THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE!!!

      I know more about "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" then I should. In fact, I am almost an expert on it. I've only seen it twice in a week.
   My Dad got me into horror movies. Dad, Dee and I watch them together, it is kind of like a horror movie watching club! My Mother wants nothing to do with it. She has never seen "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre", she never will.
   Ever since I was about seven, my Dad would tell me stories about the production of this crazy movie. It was made like No movie had ever been made. It was hot. It was Texas. The rooms in the old house were filled up with bones from veterinary bone yards. It smelled. The prop mistress accidentally injected herself with formaldehyde. Gunnar Hansen could not take off the LeatherFace outfit to be cleaned. Edwin Neal said it was worse then Vietnam, he fought there in the year 1969. The movie was released in 1974.
    After all of these years of lore, I finally decided to rent it from the library. It was the first time for Dee and I. For my Dad, it had to be the millionth.
  A group of teenagers go road tripping to a cemetery (Marilyn Burns as Sally, Paul Partain as her brother Franklin,  Allen Danziger as Jerry, William Vail as Kirk and Teri McMinn as Pam) to see if Sally and Franklin's grandfather's grave has been dug up. Graves were being robbed and a corpse was erected in the cemetery in a very crude way.
    They pick up a hitchhiker along the way (played by Edwin Neal) and eventually kick him out of the van for being nuts. I won't tell you what The Hitchhiker did, that would be a spoiler alert! The teenagers end up at a gas station with no gas and they go to their Grandpa's old place. It is abandoned. Pam and Kirk go off in search of a swimming hole. They see an old farmhouse and decide to go there and ask for some gas.
   They reach the farmhouse. Kirk knocks, no one answers, he enters the house. Who enters someone else's house if they don't answer the door? Especially a creepy old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere? STUPID. Inside, Kirk hears some crazy pig squealing. Being the law bending youth that he is, he goes towards the noise. THEN!! Out comes LeatherFace and---I won't tell you! Go see the movie! But it turns into a complete nightmare.
  Who dies? Who gets away? The gas station owner and the Hitchhiker may be involved? And why does the gas station owner look like Milton Berle? Who the heck is LeatherFace (played by Gunnar Hansen) ? This and more you can find out by watching the movie. IT'S INTENSE!
    This may be one of the scariest movies I have seen and it is not even laden with CGI! This movie is notorious and one of the best. I suggest you see it, but don't eat anything whilst watching it. It is not gory, but it has it's disgusting parts! Plus, you can almost smell the rotting bones in the Texas heat!
   So thank you Dad, for introducing this great movie to me, I dedicate this post to you.
   Ok, have you seen this movie? If so, what did you think? What is the scariest movie you have ever seen? If you see this movie, will you blog about it? Let me know, comment below! PS, here is the YouTube trailer. Remastered.

Why Arnold Horshack Is Cool.

   In the 1970s, there was a TV show called "Welcome Back, Kotter." It was about a teacher in Brooklyn, named Mr. Kotter, going back to his old high school to teach. Grumpy vice principal Mr. Woodman gives him an assignment to teach the remedial academics group, a group of students that call themselves Sweathogs. Mr. Kotter used to be a Sweathog too. So the show follows his adventures trying to teach this class full of crazy teenagers!
    So, my Dad introduced me to this show a few years ago, unfortunately it did not catch on with me as much as "Happy Days"'........until I stumbled upon on METV in November. It was one of those "where has this been all my life?" moments. I love it!!
     But this post is not entirely about the show itself, I just had to fill you in on what it was. This post is about the character Arnold Horshack, one of the main Sweathogs, played by Ron Palillo. It seems that most girls were drawn to John Travolta 's character, Vinnie Barbarino, as they should be because John Travolta is awesome. HOWEVER. Arnold is my favorite, hands down, from minute one. From the first "Hello. Howareya. My name is Arnold Horshack" second. So somebody needed to blog about this to get some Arnold fans together!! Here and now, I'm gonna talk about why he was cool:
1: He was funny. His laugh was hysterical!
2: He had great style. I tried to make the long striped scarf, but am a little discouraged. Trying to Do garter stitch for so long will do that to a person. And those plaid shirts and sweater vests though.
3: He was the smartest Sweathog. Mr. Woodman wanted to move him up and out of remedial academics, but Arnold was not going for that.
4: He knew when it was time to be a man. When he had to fight a guy from a rival school? He recognized that he had to do it. His stepfather dies? He sees that he needs to step up and be the man of the house for his mother and siblings.
5: He had an appreciation of old movies. Plus, plus! I still need to see "Footlight Parade."
6: He had his sense of cool. Not like top dog Barbarino cool. Not hip Washington cool. Not  tough Epstein cool. He had his own dorky Horshack cool.
7: Though Ron Palillo did not like his nose and had plastic surgery to change it, he has my favorite nose of all time. And I have a list of favorite noses.
Here are some random character facts.
1: Ron Palillo came up with the Arnold voice by mixing his aunt's New Haven accent with Dustin Hoffman's accent in "Midnight Cowboy."
2: He got the laugh from his dying father.
3: Horshack means "the cattle are dying. " it's a very old and respected name. Most of the Horshack men were men of the sea.
4: Gabriel Kaplan based the Sweathogs around guys he grew up with.
5: Arnold's middle name was Dingfelder.
So, thank you Ron Palillo for bringing such a cool character to life, for making me want to be a teenager in the 70s, going to Buchanan High. I know, that if that show was a real life thing, we would have been buddies.  RIP.
Have any of you guys watched the show? Share your thoughts below!!!!