Movie Night: Watcher in the Woods

Last night Liz and Bart came over to see Watcher in the Woods. It's a Disney movie and it's supposed to be scary, but really it's mostly just perplexing (I'll try to give a summary in just a sec). The whole idea for this shindig started when LL's brother Lawson alerted the rest of the Box family that there was a DVD version of the movie available AND it had an alternate ending involving aliens. Apparently they used to watch this when they were kids. He also said the movie wasn't as scary as it was when they were five.

So...the movie is about this family that moves into a creepy house in rural England. There are two daughters. The older one keeps seeing visions of a blindfolded girl, and the younger one frequently channels some otherworldly spirit and write things backwards on mirrors. She's a lot like the little kid in The Shining. Eventually, they decide that they need to solve the mystery of what happened to the blindfolded girl, which involves rounding up three of blindfoldilocks's childhood friends from 30 years ago and reenacting a seance. It generates a lot of wind and some flashes of light and shatters some windows, but the girl is rescued and reunites with her mom. She hadn't aged at all because she was frozen in another dimension. In the alternate endings, the ultimate outcome isn't any different, but they expand on the rescuing mechanism and actually show this dopey puppet-alien-skeleton-thing take the older daughter to the other dimension where she pulls blindfold-girl out of a 1980's computer graphics festival.

Anyway, we made chili and put out a vegetable platter (I got a new knife for Christmas, so I'm intent on chopping as many things as possible. For the platter, the knife got its first taste of beets and jicama! Very exciting). We also made gingerbread for dessert, and Liz and Bart brought over some cornbread. Yum!

First, here's the vegetable platter and the DVD box. Scary, isn't it? It's actually Betty Davis in the er...twilight of her career. She has terrible wispy hair that sticks straight out in all directions, except in the alternate endings where it is nicely styled.

Oh yeah...So when we were in Roswell (during our cross-country drive at Christmas), LL bought herself a little blue alien t-shirt, and I didn't get one. BUT, it turns out (unbeknownst to us) that my brother drove through Roswell that same day and bought me a souvenir and gave it to me for Christmas. So now we have the option of theming out when we watch movies involving alternate alien endings.

This is Bart at the end of the night. He's ready to go. They walked over in the rain (troopers).

And here's Liz, also getting ready to head home. We offered to let them take our car, but they opted to hoof it. They had umbrellas.

And, alas, here is what awaited me in the kitchen this morning. Booo. It's honestly not bad, plus we have leftover chili. In fact, I'm going to go find the leftover chili right now!