Category: Scary Stories

On October 28, 1978, the movie KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park appeared on NBC. By the time this show aired, KISS had moved from being a successful, edgy rock band with their Alive! and Destroyer albums to pop culture icons who sold a variety of merchandise like Halloween costumes, action figures and comic books that had their blood added to the ink.  They were developing a more kid-friendly image while the lyrics of their songs still had more adult themes.  By the time this TV movie was released they had released a total of 6 studio albums, 2 two-disc live albums, 4 solo albums and a two-disc “Greatest Hits” album. I was still a fan although my interest was waning.

On October 29,1976, The Paul Lynde Halloween Special aired on ABC.  I had always enjoyed seeing Paul Lynde on Hollywood Squares, but any of the variety shows and sitcoms that he starred in were less interesting. A show like this would usually not be on my radar to watch but this one was different.  Earlier that year, I had become a fan of the band KISS.  Ads for this special made a big deal about KISS appearing on this show.  Their single, Beth was released in August and had risen to number 7 on the Billboard Hot 100. Getting to see KISS was my reason for watching this show.

Back in the early 1980’s, I discovered the Golden Turkey Awards books and my search for bad movies began. It was also around that time that video stores began popping up.  Before the days of Blockbuster Video, it seemed like you could go to these smaller video stores and find many of these Golden Turkey award winners if you were willing to search hard enough.  Those stores were looking for any kind of content to fill their shelves and these stinker movies were often just the right thing to pad their number of movies.  For someone like me who loved these movies, a film with the title The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies was a must find.

Anyone hardcore fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000 should be familiar with the film Manos: The Hands of Fate. Manos is considered one of the worst films that ever appeared on the series.  The premise of the show is that mad scientists have captured a test case and show him bad movies.  The test subject and his robots make fun of the movies.  Manos was the only film that was so bad, the scientists apologized to their victim.  It is also considered one of the best episodes of the series.

During the early 200’s, my family and I discovered a new group of bad movies.  This group of movies was labeled as “so bad they are good” to differentiate them from the films labeled as Golden Turkeys in the past.  One of the first of this group was a Film called Troll 2.

While I won’t try to share all the details of Troll 2, I will try and share enough to let you know why this film is so beloved by its fans.  First, there are no trolls in Troll 2.  There are goblins but no trolls.  Next you should know that Troll 2 is not a sequel to the film Troll.  Troll 2 was originally titled Goblins, but the distributors wanted to market it as a sequel to Troll.  The movie was filmed by an Italian production company in Utah with an Italian-speaking crew, working with an inexperienced English-speaking group of actors. They were working with a script written in Italian and poorly translated into English, making the dialogue of the film one of the sources of humor.

In 1982 the film It Came From Hollywood was released. It is a documentary film with a compilation of clips from “Bad Movies” drawing heavily on the book The Golden Turkey Awards. There is a short clip of a film not covered in the book that I was unfamiliar with that featured a giant ape being attacked by helicopters.  The man in the ape suit is slapping around toy helicopters on strings, knocking them into paper mache mountains.  This was a low budget version Korean knock-off of what the Japanese had been doing much better for years with the Godzilla series.  The highlight from the clip of this battle is when the ape flips the bird at the camera.  He’s not flipping off the military, he’s flipping off the audience.