DOUBLE FEATURE

Hooray! Let the Halloween Weekend creepy movies begin! Last night we watched two old movies that had similar plots. Each had identical twins and each had a humongo dog--ones that were the size of small elephants--that could tell the twins apart. How's that for scary?

The first movie was 1964's DEAD RINGER starring Bette Davis. Any movie with ONE Bette Davis is usually a kick in the pants, so you can imagine how much fun it was to have TWO Bettes on screen. The poor twin killed the rich twin but made the death look like the poor twin committed suicide. Got that? The poor twin then pretended to be the rich twin, oh, the evils of jealousy, but then she found out that pulling off the ruse wasn't going to be so easy. The newly-dead rich twin disliked cigarettes, but the poor twin was a chain smoker. The rich twin hated her late husband's humongo dog, but the poor twin thinks Duke is delightful. Then, big uh-oh, she finds out that her rich twin had plotted the murder of her husband with her loverboy, Burt Lancaster. Damn! How is she gonna get out of this mess? If only she could go back to being poor, running her seedy bar, and dating that schmuck Karl Malden, who was much more of a gentleman than Burt!

The second movie was a 1935 Boris Karloff treat called THE BLACK ROOM, an 1800s period piece with good baron/bad baron twins. There's a family curse that one twin will kill the other in, what else, the castle's black room...so the black room is sealed when they are born...except the adult bad baron later unseals it, where he dumps his enemies in a spikey pit he's concocted. He wants to marry a sweet young thing, Thea, but she has the hots for someone else. In fact, no one in the village likes the bad baron and he doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of winning her love. So what's a villain going to do? He kills the good twin, assumes his identity, tricks Thea into marrying him, and right when the minister asks the church crowd if there is anyone who objects to the marriage--and I'm not making this up--the humongo dog comes galloping up to the altar to rip a chunk out of the bad baron. The fiend then takes off and hides in the black room, but guess who follows him? The humongo dog, of course! It pushes the bad twin into the spikey pit. The end.

Wow! We are off to a fabulously campy start with our Halloween Weekend movie viewing. I hope to watch many more creepy classics in the days to come. But you can bet that no dogs are invited! Especially humongo ones.