![]() It was a rout as complete as Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow – a triumph, the best time I’d ever had at the movies. He made it about halfway before fleeing to the lobby from the gauntlet of jubilant boys reaching out from their seats to pummel him with their tiny fists. The usher had clearly been instructed to go up one aisle and back down the other, making vague boogity-boogity gestures with his arms. Within an instant, the air was filled with 300 plastic oranges aimed directly at his head. Or, rather, an underpaid teenage usher who had been handed a cheap latex Mummy suit and told to get into it, go out there, and scare the kids. And where were the live monsters? Three hundred small natives began to get restless until a poorly shot chase scene toward the end, at which point the curtain at stage left parted and out stepped the Mummy. #THE HANGOVER JUSTSTREAM MOVIE#The movie was a no-budget Bowery Boys rip-off called “ The Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Monsters ” (1968), and it is now considered a trash classic by connoisseurs of psychotronic cinema, but back then we just knew it was awful. I and 300 other kids – mostly boys with whiffle-cuts identical to my own – filed in, and because it was a hot August day and the A/C was on the blink, we were all slurping cold, carcinogenic orange soda out of those plastic fake oranges with straws sticking out of the top. I have a later memory of going to Brookline’s Coolidge Corner Theatre (back when it was still a neighborhood dump rather than the indie jewel it is today), drawn by a newspaper ad that promised “Fright Show! Monsters in Person! Goes Into Audience to Get You!” I do remember a climactic fight scene between villainous Eli Wallach and romantic lead Peter McEnery in a tiny motorboat weaving among the rocks of a nighttime cove that had me standing up in the theater screaming “LOOK OUT!” until my mortified sisters dragged me down and tried to suffocate me. It also features the final Hollywood appearance of legendary silent-era vamp Pola Negri, playing a haughty dowager. Mills was 18 by now, and “The Moon-Spinners” gives the actress her first screen kiss as an English girl dealing with jewel thieves during a visit to picturesque Crete. My older sisters wanted to go and seven-year-old me got to tag along the movie was Disney’s attempt to fashion a more mature vehicle for the former child star of “Pollyana” (1960) and “The Parent Trap” (1961). Possibly the earliest summer-movie experience I can recall is going to see “ The Moon-Spinners ,” a 1964 Hayley Mills adventure mystery, at an old Main Street movie house on Cape Cod. Mine are many, from childhood, adolescence, and beyond. ![]()
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