Month: July 2008

Being born in 1973, I came across a barrage of horrifying images on T.V.: The Zuni Doll from TRILOGY OF TERROR, DARK NIGHT OF THE SCARECROW, The "V" TWINS! — but nothing was more damming to my psyche than the WAYLAND FLOWERS abomination: MADAME

Pure terror to a toddler.  When her freakish gaping maw was shut, her face looked like two large people screwing each other.  I quickly would change the channel to let's say, Mr. Rogers, but wait!… There's LADY ELAINE FAIRCHILDE, the lesser freakish sister of MADAME.  Ahrgh! I can't win.

I dare you to try to hold in your screams when you look at MADAME's home site…

I dare you.

UNKLE LANCIFER SEZ: Turnidoff, you are right. MADAME is scary as hell, but she's also notoriously difficult to work with. Based on legends that exist solely within my alcohol-rattled mind, she was, in fact, the first choice to star in the film adaptation of STEPHEN KING's MISERY. Lo and behold, a young moxie-filled, opportunistic KATHY BATES did a bit of an ALL ABOUT EVE number on the aged puppet and snatched that part right out of her puppet hands by seducing a then-naive meathead named ROB REINER.

Although the Cylons have made your Official Traumatizer list, they're not what gave me the heebie jeebies. In the 1978 movie, the Galactica crew and assorted refugees stop off at a supposedly friendly planet. But, no, the aliens aren't friendly–they want to EAT the Earthlings! The scene that freaked me out involved the discovery that the aliens were stuffing the humans into glass fronted drawers, covering them with cobwebs, and digesting them. My aunt took my cousin and me to see the movie, and I was supposed to spend the night at their house, but the dessicated, cobwebby corpses so frightened me that I had my mom come and take me home.

UNKLE LANCIFER SEZ: Tracy, you are correct to be afraid of those nasty Ovions. At least Cylons are absolutely clear about their intentions (when they're not pretending they want peace whilst implementing a holocaust), Ovions on the other hand are downright sneaky. First they set up a gambling joint where you can't loose, then they provide you with awesome entertainment in the form of singers with four eyes and two mouths and then, when you're all relaxed and fattened, they nab you in the elevator and turn you into baby Ovion food! Give me a straightforward Cylon any day over those two-faced, backstabbing rat finks! (They are very good harp players though!)

Kids in this high-tech age don't know how coddled they are when severe weather is forecast!  Today, you've got all these electronic graphics with little maps in the corner, crawls across the screen, and now and then a weatherbabe (or weatherguy) may come on to give logical, reasoned updates.

Not so when I was a kid in the '70s.

Even for a Severe Thunderstorm Watch, the programming would stop, the TV screen would fill with some ominous-looking graphic (still, of course, no movement back in those days) screaming whatever watch/warning it was in all caps, vivid colors…and worst of all, that infernal, screaming, shrill Emergency Broadcasting Service tone!  Then usually an announcer with The Voice Of Doom would come on and provide the "public service" of warning us all of impending tornadoes, damaging winds and large hail that were SURELY going to target the house you lived in and make Dorothy's tornado in THE WIZARD OF OZ about as scary as a silent fart.

Almost as bad were the "ALL CLEAR" statements that would come on-screen when the danger was supposedly past…except that the graphics were usually in more soothing shades of green and white.

The fake warnings created on YouTube are laughable compared to the horrifying simplicity of the bulletins back in the 1970s that made me want to scream running for the cellar – and, worse, my parents made me watch them because it was "educational"!

I fearlessly watched every Creature Feature run on Detroit's WKBD Channel 50 from the late sixties through the seventies, but one managed to sear its way directly onto my retinas. The 1966 ROGER CORMAN/SAMUEL Z. ARKOFF film QUEEN OF BLOOD was patched together from a bunch of eerie footage from a 1960 Russian sci-fi film called NEBO ZOVYOT. In QUEEN OF BLOOD an American spaceship crew (which includes JOHN SAXON and a young DENNIS HOPPER) intercepts a space capsule containing an inhabitant of Mars–a green-skinned, green-haired and incredibly creepy mute alien female. She turns out to be a blood-sucking space vampire who starts knocking off the crew one by one. Given that she's just an over-the-hill glamour model in green makeup and a beehive wig that might not have been so scary except for the way she does it–by hypnotizing her victims with her TERRIFYING GLOWING EYES.

The sequence that drove me over the edge was when a sleepy crewman observes her walking from the lava-lamp-equipped engine room on the other side of the ship and slowly stalking toward her victim (me in this case), then unveiling her blazing eyes (accompanied by a maddening buzzing sound) in child-scarring close-up. Later she takes out DENNIS HOPPER in the engine room in a scene that anticipates HARRY DEAN STANTON's death scene in ALIEN. We later see her licking blood off one of the crewman's wrists but in a wicked death by irony she turns out to be a hemophiliac who bleeds to death when she's scratched by the spaceship's lone female crew member.

I went to bed that night with the image of that creepy face and those electrifying glowing eyes (director CURTIS HARRINGTON achieved the effect by beaming pencil-thin points of light directly onto her eyeballs) jolting me awake every time I tried to drift off to sleep. The movie showed up on T.V. on MGM Hi-Def so I can now preserve it forever–it's ridiculously cheap and cheesy, yet when I showed my wife the corridor-stalking scene even she admitted it was creepy as hell.

If there are any advantages to having alcoholic father, one is the utter lack of parental guidance on what movies a kid is allowed to watch. My father took my older sister and I to see a double feature of FRIDAY THE 13TH and SCREAMERS. It was 1980, so that would have made me seven years old and my sister nine. I remember wanting to see SCREAMERS because people were supposed to be turned inside out! My father took us to the theater and gave me a handful of quarters so I could go to the lobby and play video games if the movie got too scary for me. Needless to say, I spent most of FRIDAY THE 13TH in the lobby.  I could tell that the movie was coming to an end by the peaceful music that was coming from the theater, so I decided to take a seat next to my sister and Dad. The image of a woman in a small boat floating along a still lake was being projected on the screen. It seemed like the worst was over. The next thing I know is that my eyes were being assaulted by the disfigured Jason popping up out of the water and pulling the hapless woman down into the lake. My sister began screaming uncontrollably and I was practically crawling under the seat out of fear and embarrassment of my sister. My Dad picked us both up, one in each arm, and carried two screaming kids out of the theater. We laugh about it now, but we were scared half to death! I never did get to see SCREAMERS!

I suffered mightily at the hands of PUNKY BREWSTER when I was still biting ankles. You see, my sister was a DEAD RINGER for SOLEIL MOON FRYE, and I am not exaggerating when I say that we couldn't leave the house from '87-88 without being mobbed by unruly children looking to get close to their idol, "Punky."  I can even recall my Mom arguing with other mothers at the grocery store: "If she's Punky, what the hell are we doing in this dump?"

AUNT JOHN SEZ: Kitty, I feel your pain. My second cousin bore an uncanny resemblance to CAPTAIN LOU ALBANO, sans the facial hair, and it made shopping at the local K-Mart a nightmare. Cousin Pam was what my mother called a "handsome girl," but I digress. Everyone needs to check out Kitty's blog KILLER KITTENS FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE. Be warned though, this kitten definitely has claws!