Category: Halloween

Robot Monster is another film that I discovered from the Golden Turkey Award books. It has a lot going for it to make it bad fun.  The monster is a guy in a gorilla suit with a fake scuba diving helmet for a head.  The opening credits lists the N. A. Fischer Chemical Products as the provider of the “Billion Bubble Machine”. The movie was made in 3-D during the heyday of 3-D movies and is a perfect vehicle for that technology.  It has stock footage of stop motion dinosaurs and fighting lizards for no apparent reason.  During one scene where a rocket is launching to escape the tyrannical Robot Monster creatures, you can see someone’s arm moving a rocket on a stick.  Even with all these fun things to enjoy, the movie seems long at a 66-minute run time.

Plan 9 From Outer Space is the grandaddy of all bad movies.  It is the film that has worn the title Worst Movie Ever Made for the longest.  One review of the movie said that it might not be the worst movie ever, but it is the most entertaining bad movie you’ll ever see.  I think this description is the best.  Its reputation was established in the late 1970’s through the book The Golden Turkey Awards and has continued to grow over the years.  The Tim Burton film, Ed Wood, about its director has added to the lore of Plan 9. 

In 1980, the movie The Creeping Terror was featured in a book, The Golden Turkey Awards.  The book shared information about a variety of movies that are considered the worst ever made. In addition to being an extremely bad movie, this one is also very fun to watch.  It involves a creature in a spaceship that terrorizes the town where it lands.  It sounds like a standard 1950’s science fiction film but the technical details of the film give it the boost that make it comedy gold.  The monster appears to be made from a giant remnant of carpet with a bunch of kids underneath it to make it move.  In several of the scenes, you can see the kid’s sneakers.  The movie was made in a small town in Texas where the director had the people from the town pay him to be in the movie. This is one of the reasons you see so many people get eaten by the monster.  The director also ran out of money before he could finish the film.  Before it could be finalized, the soundtrack got separated from the film.  They couldn’t get the people to overdub the dialogue because they were mad about the film.  For the most part, the film is narrated like a nature film.  In one memorable scene, a scientist and a military officer are arguing whether to kill or capture the monster.  The narrator describing action says “The Colonel, more concerned with saving human lives than advancing Science, told Bradford to Go to Hell.”

One day in 2009, I was channel surfing and I saw a showing was coming on called A Haunting in Connecticut.  I had recently seen ads for a movie called The Haunting in Connecticut that I didn’t think had been released yet.  The similarity of the names confused me, and I watched just to see the show on TV was the same thing.  It turns out that the The Haunting was based on the same story as A Haunting.  I enjoyed the TV show enough that I decided to go see the film when it was released. My son and my youngest daughter went with me to see the film.

My family and I started watching classic blaxploitation movies from the 1970’s on Turner Classic Movies several years ago. There is a sub-genre of these films that are horror films too.  Blackula and Scream Blacula, Scream are probably the most famous of these films.  One of the lesser known of these films is called Sugar Hill.

We watched Pee-wee’s Playhouse when it first came out in 1986.  My wife and I were fans of Pee-wee Herman and were interested in seeing how they would do a children’s show.  One of the show’s characters was someone they called The King of Cartoons.  The King of Cartoons dressed like you would expect a king to dress with a crown and regal, ornate clothes.  During the early seasons he would bring a projector which he would shine into the camera as he said, “Let the cartoons begin!”  Later the projector was replaced with a remote control. The projector wasn’t the only thing that was replaced.  After the first season, the original King of Cartoons, Gilbert Lewis, was replaced by William Marshall.  Marshall looked familiar. It was after a couple of seasons that I found out that he played the title character in the blaxploitation horror film, Blackula.

When I was growing up, the location television station that showed movies every afternoon would set aside Saturday afternoon for Tarzan movies starring Johnny Weissmuller. There weren’t enough Tarzan movies to show them all year, so they showed Shirley Temple movies and Lone Ranger television episodes instead of Tarzan.  But Tarzan movies were definitely my favorites.  One of the most memorable of these Tarzan films is Tarzan Escapes.  

The Exorcist was released in 1973.  I was 11 at the time and way too young to see it.  I knew what I knew about it because of pop culture references like the Mad Magazine parody and the Saturday Night Live sketch they did when Richard Pryor hosted in 1975.  In 1979, it was re-released to a theatre where we would regularly go.  My friends and I were eager to see it and made plans to go as soon as it was announced. 

The horror film The Howling is considered one of the better horror films of the 1980’s.  When it first came out, I went to see it on the first weekend it was showing.  My wife and I weren’t married yet and we went to see this on a date.  Just outside of the theater while we were waiting to get in, we saw some friends who had just watched it.  They didn’t like it and warned us that it was bad.  They had walked out early on the film. I didn’t trust our friends taste in horror movies. This was the same person that didn’t like Night of the Living Dead. Either way, I enjoy watching bad movies too, so their warning didn’t discourage us.  We were convinced that we would have a fun time that night.

In 1964, Olivia de Havilland made a movie called Lady in a Cage.  It’s considered a “psychological thriller”.  Her character has a broken hip and in order to get up and down the stairs in her mansion, she has a small elevator installed.  While she is home alone, the power goes out at the house, trapping her between floors on the elevator.  Ringing the alarm on the elevator only attracts the attention of teenage hoodlums who come into her house to rob it and terrorize her.  This film features James Caan in his first credited role.  It also features some gruesome scenes of violence that were controversial for 1964.