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]

My Lucky 13 -- Who Say Who?

What we were calling Messerschmitts looked nothing like the famous German fighter planes, but we called them by that name all the same. I was engaged in teaching my brother Mark a trio of paper airplane designs I had learned in school earlier in the year, not least of which was a snub-nosed model with wide wings and flaps torn into the back edges. This is the one I called a Messerschmitt, and while I probably knew the names of roughly a dozen other planes at that young age (I had a poster which portrayed planes and jets from around the world), I had actually picked the term up from a World War II-obsessed school buddy. The chief reason we called this particular design a Messerschmitt was the way this model would swoop for a short burst, and then flip over and over and over again until the plane would slam, usually ungracefully, into the ground. This made them perfect as the unfortunate victims of the other paper airplanes, most often long, sleek and pointed in the traditional way that even the most inept nebbish can build almost perfectly by accident, and most often identified by our youthful gang of brainwashed patriots as an American aircraft. Naturally, over a quarter century after a war which our tender minds could not even begin to comprehend, Germans (and not necessarily Nazis) were the imaginary evil of childhood's choice.

On that particular day, our paper-folding activities fell under the somewhat watchful eye of a middle-aged, chain-smoking daycare specialist (whom I recall as possessing the name of Nancy, though I have been called on this fact before -- I still believe I am right). We had a routine, Nancy and I, where I would do something bratty (for that is what I specialized in -- and still do) and she would tell me to knock it off. This would cause me to inquire in the biggest, booming voice my tiny lungs could muster, "Who say who?," to which she would reply in similar tone, "Me say me!!" Of course, I listened to her for the most part, but it wasn't for fear of reprisal against the evil I was undoubtedly perpetrating against her and the other children. It was because I knew what would happen if I did behave: while the other kids would eat their lunch at the kitchen table and then go off doing their little kid business, I was allowed to take part in the daily ritual at play upon the television from noon to two p.m.

This was the KIMO Lucky 13 Afternoon Movie, which seemed to the unwise to be nothing but a normal TV matinee show, but which beheld to me a secret wonderland of thrills and cinematic education. Hosted by the well-known (in Anchorage, at least) hostess, Beverly Michaels, Lucky 13 would often start with a short interview with a local celebrity or politico, but would then dive into whatever movie from whatever package the ABC affiliate could afford to run. This brought a great diversity of flicks to my attention over the few years that I devoured its contents, but naturally, I mainly remember the genre fare that was presented to me, and certainly not the generally boring romances that would pop up now and then.

And it was on this day, with the phony notebook-paper Messerschmitts crashing unloved into the stained and foul-smelling shag carpeting that was a hallmark of bad household decoration in that mostly horrendous-looking decade -- I can still bring its aroma to mind, though I certainly recall its like from many other homes and apartments of that era -- it was on this day that I paid attention to the Lucky 13 Afternoon Movie for the first time. Long before the monster movie shows that would carry me through my earliest double digit years, here was the springboard for my first movie feature show addiction.

The movie was the theatrical feature version of the Adam West Batman TV series, featuring his four greatest villains -- the Joker, the Riddler, the Penguin and Catwoman - POW! WHAP! BAM! -- and I found myself ceasing altogether my normal frenetic behavior and sinking into that nasty carpet for the full two hours. I was already reading Batman comics by that time, and had seen nearly every episode of the series several times in its perpetual rerun loop late in the afternoon. But I had never seen the movie -- hell, I didn't even know it existed -- and here was the greatest thing I had ever seen with my barely formed peepers. The battles were so epic to my young mind, I could barely think straight for days, and spent weeks recreating the fight scenes with my brothers and my friends (some of whom, like my best friend Rusty Jackson, had lucked out and gotten to watch it, too). I had no idea how completely hokey it looked to adult eyes, and while I laughed a lot while watching it, I really did not realize it was all comedy. Then, as now, I felt Batman's adventures were meant to taken seriously, even if the hero had a serious paunch and a stilted acting style (neither of which I noticed either, but keep in mind, Batman was a real guy to me).

The chief revelation, though, was that I suddenly found a place where I could regularly see adventures like this. In a time before widespread cable systems and home video devices, I had the good fortune to briefly be in the care of a babysitter who liked to turn on the local movie show every single afternoon, and boy, did I reap the profits. Before long, I was seeing Jules Verne adventures like Five Weeks in a Balloon, traversing the African jungle with Spencer Tracy in Stanley and Livingstone, and diving in a nuclear-powered submarine in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis became regular pals, often with a different wacky movie in the series showing nearly every week, and Bob Hope and Danny Kaye comedies crossed my path every now and then.

Sure, there was a lot of genuine crap, too. Not good crap like I was watching (for the most part), but genuine crap. Anything with more than one female lead was sure to be given the coldest of shoulders. And if a romance showed up? Well, they were certainly icky beyond belief, but they posed no real problem. After all, there were plenty of paper airplanes left to build... and plenty of Messerschmitts dotting the skies of that smoke-filled battle arena, and every one of them doomed to perish ignobly in the hellish flames reserved especially for such villainy. Who say who?

Me say me...

Shock Show Update: Monster Movie Week (KHIZ-TV/DT, Barstow/LA)

Somewhere in my much-belated inaugural viewing of a reduced version of Macabre Theatre on what is basically a UHF-level local cable channel last Saturday, a commercial came on which carried, much to my glee, scratchy and faded images of frantic mobs of people (are there any other kind?) fleeing the giant, looming likes of Godzilla, Ghidorah, Megalon and Gorgo. Within the first few seconds (a scraggly sort of font, that you would swear all of the other fonts would have outlawed from Fontland eons ago) crawls across the bottom of the screen, proclaiming the word “MONSTER”. It is punctuated with a rather amateurish (though lovable) attempt at embellishing the word with some sort of dramatic effect: a yellow squiggly line that wiggles over and beneath the word. "MONSTER" then scoots off the screen, trailed by the yellow line as though it were some sort of verbal dragster. The word is followed soon by two others, each with squiggly yellow lines of their own: “MOVIE” and “WEEK”. Thereafter, the unadorned phrase (though in the same rough font): “ON KHIZ-TV”.

Using my "mad skillz" that I learned from Sesame Street back in the day, I was able to decipher this confusion and put the words together into a coherent sentence. Apparently, I surmised, there was to be some sort of a “MONSTER MOVIE WEEK ON KHIZ-TV” this week. As the mayhem and destruction of Tokyo and London continued apace on the screen, a voice, in what has to be one of the worst attempts at being cool in the history of recorded voices (apart from all that phony boy band crap) is heard intimating, “It's Monster Movie Week on KHIZ. Catch it Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. Check out Godzilla and Gorgo -- this week on KHIZ-TV”. The attempt at first seems to be one of detached smoothness on the part of the narrator, but all his voice really comes off as that of a stoned dullard, and a stiff acting one at that, as he stumbles all over the last sentence.

The professionalism of the commercial aside -- which someone probably threw together at the last minute anyway; who cares about quality? – it was personally effective in that it gave me an excuse to check out that long-lost staple of my youth: the weekday afternoon monster matinee. As a matter of fact, even though I likely owned all of the movies they would be showing, it thrilled me to the core. There is a certain part of me that enjoys the commercial interruptions, and especially the cheesiness of some of those commercials (such as the one for the Monster Movie Week itself). However, finding when it aired was a small problem, since the listings provided nothing in the way of any Godzilla titles or even a “Movie Matinee” or “Afternoon Movie” block. What there was on KHIZ’s listings, however, was a two-hour chunk at one in the afternoon each day (except Wednesday, of course) titled “To Be Announced.” “This,” I proclaimed, “must be the place!” and I set my DVR to record them.

Here is what you will find: there is no “Welcome to Monster Movie Week” intro, which I really didn’t expect; the movie simply starts instead. When it does, you find in the first film, the sweetly inept though earnest Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster, what is probably the most scratch-ridden, haggard-looking copy of the film since some geekoid, sweaty, seventh-grade science teacher mistakenly decided to show it in his class as a lesson in pollution. (This really happened, and it happened to me – story at some later date.) Having a decent print on a VHS copy already, the film is all but unwatchable in this condition, but I carried on undeterred, still wrapped in the glowing memories of teenage monster afternoons on the television. The first commercial break does bring something fun: a “We will return to…” interstitial, showing a short clip from the film along with its title. “We now return…” naturally follows soon after the obligatory ads of Billy Mays yelling about “orange” cleaners and the like (along with a replay of the Monster Movie Week ad). The poor condition of the film never varied, but there was charm aplenty to be had from the situation, and I charged through the rest of the film, not even zipping through the commercial breaks, using them instead as they were intended (i.e. bathroom breaks, more popcorn popping, getting a soda, internet porn etc.)

Tuesday’s showing turned out to be Monster Zero, and if I thought that the Smog Monster had it bad in his shabby-ass print (well, Hedorah is sort of a shabby-ass character himself, so I guess it doesn't matter), then Ghidorah and his opponents have it even worse. The KHIZ-TV print of Monster Zero was probably the most washed-out and faded thing since Stephen Baldwin’s acting career (The Usual Suspects notwithstanding). There were points in the film where I swore I was watching the negative instead. Thursday, I prepared for the worst with Godzilla Vs. Megalon, but I was mildly surprised to discover that it was no worse (and maybe even better) than the public domain version that I've been coping with for eons, just waiting for a decent DVD release. Today's (Friday's) film was, of course (using the logic, as in, no logic), Gorgo, the famous British giant-monster-with-goofy-ears flick from the late 50's, and while I would have probably watched the KHIZ version just for fun, I recently obtained my official Widescreen Destruction Edition DVD of the film just a couple of weeks ago, and I really didn't want to spoil that particular viewing. So I am skipping it. I am, though, pleased to see it on the Monster Movie Week.

And that's the main thing, of course. However much I might rip on the prints being used for these films or the cheesiness of the advertising, I think back to those teenage years where I watched these same films on similar programs, and I smile. I may have even seen prints in as bad condition as these, but at that time, the films were new and important to myself and my monster-mad mind, and didn't know or care about the condition of the film that I was watching. It was merely taking advantage of the chance to see them. And if some kid out in Barstow or L.A. or Temecula is sick just one day of this week, and is flipping cable channels, and just happens to get a healthy dose of Godzilla action, then I would feel that KHIZ has done the world some justice. After all, someone has to grow up to carry the torch for the next generation.

Where a Whole Army Couldn't Get at Him... [The Ballad of Kong Pt. 1]

[Before you go on, read the prologue to this article here.]

Yeah, the sizing is completely wrong in this promo photo.
But this picture has always fascinated me...

Whatever possessed my parents in those days to allow me such latitude, especially given my more than occasional admittedly horrid behavior, is beyond me to this day. Maybe it was the impending divorce they were going through at the time. While massively upset about this, I was still able to close my mind to that situation enough to embrace my afternoons away on my lonesome in 1977, the summer before the close of my twelfth year.

Allowed to leave my younger brothers in our then babysitter's stead (Mrs. B.), whose home was a couple blocks away, I struck out after lunch most days to arrive home and in my own care for a few hours. I did have a handful of chores with which I had been entrusted to complete, such as feeding the dog and cats, which I took care of invariably, and cleaning up the dishes and removing the garbage from the kitchen, which I took care of rather sporadically. I would then sometimes go outside to hang with my best friend Rusty and his brother Rodney, or I would read books and comics, draw, or play the trading card-and-dice baseball game simulator that I had designed (with special rules adjusted for both 1-vs-1 and solitaire play).

The Manster (1959)

But what I discovered quickly that summer, almost completely by accident, was the afternoon movie matinee show that the local CBS affiliate, KTVA, would air each day at 3:00 p.m., right after my beloved Match Game '77 and the less knee-slapping but still oddly fascinating Tattletales (I was a big fan of Bert Convy and Orson Bean in those days). Turning on the TV well after I normally watched those game shows, I chanced upon the black-and-white image of a man with a large eyeball growing out of his shoulder. I repeat: GROWING OUT OF HIS SHOULDER! This was no Match Game '77! Completely by happenstance, I had tripped on an image which blew my twelve-year-old mind, and, of course, meant that I would not only be returning to that channel every single day for the rest of the summer, but I also immediately needed to watch the rest of this brain-searing broadcast from another dimension.

The movie turned out to be The Manster, a less-than-OK film by most people's standards, but one which opened yet another door in my burgeoning interest in movies. After the hero/villain split in twain and battled himself to the death on the edge of that erupting Japanese volcano, I knew exactly where I would be the next afternoon. I admit that I do not remember exactly what the next film turned out to be, nor do I ever recall any films that weren't of the horror, science fiction, or mystery genres. (There may have been some other films in the mix, but I haven't any recollection of such an occurrence.) There just seemed to be a monster or alien movie day after day after day, and I was utterly delighted. I would throw a blanket and pillow on the living room floor, use our popcorn maker to heat up a fresh batch of crunch-crunch (always with melted butter), and tune in to the goodness.

I do recall many of the prime Godzilla and other Toho productions (including, most importantly to me in my Kong enthrallment, King Kong vs. Godzilla), my first meetings with the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Frankenstein's Monster, the Wolf Man, the Invisible Man, Dracula, and Basil Rathbone's rendition of Sherlock Holmes. I even recall what is considered a minor effort of monster mayhem, but one which I will defend most vociferously, The Monster That Challenged the World. It is also where I saw three films in my personal cult, the equally ridiculous War of the Gargantuas, Fiend without a Face, and The Green Slime. But the film that I was most excited about seeing on those most edifying and monstrous afternoons? The mighty Kong, himself!

I had seen Kong once before, at the age of ten. Just a random film on a random Saturday afternoon broadcast where it rained and so I was stuck inside. It turned out to be most fortuitous for me, as Kong was the most amazing thing that I had ever seen. Honestly, I didn't know what hit me. And it seemed, for about three years, that I would never see the 1933 King Kong again. I continued learning about the original mainly from what would turn out to be latter-day editions of Forrest J. Ackerman's Famous Monsters of Filmland Magazine, of which I had managed to trade with a buddy and stash a couple copies. The stashing was a form of self-preservation, which was a necessity lest my parents discover the "fur bikini" shots of the surely divine Raquel Welch, whose treasures I had already discovered at that tender age, even though I was still a few months away from actually seeing One Million Years B.C. (There were also a number of rather provocative shots of some other Hammer girls that I found most titillating, but I digress...) While I had seen Kong already, all of the information that I knew about the film came from mentions in Famous Monsters. Luckily for me, Ackerman himself had been equally influenced by King Kong in his own youth. To find a grown man with a similar obsession to mine was fascinating to me. Wasn't he supposed to be a grown up?

One such magazine that
influenced me in those days.

Additionally, in the back of Famous Monsters (and other Warren magazines of the time, such as Eerie and Creepy, which I was also seeing for the first time) were advertisements for 8mm and 16mm films, which I was primarily interested in because I was searching out a shortened version of a Hammer Frankenstein film which had been shown to us by our teachers at the end of our sixth grade graduation camp the previous year. (We also saw short scenes from others, including The Man Who Could Cheat Death and Horror of Dracula.) I not only discovered that film could be purchased, but so could a couple of ten-minute long snippets of King Kong, along with condensed versions of many other horror films that I longed to have not only the money to purchase, but also the clams with which to buy a camera to view them.

There was another side influence at that time that was affecting my personal King Kong mania... the 1976 version of King Kong. I had not seen it, of course; there was no VHS yet and my parents did not take me to it in the theatres. But it was advertised everywhere when I was eleven, there was merchandising around (glasses, lunchboxes, etc.), and that summer of 1977, in conjunction with the night when we first saw the original version of Star Wars, obtain several packs of Topps King Kong trading cards that would become even more fascinating to me when I reach puberty. [More on this in a later installment of this article...]

This was a time, O young and X-treme ones, that when you ran across a film that you wanted to see, you watched it then and there. Cable TV was indeed available in the '70s (even in Alaska) but not in the capacity nor range that we know today. The technology for the VCR had been developed but was not quite readily available to the casual public. The only real choices that you had (outside of the movie theatre) to see movies at all were the four VHF channels on your television dial. There were a couple of local UHF channels hanging about, but they never came in very clearly, especially in those days, and I don't remember much on them from the '70s besides a few extremely fuzzy Mighty Mouse, Heckle and Jeckle, and Gandy Goose cartoons. (We had two television antennae with tinfoil formed into flags hanging off of them -- how good do you think the reception was?) It was pretty much the ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS affiliates, and that was it for choice. You really had to take advantage when they showed a movie that you were interested in, because you never knew when it would come down the pike again, if at all.

And so I believed, with my naive head lacking any knowledge of the burgeoning wave of technology due to hit the world in the next few years, that I was fated to never to see this that original King Kong movie again. I longed to see it and scanned the TV listings for another showing, but never happened across it. I had resorted to remaining enthralled over the big ape by scanning the pages of cheesy monster rags and scrounging for tidbits on the film in the local library. Of course, I was also privy to endless King Kong gags in the pages of MAD Magazine, often due to the magic renderings of Don Martin and Sergio Aragonés. And then, in a day that shall forever be titled, in the silly Martin style, "ONE FINE AFTERNOON IN FRONT OF THE TV," I found to my delight once again the film that I thought, at that time, would be withheld from my sight forever...

[To be continued in Part 2...]