The Life and Times of a Midwestern Movie Addict

When you ask a group of people what gives them the heebie-jeebies, you're likely to find several staples.  There's usually someone who's afraid of the dark (a category I fall in, and if you make fun of me I'll cut you), someone who fears death, a person who can't stand public speaking, and then there are always a handful of folk who get the willies from creepy crawlies.  Insects, snakes, and rodents are top runners in that category, but most people tend to dislike one group of crawlies in particular...the spider.  Despite the fact that spiders do nothing but rid the world of surplus insects and tend to regard us as big, scary bipeds...thanks to our own natural fears of things that are low to the ground and multi-legged and the help of the media, we tend to think that spiders are always up to no good.  Then in 1990, long-time producer turned director Frank Marshall gave us a new reason to hate spiders.  So ignore that crawling sensation on your leg for a second a...

I can remember some of my first experiences playing board games.  Often, my sister would ask me to play with her when she had nothing to do...and she was fond of cheating.  I used to be terrified to play Clue because I thought you could be killed any second of it...my sister was playing two-player Clue with me once and when she got bored with it she told me she had killed me in the Billiard Room.  It wasn't until much later that I was able to actually read the rules and find out that not only could I not kill people in the game, but that you couldn't really play the game with less than three people.  We also enjoyed playing Rings on Your Fingers (which no one remembers) and Ghosts (which some people remember) and they were great ways to waste time.  I even remember my imagination getting away from me at times and actually believing in the consequences that the games sometimes dished out.  Of course, that fascination with the fantasy world of board games wea...