Filmby Shane “Umbrella To The Eyeball” Hnetka

While working on my daily October blog column 31 Days of Horror (this year’s theme: “Space: The Spooky Frontier”), I came to a conclusion. The space-horror genre is responsible for a LOT of bad movies. Horror in general has a lot of crap, but take those scary situations and characters, load them into a rocket and blast it into orbit, and look out.

For example: Dracula 3000. Dracula feeds on people in space, while human jawline Casper Van Dien plays Van Helsing.

Erika Eleniak and Coolio co-star.

I rest my case.

DEATH BY UMBRELLA

What do lawnmowers, hearing-aids, tires, hot-tubs, flying unicorn statues and umbrellas have in common? They’ve all been used to kill people in horror movies. Writers Christopher Lombardo and Jeff Kirschner compiled 100 of the weirdest murder weapons for their book Death By Umbrella! The 100 Weirdest Horror Movie Weapons.

The book is broken into seven chapters with various themes. Chapter one is “Around the Home” (ladders, tricycles, toilet plungers) while chapter five is “Artistic Deaths” (books, harmonicas, porcelain penis sculptures).

There’s even special mention of the shape-shifting car from Super Hybrid, a little horror movie set in Chicago but shot in Regina.

The writers admit that a few of the films are crap but the focus is on weird weapons and that makes for a pretty entertaining read.

As for the titular umbrella? It’s killed at least twice: once in Silent Night, Deadly Night 2 and again in Stitches. Talk about a double bill.

POPCORN COSTS HOW MUCH?!?

Cineplex theatres just raised ticket prices across Canada. Here in Saskatchewan everything has gone up 50 cents. A standard admission is now $12.50 and 3-D tickets went from $14.99 to $15.50.

Cineplex says the reason for the hike is an increase to the minimum wage in many provinces.

With everything theatre companies have to legitimately complain about — movie studios charging more, competition from streaming services, etc., it’s having to pay some kid $10.72 an hour instead of $9.50 that leads to a ticket price increase. A little ungrateful, perhaps, since minimum wage hikes put more money into the pockets of people who are more likely to spend that money on Cineplex tickets — and $10 popcorns and colas — than, say, Caribbean vacations or a second SUV.

Shane Hnetka is a Saskatchewan film and comic book nerd. Follow his Halloween movie blog column Space: The Spooky Frontier every day at prairiedogmag.com.