Jerry Lewis Cinamerica, Summer 1975

At my closest intersection, there is a strip mall called Four Cities Plaza, because clockwise from where I live, each cross street gives you Burbank, Chicago, Hometown, and Oak Lawn. Now, Hometown doesn't even qualify as a town, its barely a half mile long. But at the east end of it, Hometown was just a few blocks from my house. If you crossed Pulaski, you were in Evergreen Park, but that's another story. I bring all this confusing stuff up because someone brought up seeing Suspiria on TCM earlier. In the summer of '75, I practically lived in Hometown, more specifically the Jerry Lewis Cinamerica. Walk from 85th to 87th, then a block past the strip mall. Horror films a quarter, all day long. If you left and came back, it was only a dime. Being 15, I saw films I probably wouldn't have seen at the Marquette or the Colony in the city. One Saturday, for a buck, I watched Every Single Planet Of The Apes Films.  To watch Ray Milland at the end of his career, Davids McCallum in DOGS, that one guy in BLACULA and another blaxploitation film named ABBY that was kind of like AUDREY ROSE, which came out years later. 1975 was the only summer of horror, after that, it was a mess of anything they could find. The building is still there, this squat grey building that looks like a decommissioned Cold War facility. I see it when I'm on the 87th Street bus, and I'm pretty certain its some orthopedic place, after being an auto parts store for decades. I don't really miss that place, but I miss that celluloid.