It's Countdown to Halloween Time!!!

Taken on the Haunted Mansion (sans flash – I don't break the rules) this month
 at Disneyland when the ride stopped momentarily.

Yes, once more – I believe for the fourth time – I am taking part in the annual online Countdown to Halloween festivities. To put it as simply as possible, if you have a website that specializes in articles, photos, how-to activities, cosplay, videos, etc. related to Halloween or the horror genre, you get in touch with the Countdown to Halloween website (http://countdowntohalloween.blogspot.com/), and then your site gets added to a handy list that people can reference throughout October (and the rest of the year, really). They promote you, they give you nifty badges you can use on your site or on social media to draw people to your sites, and thereby help promote Countdown to Halloween in general. Fun and free, with the only real consequence being that you will find out exactly how many people are really interested in whatever crap you have to say (if that is something that will bother you in the end).

I posted a hell of a lot last year as part of the 2016 Countdown. I not only had articles here on the Pylon, but also on Cinema 4: Cel Bloc (my animation site), on The Shark Film Office (self-explanatory), and on my then-latest site, V for Voluminous, C for Cinema (my book review site). My buddy Aaron and I also had a couple of posts we promoted on our Stephen King site, We Who Watch Behind the Rows. In fact, I posted so much material last year, that I probably set a high bar for quantity (let's not even get into quality) that I will probably not be able to meet this year (or ever again).

There are just too many things going on with me in a physical sense, too many personal things going on, and too many distractions from the real world for me to keep up that pace this year. To say my mind is split a thousand directions right now is an understatement, and so I have decided that I need to calm down a little bit and just get done what I can get done. I will not be driving myself crazy trying to keep apace with anyone else or some imaginary publishing schedule that I have created in my head. Last year, I had something posted every single day in October on the Pylon; sometimes, more than one thing. At a point late in the month (specifically, the 26th), I suffered a hip injury that made it difficult to sit or stand for long (and which would haunt me for basically the next 8-9 months). I also had friends and family in town (in different groupings) and so my time was of a premium leading up to the actual day of Halloween. Despite all this, I still managed to post at least once every day on the Pylon, in addition to writing and publishing everything else on my other websites.

This year will be different. I am starting out the month away from home and away from my computer (this is a prepared, pre-scheduled post itself). Later in the month, I will again have various friends coming to town, and with that will be visits to Disneyland and Disney California Adventure and probably the beach. At those moments, I really won't care if I get anything posted in time.

But away from those moments, I hope you will enjoy what I will be publishing this month. Here on the Pylon, I will have a couple of articles in my The Monster's on the Loose! series – which concentrates specifically on formative moments in my horror movie upbringing – in which I will delve into a couple of monstrous documentaries from my youth and also one of my favorite all-time monster flicks, The Monster That Challenged the World. I am planning the third installment of my annual look back at Topps monster trading cards from the 1970s, and also the third piece in my recap of episodes from the old Monkees TV series that involved supernatural themes. There will probably be a couple of pieces of my Halloween visits to Disneyland, including checking out the new stuff they have added to California Adventure for the season. I am thinking of taking a stroll through some old, creaky horror comics that I own. There will probably be some mixtape tracks added to my collection for the Halloween season. And a whole lot of stuff that will work out as things pop up throughout the month. Don't want to give away everything. Or promise too much... I also have a lot of monster movies to watch this month as well, you know...

On Cinema 4: Cel Bloc, I have a half dozen (and possibly more) scary cartoons lined up for discussion, including a couple of Disney classics late in October. The Shark Film Office will finally see me tackle the two films that got cut last year when I got injured: my reviews of the atrocious Sharkenstein (that's right: basically, Jaws crossed with the Frankenstein Monster) and the absolutely mind-destroying Shark Exorcist, one of the absolute worst pieces of cinema I have ever encountered (and that is saying a lot). It is a film so painful that it nearly made me give up writing about shark films. Over on We Who Watch, Aaron and I will start out this month with our review of the new It movie, then a review of Mike Flanagan's new adaptation of Gerald's Game on Netflix, and we are planning to reread King's 'Salem's Lot during the month to also review, And if we can, we then want to do separate reviews of the 1979 Tobe Hooper TV movie and the 2004 mini-series remake.

OK, I have a lot to do this month. I hope that you will return here through the month (and afterward) to check out the fun on my various websites. And feel free to drop a comment or two while you are here. I love to talk to other fans of the stuff that I love.

Happy Halloween (in advance)!

RTJ

Other Countdown to Halloween Thrills in Cinema 4 Land...

If you stopped by here because of the Countdown to Halloween website, thanks for visiting. I have posted new material every single day in October thus far, and plans are to keep that going for the rest of the month. But I have other sites taking part in the Countdown this year, so I want to take the opportunity to let you know about what is going on at one of them today.

On my animation website, Cinema 4: Cel Bloc, I have a post about a 1930 cartoon from Van Beuren Studios called The Haunted Ship, starring a long-forgotten team called Waffles the Cat and Don the Dog. The pair would only star in a few shorts before being humanized into a more well known team called Tom and Jerry, who would make a couple dozen shorts before retiring for good. Years later, MGM would take up those character names for a totally unrelated cat and mouse team of their own, and make cartoon history.

The Haunted Ship is an odd little cartoon, both an undersea adventure involving sharks, eels, rays, turtles, and octopuses, but also a full on Halloween cartoon, in which they tangle with skeletons and monsters as well. And its also a bit of a musical. Somehow, it ends up being far more enjoyable and watchable than you might think.

You can read all about The Haunted Ship by clicking here.

And keep checking back here on The Cinema 4 Pylon for more Countdown to Halloween fun!

RTJ

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]

There's More Countdown to Halloween Fun in Pylon-Land to Be Had!

Looking for some more Countdown to Halloween fun today (whatever day that happens to be that you are visiting this page)?

On my animation website, Cinema 4: Cel Bloc, I have a new post about a longtime Halloween favorite, Walt Disney's classic Mickey, Donald and Goofy vs. spooks romp, Lonesome Ghosts (1937). Goofy quite literally says, "I ain't afraid-a no ghosts!" in this film, and with our three heroes trying to remove a quartet of pesky creeps from a haunted house, you can bet that if this film isn't a direct inspiration for Ghostbusters, it at least had some residual influence on its creation.

You can read all about Lonesome Ghosts by clicking here.

But that's not all! My writing partner and pal, Aaron Lowe and I have a Stephen King blog called We Who Watch Behind the Rows. Our ritual is to take a written work by King, read it, and then discuss it back and forth. Once the book is done, we then tackle any film adaptations (and even their sequels) made from that written work.

Our concentration for October is on King's first published novel (not his first written, mind you), 1974's Carrie, which many of you may know even better from the 1976 film directed by Brian De Palma. We will tackle the De Palma film in the coming weeks, but for now, we have published our discussion of the novel on our website. For me, it was the first time in roughly thirty years that I have read the book, and for Aaron, who has actually read far more of King's works than I have, it was his first crack at this book.

To read our discussion of Carrie [The Novel], click here.

And keep checking back here at The Cinema 4 Pylon every day throughout October. You never know what you might find here!

RTJ

More Countdown to Halloween Fun on Cinema 4: Cel Bloc...

A bit of an open day on The Cinema 4 Pylon as local job searching played a heavy hand in today's activities, but fret not, dear friends. I have a fresh Countdown to Halloween post on my animation site, Cinema 4: Cel Bloc, today based on the 1942 Terrytoons cartoon, Frankenstein's Cat. The short has the titular monster running amok on a village full of once happy mice and birds, until Mighty Mouse shows up to (what else?) save the day! 

Loaded with plenty of early '40s monster movie spirit, Frankenstein's Cat is a fun addition to any Halloween-oriented cartoon playlist. Check out the article (and watch the cartoon) by clicking here.

More "Countdown to Halloween" Hijinks from Cinema 4...

Just a couple of quick notices to make you aware of freshly posted articles on my other sites that tie into my Countdown to Halloween theme this month:

On CINEMA 4: CEL BLOC:

Sicque! Sicque! Sicque! (1966)

The Inspector (the cartoon version of Peter Sellers' Inspector Clouseau from the Pink Panther films) and his steadfast partner Sergeant Deaux-Deaux face off against a monstrous "mue-nster" in this takeoff on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. My favorite of the Inspector series for numerous reasons, not all of them involving monsters. The second of seven Halloween-oriented cartoons that will be featured throughout the month of October on Cinema 4: Cel Bloc.

On THE SHARK FILM OFFICE:

90210 Shark Attack (2014)

A truly idiotic affair, 90210 Shark Attack would seem to have everything you need to make a cult classic: horny teenagers, sex, a magical curse, a former scream queen with major shark film credentials in need of a paycheck (Donna Wilkes from Jaws 2), and (one would hope) sharks. The man behind the camera is David DeCoteau, who gave us scream queen boobie-fests (bless his heart) in the '80s and '90s such as Sorority Babes at the Slimeball Bowl-A-Rama, Nightmare Sisters, and Creepozoids. So, what the hell happened, besides way too much horridly selected stock footage? Click the link above and find out just what...

RTJ

Countdown to Halloween 2016: Pylon-Style!

Even Totoro is ready for Halloween, resplendent
and relaxed in my Baby Monster Beanie...

Holy crap, I made it another year...

Not that I was expecting to go anywhere, but with everything that has happened to me over the past eighteen months or so, just being able to take part in another Countdown to Halloween has to be seen as some form of accomplishment.

That's right... once again, I am taking part in the annual Countdown to Halloween festivities. That's not just any ol' "taking part in Halloween" thing. That's easy to do, and anyone with sense and the spirit of fun does so each and every October. And I suppose just about anyone can take part in Countdown to Halloween as well. There are only two prerequisites, and most people really only need to fulfill one of them, while a far lesser number would need to fulfill both of them (though all are invited to engage in the second one, of course). 

The first prerequisite is to have access to the internet, which everyone but a Luddite would today. Computer, phone, TV, gaming system, tablet, school... most people have access. Visit http://countdowntohalloween.blogspot.com/ to see a list of all the websites and blogs that are taking part in Countdown to Halloween this year. Once there, you click on the sites that sound interesting to you, and check out everything they have to say to you or show you regarding the Halloween season or other topics tangentially related to the season.

The second prerequisite, and the reason why I am here, is having a blog or website that you are planning to devote to regular or semi-regular posts on whatever topic strikes your fancy that you believe followers of Halloween fun and frivolity might like to stop and check out for a few minutes during their time on the worldwide web. As I said, you really only need to fulfill one of these steps, but in my case, I like to post on my own sites and check out what others have to offer during the month. 

I have a lot of surprises in store this month, none of which I will give away here, but I do like to provide variety. Rest assured, if you are into monster movies, cartoons, toys, trading cards, sharks, and Halloween or horror-oriented books and music, you will find a little bit of each (and sometimes a lot) written about here on The Cinema 4 Pylon, and on its sister blog, Cinema 4: Cel Bloc. Both blogs are full participants in this year's Countdown, though the Cel Bloc will only update every five or six days, while the Pylon will try to stick to a mostly daily schedule through most of the month.

But there's more! I will also have sporadic posts on my other sites as well: The Shark Film Office and V for Voluminous, C for Cinema. However, links to any articles on those sites that might be "holiday relevant" will be posted here on the Pylon first, so you don't have to go crazy checking out so many different sites every day.

One other shout-out that I should make. My writing partner, Aaron Lowe, will have his blog, Working Dead Productions, involved in the Countdown to Halloween as well. Together, though, we recently created a website titled We Who Watch Behind the Rows: Stephen King in Print and on Film. For the Countdown, we have decided to do a concentration on King's first officially published novel (under his own name), Carrie, and after we finish discussing the novel, we will then turn our attention to several posts reviewing the four film adaptations derived from that work. To read our introduction announcement to this project, "Carrie" On, My Wayward Sons here.

I hope that you take some time to bounce around my sites while you are here, and if you like what you see and read, please return any time. Otherwise, Happy Halloween!

RTJ

Either an Exceedingly Happy Accident and/or The Quickening...

Chalk this one up to "Exceedingly Happy Accidents". Yesterday morning (Thursday), it suddenly struck me that I had forgotten to post a link to my review of Patton Oswalt’s stand-up show that Jen and I attended on Monday night at the Irvine Improv. I had written the review for Facebook originally, but had, once the piece moved beyond a couple of brief paragraphs, also decided to publish it on The Cinema 4 Pylon as well. I totally put aside any promotion of the piece, which is quite out of character for me, but the reason I put it aside is because I was concentrating on actual work. Actual work, as any other member of this household will tell you, is quite out of character for me now as well.

I usually start out promoting on Twitter and then move forward through Google Plus, etc. and finally end up on Facebook. On Twitter, I did up a brief 140-character or so line, included @pattonoswalt within the text in the absolutely vain hope that perhaps he might see it, though I doubted he ever would, and pressed the Tweet button.

It didn’t take very long at all and it was not what I ever could have expected. Minutes later, I received a tweet from Patton Oswalt. He had gone to my review and read it, and sent me a message (partly in response to issues that I bring up in the review) that read: “Thanks for being there. This will be ongoing, but I’m finding a gear.”

I lost my shit.

I am such a fanboy, at least as far as certain celebrities are concerned and Patton is one of those celebs. I have had brief conversations with directors Rian Johnson and Duncan Jones (David Bowie’s son) on Twitter, and those were pretty cool. Years ago when I still lived in Anchorage, Roger Ebert once replied to an email I sent him, and that kept me going for a good while.

But this was different. Patton had read something I had written about him and replied. AND he didn’t rake me over the coals for it. Not that I said anything negative about him in any way, but I was touching on the sensitive subject of his wife’s passing and his handling of comedic material regarding said passing onstage.

Patton did something else that blew my mind. In addition to his response to me, he retweeted the link to my website on his own Twitter page. You know, the one that has 2.83 million followers to my meager 2,750.

I lost my shit again. Within a couple of hours, I had 500 visitors to my website. By noon, over a thousand. It’s not even 24 hours yet right now, and over 2,000 people have visited my website since yesterday morning.

Now, on the average, I am happy to get 50 visitors to any one of my websites per day. The Pylon gets about a thousand visitors a month on average, usually a bit more, depending on how frequently I post. My animation blog, Cinema 4: Cel Bloc, usually gets twice as much, and sometimes even more. I am not surprised by this, as it has always been more popular, especially since I revived it last year. The Shark Film Office is really just taking off, but when I post it has been getting comparable numbers to the Cel Bloc.

But to match what has happened in a single day? I’ve had posts that have gotten a couple of thousand hits over the years… OVER THE YEARS. Most of them have taken many years to accumulate those totals.

So, I know my levels, and as much as I would like to love to have an ego about even the tiniest boost, I know that I am a very small fry in an exceedingly large and uncaring pond. I promote like crazy, and though I have been having more success in the past few months, the rewards have been very fleeting. It’s hard enough to get one’s own friends and family on Facebook not to ignore it when you post a new article, imagine trying to get total strangers in the vastness of Twitter to pay attention for even a split second and give you a chance.

For Patton to do this was nice beyond words. I don’t even know if he thought about it, like “Hey, I’ll throw this guy some table scraps.” If he did think about it, I doubt that he would think in that manner. I think it was more like, “Oh, this was very nice that this guy wrote this about me. I should acknowledge it.”

I wasn’t trying to get his attention, it just happened this way, which is why I am chalking this up to “Exceedingly Happy Accidents”. Now I have had over 2,000 people who normally didn’t know I existed stop by my website in the past not-quite-a-day and read my words. And for that I have to thank Patton Oswalt.

P.S. Someone just left a comment on the Pylon and it turned out to be Carl Gottlieb, the co-screenwriter of Jaws. I just lost my shit for a third time.

Visiting and Revisiting with Rik and Aaron... the Website!

http://visitingandrevisiting.blogspot.com/

Last October, my pal Aaron Lowe and I started a series of pieces on our respective sites called Visiting and Revisiting. The concept was that one of us picks a film with which he has a long history, but the catch is that it has to be a film that the other person has never seen before. Hence, one of us is revisiting the film, and the other is visiting for the first time. Then we discuss that film at great length.

We split the first five films we reviewed (and a special edition Oscars post) between The Cinema 4 Pylon here and Aaron's site, Working Dead Productions, and pretty much trusted that if people liked what they read that they would take the time to jump from one site to the other, back and forth, to finish the next portion. And, for the most part (as far we can tell from site stats), they have. But we talked about someday building a separate site for Visiting and Revisiting and letting the column live on its own.

That day has come... We finally decided to give the V&R column a site of its own, mainly because it was easier to have one place to send readers, rather than splitting each article up between two sites. As of today, our brand spanking new Visiting and Revisiting site is live!

Our first Visiting and Revisiting discussion on the new site is about Jean-Claude Van Damme's star-making, martial arts tournament fighting "classic," Bloodsport (1988). Bloodsport has been a favorite of mine since back in the day of its video release -- when I must have watched it about fifty times -- but that I hadn't watched for many years since I fell out of seeing Jean-Claude's films in the late '90s. And Aaron? He somehow missed out on the film totally, though he has pretty good reasons why. Well, we are both caught up now, and you can read about our reactions to Bloodsport in Part 1 by clicking here.

Part 2 of the Bloodsport discussion will be posted on Wednesday morning, and this Friday, we will have a Top Five or Ten post that relates in some way to Bloodsport, where we list our favorite films in a particular genre, etc. We have also transferred all of the old Visiting and Revisiting articles to the new site so that everything is in one handy-dandy, convenient storage facility. Eventually, we will add some other features to the site that you may find interesting as well.

Mostly, we hope you will enjoy all of it! See you over there!

http://visitingandrevisiting.blogspot.com/

A Different Type of Haunting [A Prologue to The Monster's on the Loose!!! #2]

Before we move on to the second installment of The Monster's on the Loose!!!, a bit of a prologue is slightly necessary.

When I started The Cinema 4 Pylon eleven years ago, it was meant, as it is now, as a collected notebook of my ongoing writing adventures. Whatever topic upon which I chose to discourse, no matter how wide a net I cast, whether fiction or non-fiction, the resulting articles or stories would be found here. Naturally, given my inclination towards monster, science fiction, and horror films, the bulk of materials found on this site relate to those subjects. And that was pretty much decided straight from the outset, when my very first extended postings (beyond the simple introduction in 2005 that still serves as the inaugural activity on the Pylon) were a five-part rant about the "Film that Changed My Life".

The five-part rant, in fact, was just that, simply a rambling rant, set off by what I perceived at the time as a never-ending (and completely unconnected) series of celebrity interviews where the hallowed set talk about a particular film or director that "changed their life". I cast suspicion upon such statements as perverse cinematic armchair quarterbacking, thrown in my face by people so carelessly content with their careers and fattened backends that they can so specifically to pinpoint a specific moment when it "all came together for them". Or maybe I was just unflinchingly jealous of their success. It was most likely the latter, because I am, at heart, a most jealous asshole. 

The other main detail I found in these celebrity profundities was based around the further notion that the film they invariably chose would be a bona fide classic like The Wizard of Oz or The Godfather or All About Eve. There is, of course, nothing wrong with such a notion -- favorite films of mine, all three -- but the influence was always seen as a happy moment that served to inspire the celeb into action on their parts or to solidify their internal feelings (always positive) towards the movies, and thereby using that moment of inspiration to project themselves towards their eventual careers in the industry. 

My sideways response was to choose a film which pissed me off in my youth, which left me feeling that my time and attention had been ripped off by an inferior product, and which taught me a lesson regarding cheapened expectations from a generally uncaring industry. I decided to serve up my own particular brand of cheekiness by subverting such pretentious mumblings from these privileged ones by choosing my own lowbrow, horrid choice for such an inspiring film, if only to solidify my notion that my life has been essentially, in the words of Woody Allen, "a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham." That film, seen when I was but a lad of twelve years old, was a 1956 Universal Studios jungle/"monster" potboiler titled Curucu, Beast of the Amazon.

And the results were... middling, at best. 

Though I left the five-part article up on the site for a decade, I never liked it. I was never content with the finished product. The article did serve to set up my general intentions of focus for The Cinema 4 Pylon, but my point was muddled and the basic premise was not thought through as fully as I would have wished. For years, the article tormented me, and I reminded myself time and again over a full decade that someday I was going to do a rewrite of the entire debacle.

It is only recently, in doing a full edit and cleanup of the entire site in preparation for recommitment to my original focus, that I pulled down all five parts of the article. There is much that I have published on The Cinema 4 Pylon where I wish that I had given the piece an extra edit, or taken a few more minutes (or even days) with the words before foisting them upon an unsuspecting public, however small that may be. (I prefer the term, "hand-picked".) But nothing on my site has haunted me as much as that initial foray into online genre film analysis and celebrity satire.

So, with the original piece (all five portions) tucked away for good, and with a new feature started on the Pylon recently titled The Monster's on the Loose!!! (named after a song that I wrote, and that my brothers and I used to sing when we were but wee lads), the time has come to write anew about Curucu, Beast of the Amazon. A monster picture that really isn't, that continues to disappointment me even into middle age -- now mostly because it is hard to find a decent copy, let alone finding a station that will air it -- but did indeed have undue influence upon me at a most impressionable time. Whether it comes out any better than my initial attempt will be up to me to decide.

RTJ

[To be continued in The Monster's on the Loose!!! #2: Curucu, Beast of the Amazon (1956)...]

New Pylon Guest Wonderfulness Over at the Rupert Pupkin Blog!

It has been a little bit since I have posted here. This has been due to an ongoing illness of which I am just now starting to recover, thanks to a series of helpful doctors and any number of medical procedures and prescriptions. I am not yet 100%, but I seem to be working my way back to health, and will hopefully at least have a firm grip on learning to live with my particular disease in the next couple of weeks. There are still some doctor visits ahead, which will hopefully include the formulation of a plan of attack that will see my feeling much better soon.

The past seven weeks or so has been pretty much a wash for me, and I have been largely unable to sit at a computer for more than a few minutes at a time. Thus, there has been zero output across any of my numerous websites. Luckily, many weeks ago at the outset of my illness, my pal Brian Saur asked me for a new list for his Rupert Pupkin Speaks blog. The topic was "Underrated Films of 1996". A few films came to mind right away, and because I was not yet quite in the pain and state of fear that I would be a handful of days later, I was able to churn out a short piece featuring four favorite films from 1996 of which I was particularly enamored and that I wish more people had paid more attention to at the time.

Rik Tod Johnson's Underrated Films of 1996

http://www.rupertpupkinspeaks.com/2016/03/underrated-rik-tod-johnson.html

Check out the list on Brian's blog, and while you are there, please check out some of the other lists provided by our fellow cinephiles, some of whom are fairly well-known (and sometimes quite well-known) directors, writers, and critics. And some of them are just regular Joes like me. What we share is a great love of cinema (both highbrow and lowbrow) and a need to shout out loud when we find something we love. And for goodness sake, please leave comments!

Brian recently posted a couple of other lists that I created and wrote about for his site. Here are the links:

Film Discoveries of 2015
http://www.rupertpupkinspeaks.com/2016/01/film-discoveries-of-2015-rik-tod-johnson.html

Underrated Films of 1945

http://www.rupertpupkinspeaks.com/2015/12/underrated-rik-tod-johnson.html

Also completed (primarily) before I got sick was the next installment of Visiting and Revisiting, a shared column with my writing partner, Aaron Lowe. The new column is about the 1978 Italian sci-fi cult classic, Starcrash, starring the voluptuous (and sadly dubbed) Caroline Munro. I will probably post my opening half of the column tomorrow (Wednesday, March 23) and then Aaron will follow suit on his blog, Working Dead Productions, with the second half. We will announce on our social media pages when the posts are live.

Take care, and it is good to be (mostly) back.

Thanks!

RTJ

Head On Over to Rupert Pupkin Speaks for More Pylon Goodness!

A short post here where it seems like I am tooting my own horn (which I am to a large degree), but mainly I want to direct anybody that frequents my blog to visit the Rupert Pupkin Speaks blog instead.

My friend Brian, who runs the site, has posted a piece today that I wrote on the topic "Film Discoveries of 2015". These are films, older than the year 2000, that I saw for the very first time in 2015 and that made an impression on me when I watched them. I selected five that I felt were of high and enduring quality that pleased me greatly, but then threw in a really Grade-Z, ultra low-budget monster flick from the '70s at the end of the article that I found to be particularly memorable and entertaining.

Rik Tod Johnson's Film Discoveries of 2015

http://www.rupertpupkinspeaks.com/2016/01/film-discoveries-of-2015-rik-tod-johnson.html

I hope that you enjoy my article, and while you are on Brian's site, please check out many of the other writers who have contributed their articles on this same topic since the start of the year. There are directors, screenwriters, critics, and many other fellow cinephiles who have written of their favorite new discoveries. The most incredible part is that, because everyone's cinematic journey is entirely different, there are few (if any) repeats mentioned across all of the lists.

Brian posted an earlier piece of mine in December that you can also read here:

http://www.rupertpupkinspeaks.com/2015/12/underrated-rik-tod-johnson.html

I hope that you enjoy my article, and please leave a comment on Brian's blog while you are at it.

Thanks!

RTJ

More Cinema 4 Pylon Goodness on the Rupert Pupkin Speaks Blog!

Just a heads up to any of my regular followers about an article that I have put together for another website...

My friend Brian has a blog called Rupert Pupkin Speaks (and if you don't know who Mr. Pupkin is, boo on you). Apart from telling the world about new blu-ray and DVD releases, Brian has a regular group of fellow movie obsessives submit articles based around various topics that he sends out to us.

After a couple of years of promising him that I would take part but not getting back in the game of writing regularly, everything is a go. Today, he posted my piece on "Underrated Films of 1945". 

If you are interested in reading my selections for that year -- or even if you love me, or mildly like me -- follow this link:

http://www.rupertpupkinspeaks.com/2015/12/underrated-rik-tod-johnson.html

That is all,

RTJ

More New Fun at the Cinema 4: Cel Bloc!

"I command you to visit Cinema 4: Cel Bloc!"

This is just a quick reminder that my animation blog, Cinema 4: Cel Bloc, is indeed live and breathing again. I have spent some time recently updating images and doing some edits (large and small, depending on the circumstances) to posts that were first published eight to nine years ago, and I plan on doing that until the entire site looks sharper than ever.

However, the best part is that I am creating new material for the site again, reviewing cartoons that I had not hit yet, and having a grand time doing it. My second post of the new era just went up tonight, a look back at MGM's Tom and Jerry classic, Heavenly Puss. Tom tries to kill Jerry, and gets crushed by a piano. His soul takes an escalator to heaven, but his past misdeeds against the little mouse might get the better of him. To avoid going to hell, Tom has to convince Jerry to sign a Certificate of Forgiveness, or Tom will be tossed into the pit with a Satanic bulldog!!

To see some swell pictures from the cartoon and to read the full synopsis and my comments, click this link: http://bit.ly/1Q2QRlJ. I hope you have fun with these articles, and feel free to check some of my older articles.

Thanks!

RTJ

Rik-O-Sound: Bohemia’s Haunted Disc, My Haunted Past

It’s sad that the mixtape has largely come to be known as something only a conniving would-be boyfriend or girlfriend makes for their prospective target of affection. I used to make them for just about any of my friends, male or female, and often my brothers or parents, anytime that I had some cool or interesting songs to share. And yes, I did make them for those more “stalker”-style moments of mine as well, often attempting to be a conniving, would-be boyfriend on far more occasions than I care to remember.

It was all different at Halloween and Christmas. For several years, I would make annual collections – and this is all in the time before I had CD burning capabilities – on audio cassette of various scary or wintry seasonal songs that I had discovered during the course of the year, duping and passing them out to a large variety of my friends and family. And on the pretext that these gifts were based around my two favorite holidays, I could give them to just about anybody. These tapes were exceedingly simple in design, as they merely listed the songs, written by hand much of the time, and I would come up with what I felt at the time was a clever title. But after about five or six years of doing this, I entered the computer age. Actually, I had already entered it quite a long time before, but it wasn’t until seven years ago that I finally got a Mac capable of burning discs. Eight years ago, though, just before the purchase of my G4 Mac, I had my pal Robear do the job for me when I decided it was time I moved up to the CD age.

My first, and, as it turned out, last Halloween disc which I gave out as a gift was called Velcome to Boo-hemia! Alaskan friends need no explanation, but for anyone outside its environs, it needs to be pointed out that our little theatrical group in Anchorage, who began goofing around together in their teen years, were named (by an old school friend, for obscure reasons) the Bohemians. (Even farther back, before Edie Brickell made it impossible to use anymore, we were briefly known as the New Bohemians.) So the title of the disc was meant to be an introduction to the Halloween side of our little realm in the Last Frontier.

Several elements from our group’s history came into play on the artwork that I drew for the disc. Viewing the cover design to the right, since the official drink of many of our party is Dr. Pepper, I built the theme around a can of soda becoming the drink of the undead. Being pissed off at the line of products then taking my beloved thirst-quencher’s place in soda fountains and chain stores around the city (there were, for a time, even reports that Anchorage Cold Storage, a Coke establishment of long standing, was going to dispose of selling Dr. Pepper altogether), I had the imposters being picked off one by one and planted in a cemetery, with headstones bearing their insidious names: Mr. Pibb, Dr. Slice, Dr. Thunder (on the back cover), and, in a dopey misnaming, The Skipper (which I accidentally called “Dr. Skipper"). Whatever its real name, that Skipper soda belonged DEAD. 

In the hand of the screaming lady on the cover is a can of Dr. Pepper, which is more noticeable in the original artwork, the lettering of which disappeared when Robear added coloring to my black and white original artwork. (I have never been all that happy with the heavy use of color anyway, as I wanted the whole thing to be a little more subtly done, if not the original version in black and white I had created.)

On the back cover is that same can in the aftermath of an attack by the winged vampire Bohemian smiley. The same vampire Bohemian smiley is also seen accosting the lady on the front cover. The implication of the back cover image is that Dr. Pepper could never die, especially after being given a supernatural afterlife by the vampire Bohemian smiley, and such an implication is meant as a cheerful gift to my friends, many of whom are/were addicted to the beverage at the time. Hard to read, but printed on the back cover, is a short paragraph in red, which I built somewhat around the opening to Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde:

"Regarding the Strange Case of Dr. Pepper, I remember very little of the affair with any real clarity. That he was left alone to fend for himself in the wild and God-forsaken badlands of Boo-hemia is a certainty, and that he was a markedly changed can was also a fact that went unnoticed by nary a soul. But what we all failed to understand was how he had changed, a sad state that we would all come to regret in the days to come, as we each found ourselves gripped with a never-ceasing, all-consuming addiction! A terrible, ravenous thirst! A thirst, unquenchable and bold, that we would eternally fail to be rid of even with the Sweet Mercy of Death! Do I blame the good Doctor? Or do I blame the Monster that made him?”

As for the vampire smiley, for many years now, the symbol of our little group (and since we have a symbol, some would even go so far as to consider us a gang, which would be stretching the usual notorious aspects of such a term) has been a spoof of the Harley Davidson logo. From what I recall, though there is a strong chance that I will run into some revisionism on this part, good ol’ Smilin’ George took the eagle wings from the famous biker logo, and then fixed between his cartoon version of those wings the head of a smiley face. (Smiley copyright owners, we have never used this logo for commercial gain, only for creating items for our internal usage. So, sod off…) One year at our Halloween show, I made a pair of bat wings and affixed them to a round glow-in-the-dark light. I added the smiley face, creating a Halloween version of our logo, to which I also added vampire fangs. When it came time to consider what to put on the cover of this disc, I gravitated almost immediately to using the vampire smiley bat (almost, because I was also plotting an Alien-style cover with a chest-burster).

The songs, which become almost beside the point after all this, themselves are listed on the third photo, but this list has always been a sore point with me, as the numbers do not actually match the songs which they portray when the disc is loaded into a player. When I made the list of songs – and this is almost entirely my fault – I forgot to indicate to Robear that there were recorded bits from movies like Frankenstein and Ed Wood between the songs. So this means that, from track one, this list goes off the rails rather quickly.

But it’s a good mix of Halloween-type tunes, actually showing the time in my life from whence it came rather clearly, but only if you had access to my music collection and knew when I bought certain items. Looking at the list, I can point exactly to two albums that I purchased not long before I made this collection (both of them produced by Mr. Rob Zombie), the knowledge dates my little “mixdisc” rather precisely for me. It was a fun project, but even though I soon had my own means to produce new gifts for my friends, I never got around to it, or at least fixing the covers so they more accurately featured the proper track list and also some less dark coloration.

Honestly, at this point, I am sure most people have lost their copies by now (I am probably the rare bird that keeps every such gift from all of his friends over the years), and even my own mother gave her copy back to me on her road trip through here a couple weeks ago, possibly not even listened to by her over all those years, but I can’t be certain... maybe once, at most. The bulk of the music – not all, but most – was probably not up her alley, but I had given her one anyway. The return of this gift made me somewhat wistful for the times in which I made it, and then I realized that it was probably one of the few items from that period – created during a low point for me on a personal level – for which I felt this emotion. Besides my best friends, movies and music were all I had at the time.

All Apologies... and Corrections

Pickings have been a little scarce here at the Cinema 4 Pylon, I know... but that is precisely why the Pylon exists. It is a portal through which everything else that I am currently involved in,or will be working on in the future, may filter. While it seems that not much is getting done here, the bulk of my writing is occurring over at my second blogsite, the Cinema 4: Cel Bloc, where there are, I'm not kidding, updates every single day! Each day, I present a review of some classic or not-so-classic cartoon from the mists of animation history; some films that are easy to find and some that are not so. The entire thing is designed as a titanic daily writing exercise to help keep my instrument tuned and supple (not that instrument! That's why we have the rest of the internet...), and my intent is to keep it going through the entire year, and perhaps even longer after that point. I am assuming that no one is reading the animation blog at all, because the number of comments on that page has reached a grand total of... (drumroll, please)... 1!

I have been involved time-wise and brain-wise in helping to coordinate a huge convention that my company holds annually, and to say that I have little left in the energy department each night is an immense understatement. Most nights I have barely had the voltage to throw up the next post on the Cel Bloc, let alone write the damn thing. But the convention is now over, and was a huge success, with almost 10,000 attendees. (This is more than a significant increase over the previous year. I attribute this rise in popularity, of course, to my arrival and participation. Ahem...) I can now get back to my regularly scheduled workload (which never actually stopped), and still have the brainpower left to spend most of my spare time pounding mash notes and diatribes to all manner of films and cartoons.

I will now reply to a handful of comments (although I may also have when they were first made), and also clear up a couple of common misconceptions:

1) "Never had a dinner...", which was inquired about by more than one person, was part of a routine that the comedian Red Buttons used to do on the old Dean Martin Roasts in the '70s. He would take the lectern and try to shame Dean and the rest of the panel by pointing out that there were far more worthy recipients of the honor of being roasted that night than the actual roastee in attendance. For instance (and this is by no means necessarily an accurate retelling of the joke; it is clouded by twenty years of distance), he would shout out the sad case of Moses: "Moses! Moses, who when he came down from the mountain, told his people, "God said "take these two tablets and call me in the morning'"... Never! Never had a dinner!" Again, I have never had a dinner...

2) Were I to have dinner, it would not involve the rending and devouring of human flesh, as I consider humans to be a pestilent species and unworthy of my attention. Nor, if I were to accept human flesh into my diet, would it be true that Rik "dines on the flesh of the living," as one of my dear responders described me. I, despite my reputation (largely earned) of being able to eat many weird combinations and mixups of various comestibles, am also squeamish in regards to things dying in front of my eyes for eventual devouring. More than a dozen times I have had to turn the station during Iron Chef, until the point when the squirming squid or lobsters or crawdads have been dispatched and it is safe for me to watch the rest of the show. And despite my Wimpy-like adoration of hamburgers, I am also always one piece of bone or gristle away from leaping headlong into devout vegetarianism. (Weirdly, though, since I moved to Anaheim, I have developed a taste for shrimp. My mother, who had to endure my childhood of kicking and screaming rants about eating the stuff, will be shocked...) So... no people. If I were a zombie, I would starve.

3) To a respondent on the Cel Bloc, I will be getting to some Sam the Sheepdog and Ralph the Wolf cartoons in the very near future. There are several, they are all hilarious, and there are some interesting themes at play in them that you may not have picked up on in your childhood. It is only when you hit the adult workforce that they become more than simple, funny cartoons.

4) I have not been sending out e-mail reminders to anyone about anything. This is due mainly to it being one more annoying step that I have to remember to do after I post on this site. However, since I have not been posting on this site, it has been even more easy a task to avoid. Soon, perhaps with this post, perhaps not, I will get it up and running. (I did promise not to send out reminders for the Cel Bloc, though I might start doing a weekly update, if only to get you jokers reading it.)

5) A couple of friends, both named Matt (though I actually refer to them as Squeak and Mattman), have started their own, uh, b-words recently. They are listed on the side of this page under Friends; so, check them out. (My reticence over the word "blog" is because one of them is insanely obstinate over the use of the word "blog"; in fact, he refuses to use it. This would be Squeak. To those of us who know and love him, this comes as no surprise. He is consistently stubborn in his stands.) Another friend, Aaron, has started his own b-word called Working Dead Productions. Check it out, too... Aaron, I still hope we get to work on one of those projects in the future. The minimal amount of prep work that we did last year was a lot of fun...

6) I will post my actual full George Romero tribute in a few days. It was what I meant to put up on his birthday, but have not found the time to finish it until this week. I will also get up some pre-Oscar musings, my picks for the best movies and performances of 2005 (which run about 50% counter to what the Academy whipped out); also, sometime in the next couple weeks, I will have a screed about misplaced priorities in moviegoing, as well as an update post about my newly found life as an Advance Movie Screener.

All this and more! Coming up onnnnnnnnnn... THE CINEMA 4 PYLON!