“Don’t Panic”: Alamo Drafthouse’s Terror Tuesdays

(Editor’s Note:  This comes to us from AC contributor Gwen “Gwendles-I-Will-Fight-You” Reza, who visited the brand new San Francisco location of the ever popular Alamo Drafthouse movie theater.  I can’t wait to check the thing out.)

I have a confession to make Aggressors, I love terrible B-movies. I love ridiculous, over-the-top gory Horror movies with little to no plot. I seek them out, I scavenge through flea market stalls for absurd VHS tapes (Yes I still have a VCR).  So when I found out that the Alamo Drafthouse has a weekly event called “Terror Tuesdays” I immediately got tickets for that night’s show.

The Alamo Drafthouse is a spectacular addition to the San Francisco nightlife landscape, think of it as dinner and a show and so very much more. The tickets for two people for Terror Tuesday cost 12 dollars total (which is an incredible deal), and once seated you and your movie-going partner can order drinks, food and specialty popcorn. The beer menu is spectacular, the full bar is excellent and they have Boozy Milkshakes – try the grasshopper, trust me.

Terror Tuesday this week was a screening of a ridiculous movie from 1988 called Don’t Panic. In Don’t Panic a cadre of teens play with a haunted-demonic-ouija board and the inevitable happens – one of them gets possessed by the devil and begins a gory-slasher killing spree all through town.

While the premise doesn’t sound terrible, the movie itself is so incredibly awful that is falls short of scary to a degree that makes is frakking hilarious. I would encourage you to seek this movie out on your own, and watch it with a few of likeminded friends but here are some highlights from the film that made me particularly gleeful:

• The hero spends almost the entire movie in Dinosaur pajamas.
• He and his girlfriend appear to get intimate pretty quickly, in his bedroom covered in posters of expensive cars. How old are these kids? 14? Seems likely, and yet they get freaky. I have many questions.
• At one point he goes ‘blind’ because he’s having a vision and pulls a pistol from his pants and shoots blindly and feverishly around the room of a dinner party.
• While he’s blind, he can still find his way around a hospital.
• This is supposed to be set in Mexico City, and yet it appears to be completely populated by white folks.
• The one thing I will say was above my expectations for this flick was the practical effects, more specifically the makeup job on the possessed-by-the-devil friend. Excellent for it’s time!

Guys, there is so much more. I had so many questions at the end of this movie and I am almost certain that they will haunt my dreams for the rest of my life.

See this movie. Go to the Alamo Drafthouse, get the kimchi popcorn. Hopefully I will see you at the next Terror Tuesday where they will be screening Return of the Living Dead on January 26th, 2016.  (You can check out their calendar here).  I will most certainly be there!