Horrible Horror (Goodtimes, 1986). [Category: Commercial]
TV horror movie host Zacherly hosts this collection of clips, trailers, and various other goodies from horror and science fiction genres. Zacherly is the best host I've seen on this kind of collection. It looks like he's just ad-libbing, and he's a great ad-libber. Mostly, it just looks like he's having a lot of fun. The collection here is quite interesting––there's lots of clips of classic and classically bad moments from these films, quite a few trailers, and lots of other miscellaneous goodies, such as 50's TV clips, bloopers from Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein, and scenes from old interviews with Bela Lugosi. Fans of cheesy horror and science fiction should particularly enjoy this.
Highlights:
- This tape has my all-time favorite trailer: the classic Killer Shrews trailer, featuring Dr. Radford Baines from the "Department of Information". He tells us about shrews and then urges us to report any sightings of giant killer shrews to our local authorities. Is this the biggest invitation to crackpots and pranksters ever, or what?
- One particularly obscure and interesting item is a scene from the 50's TV series "You Asked for It" which features Electro the Robot, the robot built by Westinghouse for the 1939 New York World's Fair. He's big and blocky and talks in a monotone. It's hard to believe that audiences of the day were impressed with him, though they were. Here he says, "My brain is bigger than yours," and blows up a balloon until it pops. Wow!
- There's two bizarre Bela Lugosi interviews on this tape: in one, he scares the silly female interviewer away by pretending to hear voices, and in the other, he claims that "Dracula goes on forever," whatever that means.
- You not only get to see the incredibly silly cowboy-hatted robots in The Phantom Empire, but you also get to find out that they reappeared in another serial––Captain Video!
- Gimmick Alert! In 13 Ghosts, you can only see the ghosts with the help of a special "Ghost Viewer", demonstrated helpfully by William Castle himself! The producers of The Screaming Skull will pay funeral expenses for any member of the audience who dies of fright! Macabre has a similar insurance policy, but warns us it does not cover anybody with a known heart condition or suicides!
- Msties, take note: contains clips or trailers from The Killer Shrews, Bride of the Monster, Indestructible Man, I Was a Teenage Werewolf, War of the Colossal Beast, Robot Monster, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, The Phantom Creeps, The Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy, The Undersea Kingdom and The Screaming Skull.
No comments:
Post a Comment