True Life 42nd Street Adventures: I Really Saw This Double Feature
Youngman McBeardo, age 19, actually did take in this one-two punch of late grindhouse-era semi-greatness right here at 42nd Street’s perpetually mourned Harris Theater.
Thanks be to whoever took the Harris marquee photo, and to the great Popcorn & Sticky Floors blog for posting it.
I wish I could claim that I also ate at Tad’s Steaks that same day, but I opted for World’s Shittiest Pizza (or whatever it was called) up by the southwest corner of Seventh Avenue.
It was early January 1988. I had just put my 17-year-old girlfriend on a bus back to her upstate New York boarding school and I had no place to be. Ever.
There was a least a week left before Mom and Pops McBeardo had to know that I was asked by the State University for which they were paying not to return for a fourth semester (my final GPA: 0.74), and I had a few Christmas bucks in my scissored-up Levi 501s, and a double feature on the Deuce beckoned.
It would just be movies, too, because it was 10am and this was a solid year before I got hip to the daytime alcohol scene, so I hadn’t worked up sufficient nerve to hit a bar and/or peep show (this would change, I assure you).
The joy of 42nd Street theaters in those (way) pre-Internet, (still) sporadically-released Gore Gazette days came in picking movies you had never heard of anywhere, and plopping down the $3 bucks to see whatever was showing, willy-nilly.
That morning, the amazingly quick-to-be-produced Lethal Weapon rip-off The Wild Pair (1987) presented one option with Bubba Smith, Beau Bridges, and Lloyd Bridges. Beau even directed! I can’t remember the co-feature, but my mood was more horror-attuned (all the time, back then) so I passed.
Blood Diner (1987) had played in the Village as a midnight movie (during the execrable era of Psychos in Love and Killer Nerd), and I skipped it, fearing cheap, Troma-esque horror spoofery, but the inexplicable ellipses in the title Thou Shalt Not Kill … Except (1985), along with its angelic hippie-skull poster, proved irresistible.
I loaded up on cans of Diet Coke from a head shop, bought a ticket, ordered a concession-stand wiener (I remain the only Caucasian I’ve ever met who dared to consume Deuce Dogs), and settled in for the show.
And I pretty much don’t remember the movies, at least not in any detail. Nor have I seen either one since. Plus the crowd behaved in a (mostly) human manner. I guess it really was early.
Blood Diner, as I recall, kind of lived down to what I dreaded, but it boasted enough tits, gore, and surprise Blood Feast allusions to occasionally charm.
Thou Shalt Not Kill … Except also sopped the screen with plasma and I recall marveling that something so toilet-budget cheap could still get released (even in’88), but that’s it.
Since then, of course, I’ve learned of the movie’s Sam Raimi-Bruce Campbell connections, and it’s come (and gone) in a deluxe DVD as Stryker’s War, but I’ve never wanted to revisit it.
It was a bad time for me. The girl I put on the bus I had met just a few weeks earlier at a Ramones show. She was one of two broads I had even kissed at that point and she made my record two-for-two when it came to dating psychotic abuse survivors whose main therapeutic mechanism seemed to be relentlessly detailing the myriad ways in which I repulsed all who were cursed to look upon me. 
So I thought a lot about her during the movies. And the looming college expulsion. And my acne and flabby physique and utter inability to ever do the cool thing and all the other qualities the young lady on the bus reminded me of all the time, most recently during the subway ride from my parents house in Brooklyn to the Port Authority.
Then it was time to leave and I ended up blowing the rest of my holiday loot at Peepland after all. I remained too scared to face the Live! Nude! Girls! one flight below, so I sat in a video booth, feeding it shiny tokens. With one hand.
The feature there starred two girls who could not possibly insult me because they only spoke German. And they were only interested in each other. And urine.
And the details of that motion picture presentation, I remember with microscopic clarity. Care to hear about them?
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Comments ( 3 )
Top-notch writing, McB. Never ate 42nd Street wieners, but in between movies on the Deuce I used to devour the dog-food tacos at a Times Square eatery called King’s. I half-remember hearing that “Blood Diner” was conceived as a sequel to “Blood Feast”… maybe as reported by the Gore Gazette?
The German movie at Peepland deserves its own entry. Keep the confessionals coming!
David Sullivan said at
May 14 09 at
4:52 pm
Thanks, DS.
Mexican food was an actual rarity in New York until the mid-to-late 90s, and some survival sense prevented me from trying it for the first time on the Deuce.
One of the foulest things I ever half-ate was a fish sandwich from the famous Barking Fish luncheonette on the northeast corner of 42nd & 8th.
My favorite Deuce meal was always shishkebob from the cart parked outside Show World.
Going back through my GORE GAZETTES, there was a definite “official” connection between BLOOD FEAST and BLOOD DINER, at least at some point. Keen eye there, sir.
mcbeardo said at
May 15 09 at
12:20 pm
Ha, ha, ha! All right. Freaky movies! Gross. I remember smokin’ doobies at the midnight movie… peein’ on the floor… coppin’ a feel off Shirley Willenhammer while wearin’ my coonskin cap and my letterman jacket… ha, ha, ha! But seriously, why not write about some more respectable movies too, like the works of Mr. Stanley Kubrick (ever heard of him)? I mean, “Blood Diner” just sounds like some kind of who-can-make-the-biggest-mess-on-the-bathroom-mirror flick. Anyway, great site.
Chicky said at
May 22 09 at
3:17 pm
