Paramount Theatre
You So Crazy!
It's good to know that less than 24 hours after all hell broke loose, weather-wise, Austin's weirdness remains at an all time high, cinematically, at least. Seriously: Last night we watched a clearly messed-with and un-nice Mother Nature uproot a three-story oak not 15 feet from our living room window while hail the size and density of Idaho very nearly punched holes clean through our ceiling. And tonight? Tonight we get to watch a hickoid necrophile with a serious case of the Oedipals deconstruct femininity and the mother-son relationship in an entirely non-theoretical fashion. Not literally, of course, although we're pretty sure that could be arranged via a quick trip to either Elysium or Bastrop. Nah, we're talking about the Alamo Ritz's Terror Thursday screening of Jeff Gillen and Alan Ormsby's 1974 Ed Gein-inspired psychobilly freakout Deranged.
Ormsby owns a special place in our heart. He scripted Bob "A Christmas Story" Clark's 1972 zombies-versus-pretentious-hippies-in-vertically-striped-flares epic, Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things, which was the first drive-in movie we ever saw in an actual drive-in, back when speaker posts (and flares) were all the rage. We were all of ten years old when some seriously misguided and/or sadistic relatives took us the re-release and thereby insured our future in horror film geekery. Needless to say, we've dug hell out of zombies and flares ever since (funny how they both keep coming back, isn't it?), although at the time we're pretty sure we ended up cowering in the back seat, shrieking like a ten year old. Go figure.