Monday, October 10, 2005

Bedtime Ballyhoo-hah

I love bad titles -- bad book titles, bad movie titles, bad song titles.

Horror film lovers harbor a warm, wet spot for classics like The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombie, though Bill & Coo, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, They Saved Hitler's Brain and Rat Phink A Boo-Boo hold high honors (that's the second Ray Dennis Steckler title I'm pitching this morn, mind you!). The sheer bravado of, say, The Beast With a Million Eyes deserves a salute, along with similar monikers promising unabashed, undeliverable hokum.

From Sinderella & the Golden Bra to Stop! My Ass is on Fire 11, the adult film industry has cultivated countless croppers, and there are almost as many head-slap-worthy giallo titles I feel compelled to double-check before typing 'em here for your amusement (though I have committed Sergio Martino's Your Vice Is a Closed Room and Only I Have the Key to memory, and What Are Those Strange Drops of Blood Doing On Jennifer's Body? also comes immediately to mind).

This weekend brought beloved bad titles to mind when a nearby NH newspaper reported the self-publication of a new sf novel by a retired Lebanon, NH janitor named Phil LeMay. Phil's latest opus is Space King I and II in Outer Space, Book II, which the paper explains is "a sequel to Space King I and II in Outer Space." Ah, good one!

Someday I'm going to use a pair of titles my old jazz-musician pal James Harvey dished out (in succinct contempt for the 1950s monster movies I love), The Bag That Ate Everything and The Box That Ate Everything the Bag Ate.

Anyhoot, Marj capped this weekend revery in the wee hours. My wife Marj isn't often hilarious in the early hours of the morn, but she made an exception this morning when I asked if she'd set aside a little over an hour to watch today's Fox Movie Channel LBX broadcast of The Day Mars Invaded Earth with me (a movie I sort-of saw as an eight-year-old at a Burlington area drive-in when it was inexplicably double-billed with Disney's Miracle of the White Stallions).

She felt the need to comfort our cat Sugar by promising Sugar we wouldn't be watching (ahem) The Day Mars Raided the Cat Population.

Clink.