**** 38 ****

   It happened. It came and went and pretty much nothing fell off, broke down or started flashing its “Maintenance Required” light at me. Just about one week ago I turned 38.

 

   It was a pretty good three days. I took the time off from work to do some things so my actual birthday was fairly relaxed. I had a nice lunch with my parents, wife and 16 month old clone, I opened a few gifts and I finished out the course needed to make me legally able to hunt in Virginia. Kind of a big goal to get back into hunting. Have you seen the coast of quality meat these days?

 

   Since no one cares about the grey hairs, aches, pains and assorted issues that come with aging yet another year and taking yet another proverbial step towards geezerhood; I’ll just jump to the stash!

 

   Basically, I’m set for late night DVD watching for about a month. Well, it would have been a month once. Nowadays, thanks to the unreasonable woman I married thinking that or child will be scarred for life if he sees quality horror films before freaking 8 years of age, I may have about a years worth of viewing pleasure. But anyhow…

 

    One film that I can watch with Ian in the room is a cool ass war film called Tae Guk Gi. Buy this film. On to the horror stuff.

 

   My slightly early gift was the complete Nightmare on Elm Streets series in a metal embossed box with collectable bonuses. It’s even got 3-D glasses. After that came a flood of really nice DVD collections containing some great, some not so great and some so bad they’re good films in them. Werewolves, Vampires & Zombies (10 movies on 3 DVDs) is over 13 hours of schlock horror that should keep me quite happy for a long time.

 

   I got a very nice 2 disc Paul Naschy collection containing Curse of the Devil and Werewolf Shadow AKA Werewolf VS the Vampire Woman. The thing that sets this set apart from others is that they have the original Castilian soundtrack with English subtitles as a viewing option. That’s a pretty cool deal since both films were actually fairly well done but kinda killed by bad dubbing for American distribution.

 

   Bloodsucking Cinema is a nice little Starz documentary that I saw some time ago and is now on DVD. Nice little doc about the origin and evolution of the vampire movie. Not definitive, but very nice nonetheless. Got a nice 20 movie pack called Vampires & More from up north that covers films ranging form the 1922 Nosferatu to Oasis of the Zombies. Included in the rescue parcel was also an awesome Hammer Films double feature that included Countess Dracula and The Vampire Lovers.

 

   Count Yorga, Vampire followed up the rear just in time to save me from the pain and anguish of living with the death of my old VHS copy recorded off of the USA channel. That rescue came along with the historically important double feature of Count Dracula’s Great Love and Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks. I say they’re “historically important” because they’re from Elvira’s Movie Macabre series. One day when Ian is old enough, he to can learn of the amazing assets she had to contribute to horror history.

 

   One thing that showed up that my wife will actually let me watch with Ian in the room is 1955’s The Complete Adventures of Robin Hood Season One. Not a bad version of Robin Hood if you’ve never seen it. It’s the one with Richard Greene as Robin Hood. And lastly on the DVD list was Dragon Dynasty’s The 36th Chamber of Shaolin. A great film that I would recommend to anyone out there. Oh, and there was also the Carson Christmas DVD.

 

   My in-laws are flipping the bill for my hunting license this year as well, so I’ll be killing Bambi maybe as soon as the end of the month. I just have to hook up with the G-Man and set up a good day.

 

   So, yeah, much movie greatness this year. Still doesn’t help with the whole feeling of geezerhood thing though…