Halloween Horror Movie Marathon
Midnight, Saturday October 27-noon, Sunday, October 28
Coolidge Corner Theatre, Brookline, $20

Bostonist has never understood how The Monster Squad (1987) gained its cult following, but we know better than to argue with its partisans, who will likely be out in force Saturday night. The film kicks off The Coolidge Corner Theatre's 5th Annual 12 Hour Halloween Movie Marathon, which begins at midnight, Saturday and lasts until noon, Sunday.

The Monster Squad is the only clunker among the half dozen films, and, if you can get through its hour and change of inanity, the rest of the marathon should be a breeze. (That is assuming that the Coolidge can belt a harness around its jackasses.) Among the highlights is Near Dark, Kathryn Bigelow's rarely screened 1987 Western that reunited Bill Paxton, Lance Henriksen, and Jenette Goldstein -- recently off the set of Aliens -- to play pyromaniacal vampires.

John Carpenter gets two entries, and rightly so. Without Halloween (1978; screening fourth), the holiday-themed slasher movie would never have emerged as a genre, and Hollywood's horror films would have run out of steam decades ago. Thank her or curse her as you prefer, but Jamie Lee Curtis -- stoned, scared, and pissed -- turns in a brilliant performance as damsel-in-distress-cum-avenging-angel.

But Carpenter's The Thing (1982) is the real Halloween treat. A loose remake of Howard Hawks's 1951 The Thing from Another World, Carpenter's film features Kurt Russell in his most nuanced portrayal of the character Carpenter invented for him: the sarcastic reluctant hero. Russell in The Thing is just boozy enough to strike a tone of pathos rather than simple buffoonery. Not that the buffoonery is bad on its own.

Why the programmers scheduled David Cronenberg's unfathomable The Fly (1986) at the end of the twelve hours is beyond Bostonist. Maybe they thought the film goes well with insomniac euphoria. In any event, it squares with our childhood memories, watching the original Fly (1958) on broadcast television, bleary-eyed on a Sunday morning.

Evil Dead II (1987; it's the funny one) also plays.