What I learned from Sci-Fi Marathon 35:
Mostly, that I should really get more sleep before heading to 24-hour movie marathons.
The final marathon tally was Ericka 8, sleep dep 4. Four being the number of movies (mostly horror films, with lots of screaming) I slept through most of.
The things I most enjoyed seeing were Labyrinth (I had seen it before, but not on the big screen) the PBS version of Lathe of Heaven from the eighties (which I had never seen) and Moon (which I saw when it came out, but was jazzed to see again). I also liked all the shorts.
Stuff I missed by sleeping through that I really still want to see: The Thing, Night of the Creeps and Rabid – all horror films with varying degrees of camp value. The other film I slept through, before giving up and going home to sleep on something more comfortable than a theater seat, was The Day the Sky Exploded, an Italian scifi film from the fifties that seemed to suffer from bad overdubbing and a surfeit of stock footage. I base that on the first fifteen minutes and the last five, which were all that I saw.
I missed seeing Night of the Comet on the big screen, which I was really looking forward to, but it became very apparent, around the 18th hour or so, that even if I was still in the theater for the film, I would still really miss it. Thus, I surrendered and went home.
The marathon is an experience that is worthwhile for its own sake. It’s definite nerd fun, with or without the traditional tin foil hat competition and the extremely non-traditional burlesque dancers.
Once you’re in a room with a bunch of people through bad movies, junk food and inordinate levels of sleep-deprivation, you wind up feeling a sense of camaraderie. I recommend trying it at least once. You should probably bring more caffeine than I did, though.
Also, for the record, my favorite film out of the entire group shown in the festival and the marathon was Ink. It is a film better seen without any spoilers at all, so I will merely observe that it’s apparently available on netflix streaming.