Back in the "Blu"

Last night, I did something I hadn't done since my heart attacks: I watched a movie on a Blu-ray player.

Mom's house is not the most tech-friendly environment to be in. The phone works...sort of. The lights work...mostly. The water from the faucets? The less said, the better. And the TV? Usually it's OK, but sometimes the screen goes white with horizontal lines for a few minutes. Or hours. Or days.

And no, we don't have cable. We have a converter box. It picks up most broadcast stations, including Retro TV (yay, Horror Hotel!) and Comet (yay, X-Files!). So whatever movies I've been able to watch in the six years(!) that I've lived there have been "over the air."

That changed last night.

You see, just a few weeks ago, I found a Blu-ray player in the alley behind Mom's house. Seemed intact with remote in tow. Only problem? No cables to hook it up to the living room TV. That turned out not to be a problem, though: All I had to do was unhook the cables from the converter box and hook them up to the Blu-ray player. Took less that 5 minutes to set up.

And what did I watch on my first night with the "new" Blu-ray player? James Whale's The Old Dark House, which I'd bought on DVD just a few days ago. Beautifully shot with a great cast: Melvyn Douglas, Charles Laughton, Raymond Massey, Gloria Stuart and Boris Karloff as the butler. (The role must have been a real comedown for Karloff, having just played the Monster in Universal's adaptation of Frankenstein). It's a relatively short film--not even an hour and a quarter long--but damn, does it pack a lot into those 72 minutes, just like most of the Universal horror films of the '30s and '40s did.

Speaking of...I've replaced my complete Universal Monsters Blu-ray set with a new one. I'll be diving into that next.