Boy oh Boy! Nothing says “Beautiful Saturday in Ballard” like murder and suspense! But that’s what you get when tasteless punks like Alfred Hitchcock enter the game, making their slimy, filthy no good trashy, you know… It’s almost like he’s trying to get the audience on the edge of their seats… Who would do such a thing!? Well, we’re going to put some of Hitchcock’s most famous films on our Wall O’ Cool so we can get such horrors out of our store before it’s… too late…. muahahahahaha

The Birds This 1963 classic has Tippi Hedren playing Melanie Daniels, a blonde with nothing much going on until a gagillion birds flock into town and attack the townspeople. What else needs to be said about The Birds?

Frenzy This later Hitchcock from 1972 takes place in London, where the Necktie Murderer is taking victims left and right. Sounds pretty bad, until you realize the police also have an innocent suspect in jail, who now must find a way to elude the law and prove his innocence!

The Man Who Knew Too Much Released in 1965, big Brass Actors James Stewart and Doris Day play innocent Americans vacay-ing in Morocco with their son, Hank, who gets kidnapped and taken to England. How they gonna get him back!?

Psycho Not many people have heard of this 1960 flick starring everyone’s favorite, Anthony Perkins, as crazy son Norman Bates. Somethings up with his mom, too…

Rope Released in 1948 and starring James Stewart, Rope deals with two young men who up and decide to strangle their classmate, hide his body in the closet, and have a dinner party. Crazy kids…

Torn Curtain This 1966 flick stars Paul Newman and Julie Andrews as a couple dealing with international espionage and deception after a trip to Copenhagen leads to Paul’s mysterious defection to East Germany. What’s up with that?

The Trouble with Harry Hitchy dives into some comedy with this 1955 film, but dont worry, it still has plenty of death. Basically, a bunch of people keep running into a corpse and don’t know what to do. Hilarity ensues.

Vertigo James Stewart is back in this 1958 romper which deals with an acnophobic detective hired to investigate a friend’s apparently suicidal wife. Doesn’t he have enough on his plate as it is!?

Get your tote bags ready! Or your shopping stocking! Or your giant shoe! Whatever will hold your movies… Are you confused yet? Let me clarify!

Starting today until Friday May 21st, we are holding a contest to raise awareness about plastic bags. Don’t worry, we will still be offering them for everyone, so if you don’t have a bag, we have you handled! At the same time, we realize the damage that plastic bags do to the environment, so we would like to help raise awareness about them!

If you come into the store, you will notice there are pamphlets on display regarding plastic bags. For the contest, however, we will be handing out a special edition of the pamphlet to every customer who makes a purchase and declines a bag. This pamphlet will be different from the ones on display because they will contain an entry code to win a $25 store credit!

So from this Friday until next, anytime you make a purchase and decline a plastic bag, one of our employees will offer you a coded pamphlet. Just keep hold of the pamphlet and check our blog (you’re currently here) on Saturday, May 22nd to see which code is the winner. If you’re the lucky winner, bring it down with an I.D. (or the I.D. of an adult 18 and over) and we’ll set up a store account for you with $25.00 on it!

Yes, we know it’s kind of silly to hold a contest about plastic bags by handing out a bunch of paper pamphlets. On the bright side, the pamphlets are made from 100% recycled paper. Things could be worse!

And no, we won’t scold you if you choose to get a plastic bag! We know they come in handy, and we definitely don’t want to discourage our lovely, delicious customers from buying things!

Used to be you could go to the movies and see a double feature for the price of one movie. Okay, that was probably a really long time ago, but let your mind drift back to those days when you’d get to go to the movies and it really was movies, plural, and not just the one. I can remember seeing The Warriors and Up In Smoke probably 5 times, for example. And The Gumball Rally and Race With The Devil. Or seeing a Beatles movie marathon once where they showed A Hard Day’s Night, Help!, Yellow Submarine and Let It Be all in a row. That was a pretty big afternoon for this kid, and there wasn’t any beatings or crying or throwing up or anything.

Anyhow, we’ve got a pretty good selection of double-, triple- and even quadruple-features here in the store so I’ve gone ahead and created a showcase on the Wall O’ Cool for some of them.

Footloose/Flashdance: On the one hand, you’ve got Kevin Bacon thumbing his nose at small town morality by inciting the local kids to dance (gasp!) and on the other hand you’ve got Jennifer Beals as a welder-by-day-and-exotic-dancer-by-night who just wants to go to a prestigious dance school. Bottom line here is over three hours of 80s dance movie awesome.

The American President/Dave: In the first one, Michael Douglas is the President, a widower, who falls in love with environmental lobbyist Annette Benning. Hijinks ensue as the Secret Service attempts to give the most public person in the world a little bit of privacy. In the second one, Kevin Kline is a Presidential lookalike asked to stand in for the real deal so he can skip out on a luncheon, and maybe get into a scandalous situation with an aide. Now it’s up to Dave to continue his ruse.

I, Robot/The Terminator: Will Smith is a technophobic cop in a world where technology has run amok! Okay, that’s stretching it a bit, but there’s a dead scientist and robots everywhere and Will is just the man who can solve this mystery. And then there’s Arnold as an actual killer robot from the future come to the past to kill the one person who can stop the robot revolution if he ever makes it to the future. Never mind that later on that same guy sends more robots back to protect him from the killer robots so he can make it to the future to send robots back to … wait. What?

Alien/Species: This is actually a pretty interesting double feature. Ridley Scott’s terrifying first entry in what would become a mostly pretty good sci-fi franchise (okay, it’s a really good trilogy with a so-so fourth installment) coupled with the only really good Species film, which is about alien/human hybrid technology gone awry.

The Riddick Trilogy: Riddick is an escaped convict with super-special eyes that allow him to see in the dark, which comes in really handy in Pitch Black, where he gets to help save a group of marooned space travelers. The action continues in the animated feature Dark Fury as Riddick battles monsters and mercenaries, and then even more action happens in the sweeping adventure The Chronicles Of Riddick. Getcher Vin Diesel fix right here.

The Good Girl/The Object Of My Affection/Picture Perfect: She’s cute, she’s dissatisfied with her life, she’s fallen in love with someone she shouldn’t have, she’s Jennifer Aniston! (and yeah, that pretty well describes all three of these rom-coms)

Eraser/The Last Boyscout/Passenger 57/The Point Of No Return: Warner Brothers has put out several of these “4 Film Favorites” DVDs and this one is called Extreme Action! Arnold Schwarzenegger is a US Marshal who “erases” the past of those entering the Witness Protection program, and his latest assignment involves a super-weapon. And lots of explosions. Then there’s Bruce Willis as the has-been cop sent to protect a has-been quarterback (Damon Wayans) from the bad guys. And lots of explosions. Wesley Snipes is “an ex-cop with a bad mouth, a bad attitude and a bad seat…” who happens to be on the same plane as a bunch of bad guys. The plan: Stop them before they make lots of explosions, of course. And then, just to prove that the action genre isn’t just a man’s territory, Bridget Fonda is a hottie/assassin in this remake of La Femme Nikita. Yes, there are explosions.

Lethal Weapon Series: Another of Warner’s “4 Film Favorites”. All four Mel Gibson/Danny Glover buddy cop action comedies in one tidy package. You’re never too old for this sh*t.