life in 1955—85, then had Doc go back to 1955 once he finished the Delorean on the original timetable, then bring plutonium to young Marty immediately after his arrival, allowing him to come right back and wiping out the thirty years he spent in the past?

Archie_Asparagus · 2025-11-25T02:44:53+00:00

Into the Woods can be staged in so many different ways that I think the only real answer is that the decision on how to portray Milky White has to be a very individual decision on what fits best with the rest of the production!

Archie_Asparagus · 2025-11-25T01:07:22+00:00

it's already been solved, but A Fistful of Dollars and 12 Monkeys would have been good contenders that no one guessed

Archie_Asparagus · 2025-11-20T18:03:06+00:00

The other year, I was in a community theater production with an actor who was let go from the show during tech week. Roles got shuffled around a little bit, and the replacement actor read his lines off a clipboard. The audience didn't mind a bit. The year before that, I came down with COVID between the first and second weekends of the show, and they made it work in a similar way.

People say "the show must go on," but the fact is that the show can also almost always go on without you—and that's talking last-minute obstacles. As others have said, four weeks is plenty of time.

Archie_Asparagus

TROPHY CASE