William Shatner shouted my name!!

True, he wasn't shouting for ME, specifically, but it was still a rather nice experience to hear a well-known star of film and television saying MY NAME, loudly, over and over. Oh, yeah!
I attended the Shatnerfest today, an eight-hour celebration of William Shatner's eight decades on this planet. Woohoo!!! Compiled and hosted by the inimitable Jim Reed, who has to be Shatner's biggest fan, the event showcased four films which have been largely ignored, but which featured the pre-Captain Kirk era man.
The film in which William shouted my name was a 1974 thriller titled "Impulse". And, no, before you get all excited that someone was shouting "Faustina", let me clarify: he was shouting the diminutive form of the name. Namely, "Tina". But, still, I'll take what I can get! The character was a bratty teen who didn't like him dating her widowed mom and she made sure he, and all others, knew it. She had a valid point, though. His character was a nervous time bomb, killing off any who touched him wrong. Yes, indeed, this was a side of Shatner I think very few have ever seen! Definitely a treat, though the film was straight 70's schlock, including the music and clothes.
The best film, even according to standards of the Cannes Film Festival, was "Incubus". Filmed in 1966 in the Big Sur of California, it featured the language of the world, Esperanto. Oddly, the art-house film was inadvertently destroyed and thought to be gone forever, until a copy was found in France about 35 years after its debut. To me, one of the best parts of this black and white battle between good and evil was actually getting to HEAR the language being used. When I was in high school, I remember learning some Esperanto, finding some similarities between it and Spanish, but I never was fluent in it. These characters all spoke it as if the words were native to them. Nice!
The above films were bracketed by a 1968 tv pilot ("Alexander the Great", which also featured the pre-Batman Adam West) and the 1977 "Kingdom of the Spiders", a cautionary tale of man's inhumanity toward other life on this planet. While both were quite good, with the first being a movie I most likely DID see when I was a kid and the latter one I almost missed tonight, I think I enjoyed the other two more so. Maybe camp and arthaus are simply so different from much of today's cinematic fare, lending them a freshness beyond their shelf life.
The Shatner Fest is over and I have the T-shirt and collectible pins as proof of my attendance. Now, time for bed!