Best Bets: Grease, Treasure Island and the Houston Horror Film Fest

It’s International Cat Day, and in the spirit of dogs being man’s best friend and cats being man’s apathetic roommate, get out of your cat’s fur for a little bit this week and check out our best bets. This week, we’ve got a classic movie musical from 1978, Houston’s largest horror convention, and a classic adventure tale. Keep reading, and don’t worry – your cat will still love you when you get home.

Grease is still the word for generations of fans, including apparently the Prince and Princess of Wales. According to a new biography, Prince William and Kate Middleton took to the floor at their Buckingham Palace wedding reception and lip-synced along to “You’re the One That I Want,” which “brought the house down.” On Thursday, August 8, at 8 p.m., you too can sing along with the Pink Ladies and T-Birds when Movies Under the Stars at Market Square Park screens the 1978 musical Grease, starring John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. Bring a blanket or lawn chair to be comfy as you watch a good girl and greaser try to keep their summer love going once back in the reality of their 1950s high school. The screening is free, and you can register for it here.

We’ve still got a little more than 80 days left until Halloween, but you can get your horror fix this weekend when the Houston Horror Film Fest, H-Town’s largest horror film festival and expo, returns on Friday, August 9, from 5 to 10 p.m. at the Houston Marriott of Westchase. The horror con promises more than 100 vendors and over 70 screenings, special Q&A panels, and, of course, celebrity meet and greets with actors from franchises like Child’s Play, Halloween, and Twilight. The fest continues on Saturday, August 10, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Sunday, August 11, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tickets can still be purchased at the door, with single-day passes available for $50 and three-day passes for $60. Children 12 and under are free with an adult ticket.

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Pictures of Ghosts is an “ode to the recreational, not-quite-extinct act of ‘moviegoing,’” one that “makes the case for marquees as timekeepers.” Brazil entered the film, a “poetic but somewhat bemused memoir-essay about place, cinema and time,” for Best International Film at the Academy Awards. On Friday, August 9, at 7 p.m., the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, will screen the film, which “suggests you can ‘read’ a city through its old cinemas and come to understand something about its civic and cultural life – not high culture but mass culture.” Though such marquees and theaters no longer populate the landscape as they once did, the nostalgia found in Pictures of Ghosts is “a nostalgia of inquiry and reflection, not stale sentimentality.” Tickets to the screening can be purchased here for $7 to $9.

Creative Movement Practices will bring Robert Louis Stevenson’s adventure classic Treasure Island, about a kid who finds a treasure map and clashes with pirates, to the MATCH on Friday, August 9 at 7:30 p.m. Though CMP’s founding artistic director, Sarah Sneesby, has adapted the story for adults, the show is still all-ages-welcome and family-friendly. Performances will continue through Sunday, August 25, at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Monday, August 19; 3 p.m. Sundays and Saturday, August 17, and Saturday, August 24; with a special sensory-friendly performance on Saturday, August 17, at 11 a.m. Tickets are available here for $15 to $30, with lap children aged two and under free, and pay-what-you-can performances on Monday and Thursday nights.

Experience the avant-garde work of women making films between 1920 and 1970 during Framing Abstraction, a short film program that will be presented over at The Menil Collection on Friday, August 9, at 8 p.m. The program will feature film works from women like Germaine Dulac and Carolee Schneemann, as well as Texas-born Mary Ellen Bute, a pioneer in visual music; Marie Menken, who not only made a name for herself via experimental filmmaking but inspired (along with her husband Willard Maas) Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf; and Maya Deren, who “nearly single-handedly put experimental cinema on the American cultural map” and “became the name of avant-garde cinema by becoming its face.” As always, programs at the Menil are free and open to the public.

Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai is “widely recognized as the greatest foreign-language film ever made,” and – fun fact – the full version of it didn’t even make it to the States until 1982. But on Saturday, August 10, at 5 p.m., you can catch the entire 1954 film, all three-plus hours including an introduction by Alan Cerny of Houston Film Critics Society and a 15-minute intermission, when the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, screens the 70th anniversary 4K restoration. The film, about a village that hires seven samurais to protect them from a band of bandits, is “breathtaking, fastmoving, and overflowing with a delightfully self-mocking sense of humor.” Seven Samurai will screen twice more, at 2 p.m. on Sunday, August 11 and September 1. Tickets to any of the screenings can be purchased here for $7 to $9.

Whitney Houston sold more than 200 million records worldwide, earned six Grammys, and had 11 No. 1 singles. In 2020, her iconic cover of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” even “surpassed one billion views on YouTube, making [Houston] the first solo artist from the 1990s to have a music video achieve that feat.” Though Houston died in 2012, her music lives on, and on Saturday, August 10, at 7:30 p.m., you can relive some of her most popular songs when Performing Arts Houston welcomes Queen of the Night – A Whitney Houston Tribute to Wortham Theater Center. Amanda Cole, formerly of En Vogue, will perform songs like “I Will Always Love You,” “So Emotional” and “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me).” Tickets are available here for $53 to $78.

And finally – Monday, August 12, marks the return of Houston Theater Week. For the third year, the tradition returns to give you one week (through August 18) to take advantage of a pretty good offer: Buy one, get one free tickets to stage productions, dance works, operas, and musical performances from companies and organizations all across the city. One thing for sure is that this is your chance to lock in tickets to see the shows that are certain to make this very list in the coming months.