Dinner and a Movie with Moxie

  The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer (NES 1989) The first time I discovered this game would have been in the early 1990s, when my dad was married to a woman who collected NES games, at the time she helped me to build my Nintendo collection as well.  Sadly that original collection that I had as a kid I had gotten rid of over the years, which was something that I always regretted.  As an adult I have been working to rebuild my old NES collection, and one of the games that I knew I had to hunt down and re-add to my collection was The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer.  This game starts off with Tom Sawyer sleeping in class at school, and then we go into his dream where he must save Becky from Injun Joe.   The game takes the player through six levels, fighting a boss at the end of every level, until finally Tom gets to Injun Joe who is riding upon the back of a sea monster, and the player must beat him to save Becky.  In the two player mode, player two gets to play as Hu...

  Pete's Dragon (1977) The beautiful bold coastline of Maine with it's cliffs and lighthouses, and quaint fishing villages has long been an inspiration for the settings of films.  Though Pete's Dragon never outright states that it is set in Maine, there are plenty of hints that Maine is the setting for this musical adventure film.  The first hint is the name of the fictional town that the film is set in, Passamaquoddy, which is the name of a tribe of natives that inhabited North Eastern Maine, and New Brunswick, which is how the real life locations of Passamaquoddy Bay, and West Quoddy Lighthouse/State Park got their names.   So knowing that this film takes place in a small fishing village on the coast of Maine, and the village is named Passamaquoddy, and that there is a lighthouse located near this small fishing village would give hints to the real life location of this fictional village where young Pete and his dragon friend Elliot found their home.  As I...

  Porco Rosso (1992) Studio Ghibli is one of the most consistently great animation studios in the world of animation, almost all of their films are absolutely amazing.  Porco Rosso from 1992, is a bit of a lesser known classic from Studio Ghibli, directed by Hayao Miyazaki, and based on his 1989 watercolour manga, Hikotei Jidai ("The Age Of The Flying Boat").  The film tells the story of a WW1 ace fighter pilot from the Italian Air Force, who went rogue after the word and became an exile from his home country and turned to a life of freelance bounty hunting.   The pilot had been cursed to become an anthropomorphic pig.   Though he fights sky pirates, he isn't really a good guy, nor is he really a bad guy, he's just a pig, which he uses to explain his bad behavior at times.   However Madam Gina has never given up on the man that became the pig, and in her heart she bears only love for him, and then there is the young and talented aeroplane mec...

  Isle Of The Snake People (1971) aka: La Muerte Viviente Sadly at the end of his career, Boris Karloff was starring in some pretty bottom of the barrel films, which is so sad to see the great actor who played Frankenstein's monster and The Mummy in their first film appearances, playing sinking to the bottom.  Just before his death in 1969 he was filmed his part for 4 Mexican horror films, that have ultimately been mostly forgotten over the years.  One of those strange Mexican b-horror films was La Muerte Viviente, or Isle Of The Snake People in the US, or just Snake People in the UK.  This film sees Karloff starring as a rich plantation owner on a remote pacific island, and he dabbles in science and voodoo, and there is some voodoo cult that dance half-naked with snakes, and zombies and an evil dwarf...okay this film is just weird.  I think that Snake People attempts to be artsy, and almost psychedelic at times, but overall just really loses its direction. Isle...

  Black Sabbath (AKA: I Tre Volti Della Paura) (1963) In 1963 Italy's master of horror Mario Bava teamed up with horror film actor and legend Boris Karloff to create a low budget horror anthology, which would go on to fail, but also whose name would be used by one of the bands that created heavy metal music, Black Sabbath.   Black Sabbath is a horror anthology film comprised of three segments: The Drop Of Water; The Telephone; and The Wurdulak.  Depending on the version that you have of the film the order of the stories might be different.  Also if you have the Italian film, you have the better version of the film, as the American version was changed to suit the conservative tastes of American viewers.   The biggest changes were made to the segment The Telephone, which in the American version is the weakest of the stories.   In the original Italian version, there was a lesbian love subplot, and a subplot of prostitution, which were taboos tha...

  House On Haunted Hill (1959) From the mid 1950's-the mid 1970's b-horror film director William Castle became famous for the gimmicks that would accompany his films.  The 1959 classic House On Haunted Hill was one of these great films, the gimmick that was used in the film was called "Emergo" where the theaters showing the film were equipped with an elaborate pulley system, that at a certain point in the film a skeleton would appear above the crowd, scaring the audiences, and emerging them into the horror happening on screen in the film.  House On Haunted Hill was a campy horror film starring Vincent Price as a rich man who invites hand chosen guests to a "murder party" in a supposedly haunted house.  Anyone who survives the night he will reward with $10,000, though if they get too scared they are allowed to leave before midnight, and forfeit their $10,000.   But when when the houses ghosts are awaken, they end up getting locked in the house, and it seems ...

  The Bat (1959) In 1959, Mary Roberts Rinehart's 1908 novel The Circular Staircase had been adapted for the stage and screen four times.   The Bat in 1959 was the fourth adaptation of The Circular Staircase, and it starred Vincent Price.   At the time that The Bat was released, the film going public were in the atom age of giant monsters and invaders from outer space, so the film felt a little antiquated, and it wasn't well received by critics or viewers at the time, though in retrospect the film has been getting more love.  The Bat is a film about a banker who stole a million dollars from the bank that he works at, and hid it in his house, but then he is killed and the mysterious murderer The Bat tries to find the money, but the house where the money is hidden is being rented by a famous murder-mystery author.  Who is The Bat, and can he be stopped before the author and all of her friends are murdered off? The Bat was written and directed by Crane Wi...