Author: aunt john

Aside from cranking out some of the finest prime-time soap operas to ever grace the small screen, uber producer Aaron Spelling also had a hand in executive producing some of the more memorable supernatural movies-of-the-week in the ‘70s. CROWHAVEN FARM stars HOPE LANGE and PAUL BURKE, as Maggie, a legal secretary prone to bouts of puritanical déjà vu, and Ben Porter, her annoyingly insecure, stay-at-home artist husband. Maggie inherits the titular country estate from some dead relative after the original inheritor dies in an automotive explosion. Upon arriving at the farm, Maggie is overcome by an eerie sense of familiarity and the desire to hightail it out of there. Useless husband Ben decides that the barn would be the perfect place to set up a studio and a gallery for his uninspired abstract creations. Somewhat bored, and somewhat spooked by the onslaught of premonitions featuring angry pilgrims, Maggie goes back to work since Ben can't seem to earn a living. Unannounced, a pack of swingers swing by Crowhaven Farm who announce themselves as being The Weekenders. Maggie learns from them that a pack of 15th century puritans were slaughtered there because of a turncoat, ala the Salem Witch Trails (in a much less publicized fashion). Shortly thereafter, the long-barren Porters end up caring for a dead-eyed, blonde girl named Jennifer. Maggie finally gets pregnant, and creepy lil' Jennifer does her best to stir the turd, and make Ben think that his wife got knocked up by one of the aforementioned Weekenders. After Maggie gives birth, she ends up being confronted by a posse of perturbed pilgrims, the same ones from her sundry premonitions. They try to crush her beneath a door laden with bricks, as payback for her selling them down the river in a previous life. Wisely, as the weight of the stones weighs upon her, Maggie offers up her dumb husband Ben as trade for her and her baby's safe release. Maggie does escape but, in an obvious back lot made to look like Central Park, she encounters a cop who can tie a bow just like her late husband. Apparently, the circle of déjà vu can not be broken.INDELIBLE SCENE(S):

• Jennifer teasing Maggie with Ben's ring
• Angry pilgrim mob scene
• Maggie goes under the door
• The bite marks on Ben's back

 

 Credit it to talent or dumb luck, only a small minority of child stars are fortunate enough to transition from the precocious years, through the awkward adolescent stage, to become working adult actors. Most child stars never make the full transition, but a lot do manage to crank out some unintentionally hilarious work during their declining post-pubescent years. Case in point, LINDA BLAIR's star turn in WES CRAVEN's 1978 made-for-TV movie SUMMER OF FEAR. With her round face framed in a bad perm ripped off the head of MISS PIGGY, BLAIR plays Rachel Bryant, your typical late '70s teen, who's into horses named Sundance and making ill-fitting dresses for the upcoming dance. Rachel's perm becomes more frazzled when cousin Julia from the Ozarks comes to spend the summer following the death of her family. Seemingly plain Julia appears nice and all at first; but when Rachel breaks out with a mysterious case of facial herpes, it doesn't take Julia too long to steal her man and look better in the moo-moo dress Rachel had spent so much time sewing. While the rest of the family is taken by Julia's charm, pox-marked Rachel is not buying her Cracker Barrel routine. After she finds a dildo-shaped voodoo doll made of her horse's hair in Julia's drawer, Rachel consults the next-door neighbor who just happens to be an "expert in the occult," and he confirms her suspicions that Julia is indeed a bitch witch. Sadly, no one listens to Rachel's claims, and Julia manages to off the horse, seduce the father, and cut the brakes in the mother's car during the chilling mountain-side climax.

INDELIBLE SCENE(S):

• Sundance the horse freaking out at Rachel's big show
• Rachel's speedy transformation from awkward teen stage to full-blown Garbage Pail Kid face
• Julia seducing the father
• Rachel and Julia's throwdown in the darkroom
• Julia's bewitching color contacts

 

Developmentally disabled Bubba Ritter spends his afternoons singing songs about colors and constructing floral garlands with his best gal pal Marylee Williams. The innocent friendship between the 36-year-old man-child and his preteen playmate is especially bothersome to postal carrier and closet drunk Otis P. Hazelrigg. When the young Williams girl is mauled by a dog, Hazelrigg mistakenly blames Bubba for her injuries and promptly packs a posse of slack-jawed vigilantes into a pick-up truck so they can swoop down on the Ritter farmhouse with blazing shotguns and baying bloodhounds. Prior to their arrival, Bubba's mother had the foresight to hide her special son in the scarecrow. Her plan backfires when the hounds pick up Bubba's scent, and the Hee-Haw hoodlums pump him with rounds of lead. Hazelrigg inserts a pitchfork into Bubba's hand, and invokes a self-defense scenario that actually works when the four killers have their day in court. Dismayed by the judge's ruling, a heartbroken Mrs. Ritter shrieks the prophetic, "There's other justice in the world beside the law!"  By other justice, Mrs. Ritter is referring to the scarecrow, presumably powered by her dead son, which methodically torments and disposes of Bubba's killers in the most delightful fashions. One man falls into a wood chipper; another suffocates as a silo fills with grain. Hazelrigg helps out in the kill department by inducing a heart attack in Mrs. Ritter and offing the third member of his posse. When Hazelrigg makes a play for the Williams girl in the pumpkin patch of good and evil, the scarecrow shows up and gives him what he's had coming throughout the whole TV movie — the pointed-end of a pitchfork.

INDELIBLE SCENE(S):

• When it comes to playing heavy-set heavies, CHARLES DURNING is the king dick. His portrayal of postman Hazelrigg is so convincingly creepy, I jump each time I see him press his pudgy nose to the window with the paper skull decoration at the church dance
• Death by wood chipper, followed by a shot of a dollop of jelly plopping on Hazelrigg's plate
• The close-up of Bubba's eyes behind the scarecrow mask when he is found hiding

 

  

As a corpulent teen coming of age in the 1980s, your Aunt John's only recourse for attaining peer acceptance was to wear black on the outside (to hide the fat on the inside), and to become a devotee of Siouxsie Sioux. Based on the 1977 TV movie THE SPELL, the way the social pecking order worked was apparently somewhat different for high school girls of a certain weight in Southern California in the late ‘70s. Our flick focuses on Rita, a big girl forced to live in the anorexic shadow of her foxy younger sister, played by the 1970s welfare-to-work-mother's answer to Jodie Foster – HELEN HUNT, and her ginger-locked ice queen of a mother, the questionably beautiful LEE GRANT (seriously, does anyone out there in KINDERTRAUMA land consider Ms. Grant pretty)? The movie commences with our pleasantly plump protagonist, clad in the requisite dumpy-pants gray sweat suit, being asked to climb the rope in gym class. While being audibly tormented by her classmates, who are all wearing sexy, crotch-cut Spandex unitards, young Rita steps up to rope while her arch nemesis executes some sort of Cirque du Soleil aerial maneuver high above the gymnasium floor. One side look from Rita at the Illeana Douglas-looking lady gym teacher, and the mean, skinny girl falls to the ground like an undernourished sack of potatoes. At home, Rita doesn't fare much better with her looks-obsessed lawyer father scolding her for asking for seconding helpings, and scheming to ship her plus-sized patootie off to a boarding school in England. Rita strikes back by sneaking out the house late at night in a Stevie Nicks cape for bewitching trysts with the aforementioned lady gym teacher, needle pointing an awesome Persian Cat handicraft, combusting some neighbor woman who saw her mingling with the lady gym teacher, and using her powers to nearly drown her waif-like little sister at a swim meet. The movie concludes with the most awesome mother/daughter showdown set in a 1970s open-air kitchen, and let's just say that the only supernatural force at work here kept Ms. Grant's ginger bob from moving. That shit looks like helmet.Speaking of which, please help us out with our first ever KINDERTRAUMA poll:

Who wore it best:

Please vote in the comments.

Lack of coordination and mild case of childhood obesity aside, the real reason I never strapped skis to my feet and realized my childhood fantasy of being the toast of the late 1970s lodge scene was due, in part, to the made for TV movie Snowbeast. In a nutshell, some sort of unseen monster has been viciously attacking and terrorizing the winter sport enthusiasts at the seemingly under populated Rill Lodge and Ski Resort. I use unseen in the literal sense; perhaps due to a tight budget disguised as a suspense device, our monster is camera shy, and viewers are treated to some heavy breathing and shaky camera work from the perspective of said snowbeast each time he is about to pounce on a victim. Disregarding the mounting body count, the elderly owner of the resort plows ahead with the 50th Annual Winter Carnival. Clearly not one to miss out on a shindig, the Snowbeast makes his first on camera appearance, much to the audible horror of the soon-to-be-crowned Winter Carnival Queen. The Snowbeast responds by smashing out a window, inciting a riot amongst the carnival crowd, and murdering the Carnival Queen's mother in the parking lot. This was the scene that scared me off the slopes some 30 years ago, and this was the scene where I stopped paying attention to the drawn out love story involving the over-the-hill Olympic skier and his annoying wife.

INDELIBLE SCENE(S):

• The appearance of the Snowbeast at the window
• The murder of the Carnival Queen's mother in the parking lot. I want that sticker off her door
• Any scene with Sylvia Sidney as Carrie Rill, the Annual Winter Carnival obsessed resort owner. During the carnival melee, Ms. Sidney does her own stunt work and takes a tumble to the gymnasium floor, all the while shrieking about the crown that was meant for the runaway queen. The crown is crushed by one of the oddest pair of snow boots documented on celluloid