pumpktoberfest #33 - the insane housewives of VT.

film: what lies beneath
beer: wolaver's pumpkin ale

being a housewife ain't all it's cracked up to be. sure you have countless opportunities to lounge about the house sipping red wine & baking pies & gossiping with your girlfriends on the phone, but there's eventually going to come a point where your lack of fulfillment gets the best of you & you end up going straight-up crazy. take oscar-winning director robert zemeckis' 2000 film what lies beneath. in it, michelle pfeiffer plays the part of claire spencer, a housewife married to norman spencer, a big-shot scientist played by harrison ford. if you think that owning a nice house in vermont & being married to a dashing scientist is a recipe for bliss, you're sadly mistaken. claire's got ISSUES.

at the film's outset, claire & norman live in a big ol' house in vermont. their daughter caitlin has just gone off to college, leaving claire with a bit of the ol' empty-nest syndrome. one day, since she's got nothing but housewife free time on her hands, she begins taking a special interest in the new neighbors, the feurs, who are prone to loud sex & loud arguments. bonus: husband feur is played by james remar (dexter's dad on dexter). one day, claire hears wife feur crying on the other side of the fence. from this point, she starts going all hitchcock blonde, spying on the neighbors & trying to connect the dots & one night, eventually suspecting husband feur of murdering wife feur.

after that night, shit starts getting weird. she starts seeing ghosts in the bathtub water. that same bathtub randomly fills itself up with water every once in a while. she thinks it's wife feur. she gets a ouija board. it points to the letters "M" & "F"...mary feur! too bad that soon after, she runs into the feurs, who are both alive & well. mystery solved? nope. ghostly stuff keeps happening to claire & when a picture frame falls & breaks, revealing a news clipping about a missing college student (played by hottie amber valetta) named "madison elizabeth frank," she's back on the case. i won't reveal any more about the plot but i will share this brief tale...

in the late 90's, around the time when i was finishing up college in boston, i worked at a video store called videosmith. one of my coworkers, helen, was obsessed with harrison ford. she knew everything about him, including the fact that whatever contract he had at the time stated that he could not play a villain in his films. for years, he was never the baddie. what lies beneath is the film that saw him break that streak. is it a good film? well, as the title of this post suggests, it goes through great lengths to play up the craziness of housewives. the "here's how you should feel" music makes me want to boot. its nod to hitchockian blondes is WAY too blatant but the hitchockian ways that it builds horror & suspense are respectable. in short, it's a hollywood film. if you're watching it this pumpktoberfest season, prepare to be whacked over the head with plot points. what lies beneath? not very much.

today we've got a pumpkin beer brewed in the great state of vermont, wolaver's pumpkin ale. it's a rebranded pumpkin beer formula from wolaver's, who until this year had put out their will stevens pumpkin ale during the fall. i'm not sure why they changed it exactly but i have a feeling it has a lot to do with the whole new rebranding thang they've had going on lately. like the will stevens & all of wolaver's beers, this year's pumpkin ale is totally USDA-certified organic. i mean, that's wolaver's thing after all. it's the organic arm of middlebury, vermont's otter creek brewing. this one's made with a "generous use of vermont grown organic pumpkins" & "four fresh organic spices." 

it's an opaque, orange-colored beer that only smells faintly of pumpkin pie spices. still, although those faint spice scents are there, they hardly show up in the flavor. the same holds true for the "generous" amount of pumpkins. they don't do much for the flavor other than giving it a mild sweetness. as a result, there's no dominant characteristic to the flavor. that doesn't mean it's a bad beer though & while i only have a tiny recollection of what the will stevens version tasted like, i feel like this one has more body & more flavor...it just doesn't have anything all that exciting going for it. i guess it pairs better with what lies beneath than i expected it to.