The End Of The World (Disc Two)

For quite a while, my heart and Master Card belonged to Deep Discount DVD (or as I used to refer to it, My Beloved Deep Discount DVD). Then Deep Discount DVD became just plain Deep Discount and changed its website, and I dunno, some of the love vanished.

But my heart and my Master Card never go unused for long. I discovered the truly bizarre shopping pleasures of Big Lots, where you never know what DVDs you might find, but whatever you do find, it'll only cost $3 (most recently, I bought Chinatown and Terms of Endearment and Sunset Boulevard there, which is a lot of cinema history for nine bucks total).

Even more Beloved to me these days is the Warner Archives store, or WBshop.com (which I always read as WBishop.com and wonder why a Bishop would be emailing me). They make no-nonsense overpriced DVDs of the kinds of movies I love, and I've bought many classic and not so classic Warner Bros. movies of the 1940s from them.

A couple of weeks ago, I discovered that the Bishop had put together a five pack of Irwin Allen disaster movies. My heart positively palpitated from the thrill, and I would claim my Master Card jumped out of my wallet, except the Bishop can already recite its numbers by heart.

A week later, the movies arrived. I scoffed at Chinatown and Terms of Endearment and Sunset Boulevard, and promptly watched Flood! in which Martin Milner and Robert Culp save as many people as possible from the raging flood waters. The next night I watched Cave In! which was so thrilling I meant to devote an entire blog entry to it, but I forgot. The night after that I watched Hanging By A Thread! Parts One And Two. A tram got hit by lightning and dangled for over two hours and Patty Duke made things much worse by lighting a cigarette and her husband threw the match onto the floor when it landed in some spilt lighter fluid and he caught fire. How fabulous is that! No one even said to Patty Duke, "Well, what do you expect, lighting a cigarette in a closed tram that could fall thousands of feet any second now, and with a child in it too." They just put the fire out and screamed, not necessarily in that order.

So last night, I decided to watch The Night The Bridge Fell! Disc One. And hard though it is to believe, it was the best of all (well, I haven't seen Fire! yet, but I don't see how it can beat The Night The Bridge Fell! Disc One). Desi Arnez Jr. is a bitter and psychotic bank robber (what a combination), and Leslie Nielsen and Barbara Rush are embezzler/lovers who ended up on the bridge at the exact same time, in separate cars, and Leslie Nielsen has his little baby son, who I don't think has a name, in his car and the baby is sick and screams on cue (unless those are sound effects and not brilliant baby acting). Oh, and there's a guy whose daughter was hit by a car in a flashback but I think he said the daughter was going to be okay, and there's a cop and there's his former girlfriend who's decided to become a nun and is driving a nine year old blonde girl orphan to her brand new adoptive parents, and the cop and the former girlfriend soon to be nun are both on the bridge at the same time also. This is the Bridge Of Broken Coincidences. Meanwhile James MacArther has the Martin Milner role (the bridge is gonna fall; toldya so). And at the very end of Disc One, another part of the bridge falls into the river, thus giving this opus not one but two money shots, and who knows what'll happen in Disc Two.

I won't. I was so excited by all this that I promptly put Disc Two in the DVD player, and it wouldn't load. It said LOADING LOAD and then it stopped.

I tried multitudinous times. I tried putting the disc in upside down (hey, it's an Irwin Allen picture; you never know). Today I tried again, hoping for a next day miracle. Then I removed the DVD of Dallas Season One that I've been exercycling to in my bedroom and put the now infamous Disc Two in, but it didn't work there either.

I am devastated. I am desperate to know what happens next. I know the orphan and the baby will survive because no child ever died in an Irwin Allen movie (as I was watching last night, I thought to myself how cheerfully I violated that rule in the dead and the gone). But who knows who Desi Arnez Jr. might shoot next or who might end up on the wrong side of the collapsing bridge. I sure don't.

I emailed the Bishop and explained in great detail what the situation was (they asked for it, by saying they more they knew, the better they'd be able to solve the problem). I'm assuming they'll replace the DVD, ideally by sending a monsignor over right away to hand deliver it to me.

Le sigh. In the meantime, I suppose I could watch Fire! which has both Donna Mills and Vera Miles, not to mention Patty Duke, who probably starts the fire with another of her cigarettes. But I sure do want to know about that bridge and how much more of it is going to fall down in the next 97 extremely glorious, if currently unwatchable, minutes!