"Plaaay!"

Mickey and the Haunted House. Another Halloween must. The whole cartoon is great by the way, but the music is really fun. In this 1929 short you can see a pretty rare example of Disney's recycling some animation cycles: some of the dancing skeleton scenes are taken from , logically enough, Skeleton Dance, a Silly Symphony from the year before. Even so, they have some fun with it by having the wind blow away all but the dancing legs!

By the way, I finished Blatty's sequel to The Exorcist, entitled Legion. This was the source to the movie Exorcist III. Oh, what an unholy mess, pun of course intended. It was not all bad, but it was so perfunctorily resolved after an immense build-up, it made me envision Blatty really working hard until the check from the publishers cleared, and then just sewing it up ASAP so he could hit the horse tracks.

Kinderman, the pre-Columbo Columboesque detective is the star of this one, and he is transformed into something of a Jewish mystic. In fact, the whole tale seems to have been written to support his philosophy that Lucifer was the big bang, an explosion of matter into a previously only spiritual universe, and that we are all part of him, trying to find our way back to God. Throw the oh-so-popular early 80's go-to topics of serial killers and televangelists, and you got yourself a sequel sir.

Even the book adds in the back of this 1983 paperback were a degradation from the awesome crap of the 70's. Here we have adds for V.C. Andrews "greatest" releases. I suppose I shouldn't mock, I have never read any V.C. Andrews. But still...