As for last week's broadcast of "The Killer Shrews--" enough said! Except that the benefits of seeing something like this a second time is that NOW the viewer knows it is going to be awful. The first time always holds out some hope!
But Svengoolie has an interesting line-up for this month. Just look!
September 3--"Frogs." (1972) --The one where Ray Milland is master (in his mind) of some plantation off the Florida coast, and Joan Van Ark wears her Seventies hair style, while being menaced by little itty-bitty frogs. It is a camp riot; if you have not seen it, you must.
September 10--"It Came From Outer Space." (1953) --This was one of Universal's early attempts at outer space sci-fi. I have never seen it, so I am really excited. It has an interesting gimmick--the havoc the monster causes on Earth is seen only through its eyes. I am looking forward to this, girls!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
September 17--"House Of Dracula." (1945) --The follow-up to "House Of Frankenstein," which was shown earlier this year. Or was it last? Anyway, this has to be seen for Jane Adams' performance as The Hunchbacked Nurse! It rivals J. Caroll Naish's performance as the hunchback Daniel in "House Of Frankenstein." Jane really goes for it, acting wise, here!
September 24--"Gargoyles." (1972) --Two words alone to watch this 50-year-old film, shown earlier this year--Grayson Hall! She livens things up, as Mrs. Parks, and when she goes, so does the rest of the film.
Now, what about our good friend, Sventoonie? Well, his new season begins next month, October 1. I do not know what film he will deconstruct but Svengoolie is preceding the event with a broadcast of "Count Yorga, Vampire." This 1970 film, which I have never seen is guaranteed camp trash, as it started out to be shot as a soft porn film! How much footage of that remains to be seen, but this is no Hammer horror. This is truly camp and let us hope Sventoonie follows it up with a classic deconstruction!
Hey, darlings, the Fall is looking up, already.
Are you ready??????????????
At the late night, double feature, picture show...
ReplyDeleteVictoria,
ReplyDeleteYes, that's what it will be.
And Saturday is the perfect night for it!
I sometimes wonder about the reasoning behind some of Svengoolie's movie choices. Usually he screens the typical "so bad its good" or "so bad its unbelievable" titles, but every now and then he picks a film generally considered one of the better examples of its genre. "It Came From Outer Space" is one of the latter: while it has its detractors (most of whom just don't get it), the film is listed among the best sci-fi entries of the '50s by most critics and enthusiasts.
ReplyDeleteThe main problem with "It Came From Outer Space" isn't the film but its defiance of genre conventions (then and now). Like many pioneering sci-fi or horror entries, the very things that make it unique and interesting also made it confusing and frustrating for the studio to market (and viewers to calibrate their assumptions). And of course, the fresh concepts it presented back then have been ripped off, paraphrased and recycled so often by later works that it is difficult now for a "virgin" viewer to appreciate just how radical and innovative "It Came From Outer Space" really was.
It was one of very few (perhaps the only) early sci-fi films conceived by an actual, visionary, talented sci-fi writer instead of some faceless studio hack. The great Ray Bradbury wrote it, and while the studio trampled it as they always did in those days Bradbury's distinctive fingerprints remain all over it. This has its good and bad points: Ray was an amazing, inspirational writer who came up with amazing ideas and plots (which briefly made Hollywood clamor for him). Unfortunately, his skill and artistry as a writer is firmly locked to the printed page: it is imbued and enlivened by a poetry that simply does not translate to film or television.
Universal producers and Bradbury went to war over the making of this movie: predictably Bradbury lost most of his ground. Which may not have been a bad outcome- in retrospect, "Outer" is perhaps the only attempt at filming Bradbury that didn't dismally fail at capturing his essence (it isn't nearly as stiff as Truffauts "Farenheit 451", as janky as (both) TV adaptations of his masterwork "Martian Chronicles" or as cringey and butchered as Serlings Twilight Zone version of his exquisite "I Sing The Body Electric".
"It Came From Outer Space" is more akin to "Forbidden Planet" than anything else of the period. While falsely marketed as a scarefest, it was a cannily crafted critique of paranoia, the Red Scare and fear of "others". The then-radical, oft-imitated notion that aliens would actually have ZERO interest in earth or humans confused and annoyed audiences who expected a war that never comes. The aliens simply want to repair their craft and get the hell away from us asap. The story hook is they need to borrow/inhabit a few human bodies to do the work while hiding in plain sight, because their true appearance is horrific to our eyes.
A mostly forgotten gem now, tho its distinctive music score is remembered by a generation of 60s kids as the spooky theme of the syndicated "Creature Feature" TV movie airings.
Darling,
ReplyDeleteThe only thing I found annoying
were the endless shots of cars going back
and forth. The whole idea was brilliant,
but lackluster in its execution. And
the monster should not have been shown at all.