Friday night frightfest.

I thought it was ingenious when I first saw the flyer posted to our door: our Halloween-crazy neighbor was joining up with our community association to show a Halloween movie in the park at the end of our street. I hadn’t heard of the movie – Monster Squad - but the flyer said it was family friendly and our neighbor has daughter about the girls’ age, so I thought it would be fun. And so at 7 o’clock Friday night, Corrie and I took our gaggle of giggling girls trudging (for those of us laden with chairs and bags of goodies) and galloping (those would be the gigglers) down the sidewalk towards the park.

Now, I know it was in the park. I’ve been there, so I knew (pretty much) what to expect. Our park is pretty new, and it is made up entirely of about a mile’s worth of running/biking trail looped through a bunch of open land. It’s flatlands built up near the gorge where the river branches out, so it can be pretty smelly. Thankfully it was only a little dank on Friday. But hey – that just adds to the Halloweenyness, right? And while there was plenty of flat grassy areas in the park, it’s not like it was mowed or anything. And then there were the bugs. If you opened your mouth, you were likely to swallow a mosquito. I had sprayed us down with ‘squito spray before we left the house, and when I saw the sheet of mosquitoes hanging in the air, I did it again. Of course, that didn’t stop the grasshoppers. At one point, I thought someone had beaned with me a rock, only to find a grasshopper the size of Montana hanging out on my leg. Thank god that sucker didn’t fly into my face when I shooed him away because I would have screamed like a little girl.

Finally, after thirty or forty minutes of music and Halloween music videos (including several Ghostbuster selections – I don’t know why they didn’t just show that movie), our neighbor announced the movie was going to start. He warned us that it was PG-13 and Corrie and I were like, WTH? Because that would have been a good thing to put on the flyer. But whatevs. Maybe it wasn’t that bad. Corrie and I hunkered down in our chairs and tried to keep the creepy-crawlies from crawling down our shirts. The girls were spread out in front of us on our blankets. Everyone was ex-ci-ted! Because a movie! Outside! In our park!!

The movie was exactly that bad. Corrie’s 3-year-old jumped up during the first scene and leapt straight into her mama’s lap. I figured Bee would be next, but she seemed transfixed (although it may have been a case of They-can’t-see-me-if-I-don’t-move. We tried to hang in there, figuring it would get better. Twenty minutes later, Corrie’s hubby showed up to rescue us. And berate us a little for not having ditched sooner, but you don’t yell at the cavalry, I’ve learned.

We headed home and watched Monsters, Inc. and Shrek instead – real family-friendly Halloween movies. Frightfest in the Park might have been a bust this year, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed for next year. Hey, maybe if I pester my neighbor from now until next October, I can convince him to go the Ghostbusters route…

 

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Tags: halloween, Monster Squad, movies