The Haunted Closet

Man From the South (1960, Alfred Hitchcock Presents)

2012-01-21T14:15:00.000-08:00

The scene is Las Vegas, circa 1960.

While lounging in a casino coffee shop one morning, a down-on-his luck gambler (Steve McQueen) politely lights the cigarette of an older stranger, Carlos (Peter Lorre). Admiring the gambler's lighter, Carlos proposes a bizarre but intriguing bet. If McQueen can light his lighter ten times in succession without it misfiring once, Carlos will hand him the keys to his brand new Cadillac parked out front.

If he loses, McQueen will give up something he can afford to lose... the pinky finger of his left hand. At first McQueen dismisses the proposition as the ramblings of a crazy old man. But after further goading by Carlos, and an explanation of exactly how he plans to claim the finger should McQueen lose the bet (with a meat cleaver!), McQueen agrees.

McQueen and two bystanders follow Carlos to his luxurious hotel room, where his left hand is tied down with some twine between two nails, Carlos readies the cleaver, and the bet begins.

A tense count of seven successful lighter strikes later, a woman suddenly bursts into the room and wrestles the cleaver from Carlos' hand. It is his wife, who scolds Carlos for betting again while she was away.

Carlos has nothing to bet with, she explains. The Cadillac belongs to her, along with everything else he once owned. You see, it took her awhile, but she won all of it. As she reaches for the car keys, we notice she has only two fingers on her left hand.

From the fifth season of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, "Man From the South" is an adaptation of a 1948 short story by Roald Dahl (which can be read in various Dahl compendiums, including The Umbrella Man and Other Stories.)

The story has such an instantly captivating hook, suspenseful final act and satisfying surprise payoff, it remains one of the more talked about Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes, and has found its way to the screen more than once.

The premier episode of Tales of the Unexpected (1979), an anthology show based exclusively on the short works of Dahl and hosted by the author himself, presented a version more faithful to Dahl's original text, which sets the story at a Jamaican beach resort instead of Sin City.

But probably the most intense version is the 1985 remake done for The (New) Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which stars John Huston as Carlos and Kim Novak as his wife, and manages to dial up the tension even further by having Novak's surprise entrance cause a draft that blows out the lighter flame, bringing down Carlos' eager cleaver for a near miss before she stops the bet.

Director Quentin Tarantino even paid homage to the story for his segment of the 1995 anthology film "Four Rooms", in which a group of drunken New Years Eve celebrants, among them Tarantino and Bruce Willis, are discussing the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode and decide to carry out the bet themselves, enlisting the aid of the bellboy, played by Tim Roth. As derivative as this premise is, Tarantino manages to make it his own with additional character nuances and a surprise ending.

I was familiar with director Alfred Hitchcock at a young age (see my previous post on his spooky story collection for children, Ghostly Gallery). As it happens, my introduction to the original Alfred Hitchcock Presents show, which I first caught in reruns on PBS sometime in the early 80s, was with the fifth season.

And what a great season to get started with, for it contains not only "Man From the South", but several other notable and memorable episodes. My favorite is the Robert Bloch penned "The Cuckoo Clock", in which a woman staying alone in a remote cabin gets an unexpected visit from an unstable stranger who may or may not be an escaped, mentally disturbed murderer.

A cuckoo clock in the cabin becomes the focus of attention for several characters, serving as a motif of madness.

"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" is a competent adaptation of the dark Ambrose Bierce Civil-War chiller we all remember from English class.

In "Special Delivery", based on a short story by Ray Bradbury, a boy starts a mushroom farm in his basement after ordering seeds through a comic book ad. But is there more to these mushrooms than meets the eye? A scene where Dad approaches his increasingly distant son in the dark basement and is ordered by his son to eat a mushroom sandwich had me squirming in my seat.

Finally, there is the exclusive, members-only restaurant depicted in "Specialty of the House", which serves a seasonal dish that seems to coincide with the loss of one of its members.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents: The Complete Fifth Season, featuring all of the episodes described above, is available now on DVD.

The Muppets Holiday Haunt (1980, Muppet Madness)

2012-01-12T17:19:00.000-08:00

Kermit, Miss Piggy and the gang find their vacation road trip detoured to a haunted castle in The Muppets Holiday Haunt, from the 1980 activity book Muppet Madness (Random House).

Muppet Madness is a softcover book of Muppet-themed comics, articles, games and papercraft projects that I purchased originally in grade school through the Scholastic Book Club. (It's actually a U.S. version of the third volume of yearly U.K. book series, The Muppet Show Annual.)

The scares continue in a haunted theater themed board game that spreads across two pages (below, with selected board details.)

A sad story for Scary Stories To Tell In the Dark

2012-01-04T17:14:00.000-08:00

If you're a reader of this blog, you probably don't need me to tell you that the Scary Stories trilogy (Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark, More Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark, and Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones), a compilation of ghost stories, spooky folk tales, and urban legends collected and retold by author Alvin Schwartz, is a must-have for any respectable haunted library.

The surreal and unsettling black-and-white illustrations by Stephen Gammell (which have graced the cover and interior pages of each volume since first published) play no small part in the books' appeal, and I'm guessing Gammell's visualizations left their mark on many a young reader's subconscious (Kindertrauma has the proof!)

Sadly, I've learned that after over 30 years of being in print (the original volume was released in 1981, the sequels following in 1984 and 1991), the publisher has decided to quietly replace Gammell's original illustrations with brand new renderings by Lemony Snicket artist Brett Helquist.

Don't get me wrong, I like Helquist's style, which has a charm all its own (this article at Adventures In Poor Taste offers some sharp observations and page-by-page comparisons). The problem is, the new illustrations look like the labor of a competent and perfectly sane artist. Gammell's, in contrast, appear to have seeped out of a fevered nightmare and manifested itself onto paper.

You just don't see this kind of stuff in children's books today (in fact, to find anything comparable I have to reach back to Franz Altschuler's shadowy and ambiguously disturbing drawings for Ida Chittum's Tales of Terror (1975).

In memoriam, I present a selection of scans from the Scary Stories Treasury (a 2002 hardcover compendium of all three volumes, complete and unabridged.) Meanwhile, if you've been putting off picking up an original copy of your own, better act fast. Prices on the used market are already starting to climb! (Hat tip to artist Daniel Danger... and if you aren't familiar with his work, click this link and prepare to be captivated.)

Chiller (1986, Exidy)

2012-01-01T19:07:00.001-08:00

By 1986, I was in high school with a still wet-from-the-printer driver's license, and on Saturday nights my friends and I would drive past several perfectly suitable video arcades to get to the one on the other side of town that had a Chiller machine.

Chiller was the latest in a series of arcade shooters produced by Exidy in which you aimed a mounted light-gun at animated video targets. Previous entries in the series were family friendly Crossbow (in which you shoot to defend a party of Renaissance-Fair adventurers) and Cheyenne (same concept, but set in the wild west).

Chiller took this play mechanic and plopped it in the middle of a haunted castle, complete with a spooky hallway, a graveyard, and medieval torture chamber. Make that TWO medieval torture chambers!

Players accumulated points in timed rounds by shooting ghosts, monsters, rats, trapdoors, skeletons, and tombstones, accompanied all the while by an unsettling symphony of digitally sampled moans, groans and shrieks.

But what made Chiller stand out from other games of the day was the explicit, gory violence. You are required to shoot repeatedly at helpless human victims strapped into various torture devices. Each direct hit bloodies the victim and illicits additional screams.

You can also use your gun to activate the torture mechanisms themselves, like releasing a guillotine blade, tightening a clamp against a person's head, or slowly lowering a dangling victim into a river of blood and the snapping jaws of an alligator. (This blog page has some excellent close-up animated .gifs to illustrate what I'm talking about.)

Even by today's standards, this was pretty gruesome stuff. Between levels, a screen displays the various special targets you must shoot to achieve maximum points and earn a bonus level. It's like a game of bingo played in Hell.

As you take out the special targets, they disappear from the bingo card to reveal a picture beneath.

Sharp-shooters are rewarded with a bonus round--this repulsive slot machine in which the jackpots are severed heads, brains, and other body parts.

I have to admit, as much as I enjoyed the game, I always felt a little dirty after a few rounds with Chiller, and had to feed some quarters into clean, happy games like Super Sprint, Rolling Thunder or Space Harrier afterword to cleanse my soul.

Chiller game flyer found at The Arcade Flyer Archive.

Monsters In My Room (Tales From the Darkside, 1985)

2011-12-24T07:36:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite Tales From the Darkside episodes just happens to be a Christmas episode. It's Monsters In My Room, which first aired in December, 1985.

Third-grader Timmy (Seth Green) is a sensitive child who is more interested in playing piano and looking at his bug collection than watching the big game with his new stepfather, macho jerk Biff.

It's Christmas Eve, and Timmy blesses everyone (even Biff) in his prayers, but what he's really hoping for is that Santa will bring him... a "Cuddle-stuff" panda bear.

Okay, in fairness to Biff, maybe this kid could use a little toughening up.

But Timmy has other issues beside his obnoxious stepdad throwing footballs at his head. His room is infested with monsters. There's a boogeyman in the closet...

...a glowing-eyed octopus under the bed that can reach out its horrible tentacles...

...and a giant spinning circular saw-blade.

These night terrors pop out of their hiding places to menace little Timmy just long enough to cause him to cry out for "Mommy!" (and reinforce Biff's feeling that he's inherited a sissy-boy.)

Christmas morning, Timmy gets his coveted Cuddle-stuff panda...

...but propped up in the bedside rocking chair that night, it seems more creepy than cuddly.

But the scariest moment of this episode doesn't involve the rocking panda, the bedroom monsters, or even this hideous cackling witch that pops up out of the bathroom later that evening.

The scariest moment is when Mom has to take presents to a neighbor, leaving a nervous Timmy home alone for a few minutes with a drunk and surly Biff. We listen with Timmy as we hear Mom get in her car, watch as her headlights beam through his bedroom window...

...and slowly pass along the wall as her car pulls away...

...only to reveal, wait for it...

... BIFF, standing over Timmy's bed, determined to teach Timmy a few lessons in manhood before Mom returns.

Monsters In My Room can be found on Tales From the Darkside: The Complete Second Season.

The Wonder Book of Christmas (1951, Lou Myers)

2011-12-22T20:29:00.001-08:00

Nothing spooky, here. Just a charming little Christmas book that, in what could only be described as a Christmas miracle, has somehow managed to travel from Frankfurt, Germany, 1955, to Phoenix, Arizona, 2011, in nearly mint condition. Warren F. Buxton, if you're out there somewhere, drop us a line and let us know how you're doing. Your Wonder Book is in good hands.

The complete title is The Wonder Book of Christmas Including The Night Before Christmas and Other Stories, with illustrations by Lou Myers (complete contents listed below). Enjoy these selected scans.

Santa Claus (poem)
Who Is Santa Claus?
The Night Before Christmas (Clement C. Moore)
The Animals' Christmas
The Christmas Story
The Friendly Beasts (Twelfth-Century Carol)
Santa Claus's Workshop
Jingle Bells (J. Pierpont)

Remember to wash your covers once a day, kiddies, to keep your library clean and healthy!

Jimmy Takes Vanishing Lessons (Walter R. Brooks, Don Bolognese, 1950)

2011-12-18T07:40:00.000-08:00

A young boy celebrates Christmas with a ghost in Jimmy Takes Vanishing Lessons (1950, Walter Brooks, with illustrations by Don Bolognese.)

The "vanishing lessons" are among several supernatural tricks taught Jimmy by a friendly ghost found living in the long abandoned home of his grandfather. He is also taught how to make his eyes glare with fire (as pictured above), the perfect thing to brighten up Christmas morning.

They first meet when Jimmy Crandall decides to investigate the dark and gloomy neighborhood haunted house to prove it isn't really haunted at all.

To Jimmy's surprise, there really is a ghost, but the unnamed spectre is more frightened of Jimmy than he is of it!

Eventually a delicate friendship develops, and the ghost offers to teach him a few supernatural tricks, like floating through keyholes.

Later, Jimmy invites the lonely ghost back to his house to meet his Aunt.

I've always liked the illustrations of Don Bolognese, who has lent his talents to a few other prominent titles from my childhood, among them The Book That Jason Wrote, The Ghost of Windy Hill, and The Wicked Pigeon Ladies in the Garden (a.k.a. The Wicked, Wicked Ladies in the Haunted House).

Jimmy Takes Vanishing Lessons is still in print.

Terror In the Jungle (1967)

2011-12-03T15:28:00.000-08:00

I happened upon a movie recently that was so awful, but in the most wonderful ways, that it instantly became my new favorite bad movie. It's a film that exists in the fever-dream funhouse where sheer incompetence collides with accidental genius. It's 1967's Terror in the Jungle.

It starts by introducing a series of characters, all traveling by budget airline to Rio, Brazil, for various reasons. Little Henry Clayton Jr., traveling unaccompanied except for his trusty stuffed toy lion, is flying down to live with his mother after his parents' recent divorce.

Next up is recent widow Mrs. Sherman, who is at the center of a high-profile scandal, accused of cheating on and murdering her rich husband. Is she hoping to escape the attention of the tabloid press by starting a new life in Rio? And whatever happened to her husband's money?

"Marian" (probably a stage name) is an exotic dancer traveling to Rio to appear in a Spanish-language musical film. A photographer snaps a few cheesecake photos on the tarmac.

A trio of nuns approach the plane (one of them in a coffin!)

Finally a mop-topped rock group, waving goodbye to a herd of groupies.

So at this point it looks like we're in for one of those Airport or Irwin Allen style disaster films, where a cross-section of society is brought together, then thrown into a survival situation, across which their individual dramas will play out, right?

We're barely five minutes into the air when the melodrama starts. Marian sidles up alongside business tycoon A.F. Keys, and we detect the early signs of an emerging love story.

Meanwhile, a couple, who may as well be named Mr. and Mrs. Exposition, is having a perfectly normal conversation on an everyday topic: the mysterious Peruvian tribe called the Jivaros, cannibalistic descendants of the Incas who continue to live in an ancient jungle temple.

And a fan of the wanna-Beatles urges them to play their hit. You know, the one that goes, "Soft lips, you've got everything I want. Soft lips."

Marian seizes the opportunity to strut her stuff in a provocative dance that is enjoyed by all...

...and I really do mean ALL. Yes, this is an actual reaction shot of the nun enjoying the spectacle.

Just as the last strains of "Soft Lips" fade out unnaturally, as if from a recording, instead of performed live by The Bewigged Three, the captain notifies the passengers of an in-flight emergency. The plane is dangerously low on fuel and they need to jettison excess weight.

Of course he's talking about luggage and such, but in all the frenzy that follows, not only does the widow Sherman's stash of money get loosed into the cabin...

...but one of the nuns gets too close to the open hatch, and the cast suffers its first casualty. Nun overboard! Considering the lightweight tone of the film up to this point, this is actually an abrupt and shocking turn, and the first sign that we may be in for more that we bargained for on this trip!

Lightening the load by a whole nun isn't enough to compensate for the severe fuel problem, and the passengers don life-jackets as the plane is forced to make a water landing in a Peruvian river.

Half the cast is taken out on impact, and the bloody aftermath of the crash is fairly gruesome, with close up shots of a split forehead and an unfortunate woman who got a facefull of birdcage.

Now the survivors need to escape the flaming and rapidly sinking wreck.

But the river is crawling with crocodiles, and every single person that enters the water is torn apart in a feeding frenzy!

The coffin holding the corpse of the third nun (propped upright, naturally) is salvaged for use as a flotation device for little Henry, who is launched safely into the water just before the plane erupts in flame.

The next morning, Henry is still drifting along on the river in his floating coffin, the sole survivor of the plane crash. In just 20 minutes, the film has set up, then abandoned, every single character and plotline. What now?

Henry gets captured by Peruvian natives (which we know, thanks to Mr. and Mrs. Exposition, are the cannibalistic Jivaros.)

Some of the natives want to sacrifice him to their god...

...until the King thinks he sees a supernatural sign: Henry's hair appears to be glowing like a halo, a comical effect created with some optical trickery.

Henry is spared and welcomed into the tribe, but not for long. The knife-wielding native, oblivious to his glowing locks and still intent on killing the child, chases him into the jungle.

Now... do you want to hazard a guess as to how little Henry gets out of this dangerous predicament? If you guessed that his toy stuffed lion would suddenly, magically, without any context or explanation, transform into a real animal and tear the native to bloody shreds...

...you'd be right!

So far I've made Terror in the Jungle sound like a non-stop rollercoaster of awesome. But the film does have its drawbacks. It's padded with dull footage of Peruvian scenery, endless sequences of our pint-sized protaganist crying his eyes out, and stock shots of wildlife obviously photographed in another time, place, and film stock.

But there's a lot of other little things that make me like the film even more. Like the fact that Marian, the dancer, is played by Fawn Silver, who also appeared as Criswell's witchy sidekick in the Ed Wood-penned adults-only topless-dancing graveyard romp, Orgy of the Dead (1965).

Or that the film is scored by early progenitor of bachelor-pad exotica music, Les Baxter!

...the shrunken head and tiki statue that pop-up in the set dressing...

...the happy coincidence that the wind sound-effect heard during the airplane crash is the same one that appears on a favorite Halloween sound effect record, Sounds to Make You Shiver!

...the baffling decision to display this message, acknowledging the cooperation of the Peruvian government, not at the beginning or end of the film, but 10 minutes into it, right in the middle of the action!

...and finally, the unbelievable fact that it took THREE directors to make this turkey (one for each location)!

Upon first viewing, I naturally assumed this must be one of those films with a rabid cult fanbase, and that I was a late arrival to the Terror in the Jungle party. So imagine my surprise to find the film had merited only a dozen or so comments at IMDB, and only one review at Amazon, with very little coverage in the blog-o-sphere. In fact the film was only recently released to DVD, unceremoniously stashed among 50 other titles on a budget multi-disc box set titled Pure Terror.

Disney Goes to Hell

2011-11-24T11:20:00.001-08:00

What the hell? Disney has visited H-E-double-hockey-sticks more than a few times in animation, film, and even in theme parks, with varying degrees of horror and humor.

The first visit occurred in 1929's Silly Symphony short, Hell's Bells, in which the Prince of Darkness amuses himself with his menagerie of demonic animals.

The mythical three-headed guard dog Cerberus makes an appearance (although in this depiction, he's more silly than Satanous!)

The closest we get to genuine horror in this outing is this "udderly" bizarre dragon-cow, that gives liquid-fire instead of milk. Satan laps up a heaping bowl full.

Satan came back for more in 1934's The Goddess of Spring, where he erupts out of the ground to disrupt a pastoral scene and demand the Goddess join him as queen of his underground kingdom, Hades.

Even though this is no cause to celebrate for the imprisoned Goddess, the imp-like demons of the underworld throw her a reception party, with organ music and a fire-dance.

We get a dog's-eye-view of the not-so-sweet Hereafter in Pluto's Judgement Day (1935), when Pluto visits an afterlife dominated by cats looking for a little rough justice.

A loaded jury finds Pluto guilty of being mean to cats.

His sentence is being burned alive by the angry mob...

Of course, this visit to the hot-end of the Hereafter was all just a dream brought on by Pluto's guilty conscience, not unlike the brief glimpse of hellfire that greedy Uncle Scrooge tastes at the climax of Mickey's Christmas Carol (1983).

Although it's not on any park map, Disneyland guests have been able pass though Hell since day one, thanks to the final room of Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, where the guests (as Mr. Toad's surrogate) are killed after colliding with a train and sent straight to Hell.

The event is not based on any scene from the ride's namesake film, The Wind in the Willows. Rather, it pays tribute to a classic dark-ride tradition of sending riders to the hot and steamy underworld. (Artist Kevin Kidney even created some artwork related to this portion of the ride that was subsequently banned!)

In 1979, Hell begins where everything ends... inside The Black Hole. The surprise climax to Disney's belated response to Star Wars sends evil scientist Dr. Hans Reinhardt to an alternate reality complete with ironic punishment (he is trapped inside the shell of his deadly robot sidekick Maximilian) that could only be interpreted as Hell itself.

We see Reinhardt's eyes peering out in despair from within his new robotic sarcophagus, in a shot reminiscent of 1961's The Pit and the Pendulum...

...before pulling back to reveal the full scale of the horrific landscape.

But Disney's most disturbing depiction of Hell has to be in 1981's The Devil and Max Devlin, in which a crooked landlord played by Elliot Gould goes to Hell after getting hit by a bus. He arrives free-falling amid other unlucky souls...

And we even get to experience a first-person, Max's-eye-view of the frightening plunge. Now there's a potential theme park ride... Soaring Over Satan?

The air is filled with the tortured cries of the damned as we watch Max land amid fiery lakes and rocky crags. And some of the mountain faces... have faces!

Satan and his minions have been reimagined as gruesome executives sitting around a conference table, with the Devil seated as Chairman. They rattle off a list of Max's sins, starting with cheating on a fourth-grade spelling test, and working their way on up from there.

When Max threatens to take soul-saving action that would deny him eternal membership to Club Hell, a demonic "Soul Manager" played by an unrecognizable Bill Cosby recites a litany of torments awaiting him for not complying.

"...Eternal damnation is yours! You’ll know the pain and horror of limbs being torn from their sockets! YOUR limbs! YOUR sockets! You’ll feel pain you never imagined in life. Flesh you’ll smell, burning! YOUR flesh! Rotting forever!"
Ouch!

Cardboard Monster Finger Puppet Book 1970s

2011-10-29T18:02:00.000-07:00

I'm used to wading back into the dark, dusty corners of the haunted closet to dig up forgotten relics from the past, but allow me now to turn the tables and appeal to the collective wisdom of the Internet to help me identify a lost artifact from my own haunted childhood.

It was a book of some kind (coloring book? activity book? sticker book?) with maybe a dozen or so full-color, cut-out, monster finger puppets on the cardboard back cover. It would have come out in the late 1970s, possibly ordered through the Scholastic Book Club. No idea what it was called, who the author or artist was, or who published it.

I'd totally given up finding this book, until a piece of evidence materialized... the equivalent of finding a bloody footprint at a long abandoned crime scene. A photo of one of the elusive monster puppets turned up in a recent post at Plastic Pumpkins. Unfortunately, Plastic Pumpkins blogmaster Steven was in the same boat as me, having only vague memories of the book.

As the detectives say, anything you can remember might be useful. I know its tempting to set aside everything you're doing to work exclusively on this for me, but also allow yourself some personal time to check out Plastic Pumpkins, which is loaded with scans from kids' magazines, roadside attraction ephemera, thrift store treasures, and one of my favorites, The International Language of Wieners.

An early Halloween treat...

2011-10-25T17:23:00.000-07:00

Since I seem to be The Last Man On Earth possessing a copy of spooky anthology Baleful Beasts and Eerie Creatures, a scanner, and an Internet connection, I thought I'd update one of my earliest posts on favorite short story The Patchwork Monkey (Beverly Butler, 1976) with scans of the complete text.

Happy reading.

Bringers of Wonder (Space 1999)

2011-10-20T16:59:00.001-07:00

I first happened upon Space 1999 as a grade-schooler in the late 70s, when it appeared in syndicated reruns Saturday afternoons. This high-concept science fiction series, equal parts space adventure and interpersonal drama, followed the exploits of Commander John Koenig (Martin Landau), Dr. Helena Russell (Barbara Bain) and crew, trapped on a space station based on a Moon forever wandering the galaxy after being knocked out of orbit.

Despite its frequently cerebral tone and serious themes, Space 1999 wasn't immune to Monster-of-the-Weekism, presenting some truly frightening extraterrestrial terrors, most notably the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea meets Alien abomination from a Season 1 episode called Dragon's Domain.

This man-eating tentacled terror even appeared on the Space 1999 lunchbox.

But for me, the real scares came in a two-part Season 2 episode titled Bringers of Wonder. Space 1999 never had a Halloween episode, but if it did, this would be it. The show is crawling with monsters, including a ship full of alien visitors who show up at their front door in costume (as normal human beings) and are using a trick in order to get "treats" (nuclear energy to revive their degenerating bodies.)

The unexpected visitors arrive on a faster-than-lightspeed craft staffed with friends and relatives of the Moonbase Alpha crew, and announce their intention to bring them all home at a festive reception party.

Only Commander Koenig (Landau), immune to the alien psychic powers that have clouded the perception of the rest of the crew, sees the visitors for what they really are...

Disgusting monsters! Yes, these alleged humans actually look more like Sigmund & the Sea-Monsters might look after climbing out of an eyeball and slime casserole.

They glow and undulate. Green globs literally drip down their bodies, and we get plenty of too-close views of their veiny eyeballs.

What really got to me throughout this episode is the fact that nobody else can see them for what they really are, standing among them completely unaware.

We later see a group of these inter-dimensional monsters stationed on the Moon's surface, waiting for orders to seize nuclear material from a remote waste site.

But the monster party doesn't stop there. Maya, a regular character added for the show's second season, is an alien "metamorph", and has the ability to transform temporarily into almost anything.

She uses that power to change into no less than five different monstrous creatures, including this fish-eyed alien...

...an amphibious man resembling the Creature From the Black Lagoon...

...a one-eyed, two-horned Moon Ape that wouldn't look too out of place on Jason of Star Command...

...and even a large cockroach that had me scratching uncomfortably at still fresh psychological scars from my viewing of Bug!

The fifth monster is one of our gooey, one-eyed haystack friends, a disguise Maya uses to try to infiltrate their ranks.

The Bringers of Wonder episodes can be found on DVD in Space 1999: Set 7.
Toss a copy of Jason of Star Command or Sigmund and the Sea Monsters in your cart while you're at it.

Trick or Treat (1978, CHiPs)

2011-10-15T14:58:00.000-07:00

CHiPs (an acronym of California Highway Patrol) was the cop show for kids that didn't like cop shows. Officers Ponch (Erik Estrada) and John (Larry Wilcox) rarely drew their weapons, and let legions of criminals walk free with a stern warning.

In the world of CHiPs, police work wasn't about using either brute force or ingenious detective work to bring hard-boiled criminals off the gritty Streets of Mean. Instead, a typical beat might entail rescuing a runaway boat on jet-skis, luring an escaped circus tiger back to his cage, or delivering a newborn on the floor of the disco (after winning the disco contest, of course!)

The Season 2 Halloween episode, Trick or Treat (1978), stayed true to the formula.

Nothing scary to see here, folks, as Ponch and John tackle decidedly lightweight incidents like a hold-up woman dressed as a ghost, candy-bag theft by an older woman convinced she's lost her wedding ring in a batch of candy, and a pair of naughty ladies stealing city property for a scavenger hunt.

Sarge demonstrates how to thoroughly search a suspect for hidden contraband.

The biggest treat of this episode is getting a look at vintage plastic Halloween adornments... close encounters of the Ben Cooper kind.

Below we have Bigfoot (mask only, missing the smock, from the 1977 Sid & Marty Krofft show Bigfoot & Wildboy), a Batman (1974, this rendering based on the comic strip), and a Raggedy Ann (1973). Oh yea, there's also a non-plastic vampire and witch, too.

Later that evening we'll encounter this group. Bigfoot again, this time complete with smock, Skeleton (looks like a slight variation of a 1974 version that I remember as being the first costume I ever wore), The Incredible Hulk (looks like an earlier version than the 1980s model posted below), and Darth Vader (sin smock, con cape).

Here's a closer look at Skeleton.

Costume images came from the awesome and topical book Halloween: Costumes and Other Treats. See many more images in a previous post here.

The Chicken Heart That Ate Up New York City

2011-10-07T19:43:00.001-07:00

Fat Albert and the gang have left their inner city junkyard to spend two weeks in the fresh forest air of Camp Green Lane. On their first night, sitting around the campfire, Bill tells the scary story of The Chicken Heart That Ate Up New York City.

(thump-thump... thump-thump...)
"The chicken heart was kept alive in a vat, in a laboratory, in a special solution."
(thump-thump... thump-thump...)

"One day a careless janitor knocked the vat over."
(thump-thump... thump-thump...)

"The janitor went to get a rag to clean it up. The chicken heart grew six foot five inches!"
(thump-thump... thump-thump...)

"He went out in search of things to eat. It went out the hallway and rang for the elevator."
(thump-thump... thump-thump...)

"It ate up all of the cabs."
(thump-thump... thump-thump...)

"Ate up the jersey turnpike."
(thump-thump... thump-thump...)

"It’s coming through the woods—he’s right behind you! Ahhhhh!!!"
(thump-thump... thump-thump...)

This telling of the Chicken Heart story appears in the October 1972 episode of Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, "Fish Out of Water". If the whole thing seems more silly than scary, that's because this is a story that is meant to be heard, not seen. It's based on a sketch from Bill Cosby's 1966 album Wonderfulness.

But the Chicken Heart story doesn't originate here. Rather, that sketch is the humorous telling of how Cosby first heard the story, as a frightened 7-year old, on the late night radio program Lights Out.

Lights Out was the brainchild of playwright turned radio personality (and eventually film director) Arch Oboler. The show first aired in 1934, but was rebroadcast in reruns as late as the early 1960s. The stories were unique and scary enough to warrant several pages of coverage in Stephen King's non-fiction survey of the horror genre, Danse Macabre. The Chicken Heart story, according to King, exploits "the mind's innate obedience, its willingness to try to see whatever someone suggests it see, no matter how absurd" to force your imagination to confront the impossible, grotesque, hungry heart that eventually expands to cover the entire Earth. (thump... thump...)

Some of Oboler's Lights Out material wound up on a 1962 album Drop Dead (available as an Amazon download here).

You won't find the usual ghosts, vampires or werewolves here. Aside from the Chicken Heart story (played straight, with tongue nowhere near cheek), you also get Taking Papa Home, in which an elderly couple, driving home from a retirement party, finds their car stuck on the train tracks, the wife desperately trying to remove her husband, drunk from celebrating, as the train barrels toward them.

In A Day at the Dentist's, a patient realizes too late that the dentist about to apply sharp tools to his pearly whites is the husband of the woman he's been having an affair with.

If you aren't already squirming in your chair, try listening to The Dark, about a mysterious black fog, seeping from behind an attic door, that turns anyone it touches inside out--without immediately killing them!

"It's a man! But the skin is the inside, the raw flesh is the outside. Organs hanging... A man turned inside out, the way a glove is turned inside out."

The Dark may have inspired the final gag of The Simpson's Treehouse of Horror 5 (aka The Simpson's Halloween Special V) in which a fog turns the Simpsons family inside out before they break out into song.

Buy the Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids featuring the episode "A Fish Out of Water" here.
Buy Bill Cosby's album Wonderfulness here.
Download Arch Oboler's album Drop Dead here.
Buy Stephen King's Danse Macabre here.
Buy The Simpsons Season 6 (featuring Treehouse of Horror V) here.

"The Grandchild" (The Waltons, 1977)

2011-09-27T19:35:00.001-07:00

I never was a watcher of The Waltons, nor was anyone else in my family. So I'm not exactly sure how it was I came to view the (exactly) two episodes that I remember seeing as a child back in the late 70s. But I do remember this--they rank among the scariest things I had seen on TV up to that time.

One of these, The Changeling (Season 7, Episode 5, 1978), has since become a bit of a cult phenomenon (and holds the honor of being the subject of Kindertrauma's debut post).

The Walton household turns into a G-rated version of the Amityville Horror when a poltergeist haunts daughter Elizabeth (Kami Cotler) on the cusp of her 13th birthday, causing rocking chairs to hover in the air, and her Raggedy Ann doll to move on its own.

But that was child's play compared to the scares contained in a 1977 episode called The Grandchild, elements of which I've remembered ever since.

I'm not sure why The Grandchild seems to have gotten overlooked among seekers of television fright. Maybe because it's a long, two-part episode, and the scary elements only occupy a small portion of one of several subplots.

Mary Ellen (Judy Norton-Taylor) is expecting her first child with husband and town doctor Curt Willard (Tom Bower). She works as a nurse at her husband's practice, and can't wait for her baby to arrive.

One stormy evening, Ab Hineman (David Hooks) arrives at Dr. Willard's office seeking help for her grand-daughter, Cassie (Beth Raines), also pregnant and going into a difficult labor. Dr. Willard is seeing a patient in a neighboring town, so Mary Ellen rides out with Mr. Hineman to provide assistance.

They arrive at the dark cabin amid wind-whipped trees and flashes of lightning.

Cassie has already given birth, and is holding her newborn, but it is eerily quiet.

Mary Ellen has to break the news that the baby was stillborn.

Cassie, a simple and superstitious person, believes the baby's death was caused by the ill omen of her having seen a dead bird the day before.

"I saw a dead bird yesterday. He had his eyes open and I looked right into them. They was all yellow and dead. It's an omen! Today, my baby's dead!"

And now that Mary Ellen has looked into the face of her "sweet dead child", Cassie now believes that Mary Ellen's baby is cursed to the same fate.

It's here that Cassie starts reciting a verse, slowly and rhythmically, as if casting a spell, that has haunted me ever since first hearing it over thirty years ago.
"Look upon the face of death...
And never feel your baby's breath."
She chants it over and over, disturbing Mary Ellen, who at first dismisses it as mere superstition, but is soon fleeing the cabin in fear.

What's waiting for her outside only tightens the psychological screws. It's the surreal scene of Cassie's grandpa, standing over a table in the middle of the lightning storm, building a baby-sized coffin.

Now in a full-fledged panic, Mary Ellen flees down the dark forest road, when a mysterious electrical phenomenon appears along the fence, blue sparks that she perceives as some supernatural sign.

She is picked up shortly by her late-arriving husband, who tries to comfort her by explaining everything in rational terms (the strange lights were just static electricity created by the lightning, etc.)

Days later, after things seem to have returned to normal, Mary Ellen is enjoying her baby shower.

Flossie Brimmer (Nora Marlowe), who wields "occult powers" as a hobby, is reading people's fortune through tea leaves. But when Mary Ellen playfully invites her to read hers, Ms. Brimmer doesn't like what she sees.

This is when a fluttering curtain betrays the presence of someone--or something--just outside the window (and we get a great Window Into Fear moment.)

It's an increasingly unstable Cassie, spying on the shower from the bushes.

Later, Dr. Willard pays Cassie a visit to check up on her well-being (he hasn't had a chance to examine her since her miscarriage.) She's hiding in the dilapidated house of her long dead parents.

Dr. Willard tries to speak kindly to her, but she states coldly: "Nothing's gonna save your baby."

After the doctor leaves, it's revealed that Cassie has been playing mother to something wrapped up in a blanket--why, it's none other than our little haunted friend from The Changeling episode!

Being The Waltons, I guess it's no spoiler to reveal that everything turns out alright in the end--but there is a last minute dramatic turn that will have anyone who's ever seen The Other (1972) looking for the nearest wine barrel.

Man, that old Walton's place gives me the creeps!

Both The Waltons Season 6 (featuring The Grandchild) and The Waltons Season 7 (featuring The Changeling) are available on DVD.

Spacecraft 2000 to 2100 AD (Stewart Cowley, 1978)

2011-09-07T18:32:00.000-07:00

Let's imagine for a moment that we're in the far, far future. It's the year 2000. Can you even conceive what life will be like? Space travel. Colonies on other planets. Discovery of alien life forms. Oh, the possibilities!

Okay, so the millennium is already old news, we still live on Earth, and the closest we've gotten to alien life forms is the freak show that is reality television. It's still fun to speculate what COULD have been, especially when peering through a telescope firmly planted in the year 1978.

Which brings us to Spacecraft 2000 to 2100 AD, a fictionalized retrospective of the first 100 years of interplanetary space travel, all told from an "in universe" perspective, in which we're to believe that space freighters first launched in 2004, a lunar station was established on Mars in 2011, and aliens from Alpha Centauri were contacted by a survey ship in 2036.

Author Stewart Cowley, incidentally, is purported to be a veteran officer of the Terran Defence Authority, who served a tour of duty defending Mars. Here's a photo of him holding his trusty space helmet.

The conceit that this is all based on historic fact, and the book itself an artifact from the future, made Spacecraft... all the more captivating to me when I first discovered it in the school library. (And for a very different example of another "in universe" book that I also loved as a kid, check out The Witch's Catalog.)

Spacecraft... is just one title in a series of similar guidebooks covering military and civilian craft (Starliners: Commercial Space Travel in 2200 AD), intergalactic wars (Great Space Battles) and wreckage (Spacewreck: Ghost Ships and Derelicts From Space), all strikingly illustrated by various sci-fi artists, among them Angus McKie, Bob Layzell, Colin Hay, and Tony Roberts. Below are some of my favorites.

Dark Night of the Scarecrow soundtrack available now!

2011-09-04T10:39:00.000-07:00

Somehow without my noticing, the creepy and haunting soundtrack for made-for-TV classic Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981, Glenn Paxton) has been quietly released as a download-only purchase, available at I-Tunes and Amazon.com.

Buy each song individually, or get the whole 17-track album for under ten bucks. Below is a full track listing (and a secret: the final End Credits track not only contains the signature nursery rhyme-like synthesized theme, but ends with nearly a minute of the isolated sound effect of cornfield insects chirping.)

1. Main Title (1:59)
2. Bubba and Marylee (0:52)
3. Dog Attack (0:41)
4. The Chase (3:27)
5. Vigilante Execution (1:53)
6. Bubba Didn't Do It (1:39)
7. Bubba's Not Gone (5:04)
8. The Scarecrow Appears (1:51)
9. The Chipper (3:16)
10. Hocker Dead (1:54)
11. Eye for an Eye (1:54)
12. Scared to Death (2:38)
13. Deadly Silo (4:15)
14. The Grave (1:08)
15. Truth Revealed (1:21)
16. Scarecrow Justice (3:33)
17. End Credits (2:30)

Don't Be Afraid of Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo

2011-08-30T15:58:00.000-07:00

Above: the house from the original Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (1972).

In a recent interview promoting his remake of the 1972 made-for-TV film Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, Guillermo Del Toro revealed the true depth of his love for the original by sharing that he hoped to someday purchase the actual house where the Farnham family encountered those mischievous little gremlins.

Well, if Del Toro ever DOES finally realize that dream, he'd better make sure to have the house thoroughly inspected by an exterminator, because that property has had a little trouble with spiders as well.

This occurred a few years after the Farnham family presumably vacated the place due to problems with a defective fireplace. By 1977, the private residence had been repurposed as a school for autistic children.

Here's an alternate angle of the Finley Ranch School for Autistic Children.

When a cargo plane loaded with Colombian coffee beans (and a few dozen deadly South American tarantulas) crash lands in a field just outside doesn't-really-exist Finleyville, California, the furry little stowaways migrate into town, lured no doubt by the promise of sinking their fangs into some of those delicious oranges advertised on billboards.

Finley Ranch lies right in the critters path, and ends up getting some unwelcome visitors who didn't bother to sign in at the front office. Here's a friendly student generously sharing her tennis racket with one of them, oblivious to the danger.

Eventually the spiders find their way to the orange groves, where the townspeople have set up a booby-trapped welcome buffet.

The whole incident was captured in the 1977 made-for-TV turkey Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo. Think of it as a less entertaining, less scary Arachnophobia, which aspires to nothing grander than to exploit the inherent discomfort of seeing live tarantulas crawling on naked hands and feet for a few cheap scares.

Like its arachnid namesake, Tarantula... kind of plods along slowly until its predictable finale. In fact, the biggest surprise in this film is the high-caliber cast that shows up (among them Claude Akins, Howard Hesseman, Tom Atkins, Pat Hingle, and pre-Whiz Kids kid Matthew Labyorteaux), only to have their collective talent left to waste like so many spoiled orange slices.

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (2010) is in theaters now.
Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (1973) has been remastered and reissued on a Warners Archive burn-on-demand DVD with commentary track and a sharp new transfer that is a big improvement over the previous release.
Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo is out of print on DVD as of this writing, but available cheap on the used market.

Final Jeopardy (1985)

2011-08-24T17:36:00.000-07:00

A long lost made-for-TV movie that I've been searching out for years has finally (and unofficially) made its way onto the Internets. It's Final Jeopardy (1985), which, after years of futile Googling, I was finally able to watch (via YouTube), for the first time since it originally aired over 25 years ago.

Final Jeopardy is the suspenseful story of small-town couple Martin (Richard Thomas, You'll Like My Mother, It) and Susan Campbell (Mary Crosby, The Ice Pirates) whose overnight trip to the big city turns into a Kafkaesque (I've always wanted to use that term!) nightmare.

The Campbells are in Detroit for one evening so Martin can pitch his start-up business idea (something to do with databases) to a prospective partner. Martin drops his wife off to do some shopping in the city's upscale boutiques, while he meets his client at a nearby watering hole, the Carlyle Bar. She'll meet him there later for a (hopefully celebratory) dinner before heading back to the hotel.

Martin gets slightly overwhelmed trying to navigate the bustling streets, and a culture shock is evident when he gets directions from a gruff and annoyed street cop, but he finally arrives (late) for his meeting at the Carlyle Bar.

A few martinis later, with no sign of his client, he phones his office to find he misheard the meeting place. They were supposed to meet at the Carlwyn Bar, not the Carlyle, and his client has already given up on him and gone home for the evening. The whole purpose of the trip is shot.

Making matters worse, the bar no longer serves dinner, and is closing at 7:00 PM, a good hour before his wife was scheduled to meet him there. Exiting the bar, he finds the lot where he parked has closed for the night, leaving him with no transportation until morning.

Susan rolls up in a cab, but the cab leaves before he has a chance to stop it, leaving the couple stranded in what is looking to be the Bad Side of Town.

The businesses are closed, streets are dark and barren. Many of the pay phones are damaged. When they finally do find a working phone, the cab company they call won't send a car to that part of town after dark.

The police won't send anyone either, since no crime has been committed.

They try approaching residents of a rat-infested apartment building, but they are too afraid to provide help.

Finally they cross paths with a violent street gang (they may have comical names like Slash, D.O.A. and Ice, but they were plenty scary to this pre-teen viewer). This results in several tense scenes with our hapless couple creeping behind dumpsters and in back alleys trying to evade the thugs, only to have them pop-up like a Jack-in-the-Box from around the corner, or suddenly dangling down from an overhead fire escape.

It looks like they may finally have found a safe haven for the night when they happen upon an abandoned theater, but while rummaging through the mess of old props and scenery, they uncover.... A CORPSE!

In another encounter, they find a hobo (Jeff Corey, he also played a bum 20 years earlier in Lady in a Cage) who sells them a flashlight and directions to get to the nearest police station... get this... through the underground sewers, so as to avoid detection by the murderous gang.

The Campbells take him up on his offer, and attempt the spooky passage through the dark tunnels, only to emerge back in front of the Carlyle Bar once again!

Final Jeopardy reminded me somewhat of Duel (1971), in that we have a modern, emasculated man (after first encountering the gang, Martin admits to his wife he's never hit a man before, having always talked his way out of tough predicaments) who suddenly finds himself in a survival situation, and must learn to accept that some conflicts can only be resolved through brute force, not rational arbitration.

Also, as in Duel, there comes a point where our protagonist is so consumed with panic over the situation that he ends up frightening people that might otherwise have been convinced to help him, if he weren't acting like a raving madman.

But that's where all similarities to Duel end, as Final Jeopardy is really just a mediocre thriller, not approaching the greatness of that earlier masterpiece.

Final Jeopardy has not been released to DVD as of this writing.

Ideal for Discos

2011-08-18T20:36:00.001-07:00

Check out this awesome old ad for Don Post masks, from the back of the first sci-fi movie magazine I ever purchased, the July 1980 issue of Fantastic Films. I probably spent more time leering over these amazing mask images than reading the magazine itself, even though it was loaded with interesting articles on The Empire Strikes Back and John Carpenter.

After all, 1980 was The Year Of The Masquerade. (That's what the ad copy says, anyway. Who am I to argue?) Ideal for parties, discos, masquerading and collecting. Be a somebody!

A couple things about this ad stood out for me. First, these masks were of much higher quality than the usual Halloween stuff I was used to browsing through at the TG&Y Store.

Second, based on the prices (some as high as $64.95, in 1980 dollars!), these masks weren't aimed at the kiddies, but at grown adults. I imagined what kind of world I was missing out on, where adults donned expensive, high-quality monster masks for a night at the disco?

I hadn't yet heard of Plan 9 From Outer Space, so I had no idea who this Tor Johnson guy was... but the unusual name stuck with me, and almost exactly two years later I would name a monster after him in my crappy home-made comic.

It also never occurred to me prior to seeing this ad that a mask might be considered a work of art worthy of being displayed. And these mounts and cases were clearly aimed at the adult collector. I mean, what kid is going to buy and install a thirty dollar wall mount to display his mask (or a $125 case to protect it)?

Which led me to ponder... what kind of adult was awesome enough to hang masks on the wall of his home for all to see? Relatives from back East coming by for a visit? There's Mr. Kool staring them down through dinner. Neighbor drops in to borrow some flour? Dracula's giving him the evil eye from within his glass cube.

Here's a pair of premium-priced repros, Nosferatu and the Face-Hugger from Alien.

Spooky Rhymes and Riddles (Lilian Moore, 1972)

2011-08-07T17:16:00.000-07:00

Hi, Julie B. I seem to have acquired your copy of Spooky Rhymes and Riddles. It's mine now. All mine.
From Scholastic Book Services, Spooky Rhymes and Riddles (1972, Lilian Moore, illustrated by Ib Ohlsson) is a collection of poems on witches, ghosts and monsters. Unlike the childhood-scarring Poems to Trouble Your Sleep, these all favor fun over fright.

The complete contents are:

The Ghost in Our Apartment House
The Monster's Pet
When a Monster Scolds Her Children
Ghost Baby
What to Say to an Alligator
The Friendly Guy
Spooky Riddles
The Ghost Goes to the Supermarket
Mrs. O'Gray
Greedy Goblin
Listen!
Cat
The Monster's Birthday
Johnny Drew a Monster
There Was an Egg
Something Is There
Spooky Limericks
Poem About THEM
When a Ghost Gets Smudgy
The Witch's Song
Bedtime Story
Teeny Tiny Ghost

1984 A.D: Battlecar-Warriors of the Lost Wasteland

2011-08-01T15:19:00.000-07:00

The year was 1984, A.D., towards the end of the Videotape Format War, and after the fall of Kajagoogoo. Three powerful forces were about to converge that would transform my world. (It wasn't quite the Great Conjunction from The Dark Crystal, but like that universe-changing triple-solar eclipse foretold by village elders, it could not have been mere coincidence.)

It was the year when the following happened:

1. I finally saw the film The Road Warrior (1981), broadcast on network television.
2. I discovered a game called Car Wars.
3. My parents purchased our first VCR.

The Road Warrior (1981) was a film I had first heard about when Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert reviewed it on their PBS show Sneak Previews (this duo also gets credit for scaring the crap out of me showing clips from John Carpenter's Halloween while I was home alone waiting for school to start.)

Most of the future-focused films I had seen to this point presented a fantastic (and mostly optimistic) vision of space-travel, robots, and laser guns. But here was a future in which the final frontier was a white-lined asphalt road, and wars were fought not with high-tech weaponry, but with the internal combustion engine, Molotov cocktails and crossbows. I was intrigued.

Of course, being rated R, I wasn't allowed to see the film in theaters, and had to wait for the slightly sanitized TV version to finally set my eyes on this apocalyptic masterpiece. The film struck me at the time as a little bit Planet of the Apes (ruined future where man is living an almost subhuman existence), Star Wars (I detected a hint of the Death Star trench run in the final big-rig race to freedom) and Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name films (A Fistful of Gasoline?)

Around this same time, I discovered a game called Car Wars. Produced by Steve Jackson Games (not to be confused with UK game designer Steve Jackson, who wrote some of the Fighting Fantasy interactive fiction books), Car Wars was a hybrid board-game/role-playing game that occurs in a violent, dystopian future (set roughly 50 years from publication day, so in the 2030s) where "autodueling", a death-sport with weaponized cars armed with everything from flamethrowers to land mines, is the popular form of entertainment (and the preferred method for settling disputes on the open road).

To happen upon this little game shortly after becoming enraptured with vehicular homicide via The Road Warrior was like having been blessed by the Gaming Gods.

I called Car Wars a "little game", because it was physically small compared to most RPG games of the day, the rulebook being a tight 24 pages, accompanied by tokens and gameboard (a few stretches of paper road) packed in a plastic 7"x4" snapcase.

But this "little" game grew in scope thanks to countless add-ons and expansion packs available for separate purchase.

Sunday Drivers (later reissued under the title "Crash City") introduced urban warfare to the Car Wars universe, as well as a back-story for various motorcycle gangs and militia groups.

Truck Stop established rules for big-rigs (critical for playing out those Road Warrior scenarios).

Many hours were clocked designing custom vehicles, setting up scenarios and playing them out in turns representing 1/10th a second of real-time. Needless to say, with all these little cardboard tokens scattered all over the place, the greatest danger to your vehicle wasn't the rocket launcher or anti-tank gun, but the breeze from a ceiling fan.

Eventually rules for trikes, helicopters, jet aircraft, boats, and even superhuman powers (Autoduel Champions) would flesh out the Car Wars universe even further. Car Wars even had its own regularly published fan magazine (Autoduel Quarterly) complete with in-universe ads. Before long, I had a foot locker of this junk.

Now, we introduce the third point in my Carmaggedon Triangle: my parents finally purchased our first VCR. We were a little late joining the home video revolution (many of my friends already owned machines), but finally, and for the first time, the possibility of selecting a movie and watching it at my convenience... not at the mercy of the networks and TV Guide... was a reality.

Now we hadn't achieved TOTAL video independence. We were still beholden to the local VHS rental shop, Video+ (located in the mini-mall, next to SuperX Drugs) and all the weirdness that early 80s VHS rental entailed. In those days, you had to pay a deposit when joining a rental service (around $100, enough to cover that copy of Poltergeist if you didn't bring it back). And at Video+, the shelves were stocked with empty boxes. You had to ask the guy behind the counter for your film by its assigned ID number (not by its title! For God's sake, why???) and hope it wasn't already rented out. This cumbersome process became quite irritating on busy Friday and Saturday nights.

Annoyances like that aside, I suddenly found myself with access to a treasure trove of films, new and old, and with The Road Warrior and Car Wars dominating my brain, immediately set out to rent every post-apocalyptic movie with an exploding car on the front cover that I could find, a mission I would continue for years to come.

My first stop was the The Road Warrior prequel, Mad Max. Set "a few years from now", Mad Max presents a crumbling, but still mostly civilized, society very much like the world I envisioned for my Car Wars campaigns. (Roving gangs may have taken over the highways, but there's still a functioning police force, restaurants, hospitals, mail delivery, and regularly updated road-fatality advisory billboards.)

Next came Roger Corman's cult classic Death Race 2000 (1975), although at the time, Roger Corman held zero name recognition for me. But hey--that guy from Kung-Fu is in it!

In Warrior of the Lost World (1983), "radiation wars and the collapse of nations" leads to a corporatocracy ruled by The Omega, which can only be brought down by a lone rider on a computerized "supersonic speedcycle". Even Donald Pleasence and Fred Williamson couldn't save this turkey from becoming MST3K fodder years later, but at least the poster was cool.

After "The Oil Wars", the last outpost of civilization must defend itself from attack by the mighty wheeled fortress that is Battletruck (aka Warlords of the 21st Century) (1982).

Condemned criminals fight for their lives in the post-Neutron Wars wasteland of Deathsport (1978).

When cars are outlawed, only outlaws will drive cars in Firebird 2015 A.D. (1981), where gas is rationed by the Department of Vehicular Control (DVC), and those who break the law are called "burners". The film opens with a corny theme-song (with lyrics like "DVC, DVC, you won't catch a rabbit and you won't catch me...") and goes downhill from there.

2019: After The Fall of New York (1983), a mercenary races to reach the last fertile woman in post-nuclear New York.

In The New Barbarians a.k.a. Warriors of the Wastleland (1983), Fred Williamson returns for more post-apocalyptic tribal warfare.

In an unspecified future where natural resources are depleted and all private transportation has been outlawed, former professional driver Lee Majors (The Six Million Dollar Man) breaks his racecar out of storage for a cross-country shot at freedom in The Last Chase (1981).

Exterminators of the Year 3000 (1983). Mutants. Motorcycles. Meh.

I have no memory of having seen either 1990: The Bronx Warriors (1982) or Land of Doom (1986), which isn't a good sign, because I'm pretty sure I saw them both.

THX-1138 (1971) doesn't really belong in this list, but it is set in a dystopian future where some environmental disaster has sent society underground, and ends with a high-speed chase between motorcycles and a futuristic jet-car, so here it is anyway.

Megaforce (1982) borrowed some elements from our post-apocalyptic friends (desert warfare, weaponized vehicles) and put them in the hands of law and order for this kid-friendly romp where the good guys always win (even in the '80s!)

Brother Bill satisfies all his gaming needs at The Game Keeper in the 1980s iteration of Metrocenter Mall, Phoenix. Unfortunately, The Game Keeper is long gone, and Metrocenter has since deteriorated into a depressing shadow of its former self (kind of like that bad alternate-1985 from Back To The Future II). But you can get a glimpse of Metrocenter in its glory days in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure (it stood in for the non-existent San Dimas Mall)...

Unfortunately there's no glimpse of The Game Keeper in that film, but you can see it's Glendale, California location in the film Cloak & Dagger (1984), including the store's trademark playing-card motif door.

Fourth of July, 1976

2011-07-03T19:55:00.001-07:00

It's July 4th, 1976, and there's a lot of special events planned all over the country. A rodeo at Wild West Park in Dallas, the opening of Enchanted Castle at Funland, Wisconsin, and a beauty contest at Sky's The Limit in Detroit.

But nothing can top the grand opening of a brand new roller coaster at Magic Mountain, Los Angeles... Revolution, the world's first modern coaster with a vertical loop!

They've pulled out all the stops for this event, even hiring a pilot to sky-write the name REVOLUTION in the skies high above the ride.

The parking lot has filled up quickly, but there's a tram to whisk you to the front entrance.

As you might expect, crowds are HUGE...

But don't worry... while we wait for the inaugural ride of Revolution to launch at 4:00 PM, rock band Sparks will entertain the crowd with their hit song "Big Boy".

The coaster has been fitted with decorative bunting for now, which will be removed before the first riders board.

There are even a few workers applying last minute decorations to the track itself. But they almost seem preoccupied, as if they are looking for something hidden along the track. Something dangerous... like a bomb!

Meanwhile, the crowd is enjoying the concert.

Everyone that is, except this one lone weirdo. He's not here to enjoy the park. He's a terrorist, and he's planning to make sure the opening of the Revolution goes off with a bang!

Balloons are released! The ride is about to open! Those holding special golden tickets, please come to the front of the line.

A traditional marching band strikes up as the first riders board.

There go the first lucky riders. I can just tell this coaster is going to be the bomb!

This 4th of July is from the thriller Rollercoaster (1977), in which an unnamed malcontent (Timothy Bottoms) tries to extort one million dollars from amusement park executives by planting bombs in parks across the country.

In a clever tie-in, the climax of the film is set at a fictional July 4th opening of Magic Mountain's new steel looper, Revolution (the coaster actually opened in May, 1976). Rollercoaster was one of four films originally released in "Sensurround", a gimmicky bass-heavy audio format requiring specially installed theater speakers.

As a thriller, Rollercoaster is okay, but it's real draw is the screen time it gives to the targeted amusement parks, including an extended tour of King's Dominion in Richmond, Virginia.

Coaster inspector Harry Calder (George Segal) has been singled out as the bag man for a money drop to occur at the then new King's Dominion park. Here he waits at a toadstool shaped phone for instructions.

All the while, the bomber is keeping watch from the top of this towering park icon, a 1/3 scale replica of the Eiffel Tower.

Hoping to confuse law enforcement officials who are monitoring the transaction remotely (and perhaps have a little fun in the process), the bomber sends Calder on an outright scavenger hunt through the park, requiring him to get his weight guessed by a boardwalk barker, purchase and wear a silly stitched hat...

...and even ride several rides, like this racing wooden-coaster which is still in service today, Rebel Yell.

Meanwhile sharp-eyed audiences will catch glimpses of some of the costumed Hanna Barbera characters roaming the park, including Banana Splits members Fleagal and Bingo...

...and despised Scooby-Doo spin-off, Scooby-Dum.

Magic Mountain's Revolution coaster, incidentally, seemed to be a real draw for terrorists. Just a few years after Rollercoaster, it was occupied in a hostile takeover by a group calling itself "The Griswolds".

Rollercoaster is available on DVD, and can sometimes be found streaming on Netflix.

Fourth of July, 1963

2011-07-02T17:45:00.001-07:00

It's a beautiful sunny July 4th, 1963, somewhere in Southern California. The roads are choked with traffic headed towards the mountains, lakes and beaches.

The all-American game of baseball is being played at a nearby stadium...

There's a parade downtown, complete with jet fly-over...

And some folks aren't waiting for it to get dark to start setting off fireworks...

Insulated from all the excitement in her little suburban home is Ms. Cornelia Hilyard (Olivia de Havilland).

Normally she might join her adult son Malcolm for a weekend road-trip, but she injured her hip a few months ago and has become a bit of a homebody. She plans to spend Independence Day puttering around her house, reciting original poetry to herself while admiring her collection of knick-knacks.

She can still get around despite her hip injury, but climbing the stairs is out of the question, so she relies on this personal elevator to get up and down.

But wouldn't you know it--after workmen accidentally disturb the power lines to her house, Ms. Hilyard is left without electricity, finding herself trapped in the very box meant to facilitate her freedom and independence! On July 4th, no less! Oh, the irony!

When the phone rings, she tries to knock the receiver off the cradle with her shoe, with no luck.

YOU try to hit a phone with a shoe from this height!

The elevator is equipped with a battery-powered alarm bell, which she eventually gets around to using.

But with all the holiday excitement outside, the alarm goes unnoticed by the passing traffic.

And who can expect a mere ringing bell to grab anyone's attention, when even the body of this poor dead dog, lying on the side of the road in full view, goes ignored by people hurrying to the beach.

But the alarm finally does get noticed by someone who doesn't have a holiday destination to get to--a drunken hobo. Unfortunately he's more interested in looting the house of its fineries than helping poor Ms. Hilyard.

After the hobo grabs a few items to pawn and flees the scene, Ms. Hilyard, desperate to escape, considers jumping from the mid-air cage. But in her semi-incapacitated condition, that just isn't an option.

As the July heat builds, Ms. Hilyard starts to go a little stir-crazy, and has herself a good ol' freakout, singing loudly to herself and composing free-form poetry about man's inhumanity to man.

Here's a sample of Ms. Hilyard's verse:"We made us cities and towns,
And thought we had beat the jungle back,
Not knowing we had built the jungle in."
Meh--doesn't even rhyme.

The hobo returns from the pawn shop with the intent to clean the place out, but is followed by a group of even nastier thugs, headed by Randall (a young James Caan).

These guys amuse themselves while ransacking the place, intending to kill both the hobo AND Ms. Hilyard, to eliminate all witnesses.

When she appeals to their basic human decency, Randall snaps back "I am ALL animal!" He's out to rattle a few cages... or at least this one!

Ms. Hilyard ends up defending herself from the murderous creep with an improvised weapon. She never did get to see any fireworks on this Fourth of July. And Randall... well, he didn't get to see much of anything after Ms. Hilyard got through with him...!

This Fourth of the July occurred in the cult classic Lady in a Cage (1964), a sometimes corny but utterly engaging thriller, whose nihilistic theme, that our supposedly modern civilization will quickly devolve into dog-eat-dog anarchy if the opportunity presents itself, is delivered with a bluntness that seems ahead of its time.

The cool animated opening title sequence might remind you of the work of Saul Bass.

They even do something I always assumed was a more recent practice... customize the studio logo to match the theme of the film.

Lady In A Cage is out of print as of this writing, but can still be found on the second-hand market.

Fembots!

2011-06-05T15:33:00.000-07:00

Question: When someone shouts "Fembots!", what image comes to mind? Is it these attractive but deadly blond ladies of a certain caliber, from Austin Powers:International Man of Mystery?

If so, count yourself among the lucky. For some people, like me, the word conjures up a horrific image from the past, permanently branded into my subconscious as a young man.

Brace yourself for the nightmarish visage I will now reveal below....

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Oh, that wasn't too bad. Looks like a perfectly normal woman. Except for that feathered hair, nothing scary here. Let me try again... scroll down, if you dare!

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Hmmm... she's not scary either. Somethings not right here. Wait, I know--we have to rough-house with them a little bit. Then you'll see what I mean.

There it is! Look! It's dead eyes are staring through my soul!

Jamie Sommers (Lindsay Wagner) aka The Bionic Woman, below, has perfectly visualized my own aghast reaction upon first encountering these creepy Fembot assassins, which predate Austin Powers by 20 years, and have never once go-go danced to These Boots Are Made For Walking.

When I was a kid in the 70s, I wanted to be the bionic man with a six-million dollar price tag, Steve Austin (Lee Majors) (and even had the Kenner doll with the roll-up arm skin and telescopic bionic eye), but I usually ended up watching The Bionic Woman.

I think part of the reason is that macho actor Lee Majors looks like he could beat you up even if he wasn't bionic. Not so with Jamie Sommers. So there was something inherently cooler when she dished out a surprise robotic ass-whooping on unsuspecting baddies. There may have been other reasons I gravitated toward The Bionic Woman instead of The Six-Million Dollar Man, but I can't seem to put my finger on it...

Anywho, in the 1976 episode Kill Oscar (a 3-parter that crossed over between shows, the 1st and 3rd parts belonging to The Bionic Woman, and the 2nd part appearing on The Six-Million Dollar Man), I was introduced to these robotic lady-killers that looked, moved and spoke just like their real life counterparts (that is, until their faces popped off to reveal those cold, staring eyes.)

The Fembots are the brainchild of Dr. Franklin (John Houseman; The Fog, Rollerball), a former scientist for OSI (Office for Scientific Intelligence, the same covert government agency that the bionic couple work for) who now hopes to infiltrate the organization with these robotic spies. As he describes them, Fembots are "the perfect women.. programmable, obedient, and as beautiful or deadly as I choose to make them."

Here he is in his secret lab, uploading his own personal knowledge of the OSI to a newly manufactured Fembot by plugging her head into the 1970s equivalent of a USB port.

Of course, this stage occurs towards the end of the Fembot production process. They actually start out as these simplistic figures that look more like mannequins than the sophisticated robots they'll eventually become.

Once completed, they will not only perfectly mimic an actual living person, but also possess superhuman strength, can transmit live 3-D video information back to base, and walk on heat-sensing feet!

Fembots are also skilled with weapons...

...and can even pilot a helicopter.

The only giveaway that these ladies aren't what they seem is that they weigh about 400 pounds, and their face pops off during horseplay.

Now with a name like Fembot, you might assume that they are all modeled after women. Well get with the times, grandpa. In the enlightened and open-minded 70s, there are male Fembots too, like this one of Oscar Goldman (Richard Anderson), the agent that shut down Dr. Franklin's Fembot research when he was still working for OSI ten years earlier.

Oscar's been good enough to volunteer in a little safety demonstration on how to deactivate a Fembot that is out of control.

First, wrestle it to the ground.

Next, pull the Fembot's wig off to reveal the power supply and socket. The wig may be discarded.

Firmly grip the power supply attached in the back of the skull.

Pull out in a straight motion. Your Fembot has now been safely deactivated.

Both The Six-Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman were popular programs, so its no surprise they spawned a full line of toys and promotional items. But it is kind of unexpected to find that the sinister Fembots were among the characters realized in doll-form, complete with removable wig and exchangeable faces.

The Fembot trilogy, Kill Oscar, can be found on The Bionic Woman-Season 2 DVD set.

The Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977)

2011-05-14T17:38:00.000-07:00

One evening while channel surfing in the early 1980s (which, back then, involved standing next to the TV and manually turning the mechanical tuner knob to cycle through less then a dozen stations...) I happened upon some show I had never seen before but immediately captured my attention, a spooky mystery set in the dark, fog-draped streets of Victorian London.

Mauled bodies were turning up in the Thames...

...and young girls were disappearing off the streets.

But this wasn't the work of Jack the Ripper. Rather, the mysterious goings-on seem to revolve around the Palace Theater.

There, the popular magician and hypnotist from the Far East, Li H'sen Chang, appears nightly, astounding audiences with an act which includes mesmerizing and levitating a member of the audience.

He is joined on stage by Mr. Sin, a creepy ventriloquist dummy that provides comic relief during the show.

But as entertaining as Chang's stage show is, the real interesting stuff is occurring backstage. Strange noises have been heard coming from under the theater after hours, and one stagehand claims to have seen a ghost.

There's also more to Chang than meets the eye. His powers of hypnosis go beyond those of a typical stage magician, and he can command people to do his bidding with an almost otherworldly persuasiveness.

We soon learn Chang has been using that power to command women to follow him down this hidden backstage trapdoor...

...into the subterranean lair of Weng-Chiang, a mysterious masked figure living in the sewers beneath the theater.

Weng-Chiang has a degenerative condition, requiring a constant diet of young victims to stave off death. He extracts their life essence with this distillation chamber, a high-tech contraption that leaves its victims' bodies shriveled and brittle like dried leaves.

That horrific process may postpone death, but it can't keep the disease from rendering Chiang's face a deformed nightmare behind his mask!

As if he didn't already have enough on his plate, Weng-Chiang has also taken time to populate the adjoining sewer tunnels with giant rats, genetically enlarged to the size of a bear. He feeds them with the bodies of whoever is unfortunate enough to get in his way (or failing that, a nice hunk of butcher's meat laid out on the sewer grate).

When one of the missing girls is traced back to the theater, it attracts the attention of a special investigation team from Scotland Yard.

Known only as "The Doctor", and looking and acting very much like Sherlock Holmes, The Doctor and his assistant Leela, soon learn that Chang's on-stage assistant, Mr. Sin, is no mere ventriloquist dummy, when he (it?) appears in their doorway one evening, brandishing a knife.

Even after Leela, a trained fighter, quickly plunges a knife into the thing's neck, Mr. Sin continues to march forward undaunted, like some murderous automaton.

Of course by now you may have figured out that the program I happened upon was an episode of Dr. Who. I had never heard of the show prior to stumbling upon this rerun of 1977s The Talons of Weng-Chiang, but quickly became a big fan, and when it started airing in the afternoons, I would rush home after school to catch every cliff-hanging minute.

Anyone familiar with the show knows that Dr. Who is a human-looking alien time-traveler, always appearing in different time-periods and on different planets, getting involved with aliens, robots, and monsters. Which makes The Talons of Weng-Chiang a rather unusual first episode for the uninitiated. The Doctor spends the entire 6-episode series in Victorian London, pretending to be a Scotland Yard detective, and there's little to suggest he's anything but that for those not already in the know.

Incidentally, that creepy ventriloquist dummy Mr. Sin is portrayed by none other than cult character actor Deep Roy (Star Trek, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, etc.)

The Talons of Weng-Chiang is available on DVD here (although it's apparently gone out of print as of this writing and is going for some outrageous prices on the second-hand market).

Happy Arbor Day from The Haunted Closet!

2011-04-28T15:42:00.000-07:00

Once again, it's that holiday I'm vaguely aware of that has something to do with trees.

I usually observe Arbor Day by not knowing it's Arbor Day. But this year I thought I'd break tradition and venture forth into that spooky old forest growing in the back of this ol' closet to examine some of my favorite arboreal (it's a word!) friends that managed to uproot themselves and branch out into the realm of monsters.

We will dispense with the pleasant-trees (zing!) and get right to "Mel", the mean-spirited specimen from 1973's Tales That Witness Madness, a British-accented anthology film of four spooky tales wrapped in a framing story set in an insane asylum operated by the always pleasant Donald Pleasence. Anyone who's familiar with Amicus' 70s anthology output will feel right at home here, even though this is a World Film Services production.

In the film's third segment, "Mel", couple Brian and Bella Thompson (Michael Jayston and Joan Collins) get into an argument over Brian's latest addition to their modern country home, a section of dead tree with the name "Mel" carved into it. Perhaps going for that primitive-meets-modern effect that causes people to decorate their contemporary living spaces with tribal masks or tiki carvings, Brian displays Mel in the living room after finding her in the neighboring woods. It's shaped vaguely like a women, even more so after Brian sands and prunes it.

Bella isn't impressed with Brian's decorating taste, but she has a good reason to object beyond mere aesthetics, as Mel seems to be alive, gently leaning and shifting position around the room, and emitting a soft heartbeat heard only by the audience.

When Brian steps out for a visit to the pub, Bella leans in too close and gets clawed by Mel's sharp extremities.

When Brian returns, Bella gives him an ultimatum: if he expects her to sleep in this house, the tree has to go. Well, you can guess how that turned out...

Tales That Witness Madness has not found its way to DVD yet, but is available streaming on Netflix as of this writing.

Next up is one of my earliest monster-tree memories, the sour-apple trees from The Wizard of Oz (1939).

Back in Kansas, Dorothy was used to picking apples off of trees. But in Land of Oz, trees pick fruit off of YOU!

In the animated sort-of sequel, Journey Back to Oz (1974), Dorothy (voiced by Liza Minnelli) and some new friends revisit the ferocious forest, where the trees have grown larger and nastier with the help of Mombi the Bad Witch's magic.

They all look like they belong to the same family tree (slide whistle) of the evil trees from Living Island, home of 1969's H.R. PufnStuf.

But going back even further, we have this unpleasant fellow from Walt Disney's first color cartoon, the Silly Symphony Flowers and Trees (1932). His morning yawn reveals a mouthful of bats and a lizard for a tongue.

While trying to burn down the forest, he ends up setting himself on fire instead, leaving behind a semi-disturbing burnt-out corpse.

Flowers and Trees led to Disney's first animated feature, 1937's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which had its own spooky forest of anthropomorphised trees.

Even though these monstrous trees appear to be the product of Snow White's overactive imagination, they can be found occasionally roaming the Disney parks as costumed characters.

Charlie Brown had regular run-ins with a ravenous kite-eating tree, which loudly and visibly devoured any kite that got too close.

It was sometimes depicted with an actual tooth-filled mouth, and in 1969's A Boy Named Charlie Brown, it even leaned menacingly at passers-by.

In 1982's The Last Unicorn, Schmendrick the Magician winds up tied to a tree that is brought to life by magic, transforming into a voluptuous lovesick tree-woman, threatening to smother the poor wizard with her... affections.

The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) featured a walking, talking hangman's tree...

Moving out of the realm of animation, we have Baranga, from 1957's From Hell It Came. I haven't actually seen this film, about a murdered island prince reincarnated as a murderous walking tree (available on DVD from Warner Archives burn-on-demand store), but the trailer looks like a lot of fun.

Anyone remember when this picture of a young Baranga was taken? I'm stumped.

After classroom chum Veronica plants ideas of witchcraft in her head, the impressionable Flavia has a nightmare that the tree outside her window is scratching to get in, in 1984's Poison For the Fairies (a.k.a. Veneno Paras Las Hadas) (hat tip to Kindertrauma for introducing me to this gem.)

But that tree was a wallflower compared to the one outside the Freeling's house in 1982's Poltergeist, which not only scratched at the window, but busted right through to grab up little Robbie between its massive limbs for a midnight snack.

Why do we always fight on holidays?

Easter Bunnies

2011-04-22T21:34:00.000-07:00

It's Easter weekend, and I'm cooking up some rabbit stew... can you help me pick the best bunny to put in the pot?

Okay, so it didn't come out so good this year... Happy Easter!

TRON made me do it...

2011-04-10T15:25:00.000-07:00

With the long out-of-print Disney film TRON finally getting re-released on DVD and Blu-Ray this week (as well as its worthy sequel), I thought I'd post a summary of the original story in 24-pages of artist's renderings, courtesy of the 1982 Read-Along Adventure Book-and-Record, The Story of TRON, and share a few memories of what TRON made me do when I first saw it in theaters as a grade-schooler... USING FRISBEES AS WEAPONS
Me and every kid I knew owned a frisbee or two, but by the 1980s, they were all lost under the bed, in the closet, or somewhere in the garage. But after seeing TRON, this forgotten old relic from the 70s got dusted off and put to good use as a projectile-missile in order to replicate the disc-war segment of the film. Originally I tried building my own custom Tron-like disc out of cardboard, only to abandon it for the much superior (and more painful) standard frisbee. Think of dodge-ball, but with hard plastic discs, and no adult-supervision getting in the way of the fun, and you get the idea. Many bruised fingers were incurred from trying to also use the frisbee as a shield to deflect incoming discs. RAMMING INTO EACH OTHER WITH OUR BIKES
After a bit of brainstorming trying to figure out how to modify our standard bicycles to leave a deadly light-wall behind them (one failed attempt involved attaching a piece of chalk to a stick that extended out the back wheel and scraped along the ground. Didn't work.) my circle of friends and I finally realized that all the thrills of the light-cycle game could be captured by just ramming our bikes into each other. The rider of the bike still standing was declared winner... but in a way, we were all winners. ADAPTING LIGHT CYCLES AS A BOARD GAME
This may sound strange, but one way I found of expressing my loyalty to a particular video game when I was a kid was to try to make my own board-game adaptation of it. The fact that home-console adaptations of arcade hits were still pretty crude and rarely captured the action of its arcade inspiration no doubt fueled my desire to take matters into my own hands. A few years later when I finally got my first PC, I would try making my own versions of arcade hits coded in BASIC, though they were usually about as crappy and un-fun as my earlier board game attempts. For the light-cycles board game, I cut out dozens of little colored rectangle pieces to use as jet-wall sections. Of course they never ended up staying in place, and the draft from a door opening, or a good sneeze, would derez the entire match.

The Farmer and the Witch (1966, Ida DeLage, Gil Miret)

2011-02-27T14:51:00.000-08:00

A farmer gets caught up in a feud with a witch in the 1966 picture book The Farmer and The Witch, one of several witch books authored by Ida DeLage and illustrated by Gil Miret. (This story was apparently also published under the title The Witch's Spell.)

After some back-and-forth in which the witch steals the farmer's pie, and the farmer chases her with a hayfork, the feud escalates when the witch concocts a brew to poison his drinking water!

Stirring her mixture 99 times to the left, then 99 times to the right, she recites:

Seven toadstools in a row.
Old black feather from a crow.
Wiggle worm,
Spider spin,
Drop another lizard in.
Big fat grub,
A snail or two.
Cook them up
For witch's brew.

The farmer ends up using a Halloween jack-o-lantern and the witch's left-behind cloak to make a scarecrow.

Edgar Allan Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum (1982, Troll Associates)

2011-02-19T08:49:00.001-08:00

Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Pit and the Pendulum seems an unlikely candidate for adaptation as a picture book for children.

After all, it lacks the psychological or supernatural elements of some of Poe's other popular works, and is little more than a first-person account of imprisonment and torture, as told by an anonymous narrator, who is serving punishment for crimes that are never revealed, as decreed by a panel of judges whose identity and authority is never explained.

This 32 page book, with wonderfully grim illustrations by Monroe Eisenberg (and with Poe's text adapted by David E. Cutts), serves as a you-are-there miserable experience for young people. Check it out!

Raising the Alien Bar: The Star Wars Cantina

2011-02-12T11:48:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes is an admittedly silly little potboiler from Season 2 called Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?

A pair of police officers, investigating reports of a downed UFO, find mysterious footprints leading from the presumed site of the crash to a little roadside diner.

They follow the possibly extra-terrestrial footprints through the snow to the diner, only to find it occupied by a single group, traveling by bus.

No one has seen any unusual visitors, alien or otherwise, but the bus-driver notices the number of people in the diner exceeds his passenger count by one... did an alien in human disguise slip in with the group? And if so, which one is it?

After some tense finger pointing and general hysteria, the cops finally concede they can't determine who the alien is, and since no laws were broken, everyone is free to leave.

It's only after everyone else has gone that a distinguished older gentleman reveals himself to be the crash-landed Martian... he has a third arm hidden under his coat!

That alone would have been a perfectly satisfactory conclusion to this episode... but there's a twist! There are actually TWO aliens hiding in the diner! The waiter working behind the counter removes his hat to reveal a third eye... he's from Venus!

The presence of one alien was an event, special enough to build an entire plot around. But that there might be TWO aliens was such a novel idea, it gave the episode that unforgettable extra punch.

Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up? stands as a good example of how aliens were typically represented in TV and film, at least in my limited experience as a kid in the 1970s. Whether there was just one individual or a whole race of them, if there was an alien in the movie, undoubtedly the entire plot centered around its very existence. Its presence was a miracle of sorts, a unique anomaly, to be feared, fought, pondered or pursued.

All of which might make you better appreciate the impact that a little film called Star Wars had on me when it first knocked me over in 1977... particularly, the cantina scene, in which our heroes wander into a barroom that, unlike the Twilight Zone diner, is wall-to-wall aliens, none of them hiding.

This little Tatooine hole in the wall seemed to contain about 50 movies-worth of monsters all in one scene, and without any particular importance attached to it. In the Star Wars universe, this intergalactic freakshow was the norm!

One of the better remembered aliens, because of his glowing eyes (unfortunately he got dropped for the 1997 Special Edition version...)

Ah, Mos Eisley, where everyday is Halloween...

This off-the-shelf wolfman mask also got 86'd from the cantina in the 1997 Special Edition version...

The entire gorgeous pageant is over in a few minutes, so I had barely started to come down from a delirious monster-kid high before the cantina scene ended and the whole thing was just a memory.

Now in 1977, you couldn't just look-up screen-caps from your favorite film on the Internet. Nor was there any realistic expectation that you would ever own a film, so the prospect of being in control of the presentation, to pause, rewind, replay, a scene to examine it in finer detail was, well, science fiction.

In those days before VHS and DVD, when you bought a ticket to a film, you were paying for admission to an event that you had no hope of replicating later at home (the film blog Scanners recently ran a good article reminiscing on this very subject), so if you wanted to relive the experience of entering that otherworldy watering hole, you either harassed your parents into taking you to another screening of the entire film, or sought out whatever details you could from supplementary sources.

That's how a book like Star Wars: The Making of the Movie (a "Step-Up Book" by Larry Weinberg, 1980) became an invaluable resource.

Star Wars: The Making of the Movie summarizes the film's plot and exposes some of the behind-the-scenes movie-magic that made it possible.

Even though it was clearly aimed at very young readers (so young they needed big words like "oxygen" spelled out for them fo-NET-ik-lee), it was still a popular read with the older kids because it provided a few frozen moments from the fleeting cantina scene.

You even got a good close-up look at the monsterized holographic chess game that we merely get a glimpse of in the film.

But this book wasn't published until 1980, a good three years after the film premiered. A more immediate bromo for cantina-withdrawal was 1978's The Star Wars Storybook, which offered a beautiful full-color two-page spread.

The official Marvel comic-book adaptation provided an artist's rendering of the cantina denizens, including this sensational cover depiction of an all-out brawl that never happens in the actual film.

It also gave fans their first glimpse of this mysterious "Jabba" character, never seen in the original film. This interpretation of Jabba, based on a random background alien (after Lucas was unable to realize the character through more elaborate special effects and cut the scene from the film) was rendered obsolete once Jabba made his big-screen debut in Return of the Jedi.

Topps Star Wars cards were a potential source of imagery, but frustratingly, it wasn't until the fifth "orange" series, 265+ cards into the run, that close-up pics of the cantina creatures started appearing with any regularity.

Kenner action-figures let us get up-close and personal with a select few cantina regulars, and also provided their names (only Greedo is called by name in the film). Aside from Greedo, just three aliens made the cut, with names that would have looked right at home on a B-monster movie marquee: Hammerhead, Walrusman and Snaggletooth.

Oodah poodah, Solo?

Hammerhead was by far the coolest alien in the bar... and who knew he was hiding such great feet under that table?

The ravenous expanded-universe has since fleshed out the details of all the cantina inhabitants, providing back-stories and species-names for every character (and sucking some of the fun and mystery out of them as well). Snaggletooth, for example, has since been decreed a "Snivvian" named "Zutton". I don't know--I kind of like the monsterish and straightforward "Snaggletooth."

The clothing style and color-scheme for most of these figures seems to be a hair off... just a hair.

Amazingly, the iconic Cantina Band was never realized in action-figure form in the original Kenner line-up, but you could purchase a painted representation of them as part of the Creature Cantina playset.

This alternate playset, Cantina Adventure, was sold exclusively at Sears stores, and came with all four of the cantina action figures (including the highly collectible "blue Snaggletooth", an off-model variation that was designed from a vague photo-reference and quickly discontinued.) Some cantina creatures and a droid are depicted on the flat backdrop.

Then in November of 1978, something incredible happened. Call it a Christmas miracle, if you like, but the exciting and elusive world of Star Wars finally came home by way of The Star Wars Holiday Special. While set on the forested Wookiee homeworld of Kashyyyk, the special included a stop-over at every 10-year olds favorite coctail lounge...Finally, I was able to revisit the Mos Eisley cantina from the comfort of my own home, and without paying for a ticket.

Even though this was a poorer, made-for-TV version, (camped up with the addition of comedian Bea Arthur as a bartender, and looking more like it belonged in the universe of Sid & Marty Krofft than that of the big-screen Star Wars), I ate up every second of it.

For more than you ever wanted to know about The Star Wars Holiday Special, check out this fansite.

FUN FACT: Lecturer and author Joseph Campbell, whose book The Hero With A Thousand Faces influenced George Lucas in writing the Star Wars stories, named the cantina scene one of his favorite film moments of all-time. He did this during a series of interviews with Bill Moyers, which was broadcast under the title The Power of Myth, and is available on DVD.

UPDATE 2-16-11: Just happened upon this hilarious cantina-themed embroidery. Find out more about it here.

The Creature Catalog - A Monster Watcher's Guide (1982, Michael Berenstain)

2011-02-06T15:08:00.000-08:00

A monster dictionary of sorts (see also All About Monsters), The Creature Catalog - A Monster Watcher's Guide (1982, Random House) is a field guide to "weird and astonishing things on earth and other places", covering all categories of monsters, from folklore to mythology, cryptozoology, literature and film, with striking illustrations by author Michael Berenstain.

If Michael's last name rings a bell, it might be because he's the son of Stan and Jan, of Berenstain Bears fame.

Here's a sampling of the 70 or so creatures covered here.

The Werewolf, we learn, may have been born out of man's fear in older times of being consumed by a hungry pack of wild wolves.

The vampire may have been made famous by Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, but it's origin can be traced to the horrific barbarity of real-life 15th century figure Vlad the Impaler.

Here's a lesser known entry from Greek mythology, the Lamia, a snake-woman with a thirst for human blood.

Brief entries on several other monsters from ancient Greece, including centaurs, harpies, and Medusa.

Another unusual inclusion: from Jewish folklore, The Golem.

Zombies are associated with the voodoo rites of Haiti...

Trolls and goblins...

From the legends of Sinbad, here's the giant vulture-like bird call The Roc...

Sea-monsters, some of legend (the Kraken), some believed to be real (the Loch-Ness Monster):

The Abominable Snowman, believed to lurk amongst the Himalayan Mountains of Tibet...

An excellent rendering of the original King Kong...

The Creature Catalog is out of print as of this writing.

I Hate Christmas (Christmas Eve On Sesame Street, 1978)

2010-12-19T16:06:00.000-08:00

One of my earliest Christmas television special memories is Christmas Eve on Sesame Street, which originally aired on PBS back in 1978.

The special was memorable for several reasons, first being that you finally get to find out what the bottom half of some of your favorite Sesame Street characters look like when they climb out from behind those little half-walls they're always standing behind for a game of ice hockey, using Bert's shoe as a puck...

But you also get a wonderful anti-Christmas diatribe courtesy of Oscar the Grouch, who sings "I Hate Christmas", (lyrics below)...

...while going on a holiday-ruining rampage that includes destroying Christmas decorations (in this case he's torn the letters down from Mr. Hooper's "NOEL" sign, leaving only a protesting "NO"...)

...knocking snow off of eaves onto the heads of formerly smiling gift-givers...

...and handing out presents dripping with motor oil (I hope... although it could just as easily be pig's blood, I suppose!)

I HATE CHRISTMAS

I can't think of anything that's dumber.
To a grouch, Christmas is a bummer.

Beaming faces everywhere,
happiness is in the air.
I'm telling you, it isn't fair!
I hate Christmas!

People loaded with good will,
giving presents, what a thrill
That slushy nonsense makes me ill
I hate Christmas!

I'd rather have a holiday
like normal grouches do
Instead of getting presents,
they take presents back from you!

Here comes Santa, girls and boys
So, who needs that big red noise!
I'll tell him where to put his toys.
I hate Christmas!

And if you want the truth, I ain't so crazy about Thanksgiving or Labor Day either!

Christmas carols to be sung,
decorations to be hung
Oh, yeah? Well, I stick out my tongue!
I hate Christmas!

Christmas bells play loud and strong
Hurts my ears, all that ding dong
Besides it goes on much too long
I hate Christmas!

I'd rather have a holiday
with a lot less joy and flash
With a lot less cheerful smiling,
and a lot more dirty trash, yeah!

Christmas Day is almost here
When it's over, then I cheer
I'm glad it's only once a year
I hate Christmas!

The special ends with the disturbing sight of a ruined Christmas tree, having been eaten bare by a ravenous Cookie Monster!

Christmas Eve on Sesame Street is available on DVD.

A very interesting take on Disneyland's Haunted Mansion

2010-11-06T09:34:00.000-07:00

Just when you think everything there is to say about Disneyland's Haunted Mansion has been, along comes Long-Forgotten, an in-depth anthropological study of all things related to the beloved dark ride.

Seriously folks, if you're a Mansion fan, you'll find plenty of new facts and theories to chew on at this exhaustive (but never exhausting...) blog, which has eaten up a good 4-6 hours of my life since I discovered it yesterday.

Recommended.

Spooky Dick Van Dyke Show Episodes

2010-10-30T15:50:00.000-07:00

Back in the days before there were 24-hour cable channels dedicated to the kiddies, children's programming was pretty much confined to a few hours in the early morning and a few hours in the late afternoon... those very narrow windows of opportunity before and after school, after which the TV shifted into "grown-up" mode (chatty talk shows, soap operas, news, and old movies during the day, more news and the prime-time lineup in the evening).

Strangely, the format didn't change during the summer vacation months, which meant after the early morning cavalcade of Little Rascals, Tom & Jerry, Bugs Bunny, Speed Racer, etc. ended, you were left with the grim choice of either widening your viewing habits to include more adult-leaning programs, or, you know, actually turning off the TV and going outside.

Which is how I ended up becoming a regular watcher of The Dick Van Dyke Show. In fact the local programming block of Dick Van Dyke at noon, followed by The Andy Griffith Show, and then I Love Lucy, saw me through many, many summers spent home alone as a latch-key kid.

Sometimes The Dick Van Dyke Show would wander into spooky territory (well, never REALLY spooky. It was a sit-com, after all) and these are some of my favorite episodes.

IT MAY LOOK LIKE A WALNUT (Season 2, 1963)

This season 2 episode starts with Rob Petrie (Dick Van Dyke) and wife Laura (Mary Tyler Moore) watching a late night movie on "Insomniac Theater", an alien flick sounding vaguely like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which human-like aliens from the planet Twylo are taking over the planet Earth.

Rob explains the plot to a frightened Laura. The Twylo-ites, who look human except for a second pair of eyes hidden under their hair, plant walnut-looking alien eggs, filled with "absorbatron", in grocery stores around the world. Once a person opens one of these alien walnuts, they begin to take on the characteristics of the invaders. They are led by Kolak, whom Rob describes as looking like actor Danny Thomas.

Rob seems to get a real kick frightening Laura with the story, even slipping into a Boris Karloff accent while explaining that the aliens' plan to enslave mankind is to remove the humans' thumbs and their sense of humor.

The next morning Rob wakes up to discover a living room littered with walnuts. He suspects an angry Laura is trying to get revenge, but she plays innocent... even while preparing his breakfast, "scrambled walnuts."

That morning at work, Rob (who is a television writer for The Alan Brady Show), becomes suspicious when he finds writing partner Buddy (Morey Amsterdam) eating walnuts. In one of the funniest lines of the episode, Rob asks, "Did Laura call you this morning and tell you to eat walnuts?"

After finding more walnuts hidden around the office, an increasingly agitated Rob demands that they end the joke.

Buddy suggests ominously that Rob has lost his sense of humor...

When Rob finds an unusual glittering substance inside one of the walnuts, then notices his thumbs have disappeared, he panics, before assuring himself he must be dreaming.

He rushes home and is knocked over when Laura, surfing on an avalanche of walnuts, bursts out of the closet.

Laura claims she is now Lolak, a Twilo, and reveals her second set of eyes to a disgusted Rob (unfortunately the audience doesn't get to see them as well...)

Finally all of Rob's workmates emerge, walking zombie-like and laughing maniacally, including the real-life Danny Thomas.

Of course the whole thing is a dream, and Rob wakes up and comforts his wife, who had her own nightmare--that Danny Thomas was throwing walnuts at her, and every where they landed on her, a new eye would grow.

THE GHOST OF A. CHANTZ (Season 4, 1964)

The next spooky episode is of a more traditional variety. Rob, Laura, and Rob's writing partners Buddy and Sally (Rose Marie) are spending the weekend at a lakeside retreat to work on some new television show their boss Alan Brady has cooked up. But due to a reservations mix up, no cabins have been reserved for them.

There is only one cabin left, but they are warned that it is thought to be haunted by the ghost of Amos Chantz, who disappeared from it three years earlier, presumed murdered.

The quartet takes the cabin anyway, and spend the night being spooked by a fireplace that lights itself...

...a creaky door that opens and closes, and a rocking chair that rocks on its own...

...and a mysterious face appearing in a mirror.

Eventually Buddy, Laura and Sally are abducted by hooded figures while Rob's head is turned...

Finally, with Rob the last man standing, his boss Mel Cooley (Richard Deacon) appears in the haunted mirror to reveal the whole thing was a set-up for a new hidden-camera program "Sneaky Camera".

LONG NIGHTS JOURNEY INTO DAY (Season 5, 1966)

The final spooky episode is also the scariest. Laura is spending the weekend home alone with a cold, while Rob, their son Richie (Larry Mathews), and their neighbors Jerry and Millie Helper (Jerry Paris and Ann Morgan Guilbert) go off on a fishing trip.

Millie leaves Laura with a personal security alarm disguised as a pen (in case a maniac breaks into her house to "bash her head in"). She further advises her to stack cans of food at the front door to serve as an alarm, and to never take a shower... because of that Alfred Hitchcock movie! None of this advice is very comforting to Laura.

Once alone, Laura puts on a one-woman show of suspense and paranoia, with every creak of the house and shadow in the window making her uneasy. She is further frightened when the phone rings and no one speaks on the other end.

Convinced she saw someone through the window, she pulls the shades.

Later, she is startled by Millie, who returned early from the fishing trip and let herself into Laura's house with her key. Laura brings Millie into her circle of fear after describing the creaks and shadows and phone calls that have set her on edge.

When they think they hear footsteps in the other room, Laura and Millie engage in a loud conversation to try to scare the intruder. "WHY-DON'T-YOU-GET-THE-GUN, DARLING?"

But the girls get really terrified when the power fails and the house goes dark.

They make their way to the garage, hoping to sneak out of the house. Meanwhile, Rob has also unexpectedly returned early, and sets of the tin-can burglar alarm, terrifying both the girls and himself.

The Dick Van Dyke Show is available on DVD here.