Crawling From the Wreckage: Tape #779

Commander USA's Groovie Movies
featuring:
Doctor Dracula (1978)
2 hours, 1989, USA Network w/ads

The movie on this tape is not important. In fact, I was seriously toying with just throwing away Tape #779 because I had no interest in keeping Al Adamson's Doctor Dracula in my collection, and absolutely no attempt to even look up the film for potential DVD purchase had been considered on my part. Certainly the film is such a trainwreck that there is a certain fascination regarding it, as there is with most truly pathetic films, and I will own up that this is why it is in my collection. But paying money for it? Unless there were something else built around it to make it worthwhile, like on an Elvira or MST3K disc, I doubt that I would.

But while I was going through my tapes, I started to wonder why I taped Doctor Dracula in the first place. It was so long ago, and such a while since I had watched Tape #779, that I had quite forgotten its origins. And then I started to wonder if perhaps I might have another old Elvira show on my hands, when I thought that I only had one such film in my collection. I popped the tape in for the first time in perhaps fifteen years or so, and was surprised to find out that it was indeed recorded off of a hosted bad-movie series. Just not the one that I expected.

Somewhere in those fifteen-plus years, I had erased all memory of Commander USA's Groovie Movies from my memories. Granted, I only saw the show a couple of times, but I am usually pretty good at recalling these things. I have the sort of mind that allows me to remember networks, air-days and even time slots for shows I didn't even watch growing up. As a kid, I turned into a walking TV Guide (or at least, the Anchorage Times/Daily News version of it, since TV Guide was not sold in Alaska in those days -- they wouldn't produce a version for our time zone, limited in population as it was), and I could recount nearly any time schedule anytime anyone asked. It was a lousy, accidental talent, and it did not make the leap to the cable age. Nowadays, I don't know when anything is on, but I can still remember all the crap from my youth. And from my twenties as well, including watching junk movie shows on basic cable. But, apparently, not Commander USA's Groovie Movies. At least, until last week...

There are places on the 'Nets where you can find more information on the good ol' Commander, but here's the gist: Commander USA was played by Jim Hendricks from 1985 to 1989 on the USA Network, most often on Saturday mornings, and he hosted an unending stream of the type of movies one is used to seeing if one is predisposed to tuning into shows like Commander USA's Groovie Movies. That sort of person would be me, but apparently I didn't watch him enough, because I actually recall very little of the show. Even watching the Doctor Dracula tape only brought back fleeting memories of seeing a couple of other shows, one of which I believed involved some sort of oddball talent contest.

This particular episode involves the Commander coming up against the supposedly stern Civilion (sic) Review Board, or the CRB as the Commander refers to them. A sign on the inside of the door that leads into the Commander's command center, which is supposedly mired in the basement of a shopping mall, reads "CRB Day" (which extends, in a minor and satirical way, the tradition of themed days on special "club" shows, much in the manner of the Mouseketeers and their "Circus Day" on Thursdays, etc...) After a good deal of cigar-chomping and a handful of quick barbs regarding tax deductions in the superhero, Commander USA introduces us to the CRB, a disparate lot, seemingly made up of characters inspired simply from whatever costume (or lack of) the people playing the characters happened to have laying around. Without going into all of their names, in addition to women playing, respectively, a Greenwich Village artist and a soccer coach, we also meet The Black Whip, a black-clad, cowgirl type with, naturally, a whip; the Alligator Man, a normal guy except for sporting a ridiculous plush gator head, probably won at a particularly cheap carnival game; Jack Sajak, host of TV's "Wheel of Wealth"; and finally, Jason -- yes, Jason... a guy in a hockey mask sporting a neat sport jacket and a huge plastic axe, with which he will torment a bowl of chips over and over through the broadcast any time he is called upon to throw in his two cents.

The Commander uses a slide whistle to get his "Tele-Psychotronic Screen Heat Radiation Shield" open, and when it rattles rather shakily to reveal the movie screen, he exclaims "Holy Cats! I'm gonna have get that tubular guidance system greased pretty quick!" The Commander then gives us a quick preview of Doctor Dracula, the best part of which is when he shows the scene of the nightclub dancer dressed as a butterfly, and shouts "Holy Cats! Imagine what she looked like in her pupae stage!" The Commander, New Jersey tough guy all the way, is not one to shy away from a good dirty suggestion. Later on, once the vampiric dealings begin in the film, the Commander will spend his breakaway moments recreating such scenes from the movie with one of his favorite props, a blow-up love doll. Saturday mornings, yes. Silly, kid show-style set-up and superhero antics, yes. Not necessarily kid stuff though.

Still, it's all fairly harmless, and I did sit through Doctor Dracula again, although I mostly ended up waiting impatiently for the Commander to pop up again. When he sometimes wouldn't pop back up going into a commercial, I found myself rather disappointed. While it is in no way a polished entertainment, there was enough of a humorous tinge -- and features a committed, smooth and rather grittily endearing performance by Hendricks as the Commander -- to make me sad that I didn't watch the show more in those late '80s days. Or at least tape a few more episodes for posterity. Who knows, maybe somewhere in this stack of boxes of old videotapes, I have a couple more episodes that I have forgotten to label properly. It happened this time, it could happen again.

[Also on Tape #779: a haggard copy of Hammer's Dracula Has Risen From the Grave with Christopher Lee, which I have since gained on DVD, and a couple hours of old MGM and Warner Bros. cartoons from off of TNT back when they used to run them throughout the night, each and every night. It includes MGM's Abdul the Bulbul Ameer, so now I have that ancient song (with a slightly different title) running through my skull again. Sometimes, looking back is a dangerous thing. You can get earworms...]

REVIEW... REVIEW... REVIEW... REVIEW... REVIEW... Spout Mavens Disc #15 (and likely, the last): More Shoes... REVIEW... REVIEW... REVIEW... REVIEW...

More Shoes
Director: Lee Kazimir
Cinema 4 Rating: 6

I've been asked to recommend a film either at the top or bottom of this post, which isn't actually a review, though many people still insist on referring to these pieces I construct as reviews. All the same, I have also been asked to place the word "review" into the title. It was rough going, trying to find the exact spot to place that (used erroneously here) noun, but I hope I have at least been able to follow through properly by some small measure on that count.

As for that recommendation... well... let me ask you one small question: Do I know you? Apart from one other person here on Spout, The Working Dead, I don’t personally know any of you. Yes, a handful of people on here have left some very nice comments regarding my writing, and I am sure some of them would make great friends, but I still can’t know someone from just a quick comment or two. It makes it hard to recommend anything if one does not personally know those to whom one is speaking. That the reader can ascertain elements of my personality from my writing is readily apparent, since my style is of a more personal nature, talking about how films affect me more often than actually reviewing them. In the broad sense, though, this is not necessarily true of most “reviewers” or “critics,” who often shoot for a bland sameness in their acceptable styles. Regardless of style or intent, the reader still has it all up on the writer, including myself. They can scan through any number of my posts and get a fairly accurate picture of my emotional range, my psychological bearing, and my critical eye (which, more often than not, one will find those eyes closed). They can read my writing for a short while and get a decent summary of my being. They can determine whether they want to listen to my railings any further, and whether to accept my judgment, good or ill, of the film in discussion.

That’s all fine and well, but while it seems that such a relationship is one on one for the reader – reader meets writer – in fact, it is the complete opposite for the writer. The writer, presumably reaching out to a vast audience, most often has to tailor his words for that entire audience. In doing so, whether he is recommending the object of his review to his readers or not, he is in fact, doing them a disservice unless he is careful to couch his recommendation (or lack of one) in qualifiers: “this is the sort of film this sort of person, or such and such a type of people, would enjoy,” etc. But most critics do not take this extra step. They assume that whole goose-and-gander maxim thing holds true for the critic and their prospective audience: heed my words, you will love/hate this movie, no matter who you are!

Since I only write for myself, and mainly as a therapeutic means, I don’t worry about “recommendations.” Flat out, I don’t do them. I especially don’t since the Eraserhead and Motorama incidents of many years past, in which I didn’t actually recommend those films to anybody, I just suggested to my more or less captive and bored audiences that we watch them, and I have received endless harangues from the less adventurous amongst my friends ever since. The misunderstanding comes from their blanket need to be entertained -- and only entertained -- by movies. This runs counter to my need (though there is still an entertainment factor at play in my heart) to see films that are at least interesting, if not outright mind-expanding. I will not go into details about those films – this is not the time and place – but rest assured that they definitely made me start being far more careful about what films I show or even recommend to individuals. When people in the office ask me to recommend a movie, I generally ask, “What do you like?” If they answer “Oh, I just love Pretty Woman!” or some such other pap (which has happened more than once, I am afraid), I am likely to respond, “Hmm, sorry. Can’t help you.” (I hold back on what I would like to add to that statement: “It’s too late for you…you can’t be helped.”) It’s not that I can’t back up my words or my opinions; I just don’t want to have to hear those people whine once they climb down the other side of the Rik Recommendation Mountain. The world is now made up of people who believe that their time is Oh So Very Precious – the “I can’t believe I wasted 90 minutes of my life on that film” contingent, when they all, to a person, are just as likely to turn right around in an instant for ten straight hours of Nintendo or a night of being soused with their brain-dead buddies. That’s fine – to each his own – but don’t hit me with your personal prejudices concerning films, and your own insecurities with personal time management, when you have asked my opinion in the first place.

Because this has happened time and again, unless I know someone extremely well, I do not recommend any films to anybody. My mother, my father, stepparents, brothers, the Working Dead, Raw Meat, Egg of the Dead – these are people, and their individual artistic tastes and boundaries, that I understand and know fairly well, and I can launch into recommending a film to them with a certain assurance that they will at least give me a measured opinion of their own on its excellence or lack thereof. I am not afraid to recommend titles to them, because I know them. In some cases, too well.

You, generic reader, I don’t know. So, outside of the film which I am purportedly supposed to be discussing here – More Shoes, a first-person documentary about the travels of a would-be filmmaker who definitely takes an offhand recommendation a tad too far, and when I say “too far”, I mean roughly 4000 miles in that direction of limits past the stretching point – outside of the film at hand, I cannot offer up a recommendation to you. What if I were to go all loopy and go, “Wow, the guy in this movie travels across part of the world in search of his artistic sensibilities as a director, so, since he travels, I recommend RV with Robin Williams!” For all I know, you aren’t the type who enjoys overproduced but under-thought hack comedy by people who should all clearly know better, and since you trusted my notion to recommend this film to you, you are going to be pissed off at me. You will be less likely to pay attention to one of my posts the next time around, and all because I told you that “you’d be sure to enjoy this if you enjoyed that.” Making recommendations is a dangerous game if played improperly, and everyone – even the self-aware – does play it improperly. And if both sides are crazy to begin with, no one can ever win. And, of course, there is the chance that I would recommend a really crappy film to everyone on purpose, because that is the sort of guy I am sometimes.

So, in the interest of this “review” still containing some form of recommendation in it, why not do an end-around and concentrate on the film at hand. Would I recommend More Shoes to you? I certainly liked large portions of it, even if it is not completely engrossing and a little too laid back in its approach. I will, perhaps, even watch the film again at some undefined point in the future, regardless of whether I would then have to put up with the director/star’s choice of hideous footwear. In fact, before I watched it again, I would re-title my copy of the film Better Shoes instead of More Shoes, because surely he would have benefited from some well-designed walking shoes rather than the usual slacker’s choice of ugly Birkenstock-style gear.

More Shoes is a film by Lee Kazimir, a young man with a certain small amount of filmmaking experience before this film takes place, who takes the recommendation of a legendarily crazy but brilliant film director, and decides to walk across Europe in search of his filmmaking soul. Werner Herzog once recommended that aspiring filmmakers forego the classroom experience of film school and “make a journey alone, on foot, for a distance of 5,000 kilometers, let's say from Madrid to Kiev.” Herzog, in his usual manner, proffers this advice to any within earshot, and most people will smile, shake their heads and go, “Oh, that Werner! There he goes again,” and then move on. Not Kazimir. He literalizes Herzog’s offhand statement, and hits the road on foot, and not just by making an epic journey on foot, but by actually duplicating the starting and stopping point of Herzog’s tossed-off, imaginary excursion. It's the sort of idea for a film that gets publicity from the sheer audacity of it, and a more cynical person than I would probably point out with a sharper finger that maybe the true impulse behind it was publicity, to get the director noticed and nothing more. There might be a little of that here, but I think its more the approach of a man who is a little frustrated and lost in his would-be talent, and desperate to find if he belongs anywhere, doing anything.

To me, it’s a foolhardy though impressive ambition that drives Kazimir, but my chief problem with such an attempt is that, in my estimation, even if one decided to brave the rigors of such a trip, Herzog was not talking about actually filming such a journey. He was basically suggesting one surefire means in which a novice artist could gain life experience on a massive level before embarking on their filmic career. A travel of considerable size, of perhaps thousands of miles through historic towns and decaying society, would certainly afford the aspiring filmmaker ample opportunity to gain such experience. His life would be threatened on occasion, he would perhaps fall in love or at least lust a number of times, he would see the best and worst of humankind, and he would be given a true sense of man’s place within the construct of nature on this trip. All of the ingredients needed to allow the artistic self to merge with the more physical aspects are readily available for the hapless soul embarking on such a journey. Herzog does suggest his “Madrid to Kiev” trip specifically for an aspiring filmmaker, but he never suggests that such a filmmaker should bring a movie camera along with him down the road. And, really, such a task -- almost a spirit quest, in a way -- would serve the same purpose for a writer, painter or architect as well. Since Kazimir goes into his trip with film experience, it’s no surprise that his survey does take the form of a video, rather than a book, statue or mural. But I still think that such a journey of discovery would be best taken by using the memory directly, not capturing it on a series of tapes.

But, I don't fault Kazimir from wishing to use his particular focus on capturing his journey. While he may doubt whether he wants to continue working in film, and uses this experience more as a litmus test regarding his artistic ambitions, he really has no choice but to film it. After all, if he doesn’t, there is no record of it. While he would perhaps be better suited to simply backpack across Europe like many thousands of other kids of his relative age, if one is a filmmaker, why not film it?

My mother was recently in town, and she brought along her new digital camera, with which she proceeded to take hundreds of pictures while she stayed in Anaheim. She is on an epic journey herself -- by fifth-wheeler, not by foot -- on the first real vacation she has taken in twenty years or so. Naturally, she wants to capture everything she can on film. But there is no actual artistic impulse involved, at least none that is apparent to her own child. It is merely another person doing what we all do through life: collecting keepsakes, mementos, souvenirs... whether through a purchase from a gift counter or through the lens of a camera, we all tend to do this when we travel. In this sense, what Kazimir has collected on his travels on his camera matters no more than the photos taken by a 62-year old mother on a seriously long road trip that zigzags back and forth across the U.S.

In fact, if anything, in the same way that no one wants to be trapped on a couch while a relative makes them look at photo album after photo album of blasts from that relative's past, where every third person in each photo has to be explained at great length for the (usually stiffly posed) photos to make any sense at all, so too can More Shoes seem a bit like a chore at times. We are basically shown scene after scene, with little in the way of explanation, and with what little explanation we are given sometimes ruining what little suspense does build up along the way. At times, I wish there were no narration at all, and would prefer to almost just bump along silently through the film, enjoying each turn around the corner on my own judgment. But, at other times, I wanted to know more about the people I met in Kazimir's video journal, and the narration would fail me in that regard.

And still, I never lost full interest in his journey across a multitude of countries. There is enough here to sustain one between Madrid and Kiev, even if Kazimir himself starts to lose faith in his abilities along the way. This viewer really did start to feel for him, even if Kazimir brought it all on himself. I'm one of those "I need a vacation from vacation" folks, so I couldn't even begin to imagine what Kazimir was feeling in the waning moments of his walk. Or maybe I could, since he decided to film all of it, instead of just keeping it to himself. Like a collection of snapshots that really require a livelier narrator than someone's 82 year-old aunt to be more than just mildly interesting.

So, would I recommend More Shoes? Damn it. I’ve already told you – I don’t know you… but here's a recommendation I can give to everyone: Don't Follow Recommendations. Make your journey through the history of the cinema a more organic one. Start out trying twenty films from every single genre, no matter how much you think they are going to suck. Watch a film because one actor is in it, and then choose another actor in that film, and watch your next film with that actor in it, and so on. Open a film guide, drop your finger in, and then watch the collected works of whatever director the tip of your widdle nubbin lands upon. Do what I have done twice in my life and watch a thousand films in one calendar year (that's averaging just under two and three-quarters films a day, and its actually easier to do than one might think). Pick a book on a specific genre of film and then attempt to watch every film in alphabetical order. Or do what I do currently, and just check out any film that catches your fancy. Don't over-think it... just watch, try to enjoy yourself, and well after the film is done, ponder on how watching that film affected you, good or bad. Never... ever... worry about how much money a movie made at the box office. Unless you are a movie producer, box office means nada... And most of all, I recommend that you don't listen to strangers. Listen to people that you know, respect or trust. Value their opinions, even if you don't agree with them, and try to understand their point of view even if it skews 180 degrees away from yours. If they liked a film and you didn't, discuss it with them and find out what it is in their life that makes them be so incorrect -- er, I mean, different.

So, there you go. A recommendation section in this non-review that has "Review" in the title I am sorry that it isn't actually a film recommendation, but if one is required, I recommend everyone watch Nightdreams, directed by F.X. Pope. It's hard to find, but it has Wall of Voodoo performing a genuinely spooky version of Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire while lipstick lesbian cowgirls act badly on purpose, and yet still manage to act badly for real. It's the greatest scene ever filmed, and I am only half joking.

What's that? You don't enjoy hardcore flicks, even if Nightdreams is a relatively big-budget attempt at genre crossover, with some very interestingly staged, surreal sequences, including one involving a housewife becoming intimately involved with a giant Cream of Wheat box while a piece of toast plays Old Man River on a saxophone?

Well, that's the way it is with recommendations: you never know what you are going to get, especially if you don't know the person doing the recommending. You don't know me and I don't know you...

...and now I probably never will. Goodbye, Spout...

Crawling from the Wreckage: Prepending a Prologue?

You will find below, my friends, the contents of a post that I wrote just shy of a year ago, which I was using as a prologue to a new project, which I was then supposedly undertaking as part of my attempt to go through the massive pile of garbage that had been dumped into our abode just a month before. The attempt has continued through the year that followed, but the project went astray. The point was to go through what remained of my old VHS collection, cherry-pick a handful of interesting tapes that I had recorded years ago, and then re-watch them, sometimes for the first time in eons.

Circumstances have changed, the pile has lessened somewhat, and it just happens to turn out that I am now at that juncture where it is imperative that I do such a project. I am currently going through each tape and determining that which is now on disc since I moved three years ago, and that which stubbornly remains obscure or missing to this erstwhile DVD aficionado. We would like to get a few more of these boxes out of here -- and so my winter project of last year is now the winter project of this one! But, before I launch into a series of Crawling From the Wreckage posts detailing my misadventures while tripping through these taped nightmares, I figured that allowing one to catch up with the previous lead-in post would be, in the words of the Elephant Man in the pages of the National Lampoon, "devilishly apropos." Some things must be updated, however... Evil Roy Slade has arrived on disc since the initial post. Wheww! That's one I thought would never come out...

Herewith, the prologue:

Think you can do a better job?

Really, I invite you to come over and sift through 40-odd years of assorted fooferaw and folderol, all jammed into a one-bedroom and offset-den apartment -- keeping in mind the limited monetary range when planning such an epic trek through one person's lifetime of nonsensical ratpacking -- and work out a more efficient means of gaining some sort of control over the avalanche. By the second day, the two thousand CDs were already stacked and alphabetized (and yet, with no shelving on which to place them); a month later, all 200 boxes had been at least opened in some manner, half of them unpacked and obliterated, the contents sorted and placed on what shelving I did have going into the project. Now, three new cheapie bookcases from Ikea will cut us a decent swath in which to place our annual Xmas fetishism altar; the bookcases are the sort of things we can easily excise or take down should we ever find the extra bucks to gain the sort of furniture that actual adults tend to purchase.

With all the stacking and unpacking and sorting and contorting came the realization that, even with the massive selling, swapping and trashing of a couple thousand videotapes (supposedly to signify my complete transition into a DVD-aholic), I still had several boxes of the things taking up valuable floorspace. The first step was easy: sort through them and eliminate any tapes which have been released onto DVD in the two-and-a-half years subsequent to my packing these tapes into boxes. This actually cut the amount of tapes down to half, but please, close and personal friends of Rik who became beneficiaries of my last Great Tape Upheaval -- please, please don't get excited about numerous tapes showing up under Christmas trees. The tapes to which I am referring are of the personally recorded ilk, and many of them are not of the greatest quality. They just happened to have items on them with which I simply could not part at the time.

And if you wonder why I would take such pains to transport hundreds of videotapes thousands of miles, then you just don't know me very well. It is the obscurity of some of the films in my collection that provides my very interest in them. I would no sooner get rid of my ancient and well-loved WTBS showing of John Astin's Evil Roy Slade than I would my own immediate family. Of course, for a while now, this tape was just as far away as some of that immediate family, but now it is here, and it is most decidedly not being trashed. But its reappearance into my life did pose this question to myself internally: just why am I hanging onto some of these films?

Thus begins a new regular feature on the Pylon -- Crawling From the Wreckage -- as I scour these long-lost tapes and find out exactly what is on each one that makes me not wish to depart with them. You might not care, but that is not the point. Really, it's just another blazingly transparent excuse for me to write about a bunch of obscure movies. (Not that I ever truly need an excuse to do this...)

So, come on over and get cranking on your new and better plan to sort through all of my crap. I will welcome your presence with much appreciation... and the key to the city... and fireworks... and a parade... and a laurel... and hardy handshake... and whatnot. After the celebration, dive right into doing "that better job." After all, I've got writing to do...

Chapter 427: In which our hero whines and whines about something that no one put a gun to his head to do (it may have been a better option, though...)

For two of the last three Halloweens – the count of said holiday celebrations, up until last Friday, since I moved here in 2005 – I have spent my evening hours in the comforting arms of Disneyland. Not having my old network of friends here has greatly reduced my chances of hitting a Halloween party, and thus, costuming has become a non-factor and I have fallen into merely going to some appropriately decorated environs and enjoying the evening riding some rides, watching the parade, looking at pumpkins and getting a kick out of the variety of costumes on display from the younger denizens of the park. I usually make a goal of riding a full set of what I call “the skeleton rides” – Pirates of the Caribbean, Indiana Jones, the Jungle Cruise, the Haunted Mansion and Big Thunder Mountain Railroad – any ride that has a skeleton or at least a skull on display, of the three-dimensional variety only, somewhere in the attraction (Peter Pan’s Flight does not count, even though the ol’ skull-and-crossbones is readily apparent on some of the flying ships). I also attempt to purchase the season’s first gingerbread cookies at one of the candy shops, of the most excellent type that make my knees buckle as I walk whilst devouring them. I don’t ask much, just a handful of rides and some pleasant atmosphere, and I am good to go. It has proven on the previous two trips to be a very relaxing experience, of the sort of fall day I never really got to taste when in Alaska, where fall is almost an afterthought at times, since the initial downfall of snow that signifies winter seems to actually beat autumn to the punch on occasion.

Last Friday, on Halloween 2008, jumpy and almost bursting to be let out of work, I went to Disneyland.

It was the worst three hours I have ever spent at the park.

I’ve been at the park when it has been pouring rain through driving winds, to the point where everyone else in the place is scrambling frantically to be let out of the park, while diving under canopies or leaping inside shops for fear of even getting hit by a single drop of water, and I have been absolutely fine. It just meant less people in line for the rides to me. A little rain, even a shitload of rain, is nothing to me. I’ve also been at the park with a sinus cold and a rising fever, and with my head threatening to cleave itself in twain in order to relieve itself of the immense pressure building up behind my eyes, and while perhaps after a bit I did retire to a hotel room to rest up, or perhaps even caught myself napping on one or two rides due to my illness, I still managed to keep a smile going while bopping from attraction to attraction. I’ve even limped through an entire two days of park time while my knee filled up with fluid after wrenching it once more stepping off a ride, and still had a terrific time at the park level, even while biting my lip from the pain. I can take a lot at or into Disneyland in order for myself to simply enjoy Disneyland.

I lost it on Halloween 2008.

Here is a partial list of what went awry when Jen and I went to the park that evening with my erstwhile working companion Raw Meat and his girlfriend Raw-Chel. Keep in mind that this is an extraordinarily superficial list, of the sort that only someone who has been immensely spoiled rotten as regards the Disneyland experience can put together. The point is, I turned into a whiny baby that evening, perhaps not fully in front of everybody, but it certainly led to my wearing a full-on monster-sized pout throughout much of the evening.

1. THE WEATHER: It was reported throughout the week, and all through the day, that the weather on Halloween in Anaheim was going to be windy and rainy. Windy and rainy, everywhere you looked. The day, at 6:00 am, may have started out that way, but it was pretty much gone by the time we left for the park at 4:00 pm. Just in case, with dark clouds scattered throughout the skies threatening more of the same, it seemed like we were in for it. This would have been fine with me (note my previous mention of enjoying rain at the park). When it rains at Disneyland, most people turn into pussies. The tourists understandably split for the hotels or restaurants (or both), and the less hardy locals, which is most of them, hightail it for home. This leaves myself and Jen and a group of the more waterproof amongst us to bop on and off the rides all we wish. We were actually hoping this might be the case, and I wore a light jacket and my Jack Skellington scarf just in case. It proved to be too much, as the weather actually got warmer and warmer into the evening (perhaps due to the Santa Ana winds), and the fact that the crowd on the Disney streets kept swelling due to the rides constantly breaking down, did not help the temperature factor either. I sweated through most of the night, even after removing the jacket and scarf early into the proceedings.

2. THE RIDES BREAKING DOWN: Oh, I am sorry. Didn’t I just mention that the rides kept breaking down? Well, they did, and always at the worst times, too. We grabbed a Fastpass for Indiana Jones once we got inside the park, and were supposed to go back between 6:40 and 7:40 pm to hop on it. We rode Pirates (and not without incident; more later), but Haunted Mansion was broken down on the worst of all possible nights. So we got dinner (which was the only thing that went well) and then went to Mr. Jones. Our Fastpasses got us to within about forty feet of actually getting on the damn thing – and then they told everyone to evacuate the building as soon as possible! Everyone inside the ride had to make the massive trek back to the front, hundreds of people all filing out, and every one of them grouching about it as they did so, including us. A fire department official entered the ride as we had just left it, but we never found out what happened. So we made our way back to the Haunted Mansion, which by then was open again, but so many people had been waiting to ride it, that the line rolled out through the front gates and over towards the New Orleans train station. The sign flashed a full 50 minutes wait to the impatient reader (composed, this time, of normally patient me), and so we decided to find easier prey. We first walked around the corner to check out the candy store and were met with a massive wave of people departing Splash Mountain, which had also just broken down, and wouldn’t be back up again, they announced, for at least another hour. All of the disappointed riders of that attraction poured into the streets of New Orleans Square and into the lines of the all the other rides in the area, which made everything hotter and more crowded. We hit Big Thunder, and met a longer than usual double set of lines there, but managed to get through it relatively quickly, all things considered. We took another pass at the Mansion, but the line was even longer than before, and while the sign still said 50 minutes wait time, we knew from a glance that it was even worse than that. With the prospect of getting out of the park before the crowds blocked Main Street for the impending fireworks, we decided to just catch the train at New Orleans station and get the flock out of there. Thankfully, even though we had to wait for two trains, at least they were running on time.

3. THE CANDY STORE: So, you go over to the candy store in Critter Country to get away from the whining crowd streaming out of Splash Mountain, and you figure if everything else is going to go wrong this evening, certainly you will at least be able to continue one of your new Halloween traditions, and make off if the most delicious gingerbread man cookie (with Mickey Mouse ears dipped in chocolate) in the world. Alas, it was not to be. Not a cookie in sight, not even an empty tray where they used to live earlier in the evening. I had gotten one of the cookies a couple weeks earlier when I took my parents to California Adventure, so I knew that the gingerbread had hit the park for the season. But nothing in sight. That was nearly the breaking point. I sat down on the rabbit bench outside of Pooh Corner and pouted briefly, in much the same style I did back when my friends used to call me “Tigger” (before the name was stolen away from me by a mustachioed weirdo). Following that, we marched over to the Mansion, where, as I said before, 50 minutes turned to a possible 75, and we left, sans gingerbread, sans happiness in the Happiest Place on Earth. Even seeing Primeval World on the train did little to quell my anguish. Oh, tortured soul…!

4. THAT FAMOUS PIRATE RIDE: The less said here, the better. The ride was fine, but a relentless onslaught of flash photography in the front of our boat caused one of our party to stand up while we floated through the pirate caves, and then to yell quite sharply at the clicking moron to knock it off. There was an attempt to calm down our party member, then I had to tug on their shirt to get them to sit down, and then Jen spent the rest of the ride fretting about being met at the ride’s end by a suit or a security person, who would then lead us out the park. Jen was afraid, too, that said behavior would come back at her in a more corporate form, as she was the one who signed we troublemakers into the park. As Pirates was the first thing we did, it definitely set a certain mood of anxiety and frustration over the rest of the evening.

5. THE FIREWORKS: I wanted to see the fireworks, but we had to get out of there. I briefly mused that perhaps it was best to not stay for the ‘works anyway, since our luck that evening would probably demand that the event be cancelled. We were gone by nine, and honestly, I am not sure if they ever did go off. Raw Meat says he didn’t hear them from his apartment, and he usually can, as can we, though Jen and I went to the store to find something to cheer us up.

The cure that evening for me? I nearly righted the ship by watching three movies – The Devil Bat with Bela Lugosi, and a pair of Herschell Gordon Lewis gorefests, Blood Feast and Two Thousand Maniacs – before retiring for bed. I finally got some semblance of a decent Halloween, but I had to meet it on my own terms, and on my own field of battle. And man, did I get whiny. Spoiled rotten? You bet. Spoiled on the Halloween Disney experience from now on, and time to seek out new party opportunities instead? Only time will tell. I’ve got a whole year to figure it out.

Happy Halloween, Pals And Gals!

And a special Happy Halloween to our buddy Steve, from Chipper and Raw Meat! (And Gojira, of course…)

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.

Buzzing Thru the Pylon: Halloween Free-For-All, Pt. 7: Return of the Best Buy Exclusives!

Once more, a trip to Best Buy caused me to happen upon new discs which I had not seen discussed elsewhere. Warner has released a pair of discs exclusively to Best Buy stores, and one of them (featured below) was a no-brainer purchase for me. Some would contend, such as my girlfriend, that I would have to possess little in the way of gray matter to purchase such a thing in the first place, and this would not be a statement based solely on its content… the deeper truth is that we have little or no more room for such items in our relatively cramped abode, and my predilection for purchasing books, music and movies constantly has her making the odd comment here and there about the situation.

But she should put down the knife -- at least, she can after Halloween -- since I actually did show a small measure of restraint, as I did not purchase the twin disc to this set, a double feature of the Lovecraft feature The Shuttered Room and a Roddy McDowall golem flick called, simply, It! Since I have never seen the former before and it is actually being shown on TCM on Halloween, I decided to delay its possible addition to the collection for the time being. (Shuttered’s potential is the only thing in discussion over such a buy, since It! is really not very good at all.) But if I miss out on buying it, I miss it. That’s the choice I made, and Jen should be momentarily proud over it. Here are the discs:

Warner Horror Double Feature // Best Buy Exclusive
featuring:
Chamber of Horrors
Director: Hy Averback
Warner Bros., 1:39, color
Cinema 4 Rating: waiting to watch this over again, some 25-30 years later

The Brides of Fu Manchu
Director: Don Sharp
Hallam/Anglo-Amalgamated/Seven Arts, 1:34, color
Cinema 4 Rating: waiting to watch this over again, some 20 years later

Two more British horror flicks from the ‘60s that somehow my mind – and I am sure that I am not the only one out there – automatically triggers on as belonging to the long and bloody line of Hammer horror films, even though they, in actuality, are not. I know that somewhere far back in my past I saw Chamber of Horrors, a gimmick-laden (and how!) revenge festival with Patrick O’Neal as a one-armed madman with a variety of stump accessories, a couple of times. But, it was so long ago, I scarcely remember it past O’Neal’s image, being one of the few times I actually watched him act. The second of Harry Allan Towers’ Fu Manchu series I recall a tad bit better, having seen it slightly more recently, though still long enough ago where reading the film’s synopsis on IMDB has me now confusing with the later films in the series that I have caught in the past couple years.

Am I suggesting that all Fu Manchu flicks look alike? Hardly, that would be mildly racist, even when I am merely attempting to be ironic. But when all five films star the great Christopher Lee in the lead role, and all five basically have the same plot – the abduction of hot girls; forcing scientists to bend to his evil whims; trying to take over the world (the same thing he tries to do every night, Pinky…) – then you can understand the confusion. Fu’s megalomania is quizzical, since he can barely control a dozen people in one room – how is he going to control everyone in the world? He’d get no rest at all, and one would certainly beg for some extra leisure time with all the hot girls around. Maybe he should shoot for a smaller goal. Like taking over a movie studio and forcing them to make a halfway decent film. While Lee’s presence, and the attendant gore and torture that follows in his notorious character’s wake, could serve as the sole reasons why the connection to the Hammer series looms so large in my mind, perhaps it is also because these were shown side by side with the Hammer Frankenstein and Dracula films in my teen years, and so that made the true connection for me. Regardless, Hammer or not, The Brides of Fu Manchu will now rest side by side on my DVD shelf with those same films, if only for Mr. Lee.

Paul Naschy Double Feature // Best Buy Exclusive
featuring:
Curse of the Devil [El Retorno de Walpurgis] (1973)
Director: Carlos Aured
Spanish, 1:24, color
Cinema 4 Rating: haven’t seen yet in a real version

Werewolf Shadow [La Noche de Walpurgis] (1971)
Director: León Klimovsky
Spanish, 1:35, color
Cinema 4 Rating: haven’t seen yet at all

Trick or treat? I really won’t know which until I – and I will consider the opportunity a treat until I learn otherwise – dig into one or both of these Spanish horror films this Halloween weekend and discover the truth for myself. Most people outside of horror circles are probably not all that aware of Paul Naschy, who has as large a legacy in horror films in many countries in the world as Karloff, Lee, Cushing and Lee have in the English-speaking world. If they are aware, they may not know him by name, but possibly have crossed paths with him on Spanish-language channels here and there, generally in very censored and misshapen prints of his films, or even occasionally in badly dubbed versions of a couple of his films, such as Fury of the Wolfman, on UHF and cable access channels. In addition to his appearances in scads of films over his nearly fifty-year career, Naschy has knocked out a dozen films featuring his Hombre Lobo character, a wolfman named Waldemar Daninsky, even appearing as Daninsky as recently as four years ago. I only own copies of two of his films on videotape, both dubbed and truly atrocious in recording quality to view. I was aware that several of his films, including the two released on this combo disc (which I have read elsewhere can only be found at Best Buy), had been released to DVD. I figured now was as good a time as any, with my interest in world cinema, to become truly acquainted with Mr. Naschy (nee Jacinto Molina), and to let my own opinion take over in my mind all of the comments I have read – from disparate sources, mostly negative but coddling, as though they were films proposed by filmmakers with the talents of mere preschoolers, making films for the even more infantile. I doubt this is the truth, and there has to be some level of professionalism involved for such a series to have lasted so long and so popularly.

But then I think about Police Academy, and I worry…