Thank God the Wuhan Coronavirus hasn’t derailed America’s Halloween Animatronic industry:
Lots of zombies, lots of clowns, lots of zombie clowns…
Posts Tagged ‘Halloween’
Halloween Horrors: 2020 Transworld Animatronics Show
Saturday, October 3rd, 2020Halloween Horrors: The Pedophile Living In Your Daughter’s Closet
Friday, October 2nd, 2020Remember the spider man of Denver and the Japanese woman that secretly lived in a man’s cabinet for a year without him knowing?
Well, the wackiest state in the union manages to one up that one:
A Louisiana man has been arrested after a 15-year-old Florida girl’s parents found he had been living in their daughter’s bedroom closet for more than a month after he met the teen online two years ago and traveled to meet her for sex.
Jonathan Rossmoine, 36, was arrested and charged with multiple sex crimes Sunday after the child’s parents learned he had been secretly living in her bedroom at their family home in Spring Hill, Hernando County.
Rossmoine allegedly confessed to traveling from Louisiana to Florida on multiple occasions to have sex with the child, who described the 36-year-old as her boyfriend.
Police said he then moved into the girl’s room in August, where he would hide out from her parents in the closet and emerge when they left the house.
Even creepier: It’s not the first time this sort of thing has happened, a father found a 42-year old man hiding in his 12-year old daughter’s closet:
See also: Jack Vance’s Bad Ronald.
So they next time your children ask you to check their closet for monsters, remember that there are some in human form…
Halloween Horrors: The Abominable Dr. Phibes
Thursday, October 1st, 2020I just picked up The Vincent Price Collection from Shout Factory on Blu-Ray and had a chance to watch The Abominable Dr. Phibes for the first time, a movie that’s now just shy of a half a century old.
It’s less a straight horror film that a black comedy Grand Guignol take on a Jacobean revenge drama, in which organist/inventor/theologian Phibes (Vincent Price, wearing disguises to hide his horrible disfigurement and speaking through mechanical aids) and (never explained) beautiful female assistant Vulnavia (Virginia North) venture from their elaborate Art Deco lair (complete with a raising and lowering organ for Phibes to play, along with an animatronic jazz band) to carry out a series of revenge murders based on Biblical plagues on a team of doctors lead by Dr. Vesalius (old pro Joseph Cotton), who Phibe feels botched his late wife’s surgery. Victims are dispatched by bats (who actually look quite adorable), rats, a particularly nasty mechanical frog mask, and (in the case of British comic actor legend Terry Thomas) having their blood drained.
Police, as usual, are always one step behind the fiendishly clever Phibes.
The film it most reminds me of is near-contemporary Suspiria, in that both are completely nutso, color-drenched horror films of hallucinatory intensity. The art direction by Bernard Reeves is so striking, and so integral to the success of the film, that it’s quite surprising he never did another full-length film.
I actually tracked Reeves down and asked why that was:
Thank you for your enquiry, yes I am the same Bernard Reeves that Art Directed the film Abominable Dr. Phibes.
I did very few films in my life, basically due to the fact I was Production Designer for TV commercials and travelled abroad a lot.
These days he’s best know for his motorsports art.
Phibe’s lair is so vivid that it does a great job of making you forget the usual American International Pictures cheapness in the rest of the film. Another fascinating aspect is that while it’s set in 1925, the design of both Phibe’s lair and of Dr. Vesalius’ house is less straight Art Deco than a version re-imagined through the prism of mod London, with bright colors, wall mirrors and anachronistic red plexiglass panels on Phibe’s organ.
And you can easily imagine Diana Rigg modeling some of Vulnavia’s very sexy fashions in The Avengers.
Speaking of which, Director Robert Fuest (who directed several post-Rigg episodes of same) keeps things moving along at a steady clip, so it never drags over its 94 minutes. It’s not really scary, but it does hold your attention throughout. It’s not as good as Suspiria, manly because nothing matches the crazy intensity of latter film’s first murder, and because we root for Jessica Harper’s protagonist in a way we can’t for Price’s twisted antihero.
Some have talked about The Abominable Dr. Phibes as an example of camp, and while aspects lend themselves to that, distance and the sheer vivid weirdness of the film has given it the feel of an intense fever dream.
Still worth a look.
2019 Fark Annual Scary Story Thread
Thursday, October 31st, 2019Today is Halloween, which means it’s time for the annual Fark Scary Story Thread!
Here are the links to threads from previous years:
While you’re here, feel free to check out some of my other freaky/creepy/scary/silly Halloween posts.
Halloween Horrors: Mysterious Dark Atlantic Mass Eats a Torpedo
Wednesday, October 30th, 2019Have you ever heard of the cryptid known as the Lusca?
The Lusca has been described in varying ways. Some cryptozoologists have suggested it is merely a giant octopus that has been misidentified. Many others have described the Lusca as a half-shark, half-octopus hybrid monster.
It has razor-sharp teeth and multi-suckered tentacles. It sometimes has many of the same characteristics as a colossal octopus, but has also been described at different times as having multiple heads, dragon-like features, or even appearing as a vaguely described evil spirit.
Some eyewitnesses have described the Lusca as appearing like a squid-eel hybrid, rather than the shark-octopus combination.
The Lusca is said to be over 75 feet long, possibly growing as large as 200 feet in some cases. It can change colors, much like some smaller species of octopus. Its habitat is rugged underwater terrain, large underwater caves, the edge of the continental, or other areas where large crustaceans are found, as this is assumed to be its food source.
It’s said to inhabit “blue holes,” deep blue pits in the ocean floor, especially in the Caribbean.
Which brings us to this story, relayed second-hand by a guest of Joe Rogan’s:
Back in the ‘90s, this pilot’s job was to fetch BQM aerial target drones and submarine telemetry torpedoes from the ocean. At the time, the pilot was flying a CH-53—“a big, heavy-lifter the Marine Corps uses for certain things,” Fravor told Rogan. “Off the East Coast they do a lot of shooting, at the time it was off Puerto Rico.”
“The helo drops a swimmer in the water, he hooks the whole thing up and they fly back,” Fravor said. “The first time they were out and they were going to pick up a BQM, he’s sitting in the front—in the CH-53 you can see down by your feet—and as he’s looking down, they’re 50 feet (15 metres) above the water, he sees this kind of dark mass coming up from the depths.”
As the pilot picked up the BQM, he was apparently at a loss for words. “He’s looking at this thing going, ‘What the hell is that?’ And then it just goes back down underwater. Once they pull the kid and the BQM out of the water, this object descends back into the depths.”
One dark mass coming up from the depths is weird enough. Two is officially cause for concern. A few months later, the helicopter pilot saw the exact same thing.
“He’s out picking up a torpedo, they hook the diver up on the winch, and as they’re lowering him down, he sees this big mass. He goes, ‘It’s not a submarine’. He’s seen submarines before. Once you’ve seen a submarine you can’t confuse it with something else. This big object, kind of circular, is coming up from the depths and he starts screaming through the intercom system to tell them to pull the diver up, and the diver’s only a few feet from the water.
“They reverse the winch and the diver’s thinking, ‘What the hell is going on?’ And all of a sudden he said the torpedo just got sucked down underwater, and the object just descended back down into the depths. They never recovered it.”
Some people are obviously going to think of UFOs, but I thought of the Lusca…
Halloween Horrors: Creepy Irish Statues
Tuesday, October 29th, 2019Would you believe there’s a park in Ireland filled with creepy statues?
Behold Indian Sculpture Park in Victor’s Way! But don’t tear yourself apart over it:
And don’t get stuck in a rut:
But you’ll just have to click through for the female nudes…
Transworld 2019 Halloween Trade Show
Thursday, October 24th, 2019Enjoy another Halloween trade show video:
Halloween Horror Movie Review: The Night Stalker
Wednesday, October 23rd, 2019Before the Kolchak: The Night Stalker TV show came the original TV movie The Night Stalker, which first introduced dogged yet deeply-irritating reporter Carl Kolchak, brilliantly and unforgettably played by Darrin McGavin. Our grizzled, disheveled hero starts listening to his own notes on a tape recorder, about a very strange murder case. We see a Vegas girl get killed by an incredibly powerful man, then cut to an autopsy performed by a pre-M*A*S*H Larry Linville (who would go on to play a Police Captain of The Week Who’s Annoyed With Kolchak’s Shenanigans in the TV series), who discovers that a body has been completely drained of blood. So three minutes in, any viewer is going to figure a vampire is stalking Las Vegas. (And it was obviously filmed in Vegas; everyone looks believably hot and sweaty.) It takes the Vegas police a whole lot longer to figure things out.
Enter our intrepid seersucker-clad hero.
Kolchak is pretty much fully formed the moment he walks into the news office, a smart, cynical, sarcastic reporter with authority issues. You quickly see how he would get on just about anyone’s nerves. (Later he recites all the cities he’s been fired from newspapers in. “Wasn’t it twice in Boston?” his much too young and pretty girlfriend (played by the recently deceased Carol Lynley) asks, to which he holds up three fingers.) He doesn’t think much of being assigned the first murder, but when a second one shows up, also drained of blood, with no tracks leading to her final sandy resting place, he realizes something is up, and tenaciously goes digging into the story, despite staunch opposition from both the police chief (Claude Aikens) and his own editor Tony Vincenzo (Simon Oakland, in a role he’d reprise in The Night Strangler sequel and the TV show).
The plot moves along at a quick pace, police procedural fashion, as it quickly becomes apparent to Kolchak that an actual vampire is killing young women in Las Vegas. The “vampire police procedural” has been done plenty of times since, but this was pretty much the first media instance (though Leslie H. Whitten’s novel The Progeny of the Adder preceded by seven years), and even today, despite the obvious budgetary constraints of a TV movie, it has a compelling intensity to it that later examples have never duplicated.
But McGavin’s Kolchak is what holds the entire thing together. He was a great, underrated actor, and in the scene where the police finally break down and promise to follow his lead and give him the exclusive, he’s so wonderfully, unbearably smug that you know exactly why he keeps getting fired. The movie has a panoply of solid TV character actors, tight direction, and plenty of tension when (inevitably) Kolchak tracks the vampire back to his lair…
We watched a beautiful Kino Lorber Blu Ray, but the movie is also available on YouTube if you want to get a taste:
There are a few extras on the Blu-Ray, including with producer Dan Curtis and director John Llewellyn Moxey, who said it was much easier to get a TV movie made in the early 70s. You had an idea (comedy, drama, horror, whatever), and if someone at the network liked it, you got a greenlight to do it. He said that now there are too many people involved in the process to get anything approved anymore. Wikipedia says that it was made for $450,000 and earned “a 33.2 rating and 48 share,” which is absolutely unheard of for a TV movie in today’s media landscape.
(More thoughts from Dwight.)
Halloween Horrors: Mickey Mouse in The Haunted House
Wednesday, October 16th, 2019Coming just one year after “Steamboat Willie,” “The Haunted House” was already the fourteenth Mickey Mouse animated short, as Walt Disney wasted no time getting his studio up to speed after splitting with Winkler Pictures.
Hope you like dancing skeletons and xylophone music…
Halloween Horrors: The Ghost of Stephen Foster
Monday, October 14th, 2019Enjoy a ditty by the Squirrel Nut Zippers accompanied by some fine animation aping the “rubber hose” style of classic Betty Boop.