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Cenobite Me
Aug. 18th, 2019 08:47 pmThis past weekend was the Monster-Mania Convention in Cherry Hill. Beth and I go to these regularly. For the first few, we went on all three days; but after a while they started only really having events on Saturdays, so there isn't a lot of point to going to the other days. For us, that is; other people go in order to meet celebrities and get autographs, and I'm sure that's the bigger money-maker for the convention. The night before, we stopped at Red Lobster on the way down from Brooklyn. I don't think either of us had eaten there in two years or so. It's still good, but not good enough to go there that often. She tried a Crabfest special, while I stuck with shrimp. On Saturday, we drove to the convention, and fortunately they have a dedicated parking space aside from the one at the hotel itself, which fills up really quickly. This time, they reduced the length of the daytime panels from an hour (well, generally less than that, really) to a half hour each. It moved things along quickly, but there were some guests I might have liked to hear from a bit more. The first panel was with Shawnee Smith, who was in the original Saw movies. Then came Beverly D'Angelo, who had some interesting stories.
When someone asked about her appearance on The Simpsons as Lurleen Lumpkin, she mentioned that she wrote "Bagged Me a Homer" and never signed over the rights, so she continued to get residuals for it. She sang much of it, too. She also discussed how she lived near Frank Zappa, and she met Matt Groening through him. His house was since bought by Lady Gaga, and there are always a lot of cars outside. Next was Kathy Najimy, who mentioned having been a big fan of Bette Midler some time before starring in Hocus Pocus with her. (That's a movie I still haven't seen. Beth saw it at the theater with her uncle.)
She also talked about how Peggy Hill's interest in Boggle came from her, and the character's bad Spanish was how a lot of Americans in California spoke the language. The last of the daytime panels was Devon Sawa, and I didn't know much about him, although I did see the original Final Destination some time ago.
After a fairly long wait, here were two later, hour-long panels, the first being several of the actors who played Cenobites in the Hellraiser movies: Barbie Wilde, Nicholas Vince, Simon Bamberg, and Doug Bradley. Clive Barker also showed up for part of it, although he left early.
He and Doug knew each other from way back when they both lived in Liverpool. Doug addressed the story about how he was offered the part of either Pinhead or the mattress delivery man, which is technically true, but it was always intended that he play Pinhead. There was just a moment where he thought maybe he should take a role where you could see his face. Some other discussion involved how there might have been more to the story of the second film if they hadn't run out of money. The final session was with Robert Englund, who talked about how he wouldn't necessarily mind playing Freddy Krueger again, but knew he couldn't do it for much longer, and thought they should go with someone younger.
He said he'd heard a rumor about Kevin Bacon taking the part (or maybe that was just Robert's own suggestion; I can't recall for sure), but as a guy mentioned afterwards, Bacon is only eleven years younger. I wouldn't be surprised if they do make another remake at some point, although the 2010 one with Jackie Earle Haley as Freddy got bad reviews (and deservedly so, in my opinion). I should mention that we saw someone dressed as Falkor from The Neverending Story, not really horror-related, but a great costume.
Dave Hagan, who runs the convention, said that next year he wants to try having a sort of spin-off highlighting other pop culture, because he's had guests who were interested in attending but didn't fit the theme, not that I'm entirely sure what Beverly D'Angelo has to do with horror. Dave also wrote a novel, which I bought for Beth. Our tradition is to eat at Friendly's afterwards, although we go there quite often when we visit New Jersey anyway.
Today, we went to a birthday party for Beth's young cousins before returning to Brooklyn. They have four dogs there, and they all want to be around her uncle Harry, even though two of them technically aren't his dogs.
Now we're back home again. We don't like to leave for long, because the cats like to have people around. I understand yesterday was Black Cat Appreciation Day, and we weren't even around ours.
When someone asked about her appearance on The Simpsons as Lurleen Lumpkin, she mentioned that she wrote "Bagged Me a Homer" and never signed over the rights, so she continued to get residuals for it. She sang much of it, too. She also discussed how she lived near Frank Zappa, and she met Matt Groening through him. His house was since bought by Lady Gaga, and there are always a lot of cars outside. Next was Kathy Najimy, who mentioned having been a big fan of Bette Midler some time before starring in Hocus Pocus with her. (That's a movie I still haven't seen. Beth saw it at the theater with her uncle.)
She also talked about how Peggy Hill's interest in Boggle came from her, and the character's bad Spanish was how a lot of Americans in California spoke the language. The last of the daytime panels was Devon Sawa, and I didn't know much about him, although I did see the original Final Destination some time ago.
After a fairly long wait, here were two later, hour-long panels, the first being several of the actors who played Cenobites in the Hellraiser movies: Barbie Wilde, Nicholas Vince, Simon Bamberg, and Doug Bradley. Clive Barker also showed up for part of it, although he left early.
He and Doug knew each other from way back when they both lived in Liverpool. Doug addressed the story about how he was offered the part of either Pinhead or the mattress delivery man, which is technically true, but it was always intended that he play Pinhead. There was just a moment where he thought maybe he should take a role where you could see his face. Some other discussion involved how there might have been more to the story of the second film if they hadn't run out of money. The final session was with Robert Englund, who talked about how he wouldn't necessarily mind playing Freddy Krueger again, but knew he couldn't do it for much longer, and thought they should go with someone younger.
He said he'd heard a rumor about Kevin Bacon taking the part (or maybe that was just Robert's own suggestion; I can't recall for sure), but as a guy mentioned afterwards, Bacon is only eleven years younger. I wouldn't be surprised if they do make another remake at some point, although the 2010 one with Jackie Earle Haley as Freddy got bad reviews (and deservedly so, in my opinion). I should mention that we saw someone dressed as Falkor from The Neverending Story, not really horror-related, but a great costume.
Dave Hagan, who runs the convention, said that next year he wants to try having a sort of spin-off highlighting other pop culture, because he's had guests who were interested in attending but didn't fit the theme, not that I'm entirely sure what Beverly D'Angelo has to do with horror. Dave also wrote a novel, which I bought for Beth. Our tradition is to eat at Friendly's afterwards, although we go there quite often when we visit New Jersey anyway.
Today, we went to a birthday party for Beth's young cousins before returning to Brooklyn. They have four dogs there, and they all want to be around her uncle Harry, even though two of them technically aren't his dogs.
Now we're back home again. We don't like to leave for long, because the cats like to have people around. I understand yesterday was Black Cat Appreciation Day, and we weren't even around ours.
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