"The horror! The horror!"

Yeah, yeah, so I finally got a DVR a little over a month ago. I put it off for a long time because I find it hard to commit to television shows, so why would I bother to record anything?

I don't just sit and watch TV, I'm on the computer and the TV is on. Shows will come on and I'll watch them and just love them love them love them for a few weeks, and then I forget they're on and the next thing I know it's season 3 and I just don't care!

An admittance though....I actually do sit quietly, staring at the TV, when Who Do You Think You Are is on. Except when the commercials come on of course! I DVR it, but I like watching it when it's actually playing for the first time.

So even then I wasn't quite sure why I'd gone and gotten the DVR, if I really love it, I watch it, and for the 99.999999% of programming, I just really don't care, if I stumble across it, I'll watch it.

BUT THEN!

I starting setting up some searches looking for movies/shows that had certain actors and directors.

My first one?

Vincent Price.

It's true, I've loved him all my life I think. Sometime around the age of 6-7 I discovered the magic of old horror movies. They had a Creature Double Feature which I believe was on Channel 48 here in the Philadelphia area on Saturday afternoons.

Yes, you spoiled young whippersnappers out there, I grew up with 7 channels! SEVEN! 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-done!!!!! You had the main networks, 3, 6 and 10 (NBC, ABC and CBS), Channel 12 (PBS), and then the UHF channels - here we had 17, 29 and 48. Eventually we had a channel 57 too, can you believe the choices! Then cable happened and my attention span went all to crap. Wait, what was I talking about?

Oh yeah! Channel 48 would show the Creature Double Feature - two truly horrible back-to-back horror movies. Vampire movies, mummy movies, werewolf movies, Frankenstein monster movies, those weird occult movies the Brits cranked out in the late 60s, early 70s. I loved them all. Except the alien movies. Those 50s alien movies just never really did it for me. The 1950s loved worrying about how man would be the cause of his own annihilation what with atom bombs making giant ants and things from outer space and all that. Eh.

Give me a haunted mansion on a seaside cliff with a days long thunder and lightning storm, slamming doors, creaking floors....I LOVE IT!

And Vincent Price was one of my favorites! I think every Edgar Allen Poe story put to film starred Vincent Price (even if the title was the only thing the story and movie had in common).

And now, I get to search for him in upcoming movies! I already have like 4 saved up. And guess who tends to play them? Early morning hours on good old channel 17. Thanks Channel 17!!!

You might think a channel like, oh, say, the Sci-Fi Channel might play cool stuff like that? Oh no, they are too busy showing wrestling shows. Go figure. Oops, sorry, that's the "Syfy" channel now. They changed it. Why? My guess is because you can't copyright "Sci-Fi". But maybe I'm jaded. Or right. Either one! :-D

So now I have awesome searches saved in my DVR like Vincent Price (of course!), Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff and so on.

I'll be re-living my childhood!!

My poor mom never did understand why I wanted to watch these movies and I think she was always on the verge of prohibiting it - but I never had nightmares or anything..except for once.

I had watched one of those stupid alien 1950s movies (why? Because there were only SEVEN channels people!! What else was i supposed to watch? 60 Minutes???

[Oh, and that's a story for another day - 60 Minutes and the Walt Disney show were on opposite each other on sunday nights and can you believe it, my father would actually sometimes make us watch 60 Minutes? Dad??? What the hell?]) - see it's another tangent, a symptom of my non-existent attention span.

So I watched one of those alien movies, and they were like a huge blob with feet and a dish-sized eyeball in the middle of their blobbiness and at some point some flailing human poked the eye of an alien and I was totally grossed out. Blech! And that night I dreamt there were 2 of those big-eyed aliens under my bed.

But I swear Mom, that was the only time! And it was an alien movie which I don't watch much of anyway....

Except of course for Alien, Aliens and Alien:Resurrection (you can just dump Aliens 3, even my generous nature doesn't bother watching it when it comes on). I've said it before and I'll say it again....Aliens is one of the best movies EVER. Bill Paxton should have won an Oscar. He was robbed.

But except for those, no alien movies.

So yes, I am very glad I finally gave in and went through the effort of getting a DVR installed. Now on some upcoming weekend I can get a snack and watch my own creature-double feature. I can't wait!!!