pumpktoberfest #29 - every time i turn around.

film: invitation to hell
beer: sixpoint pumpkin brewster

wow. how time flies when you're spending your days drinking copious amounts of pumpkin beer & watching horror films. with this here entry, we've come to the end of another pumpktoberfest season. frowny face. to close out the season, we're bringing you a film from a genre that i like to describe as "suburban horror," wes craven's invitation to hell. it's a 1984 made-for-tv movie that came out a few months before he hit the jackpot with a nightmare on elm street & stars robert urich as matt winslow & susan lucci as jessica jones, the head of a mysterious country club in a matt's housing development. when matt moves there for a job with his wife (joanna cassidy), son (barret oliver, bastian from the neverending story) & daughter (soleil moon-frye/punky brewster), he discovers that something's not quite right about the place.

our first clue is the opening scene of the film, where jessica gets hit by a car, springs to her feet & points her finger at the driver inside the car, shattering the back window & frying him. matt & the fam haven't moved to the community at this point, but they do soon after, as matt takes a new job at a technology company that's developing a suit for travel to venus. the suit has a built in laser & flamethrower & can withstand ridiculous temperatures. once matt gets his hands on it, he adds the ability for it to distinguish between human & non-human life forms. while things seem to be going fine at work, things aren't so good at home. with the exception of a few friends of theirs, everyone's got a tinge of creepiness & they're fixated on matt & his family joining the country club.

as the head of the country club, jessica puts the most pressure on matt & his family to join. after all, everybody else in the neighborhood is a member. matt's not interested though & when his secretary tells him she has important info about the club & then she's fired the next day before she can tell him what it is, he starts to wonder what the club's really all about. after his co-worker & fraternity buddy (played by joe regalbuto of murphy brown fame) joins the club with his family, matt's family starts pressuring matt about joining. they just want to fit in. all this makes him more & more curious & as he continues investigating, he discovers that the club is TOTALLY EVIL & must be destroyed.

in all, it's an awful made-for-tv movie with ONE redeeming quality for me--the nostalgia attached to the film. it's unmistakably a product of the 80's & punky & bastian are about the age i would've been when the film first aired. the computers & hair are large & in charge. bastian has a sweet hand-held video game called "astro blaster" that sorta looks like the 80's version of an ipad. susan lucci wears a fashionable jumpsuit. there are a bunch of lasers & junk. best of all, since i grew up on punky brewster, there's a scene near the end where a seven-year old moon-frye puts on an emmy award winning acting performance. kitschy? yes. worth watching? also yes.

in honor of punky, on friday night, before watching invitation to hell, i traveled to midtown manhattan to a beer paradise called rattle n hum. i was there to finally try the elusive sixpoint pumpkin brewster, a pumpkin beer i've been searching for all month long that's made by brewers out of red hook, brooklyn. i read about the process behind making the beer on serious eats on the first of the month & immediately started searching for bars here in brooklyn that had it. though i found a few places that were serving it, without fail, by the time i actually got my ass over there to try it, they were out. eventually, i discovered that rattle n hum had it & called them to learn that while they didn't have the pumpkin brewster at the moment, they had three kegs left & it'd be back in the rotation within the week. on friday, i checked the daily menu on the website in the afternoon, saw it was on tap, confirmed it via phone & when the evening came, made my way there.

after hearing about how the folks at sixpoint carved over fifty pounds of locally-sourced pumpkins by hand to make it & with all the effort i took in trying to find it, i was really looking forward to it. in the end, i was quite let down. like with the blue point pumpkin ale, i felt that it's good as a beer but lacking as a pumpkin beer. it's an amber beer that poured with a so-so head. tastewise, it's got a slight squashy taste to it & a light amount of hops, but there's a serious lack of both spices & pumpkin flavor. amongst the batch of brand new, flavorful pumpkin beers i tried this pumpktoberfest season, it doesn't rank very high. still, it's a tasty enough beer finish to the pumpktoberfest season with.

SO...dawn of the dead arrived in the mail yesterday & i have a smuttynose pumpkin ale in the fridge for tonight. once i'm done with both of them, i don't want to see a horror movie or pumpkin beer for quite some time. still, for the next few hours, HAPPY PUMPKTOBERFEST EVERYONE! pumpktoberfest 2011 is only 334 days away!