Boo! at the box office

According to this story, the Friday night Halloween holiday dampened the weekend box office.

Maybe. We might also consider that most of the stuff released in the last couple of weeks is swill no one wants to see. And in some cases, recycled swill no one wants to see. High School Musical 3 and Saw V, I'm talking to you. I hope I got those sequel numbers right, but truthfully, if I didn't, who would notice? Sure, it would be great to think that the world's karma is burdened by only three Saw movies, but the downside is that it would mean there have been five High School Musicals. And you know what it means if you're still in high school after five years. You're a teacher and no one wants to make a musical about you. Putting up With Snotty Little Know-It-Alls and Their Enabling Parents in Order to Make a Difference in the Lives of a Handful of Decent Kids is just not going to get good buzz.

The last time Halloween kept viewers from the box office, as I remember, was when it was re-made by Rob Zombie, who insists on trying to convince people he's a worse movie-maker than he is a musician (Hint: It's a tie). Well, it kept me away from the box-office, anyway.

Seriously -- the two major new releases were a blink-and-you-miss-it horror film called The Haunting of Molly Hartley and a film whose existence subtracts gray-matter cells from the earth quicker than brain-eating zombies, Zack and Miri Make a (Word I Won't Use Because I Don't Want to Show up on Those Google Searches). Zack and Miri is rated R, which in my way of thinking means that it wouldn't be doing boffo biz with the trick-or-treat set anyway. Maybe it opened worse than The Love Guru (according to Box Office Mojo) because it stunk and everyone except the "OMG! Clerks is the best film since someone ever had the idea of celluloid and Kevin Smith is awesome and dude, that movie is my life!" crowd didn't want to spend 102 minutes watching a remake of The Sure Thing with 100% more crudeness and 100% less John Cusack? Just a thought.

As for the PG-13 Molly Hartley (and the rest of the motley crew onscreen this week), how hard a decision is this: Walk around the neighborhood and score free candy or head off to the cineplex where you pay twice your monthly allowance for a box of same that's half air and a small drink?

Anyway, the new Bond film opens in a couple of weeks, which should be enough to drag my behind into the theater again.