Late Night Chills and Afternoon Thrills...

Son of Terrible Movies Promo: Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter
from The Cinema 4 Pylon on Vimeo.

The first great wave of concentrated film interest in my life was between the ages of 12 and 16 – before the VCR, Elvira, and cable television came to rule my existence – through the latter half of the 1970s. Left with few outside resources such as having a local movie theatre in our hamlet of Eagle River, Alaska (we had to drive fifteen-plus miles to see one on a big screen in "big city" Anchorage), my burgeoning film hunger was fed largely by four movie programs that aired on local network affiliates broadcasting from Anchorage.

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Monster Matinees

First was a weekday matinee show that ran at 3:00 pm on CBS affiliate KTVA-11. I don't remember the name of the program or if it even had a title. This is strange because the films it showed were never to be forgotten by me. The program aired classic (or non-classic, depending on your viewpoint) horror and science-fiction movies, and chiefly from Universal, AIP and Toho. As a result, this is where I got my basic education on the films from those studios. It's where I finally got to see those Dracula, Frankenstein, Mummy, Wolf Man and Creature from the Black Lagoon films I was reading about in the then-waning days of the original run of Famous Monsters of Filmland Magazine. I also was able to catch the bulk of the original Showa period of Godzilla and other kaiju films from Toho. Other favorites which I would first see on this program were The Manster, The Werewolf, The Monster that Challenged the World, Fiend Without a Face, Son of Kong, The Green Slime, This Island Earth, and most importantly, The Thing from Another World. And yeah, this is where The War of the Gargantuas became such a thing for me. 

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The CBS Late Movie

Found on YouTube.

Late nights (post 11 p.m.) on KTVA-11 during weekdays and weekends was The CBS Late Movie program. The name was something of a misnomer, because in later years, the programming mostly consisted of television series episodes. But some of those series were profoundly influential to me, such as The Avengers (oh, Emma Peel...), The New Avengers (I was likewise in love with Joanna Lumley as "Purdy"), The Saint (starring Roger Moore, who was by then the current James Bond), Return of the Saint (starring Ian Ogilvy, whom I didn't like nearly as much as Roger Moore), and best of all, the super-scary (for then) Kolchak the Night Stalker. 

But it was the movies that I saw occasionally in this time slot that had me staying far too late in my early years. Some of my favorites were Killdozer, Help!, A Hard Day's Night, Night of the Lepus, Head, Mako: Jaws of Death, Willard, Frogs, The Giant Spider Invasion, Ben, Yellow Submarine, Sssssss!, Who's Minding the Store?, The Disorderly Orderly, and Tarzan and the Great River.

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The Lucky 13 Movie

Running in matinee form on another channel, ABC affiliate KIMO-13, was The Lucky 13 Movie, which I could only watch on summers off from school (or when I was sick or faking sick), since it aired at noon. I remember two separate hosts of the show mainly: Lois Blessington and Beverly Michaels. (I had a sort of puppy love crush on Ms. Michaels, even though she was decades older than me.) The run of films was decidedly more pedestrian on this program; there were few science fiction films, though the ones they showed stuck with me, and zero horror films, at least as I can recall. Still, this matinee show played a rather secretive part in my development, as I was yet to realize that I was a film fan. 

Because I started watching this show much younger than the other programs, I often saw it due to the kindness of assorted babysitters (including the great Mrs. B) in my younger years. As I mentioned, the films were more mainstream at times (they showed a lot of melodramas, and there were many that I never cared for, which would inevitably cause me to wander off to play instead). But the ones that caught my attention did so in a magical way. 

My main introduction to the films of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope, and a lot of westerns was due to The Lucky 13 Movie. Favorites for me included Stanley and Livingstone, The Crimson Pirate, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, When Worlds Collide, The Naked Jungle (with those scary army ants!), The Court Jester, Irwin Allen's version of The Lost World, Five Weeks in a Balloon, Boy's Town, Jim Thorpe: All-American, A High Wind in Jamaica, and the movie version of the Batman TV series, a show which had been my favorite series since I was toddler. (Not joking -- the proof is in my baby book...)

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And, finally...

The World's Most Terrible Movies

The World's Most Terrible Movies: Back to the Movie interstitial from The Cinema 4 Pylon on Vimeo.

But the greatest show in the world for me in those days, also on KIMO-13, was The World's Most Terrible Movies. KIMO had surprisingly incredible movies showing on Saturday nights beginning at 10:00 p.m. It's where I met up with the incredible Professor Fate and his henchman Max squaring of against the Great Leslie in The Great Race time and again. It was where I first saw The Birds (my first Hitchcock), War of the Worlds, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Jason and the Argonauts, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and The Valley of Gwangi. 

But somewhere between midnight and 1:00 a.m., depending on the length of the 10:00 p.m. feature, The World's Most Terrible Movies would start. I have written about The World's Most Terrible Movies at length on this website. Doing so put me in the acquaintance of an individual who was responsible for the show back in that time, Richard Gay, who contacted me and eventually sent to me a disc full of old promotional clips from TWMTM and some others (such as The Lucky 13 Movie) with which he had responsibility on the station at the time.

To read my full ongoing articles about this show, click on the following titles:

• Return of the Son of Terrible Movies Promo Blowout! [Pt. 1]
• Return of the Son of Terrible Movies Promo Blowout! [Pt. 2]
• Holiday Remix of the Return of the Son of Terrible Movies Promo Blowout! [Pt. 3]