As
far as B-Movie geeks go, as a child, I
was deprived. Living in a farmhouse out
in the middle of nowhere, I was stuck
with a television that had a grand total
of four stations. Let me repeat that.
FOUR STATIONS! The three major
affiliates and a PBS station was all we
had, and every stinking one of them went
off the air around midnight. No cable.
No satellite dish. And no local monster
showcases hosted by a cool ghoul
announcer. Once in a while, I'd get
lucky and there'd be something on the
late-late show that almost qualified as
a B-movie. Unfortunately, this was more
naught than often, and by the close of
the 1970s, aside from a few Godzilla
movies and the later Harryhausen films,
the number of B-movies that I had
actually seen could probably be counted
on hone hand.
To
make up for this, my room was stacked
high with monster magazines and books
devoted to the subject. I devoured every
bit of information I could get my hands
on, and would drool at the back of my CREEPY
and EERIE magazines with the
offers of film projectors and 16mm
outtakes of these classics that I could
only read about. Alas,
a dream that never reached fruition.
On
came the '80s, and the birth of the VCR.
I honestly don't believe that this
generation of B-Movie fans know how
lucky they are with things as simple as
a VCR --
let alone DVD or the internet. But luck
was against me again when a shifty
salesman conned my mom into buying a
Betamax. Well, we all know what happened
there. Stuck with an Edsil, all
the stuff I’d been longing to see was
readily available in VHS for rent or
sale, but it was still agonizingly out
of my reach. Occasionally I'd scrape
some money together and rent a VHS VCR
and dub off some prized treasures. I got
the original Thing
From Another World and King
Kong this way, along with Steve
McQueen in The
Blob
and Earth
vs. The Flying Saucers.
Eventually,
Santa brought me a VHS player for
Christmas in ’86. (Wohoo!)
And
that wonderful black box popped my B-cherry
on many a cinematic challenge for over
ten years as I frantically caught up on
what I'd been missing. I’ve lost count
of all the alien invasions, irradiated
bugs, and other monsters running amok
and threatening mankind. It immersed me
into the world of Edward D. Wood Jr.,
Bert I. Gordon, Del Tenney and Roger
Corman. Then after going through two
sets of heads, she finally wheezed and
died on a rainy day in October of ‘97.
The old girl still sits proudly on a
shelf bearing a paper plaque that reads:
"He tampered in God’s
Domain."
So
this one's for you, old girl. *sniff*
Okay,
is this coming off as earnest -- or
pathetic?
Be
honest now.
Well,
on second thought. Don't.
Alrighty
then, enough with the nostalgia and
childhood trauma, on with this week's
film!
One
of the few films available on Betamax to
feed my need for a B-movie fix was It
Came From Hollywood.
Six years before the
greatest show on earth premiered on a
local Minnesota TV station, this movie
came out with a group of comedians showcasing
some of the oddest things committed to
film. While they watched, they
commented on the insanity playing across
the screen. And the most exciting part
was, I was finally getting to see things,
albeit in short clips, that until then
I’d only been able to read about.
Dan
Aykroyd tackled aliens, troubled teens and
the brain. (Eek!
A brain!) It
was a here that I got my first glimpse of
the invading "hostile pipe
welders" in Prince
of Space,
Ed Wood’s take on juvenile delinquency
during The
Violent Years, and the disembodied
brains hopping around in The
Fiend Without a Face.
John
Candy gives us a touching tribute to Ed
Wood, some wonderfully demented previews
of coming attractions (and
does anyone else think the preview for Attack
of the Killer Tomatoes
is
more entertaining than the actual movie?),
and
a nice sincere segment defending the minor
technical triumphs of these
budget-strapped epics.
Then
Cheech and Chong guide us through a tour
of giants and little people, the animal
kingdom gone berserk, and an intervention
to "Just say no" by highlighting
films about getting high. Colossal men and
puppet people indulged my senses, and I
also learned to avoid the fog at all costs
our face the wrath of a 50-foot Chicken Wing
(better
known as The
Deadly Mantis.)
Gorillas,
oddball musicals and monsters got the
Gilda Radner treatment. This is special
because I got my first glimpse of my
personal hero -- Ro-Man the Robot
Monster, and A*P*E,
the giant horny gorilla. Icky tree
monsters and burnt casserole men also
plodded along, warming the cockles of my
heart.
Now
as much as Cheech and Chong’s drug
segment cracked me up, Radner’s
memorable musical moments is my favorite
part because, out of all the films
featured in the movie, those to me came
off as the most bizarre:
Who
can forget the Everly Brothers other
brothers, the singing duo of Chip and
Emil. (Emil’s
the one with the slight muscle disorder.)
The grand
display of synchronized dancing during the
banana ripening number in Sunny
Side Up,
and no matter how hard I try, I can’t
get the song from Mantango
(a/k/a
Attack
of the Mushroom People)
out of my head.
"Da-da-da
daah dah, dada da dah...
"La
la la laaah laa la lah..."
See.
Told ya.
But
the one clip that I can’t shake is the
really disturbing "Going to Heaven
on a Mule" number from the
musical Wonder
Bar
that featured Al Jolson and others in
black face as singing stereotypes. Man
that is just wrong. Weird, but wrong (and
a hi-de-ho.)
This
movie has taken some grief because, along
with the usual cheese, some classics like War
of the Worlds,
Creature
from the Black Lagoon
and The
Incredible Shrinking Man
were included. I’m not that much of an
elitist and these films take their lumps
in stride. And I figure that if MST3k
can do This
Island Earth
than I say It
Came from Hollywood
deserves a little slack.
Admittedly,
they cheat a little bit with the editing
and sound effects, but again, I didn’t
really care. You can sense that underneath
the sarcasm is a genuine love and
affection for the genre we also know and
love.
As
the credits rolled, and the list of films
dismantled by the comics began to scroll
by, I vowed to someday view each and every
one. I’m still working on it, but I’m
happy to report that it’s now the number
of films that I haven’t seen that I can
count on one hand.
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