Last night I got to meet one of the greatest people in Horror Movie History. Elvira, The Mistress of the Dark graced Austin with her presence by hosting three sold-out shows at Alamo Drafthouse (the Ritz location). It was a perfect birthday celebration for me too and I was smart enough to buy my tickets in advance; to my friends out East, there was a reason why I needed to hit Starbucks for their wireless access that day!
To answer your immediate question…Yes! Cassandra is a very sweet lady. She’s always smiling and ran late to open my 10 PM movie because she loved to take the time to talk to every fan who bought an autograph. (I have no problem with them charging, for many of these non-millionaire actors, this is what pays the bills and it’s a grind.) When Cassandra took the stage, there was a huge round of applause from the weekly Terror Tuesday crowd. There was a brief Q&A from the audience in which there was no show of annoyance because I’m confident she’s been asked half of them constantly. The MC gave an awesome piece of trivia, Cassandra’s writing partner of 21 years was John Paragon who most of us know as Jambi the Genie in Pee Wee’s Playhouse. Another interesting fact is that Cassandra isn’t fond of most Horror movies, especially contemporary ones due to their inability to leave much to the imagination (the Saw franchise comes to mind) and they’re not very funny. I’ll scan the autographed photo I bought later, it’s pretty funny what she wrote.
As for the movie, the feature Jeremy and I saw was The House on Sorority Row, a typical slasher movie from the early Eighties when those flicks were popular. According imdb.com, it was released in January 1983 but the copyright during the credits said 1982. We were close. Jeremy guessed it was 1979-80, I went with 1981; the band 4 out of 5 Doctors was my argument: their clothes and sound. However, I could see Jeremy’s point for 1979; the van the girls used to transport a corpse and the beer cans still had the old-style pull tabs. Was it worth seeing without Elvira? No way, it was awful. It had a few funny moments, one I think was an accident, but I am not a fan of “so-bad-it’s-good” (aka Camp) movies, especially the slasher genre. This hasn’t stopped Hollywood, before the projector started rolling, he announced the release of Row‘s upcoming remake appearing this Fall, blech!