Amok! Amok! Amok!

Witch Please: Hocus Pocus / Teen Witch
Mahoning Drive-In Theater - Lehighton, PA
On Saturday night, the Mahoning hosted their annual family friendly Halloween event with a double feature of holiday classics from my childhood.

Show banner and poster designed by Andrew Kern

Show t-shirt designed by Tom Bifulco

Witch Please was about more than just the movies.  The gates opened at 4:00 pm for a spooky vendor market on the lawn under the big screen and around the concession building.  We picked up a couple of very nice Longaberger baskets from our friend and Mahoning projectionist Rob, and I managed to find this treasure at a very good price.

Warlords is an arcade game from 1980 that was ported to the Atari 2600 the following year.  It's a multi-player Pong style game in which each player takes control of a castle at one of the four corners of the screen.  The castle is represented in the game as a wall of bricks similar to what you'd find in a game like Breakout or Arkanoid.  Your king is protected inside this wall, and the character you control is a shield-shaped Pong paddle that can travel outside the perimeter of the wall.  When the game begins, a ball is released into the playing field.  The object is to use your shield to keep the ball from breaking the bricks of your castle, while at the same time hitting the ball toward your opponents castles.  The winner is the player who survives as the last person whose king hasn't been hit by the ball.  It's a very simple game, but it's a hell of a lot of fun and it still holds up over 40 years after its release.

The main vendor of the night was The Big Kid Store, which once again hosted an awesome scavenger hunt.  Everyone was welcome to play, but our group left this one to the kids because we were busy manning our cars to give out candy and rubber duckies for trunk-or-treat.

 

There was also a costume contest.  I was going to come dressed as a werewolf, but the costume is lost somewhere in the labyrinth of boxes that is my garage.  I have a costume specifically for this season, but that has to wait until next weekend because it's a two-person act and my partner-in-crime Ben was not able to make it out to the lot last night.

There was also a pumpkin carving contest and a Halloween Egg Hunt on the lawn about 20 minutes before the start of Hocus Pocus.  It wasn't really a hunt, but a mad dash to collect as many of the prize-filled eggs as possible on the count of three.  The kids all looked like they had a hell of a lot of fun... especially my friend Tom, who I think it's fair to say was the biggest kid in the hunt.  He signed up under the condition that I capture it on video, and the results are now my favorite piece of footage that I ever captured on the lot.  This tops Mr. Nasty singing church hymns to a group of largely inebriated folks at VHS Fest.  The boy that he is repeatedly egg-blocking throughout the hunt is his son, Jackson.

I didn't take any video of the costume contest this year, but it was a lot of fun with a lot of creative costumes from children and adults.  My favorites were the boy or girl who came dressed up as Ultraman complete with light-up eyes, and the girl who dressed as a Hollywood Video clerk.

 

There was a Speedy Gonzales cartoons screened on 35mm prior to each of the films in last night's double feature.  Both were brought to the lot by a collector of vintage 35mm cartoons who often shares his collection with the Mahoning.  We saw both of these last year when they were shown on Night Two of Universal Monster Mash, and we both enjoyed them every bit as much the second time around.

The one that played before Hocus Pocus was the 1958 Robert McKimson short Tortilla Flaps.  It's one of the few Speedy Gonzales cartoons that I can recall that don't feature Daffy Duck or Sylvester The Cat as the antagonist.  This one instead features a bird named Señor Vulturo, who only appears in two Loony Tunes shorts throughout its entire history.  The vulture swoops down on a community of mice who are having a Cinco de Mayo festival in the hopes of making some of them his dinner, but he is thwarted by the fastest mouse in all of Mexico and is turned into one of their carnival games by the end of the cartoon.

The first feature-length film of Witch Please was the 1993 Disney Halloween comedy Hocus Pocus.  I would have bet money that I had seen this at the Mahoning, but this was my first time seeing it at the drive-in and my first time seeing it on 35mm.  What had me confused was the fact that my local Regal Cinema screened it during Fall 2020 when they briefly re-opened the theater during the Covid-19 pandemic.

I think this is my favorite family-friendly Halloween flick.  It's a fun story with a lot of laughs, and undoubtedly my favorite performances from Bette Midler and Sarah Jessica Parker.  It's become an annual tradition to watch it in October since I saw it for the first time when I was a teenager, and it never fails to bring a smile to my face every time that I see it.

The Speedy Gonzales cartoon that was screened prior to Teen Witch was the 1959 Friz Freleng short, Here Today, Gone Tamale.  This one features Sylvester the Cat, who has been hired by a cargo ship to protect all of its cheese from a group of very hungry mice.  Naturally, our hero is able to get past the despicable cat and bring plenty of cheese to his friends.  After Sylvester gets tired of suffering for his efforts to stop Speedy, he adopts an "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" mindset and begins dancing with the cheese-munching mice.

The second half of last night's double feature was the 1989 high school comedy Teen Witch.  I know that I had watched this once before, or had at least seen part of it, but I didn't remember if I enjoyed it or anything about the plot other than what is obvious from its poster and title.  Having now watched it on the big screen from beginning to end, and having watched quite a few 80's movies in my life, I am prepared to unequivocally state that Teen Witch is the single cheesiest movie to ever come out of the 1980's.  The cheerleader's locker room song, and Polly's "Top That" rap to the boy that she likes are reasons enough to give it that title, but those are just the gourmet servings of fromage that this film has to offer.

Teen Witch stars Robyn Lively (the love interest in The Karate Kid: Part III) as Louise Miller, an awkward young girl who is tutored in witchcraft by Zelda Rubinstein (the medium that helps bring Carol Anne back in Poltergeist).  The cast also includes Dick Sargent (the second Darrin Stephens from Bewitched) as Louise's father, and Joshua John Miller, who made his film debut as Tom Atkins son in Halloween III, as her younger brother.

The plot follows Louise, who learns witchcraft and uses spells to become popular in her school and to date the quarterback of the football team.  It follows every trope that you're imagining from that description, complete with the after-school special worthy moral at the end.  I know that sounds cheesy, but trust me, whatever amount of cheese you're imagining this to have is not nearly enough.  I'm talking Olympic swimming pool amounts of liquid nacho flowing from a cheap gas station dispenser the size of a dump truck.

You can stream Teen Witch for free on Tubi, Pluto, and The Roku Channel, and it's a hell of a lot of fun to watch if you can handle the Fremdschämen.  Just know what you're getting yourself into.  If you can work a drinking game into the experience somehow, all the better.

And that's a wrap on Witch Please!