Category: Telenasties

 

 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

 

  

SCOTT JACOBY, who is also excellent in THE LITTLE GIRL WHO LIVES DOWN THE LANE, plays Ronald Wilby an introverted outsider and part-time momma's boy. Ronald isn't so "bad," really he's just the victim of circumstance. When a nasty albino dwarf talks smack about his mom, he grabs her by the face and pushes her backwards. (Hey, it worked for CARY GRANT.) Unfortunately the brat's noggin' hits a poorly placed cinder block and B.R has no choice but to dispose of the evidence via a shallow grave. When he gets home, you learn why he took such umbrage to the uggo's taunts. His mother is none other than KIM HUNTER the sexy monkey from THE PLANET OF THE APES! I know she's meant to be all Norma Bates overbearing but, to me, she seems like the perfect mom. When told of her son's murderous mistake, she devises a plan to turn the downstairs bathroom into a luxury artist studio he can hide out in. The door is covered with wallpaper and there's a cubby door in the pantry where she can deliver him candy bars and Carnation Instant Milk. At this point I'm realizing that by simply snuffing a simp, B.R has acquired the lifestyle I have always dreamt of. He no longer has to leave his domicile and he can spend all day working full time on his, "Extraordinary vision of fantasy," a make-believe world called Atranta. As God would have it, all good things must come to an end and Ronnie's dream set-up is demolished when his mom dies from a routine operation. Now Ronald must fend for himself while nosy neighbor Mrs. Schumacher sniffs about and a new family headed by DABNEY COLEMAN moves in. Bored out of his skull, Ronald projects his Atranta fantasies upon the youngest sibling the whiney Babs, who he thinks is the embodiment of his creation Princess Fansetta. As dopey as this all sounds, it's perfectly enthralling as the family has no idea the local legendary killer is Anne Frank-ing it in the second bathroom they tragically never knew existed. Things come to a head as our Ronald becomes more brazen and it finally culminates in a startling climax when the Jan Brady-esque middle sister finds an eye staring back at her through a hole in the wall. Creepy, voyeuristic, and endlessly entertaining BAD RONALD is a must see for television movie enthusiasts and shut-ins everywhere.

INDELIBLE SCENE(S):

• Brat meets cinder block
• Mrs. Shcumacher's revelation and subsequent dive
• Peephole discovered and Ronald crashing through the wall crying, "Mother!"

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.

When I was young I was scared of two things, The Bermuda Triangle and the Devil. I was pretty sure the triangle had to stay put, so if I decided not to go on any plane or boat rides I would be all right. The devil too, I imagined was easily identifiable, (resembling the character on the Underwood Deviled Ham can) and pretty much restricted to staying far underground in a place called H-E-double-hockey-sticks. These theories and more would vaporize the night I begged my mother to let me stay up and watch SATAN'S TRIANGLE a 1975 television movie. The film starts off pleasantly enough with the Coast Guard finding an abandoned vessel with one lone survivor. Doug McClure listens intently as an icy Kim Novak recounts the paranormal demise of all aboard. Doug is a skeptic and is able to find logical solutions to every mysterious anecdote she has to offer. It's all very soothing to realize that every spooky unexplainable occurrence can be effortlessly shot through full of holes by the rational McClure. After everything is put in its place and we decide nothing is amiss, a helicopter arrives and suddenly the fabric of all we thought was real begins to unravel at a demonic speed. As much as I'd love to reveal the ending, I really couldn't do it justice anyway… suffice it to say, it's still the scariest I've ever seen. Besides bearing witness to the creepiest, longest, direct eye contact, smile ever put to film; my sense of reality along with Mr. McClure's character's was smashed into a million pieces and would never be repaired. My mother had her hands full trying to get my screaming, crying ass into bed that night and, for what seemed like years, I would huddle under the covers trying not to think bad thoughts. From that night on I lived with the realization that the devil and even the Bermuda triangle were a lot closer than I thought.

INDELIBLE SCENE(S):

• The levitating cadaver
• Death by swordfish
• EVERYTHING that happens after the Helicopter arrives…

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

Aaron Spelling produced this fondly remembered 1982 supernatural outing that stared Dennis Weaver, Valerie Harper and the legendary Ruth Gordon. A family moves into a new house in an effort to start anew after the tragic death of their eldest daughter. Soon middle child Mary is in full contact with her dead sister and willing to do her bidding which includes the systematic annihilation of her entire family. Is Mary insane? Schizophrenic? Possessed? Or is the ghost of her sister the real deal? Highly engrossing, admittedly campy, indisputably creepy, and nearly impossible to shake.

INDELIBLE SCENE(S)

• Gordon's death by lizard
• the "artsy" smashing watermelon cut
• The ominous pizza cutter rolling up the bannister
• Mary tying Jen's shoes together in the car
• Any scene of Mary in a straitjacket
• Big sister Jennifer's horrifically uncanny Cheshire cat grin in the film's finale

This seminal 1979 Stephen King adaption may start off like a Peyton Place inspired nightime soaper but by the end of its nearly four hour run viewers were witness to some of the most terrifying scenes on network television. Tobe Hooper's less then faithfull adaption takes it time, but its pacing only adds to the palpable atmosphere of dread. Lingering shots and long moments of silence are seldom taken advantage of in contemporary horror films. Here they are utilized to create unbearable moments of suspense, and perhaps one of the last truly great gothic vampire films.

INDELIBLE SCENE(S):

• The young vampire floating outside the window surrounded by backwards moving mist, scratching at the glass
• A glowing-eyed Geoffrey Lewis getting up from his rocking chair to demand "loook at meeee teacher!…"
• Nosferatu inspired master vampire Barlow appearing in Lance Kerwin's kitchen to knock his parents skulls together

Laura's trippy nightmare at around the 2:45 mark still haunts my subconscious some 30 years after this Little House aired:

If there was ever one show on television that was the least likely to induce chills it was this depression era family friendly drama. That is until 1978, when Elizabeth hit puberty and all hell broke loose on Walton mountain. Clinging desperately to her youth and unwilling to accept the inevitability of her oncoming decrepitude, the no longer adorable gingerfrau Elizabeth inadvertently invites a poltergeist to terrorize her family with sub-par piano playing, and the smashing of worthless heirlooms. Stones levitate, mirrors fog up, and radios stop working whenever the schlep-rock carrot-top is present. Finally, the tension culminates when the specter wreaks havoc at an ill-conceived slumber party. In order to dispel the presence, our war torn, copper-topped hero must renounce her childhood and own up to her gerontophobia. In the voice over epilogue provided by the always mole-faced John Boy, we are informed that the supernatural incidents were never repeated after our eumelanin-challenged heroine's impromptu exorcism.

 INDELIBLE SCENE(S): That crazy rag doll getting up and walking around!