And their delivery was golden. Aykroyd's "It's the Stay-puff marshmallow man," had just the right note of being resigned to the absurd horror of it all.

I just checked, and my place of employ has Ghostbusters on DVD! Go Team Weekend Fun!

mr. flea has gotten really good at making popcorn in a pan. After many years of microwave popcorn, I had forgotten how much better pan-popped is.

Yummmm, pan-popped popcorn! My mom had gotten rid of the old popcorn maker when I was in college, so she started using the dutch oven pan for popping it on the stove, which is where I got my taste for that way of cooking it. Microwave has nothing on pan-popped popcorn.

I just wish it was easier to clean the oil out of the pan later. No matter how much I soak it right away, it still keeps that yucky slickness.

Why, cuz I haven't seen those movies?

Because when I was in grade school, you couldn't escape Ghostbusters.

Do you know where I was pretty much exactly 21 years ago today? At Lewis and Clark Theatre, with a bunch of my classmates, my hair in freaking curlers under a cap because my sister was getting married later in the day and I was to have ringlets, watching Ghostbusters. For the second time.

Hmm. I was probably spitting food on my bib.

t /mean

I remember you couldn't escape the Ghostbusters theme at the skating rink.

OFFA MY LAWN!

I remember you couldn't escape the Ghostbusters theme at the skating rink.

I'm a few years older, I guess. Skating rink anthems were all disco ones for us ("I Will Survive" and the all-time skating classic, "YMCA"). Roll Bounce is set during my prime skating-rink years.

I feel compelled (I'm not sure why) to report on the movie JZ and I watched last night.

When I'm selecting things to TiVo I scroll through every listing on Turner Classic Movies and there was one title there just taunting me. I let it pass the first time, but finally gave in to the irresistible title Zombies On Broadway.

It's squarely in the mold of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and, the comedy duo was modeled very exactly on Abbott and Costello. Except they weren't funny at all. As the movie made it's way to the Carribbean I kept thinking "That looks like the set to I Walked With a Zombie. Hey! That's the guy that was the zombie in I Walked With A Zombie." So this was made by RKO and they just recycled some of the set and cast for a quick B feature.

The movie was very short (69 minutes) and briskly paced, which as JZ noted - makes its lack of genuine funniness highly tolerable. I'd never heard of the female lead, Ann Jeffreys, but checking on IMDB found out that she had a very long interesting career. She did only B Movies for RKO and Republic, then became a major stage performer hand selected by Kurt Weill and Cole Porter to work on their musicals. She did 887 performances of Kiss Me Kate. Went on to form a very successful nightclub act with her husband, which got them the role of the ghosts in the TV version of Topper in the 50s. She was always very beautiful, and when we checked her gallery were surprised to see the most recent shot of her was just a few weeks ago and looks pretty freakin' good for 82. She was doing the soap Port Charles as recently as 1997. She was David Hasselhoff's mom on Baywatch, was on Falcon Crest, and also on the original Battlestar Galactica.

I can't recommend the movie as such, but it was a fascinating tour through the back alleys of the studio era. I always love finding movies that recycled sets or props (the mad scientist gear in Frankenstein probably being the all time champion for reuse). The Spanish version of Dracula (shot on the same sets as the Lugosi version concurrently, but during the middle of the night) is another example.

Also, as evidenced by the photos on this site, Anne Jeffreys was seriously gorgeous as a young'un.

She looked very odd in the movie -- she has what reads to the '05 eye as a very contemporary face, kind of like a smart and snarky-minded mashup of the youngish Cybill Sheppard and Teri Garr, surrounded by a brazilian very, very mid-40s looking Z-grade character actors.

And, yeah, the pacing was great. I've seen lousy movies that were really rather better written than this and even better acted, that just torpedoed themselves with their own deadly slowness. All they did was give you time to notice just how bad they were; Zombies On Broadway just zipped right along like it was trying to outrace a mildly irritated audience's attention span, and mostly succeeded.

Also, incredibly low-grade but effective creepifying effects (big glassy fake eyes pasted over the zombie actors' entire eye socket cavity, giving them horrid bulging glazed expressions, made considerably worse when one of them smiled an idiotic smile that looked unspeakably wrong with the fake eyes). And two tiki bars! And a monkey! eta: And, best of all, a swanky NYC nightclub crowd swellegantly rioting with the immortal chant, "WE WANT A ZOMMMM-BIE! WE WANT A ZOMMM-BIE!"

Really not in any way, shape or form a good movie, but thoroughly satisfying.