spiders in the knight...

For real! He had spiders in his head! Not spiders in his hair, that wouldn't have been so bad. Heck, he could have been one of Jack Skellington's buddies if he had the spiders in his hair -

STOP! What are you talking about???

This fellow who was the lead character in Jim Reed's movie tonight at the 'Bean. Hank...yeah, that was his name! Hank! Long, lanky, geeky fellow who claimed to be a poet.

And he had spiders in his head? How do you know that?

Well, the movie showed them! True, I arrived a little late, so they caught me totally unawares! I wondered for a moment if maybe he had to switch to one of his beloved horror films instead of the love story he had said he just knew I would enjoy. His words were, "when I first heard of this movie, I thought it would be something you would really like." Nice, right?

Yes, very nice... though I didn't think you'd like a horror movie with spiders...

But it wasn't that at all! When I finally got to the PFS screening, there were several residents of this apartment building gathered in the lobby, by the mailboxes, lightly harassing the mail lady for being late. She, in turn, asked them about the person in Apartment 206, as there was so much mail in their box that she could not fit anymore in. They told her he had been in his apartment for four months and never came out. Never. Sometimes they heard him screaming in there at night, but he never came out. And he had been living there for six months.
Then, the scene shifted to inside that apartment. A gangly man in glasses was clutching at his head and, as the camera zoomed inside his skull, we saw long-legged spiders crawling out of his brain and out of his head and down his pants leg...
I really wondered if I had walked into the wrong movie. But I hadn't!

How did that come about? What made you think you had not been led astray?

Detroit's Most Wanted showed up! In the guy's apartment! Singing a whackadoodle song about him having a "nervous meltdown" and using his head to skritch-scratch on a turntable. Hilarious!!! Then we switch scenes to a thin blonde, deserted by the guy she'd followed "out west" from middle America. She finds a damaged plant in the trash and pulls it out, "to save it". Then she sees a cute lost dog and tries to befriend it, but it runs out into the street, right in front of a trash truck - bam! And that convinced her that she was cursed.
Perfect!
Nancy seemed to be the right girl for Hank!
This was definitely a love story, in the same vein as "Into The Night" or "After Hours" or "Red Rock West" - all very quirky and cool!

Ohhhhh-kayyyy, if you say so. And jsut how did their paths cross, pray tell.

Well, Hank was trying again to find love by dialing the number in one of those "girls, girls, girls"-type of ads in the many magazines he had in his aluminum-foil-as-wallpaper apartment. She was in a phone booth, hiding out from some street thugs. She had stolen their leader's gun and shot him in the foot when he had threatened to "pull a train" on her with five other guys...

Tick, tick, goes the clock...

Yes, yes, I hear it.
Anywho, Hank has dialed a number in a magazine, we see the call being routed through a maze of coils, and ending up...at the phone in the phone booth where Nancy is hiding. Amazing!
She recognizes serendipity when it's right in her face and agrees to go to Hank's place. And so it goes from there, with him eventually coming to her rescue, literally, as a foil-clad knight in shining armor, with his trusty baseball bat.
I loved it!
Strangers in the night, indeed!
"Lunatics: A Love Story" is now on my list of favorites!
Thanks, Jim!

And i thank You, God, that I was able to steal time away on a lab night to see this treasure!
Coincidences... amazing!