Context

When I grew up in Texas, I would steal away to the third floor late every Saturday night to watch Joe Bob Briggs's Monstervision on TNT. This is the best way to watch cult horror movies - alone on in an isolated room at the top of a big, empty house in Texas in the middle of the night. I have Joe Bob to thank for my love of Barbarella and Big Trouble in Little China.

In college, two of the movies that I had the most fun watching were Shaolin Soccer, which was an excellent movie, and Blade II, which was a terrible one. I saw Blade II at a free movie night at the one theater in our tiny college town, and Shaolin Soccer with a crowd of about 50 college students in the attic of a fraternity late one Thursday night.

I had such a great time watching these movies in these contexts because this is how they were made to be watched. You watch your cult horror films alone so you can scare yourself stupid without anyone to judge you and you watch your good guy vs. evil guy movies with a big crowd of college students so by the end everyone's cheering the good guys and hating the bad guys and you're really living that movie along with everybody else.

This Saturday I'm seeing ATL with codename Erin, my cousin the revolutionary, and a couple of other kids from the great, lost city of Atlanta. Grab the southern side of your family and I'll meet you in Times Square.