Sarah and I wrapped our annual scary movie-watching experience with the film “The Strangers.”

Released earlier this year, the movie sort of came and went with little fanfare. While not the best horror movie I’ve seen, it’s a decent flick. Lots of freaky moments.

“The Strangers” is allegedly based on a true story, but a quick Google search proves that to be quite a stretch. Basically, a mom and her family were killed in a cabin maybe 20 or 30 years ago (I’m too lazy to search it again, and we watched this on Thursday so I’ve forgotten some details). Anyway, in the movie version, it’s a man and his girlfriend who are the victims. They’re attacked at a house, and that’s seriously the closest connection I could see.

The couple is played by that Ben guy from “Felicity” and the girl was played by the better half of those old Aerosmith videos (Liv Tyler, for those who don’t know). Well, they get attacked over and over. The attackers wear masks and never explain why they are attacking. The couple do stupid things over and over … you get the point.

So pretty scary, but not the best. Oh well. Maybe we’ll have better luck next year.

Sarah and I continued our annual October tradition of watching scary movies by viewing the flick Halloween (2007). As I mentioned previously, this movie was directed by Rob Zombie and I was very much looking forward to seeing his interpretation of this 30-year-old franchise.

Short on the suspense that made the original “Halloween” such a classic, this version ups the bad language and gore. Oh yeah, and it also ups the nudity (curiously, or perhaps intentionally, Zombie’s extremely attractive wife, who plays Michael Myers stripper mother, is one of only a couple women in the film not to bare their chest). 

The two-hour film is broken up into two halves. The first half is slow to build up, focusing on a young Michael Myers and how he came to be the slasher we all have grown to love (and fear). The second half of the movie follows the somewhat formulaic slasher format. Myers escapes, kills a bunch of people, survives things that would kill a normal person, etc. I don’t think I’m giving away the plot here.

The film didn’t scare either of us as much as we thought it would, but it was decent enough overall. I’d probably put it right in the middle of the pack of all the scary movies we’ve seen.

Hopefully Sarah and I can catch one more scary movie before Halloween (the holiday). We’ll see.

Thanks to everybody who gave us scary movie suggestions the past few days, both here on the blog and off-line. Sarah and I are going to try and watch at least three movies from this list:

Vacancy
Halloween (2007)
The Strangers
Prom Night
30 Days of Night

We started our “scare adventure” last night with the movie “Vacancy.” This movie is from 2007 and sort of just came and went at the movie theaters. I barely remember hearing about it. It stars Kate Beckinsale (and my libido goes “hummna-hummmna!!”) and Luke Wilson (an odd casting choice to me at first glance, but I liked him in the role).

Horror movie clichés abound (car broken down in the middle of nowhere, creepy hotel, etc.), but it was packed with some tense, scary moments. The plot of the movie revolves around the making of snuff films. Enough said. Perhaps the best part of this movie was it’s running time: It came in around an hour and 20 minutes. As tired, new parents, we love movies that are short like that.

Next horror movie up? Not sure yet, but I’ll let you know soon enough. I’m leaning toward “Halloween” (2007), which was directed by Rob Zombie. He’s the guy behind a CD I listened to a lot in high school (“La Sexocisto” by White Zombie) and helmed my favorite horror movie of all time “House of 1,000 Corpses.” It will be interesting to see where he takes the “Halloween” movie, since that’s one of my favorites as well.

Each October, Sarah and I watch several scary movies. However, we have yet to start this year (unless you count the lame, shaky camera “Quarantine,” which we saw this past weekend).

That said, we need some suggestions for good horror movies. Or just plain movies that will scare us. Frankly, we’re just out of ideas. My favorite from the past few years is “House of 1,000 Corpses,” though it was too freaky for Sarah. Others we have enjoyed are “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Shining.” And we’ve seen all the popular ones, like “Saw,” “The Omen” and “Psycho.”

The list below is courtesy of IMDB.com. I have crossed out the ones at least one of us has seen already (though some of these aren’t really “horror” movies, are they?). Do you have any suggestions from this list or elsewhere? Think outside the box, because chances are that we’ve seen the movie you suggest. Leave a title (or two) and a description in a comment and maybe we’ll check out your movie. Thanks for the help!

Sarah and I had two date nights in the past four days, thanks to a five-day visit from my mom. She came to spend time with Oliver, and who were we to argue with that? It was great having her here. Not to mention that her presence allowed us some time away from parenting and our house.

On Thursday, we went to The Pageant for a Ben Folds concert. We had a decent time, but were a little disappointed in the set list, which was heavy on new songs (check the set list on the link above; I’m not going to re-count, but I think 12 of the 15 songs played before the encore were new or alternative versions of new songs). We did get to hear a few classics near the end which made up for things, sort of. Anyway, our old legs and backs were tired by the time the show ended. Three hours of standing was tough.

Us old timers had another date night last night. We headed to Old Town St. Charles for some fantastic New York-style pizza at Talayna’s. Afterward, we went to the movies to see this horror flick called “Quarantine.” It was one of those shaky, hand-held camera movies (like “The Blair Witch Project” on steroids). We both felt sick from the god-awful camera work and kept closing our eyes. Sarah left the theater with 30 minutes left, but I stuck it out to get our $18 ($18!!!!!!) worth. Blech!

So two date nights in four days … that was great. But an observation I had: Parents dating in their early 30s are  a lot like teenagers from my era dating in high school. Here’s how:

HIGH SCHOOL: You go to dinner at Denny’s, Steak n’ Shake, McDonald’s or the like, chowing on burgers and swigging down soda.
NOW: You eat dinner at cooler restaurants, enjoying pizza, fish tacos or steak while downing a couple beers or margaritas in the process.

HIGH SCHOOL: You follow up dinner with a dollar-show, PG-13-rated movie.
NOW: You drop $18 ($18!!!!!!) on a really lame movie at some giant megaplex, making sure the flick is an R-rated movie so you don’t have to deal with obnoxious teens.

HIGH SCHOOL: You rush to make it home by midnight to make curfew.
NOW: You rush to make it home by midnight because you’re old and tired.

HIGH SCHOOL: [Original thought, involving the “end” of the date, removed at the wife’s request]
NOW: [Same here!]

Most of my readers know me, and they know how to pronounce and spell my last name. It’s Lopinot. Pronounced like LOW-PUH-KNOW, with the emphasis on the “low.” Well, it gets butchered all the time. Sometimes we even get weird pronunciations with letters that are juxtaposed or not even in the name. Here are a few common mistakes:

LOP-UH-KNOT
LOP-UH-KNIT
LOW-PINTO
LOW-PIN-YO (they get the silent “T” correct but throw a Spanish tilda over the “N”)

And trying to get people to spell this right? Yeesh. That’s partly why I changed my UMSL e-mail address, when I worked there, to justin@umsl.edu. Much easier to give that out to reporters than to go through the rigmarole over my last name.

So anyway, the point of this whole blog post is to tell you about a funny conversation I had on the phone yesterday. I was leaving a message for somebody, gave my first name and then was asked for my last name. Here’s how the next couple of minutes went:

ME: It’s Lopinot, L-O-P-I-N …
HER: O?
ME: What?
HER: O?
ME: No. It’s Lopinot, L-O …
HER: O?
ME: No. It’s Lopinot, L-O-P …
HER: I’m sorry. O-P?
ME: No. L, as in Larry. O-P-I-N-O-T.
HER: L-O what?
ME: [slowly] L-O-P-I-N-O-T
HER: L-O-P-I-N … what?
ME: L-O-P-I-N-O …
HER: O?
ME: Yes, O.
HER: O.
ME: T.
HER: P?
ME: No. T, as in Tom. L-O-P-I-N-O-T.
HER: Huh?
ME: It looks like LOP-UH-KNOT
HER: Oh! I got it now.