monster is spelled m-y-s-t-e-r-y

I kid you not.
ConnectSavannah misunderstood the PFS listing.
The scheduled movie was a mid-1990's horror spoof about giant insects. Somehow, the folks at the weekly entertainment magazine thought the monster film was to be one of Jim's "to be named later" films ... and that's how they wrote it up.
I very much enjoy the "mystery" movies! Going to one is like digging into a box of chocolates, as Mr. Gump would say.
(smile)
So, when the write-up promised that an inductee into the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame was starring in this "mystery" monster movie, I was all in!
Jim met me as I was buying my ticket.
"Oh, you're going to like this one," he said. "But you should know that it isn't the movie that I was going to show tonight. This is a different mystery monster movie, though not the one advertised."
"How do you know?" I asked. "If it's a mystery, how would anyone know it's not the intended mystery?"
Indeed!
And that's when I found out that several people already knew the title for the scheduled film, especially as Jim had shown promos for it at earlier PFS screenings.
The scheduled film's title was not a mystery.
The newspaper got that wrong.
But, that's okay!
It all worked out just fine!
I was still lured there for this 59-year-old film, "The Giant Claw"!
What a hoot!
A giant, zombie-looking, aerial predator with an antimatter shield?
Oh, do tell!
My favorite character had to be Mitch McAfee. An electronics-whiz rebel who billed himself as the "chief cook and bottle washer in a one-man bird watching society"? How could I resist a line like that? Especially coming from a man who resembled James Garner in appearance, voice, and mannerisms?
He was definitely batting them over the wall!
(The baseball metaphors were fabulous!)
Truly, it was quite funny and charming...
and also scientifically interesting, as it would turn out.
In the movie, it was proposed that they create a ray of "mesonic atoms" to pierce the antimatter shield that protected the beast from all weapons.
"Mesonic atoms"???
Hahahaha haha!
We all laughed about that one!
And we were all quite mistaken.
Apparently, the 1957 script writers were more up-to-date on the research in physics than were any of us in the screening room.
Mesonic atoms were the focus of several researchers in the 1950's, including a CalTech group in 1954, and a New York physicist in 1956. But that wasn't where the science exploration ended. It continued into the 1970's and beyond, including a 2012 textbook.
So... this movie was actually pushing some cutting-edge physics in our direction, in the guise of an extraterrestrial science fiction flick.
Wow...