Sunday

While Saturday started out dedicated to getting projects done, it eventually led to Wheaton, Maryland, just past Silver Spring, and a dinner party of Sunshine's coworkers. What a nice evening, and I never once got bitten by a mosquito--though the family dog actually took a nip at me once when the little fucker's leash got tangled up around my legs in the dark. He was too little to break the skin. After the party, Sunshine hailed a Virginia-bound carpool while I rode the Metro back to Silver Spring. There's a retrospective of eighties movies this month, and last midnight they screened the incomparable Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn (1987),* featuring a star-making splatterstick turn by the limber Bruce Campbell. Is this necessary (?): Bruce plays Ash, stranded alone in a decaying mountain cabin after playing the late owner's demon-summoning book-on-tape and, in the process, unleashing malignant demons who possess his girlfriend, the bridge back into town, and his right hand. The midnight movie audience was great, shouting encouragement and warnings, reciting the choicest dialog. It was good to see something so forcefully unprofessional, a monster movie with bite, engineered by gung-ho twenty-somethings for the sheer unqualified love of it. Thursday's third movie, conversely, was yet another mindless animated foray into the arcade fancy marketers ascribe to target males, a movie built by committee containing the recommended allowance of moistened abs, pop-culture jargon, teen angst, golden sunlight, cartoon violence, and just enough edgy profanity; mixed well with lots of sterile, plastic looking light-up moving parts and that cool handheld camera and crafty jump-cut effect making the movie look realistic just like news television. Ah, the Transformers,* not one whit different, deep down, than any other toothless corporate fast food. Evil Dead... managed to cleanse the palate completely. [Cavin]