Mystery Movie Marquees

Originally published September 8, 1995, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1138

If you look up the word “hectic” in the dictionary, you’ll see a picture of this past week.

In order to make my life simpler, I have a sort of “guest column” here by Corey Bond in Lake Charles, La. Corey was prompted by the column back in #1127, in which I pointed out the amusement of my local theater having two movie titles combined on the marquee, to wit: Die Hard Casper. And so Corey whipped up this sort of pseudo-BID column (pseudo in that it doesn’t run on anywhere near the length mine do) on the topic.

Ladies and gentlemen, guest columnist Corey Bond:

Mystery Movie Marquees

The summer blockbuster movie blitz is upon us again. As an avid moviegoer, I relish this time of year, and not just for the opportunity to behold Hollywood’s newest and most innovative explosions. Special effects aside, the summer movie season provides the best opportunities to spot what I like to call the Mystery Movie Marquee.

The Mystery Movie Marquee generally occurs when there are a number of films doing well at the box office, and theaters want to show more movies than they have screens. Their solution is to run two different movies on one screen, showing each one at different times of the day. They run into a problem when they don’t have the extra space available on the marquee to properly advertise the additional feature.

The inevitable compromise is to put part of each title in the one space allotted and assume the movie-going public can decipher the marquee by filling in the missing words themselves. My deranged mind, however, unfailingly runs the two partial titles together and then tries to make sense of the new conglomerate film.

For example, when the Oak Park Cinema 6 decided to run Surf Ninjas during the day for kids, and Sleepless in Seattle in the evenings for the grown-ups, the resulting marquee read Sleepless Surf Ninjas, and I decided that I had no sympathy for insomniac beach assassins. When Surf Ninjas left to be replaced by Undercover Blues, the result was the somehow redundant Sleepless Undercover.

Being an easily amused individual, I decided that I would begin to collect these fictitious films in a notebook. A friend of mine who has managed a few moviehouses helped me out with his personal favorite, Fievel Under the Stairs. Just what my imagination needed, a Wes Craven movie about a cannibalistic cartoon rodent. He later told me that he had to stop an employee from altering the Prien Lake Cinema marquee to read Jurassic Fugitive, no doubt a classic thriller about an innocent dinosaur’s desperate pursuit of the one-armed mammal.

A fairly intriguing combo title I witnessed was the cross-fertilization of The Secret Garden and In the Line of Fire, resulting, naturally, in Secret Line of Fire, which is certainly not something you want to stumble upon by accident. (“How come Bubba’s got all them bullet hole in ‘im?” “Aw, he wandered into that secret line of fire. Never saw it comin’.”)

A more recent example occurred when the movie Getting Even With Dad shared a screen with Blown Away. The title on the marquee read Even Dad Blown Away, which sounds to me like a made-for-television flick about the Menendez brothers. Nevertheless, I must admit I sometimes fantasize late at night about mad bomber Tommy Lee Jones successfully blasting Macauley Culkin to kingdom come.

When a marquee jumble reminds me of a “Coming Attractions” feature from Fox’s The Critic, I suspect premeditated genius. Such was the case with Andre The Client, spotted at a Houston theater. Mimicking the stage name of famous wrestler Andre the Giant, this combination of Andre, a movie about a girl and her seal, and The Client, a movie about a boy and his lawyer, causes a celluloid imagery pile-up in my brain. Is it a movie about a seal on the run from political assassins? A professional wrestler adopted by a little girl? A wrestling seal who saw too much for his own good?

The most epic specimen of the Mystery Movie Marquee phenomena turned out to be a trilogy. Disney’s rerelease of Snow White remained at the Charles Cinema while Guilty as Sin, Menace II Society, and Last Action Hero all came and went. Witness, if you will, the tragic, heartwarming sage of Snow White’s fall from grace and subsequent redemption. Our protagonist is convicted of crimes against dwarves in Snow White Guilty, escapes from Disney Penitentiary to take her revenge in Snow White Menace, but manages to redeem herself in the eyes of Uncle Walt and children everywhere in Snow White Hero. Although I’m anxious to view these Academy Award winners, I’m holding out for a complete set of the letterboxed videotapes.

I’m anxious to discover what sort of Mystery Movie Marquees this year’s crop of summer thrillers will sprout. It seems to me that the movie studios are already playing unfairly, what with titles like The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain. Keep your eyes peeled and see if the local theaters can top last summer’s most inevitable Mystery Title Duo, Forrest Gump and Speed. Yes, the marquee read Speed Gump.

(Corey Bond is a sad and lonely figure and would appreciate mail from anyone wanting to contribute to his bogus movie title collection. He would also like to hear from anyone with a better score in Scattergories than the eight points he got for “Song title beginning with the letter D”—The Police’s “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da.”)