It’s time for fireworks to celebrate our independence from the Brits (we Americans do like our big booms), so I’m going to make it quick this week (no jokes). Hopefully, wherever you are in the United States, it will be fair weather for your festivities. For those kind readers from other parts of the world– glad to have you here and please enjoy our Fourth of July viewing classics with us. USA, baby, all the way.
Some of you out there may want to watch The Patriot to get in the mood for the holiday. I, myself, have two July Fourth holiday essentials I hope you add to your viewing list once the bombs bursting in the air have disappeared into the night.
Jaws is the movie that invented the summer blockbuster. It singlehandedly created the summer movie season. There wouldn’t be an Independence Day without it. Once upon a time, summer is where Hollywood studios used to dump their lesser quality pictures. After Steven Spielberg’s juggernaut of a great white shark film raked in boffo box office bucks and won three Academy Awards. If you’ve lived under a rock your entire life and have no idea what the movie is about, it’s a tender love story between a shark and the people he loves to eat.
For something different, and gruesomely funnier, there’s Return of the Living Dead. It sticks to its guns that George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead was a based on a true story and one of the canisters containing a reanimated corpse found its way to a medical supply company due to the government’s mistake in shipping. It’s a love story about the bond between the living dead and the people they want to eat.  Brains!
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Happy Fourth of July, folks!
Curio Macabre 