paranormal – Go Retire Psychiatrist

Svengoolie Show Movie: “The Mummy’s Hand” and Svengoolie Cameo

Svengoolie Intro: “Calling all stations! Clear the air lanes! Clear all air lanes for the big broadcast!”

OK, I saw this movie The Mummy’s Hand (1940) last night and went to bed wondering if I was crazy or fell asleep briefly and had a dream during the show. I saw something incredible; it looked like Svengoolie had a cameo in the film! At about half hour or so in, the archaeologists are at the dig site looking at an old locket with photos of an old woman and a man. The old woman was Svengoolie in drag!

I checked this morning by looking at the Internet Archive version of the movie and there were two photos in the locket, one of them a man on the right and a woman on the left. Neither was Svengoolie.

I searched the web and immediately found the Svengoolie movie Facebook page in which several other people had seen that Svengoolie in drag was the picture on the left in the locket. Apparently, he pulls this kind of prank occasionally, but this was the first time I’ve seen it.

Anyway, the movie stars Dick Foran (Steve Banning), Wallace Ford (Babe Jenson), Peggy Moran (Marta Solvani), Tom Tyler (the Mummy), and Cecil Kellaway (Mr. Solvani). I didn’t expect the film to be a mix of comedy and horror, but making fun of the mummy tropes seemed to work.

I haven’t seen the first movie, “The Mummy.” I’ve seen “Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb,” (also on the Svengoolie show a couple of months ago) in which Babe was a little less funny than in “The Mummy’s Hand.”

The special Tana leaves again appear in this film, which privileged ancient Egyptians rolled up using Zig-Zag paper and smoked, which was better than the weak beer they made and could make mummies come back to life and enable them able to leap tall date palms in a single bound.

The evil Andohep (played by George Zucco), who is sweet on Marta and tries to flirt with her by enticing her with a Tana joint, controls the Mummy with a bong full of the stuff, which enables it to bound across the desert despite lacking the full use of its left leg and right arm.

The comedy duo of Banning and Babe talk Mr. Solvani (a stage magician) into bankrolling their next archaeologic expedition by causing a huge bar fight which Marta breaks up by using her karate skills although later she develops fake fainting spells which allow her to fall into Banning’s arms. Babe gets jealous because all he gets is a little dancing hula girl doll which seems a little out of place in the Egyptian desert but, whatever.

The action takes a side track when Babe tries to learn Mr. Solvani’s magic trick of seeming to swallow a fair size boulder but then makes it appear out of thin air to drop on a Bactrian camel (appeared in this film) which, while not native to Egypt, can gallop from central Asia to munch on Tana leaves, although apparently, they can be crushed by large rocks falling from Babe’s mouth, which occurs after he, seemingly choking on the rock, is saved by the Mummy who dislodges it by using the Heimlich maneuver. This brings them all together to fight for rescheduling Tana leaves to Schedule III by fooling all the DEA agents into believing they can learn to shoot like Marta, who’s a better shot than Annie Oakley.

This is a pretty good movie, mostly because of the Svengoolie cameo gag, and I give it a Shrilling Chicken Rating of 4/5.

Iowa Blizzard Update!

The blizzard started yesterday evening. I put out the garbage this morning and scraped out a path to our doorstep in case we get the cribbage boards delivered today from Canada. I’m not expecting it.

It’s still blowing snow around. The stuff is freezing on the driveway and the sidewalks. I’m surprised the garbage can is still upright. It won’t be a good day for using the electric snow shovel. The blades might not stand up to the thick icy crust. I’ll make do with the shovel. The plow just went by.

Looks like Bigfoot survived it.

Rash of Bigfoot Sightings in Ohio, So What About Iowa?

Actually, I should refer to the multiple sightings of Bigfoot as a flap. That’s proper terminology. The news story shows a video with the cryptid on it although I think it looks more like somebody smeared a chocolate bar on the camera lens.

There’s an organization called Bigfoot Society that is tracking the story. The Bigfoot Society Podcast by Jeremiah Byron of Earlham, Iowa posts weekly about Sasquatch sightings and lore. Here’s one about Iowa. There are a lot of ads periodically, so be patient.

There’s one thing I couldn’t find on the web and that’s the Iowa Bigfoot Information Center. There was a guy named Kevin Cook who was the head of it, but that was back in the late 1970s, which supposedly is when there were a lot of Bigfoot sightings. I found a really short article from September 24, 1978 published in the Des Moines Register about him.

I did a little digging and Kevin Cook partnered with another Bigfoot researcher named Clifford Labrecque to start the Iowa Bigfoot Information Center. Jeremiah Byron’s full YouTube presentation is sponsored by the Bigfoot Society Podcast and, unfortunately is available to members only. But there is a short teaser.

In the teaser, Byron interviews Kevin Cook and, although I can’t tell exactly how recent it is, I believe it was done shortly after Labrecque passed in 2021. The discussion mentions a prominent scientist, Dr. Jeff Meldrum, who has been interviewed on TV about Bigfoot. Unfortunately, he also passed in September of 2025. He was a full professor of Anatomy and Anthropology in the Dept of Biological Sciences at Idaho State University. He was a guest on some popular TV shows about Bigfoot (one of them misidentified him as being on faculty at Iowa State University). People are always getting Iowa mixed up with either Idaho or Ohio.

I’m reminded also of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO), which keeps records of Bigfoot sighting around the country and they also sponsor annual Bigfoot hunts in Iowa. They had one last year, but I couldn’t find out how that went. There’s 2026 Iowa BFRO Expedition, which starts next month, April 30-May 3. Details are available below the announcement. Guns and dogs are not allowed.

Sena and I have done our own Bigfoot expeditions and one of them is below. No need to thank us; it’s our pleasure to contribute to the scientific endeavor.

Upcoming Sven Squad Movie “Friday the 13th”

The upcoming movie with the Svengoolie Sven Squad this Saturday the 14^th comes a day late. It’s the very first “Friday the 13^th.” I’ve never seen it, but I think I’ve seen a couple of the 35 sequels. I always have to stop and think about how to distinguish the 1978 slasher “Halloween” from the 1981 slasher “Friday the 13^th,” which I think I saw.

I can’t, but that’s OK because I’ve been too busy trying to figure out why the name of the star of the first Friday the 13^thfilm sounds familiar to me. You’ll be thrilled to know that I finally remembered it’s Betsy Palmer from the old 1960’s TV show “I’ve Got a Secret.”

I think she wanted this movie to be a secret until it started making some real money.

Anyway, the movie starts with some guy in a hockey mask slashing various people who then hire a guy in a fancier mask to slash the first guy so they can go back to having casual you-know-what-kind of relations and shoplifting candy cigarettes from K-Mart, which by the way used to be Kresge’s which I am old enough to remember although I never shoplifted anything I swear. What happens next is that Slasher 1 and Slasher 2 meet on the street at high noon and threw samurai swords at each other, often missing and breaking Kresge’s windows until this wakes up Chuck Norris who is pretty annoyed and roundhouse kicks both Slashers into Saturn’s orbit although they manage to hitch a ride on one of those newfangled UFOs which resemble orbs, the extraterrestrial pilots of which hit the warp drive and shoot through a wormhole portal sending them backwards in time to 1977 and boy does that ever mess with the gyroscopes and scorch the spark plugs making it necessary to jettison a load of poorly mixed nuclear grade molten metals into a field in Council Bluffs, Iowa which for some reason did not lead to that fine community becoming a major tourist attraction, so…well, the film probably doesn’t go exactly that way but then I’ve never seen it so it doesn’t hurt to speculate a little bit.

Svengoolie Show Movie: “Son of Frankenstein”

Svengoolie Intro: “Calling all stations! Clear the air lanes! Clear all air lanes for the big broadcast!”

Last night I thought I was going to see the movie “Son of Frankenstein” again because I saw it a year and a half ago.

In fact, while watching it I thought I either fell asleep during most of it the first time or it was a different movie. Because Svengoolie mentioned that it was a longer version of the film, I’m pretty sure it was the latter.

I didn’t write a review of it in 2024 and I also mentioned that I hadn’t read the Mary Shelley’s novel. “Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.” So, today I actually read the Gutenberg Project version of it (OK, I don’t know if it’s the 1818 or the 1831 edition and this was not required reading in my college literature class), which was devilishly difficult to read because of the page setup.

Despite the archaic diction, I thought it was a great book and it confirmed my thought about one of the major themes in it—revenge.

I think one of the most interesting things about Shelley’s book is the connection to Prometheus. So, Dr. Jenny Lind Porter taught my English Literature class at Huston-Tillotson College (now H-T University) in Austin, Texas and she assigned the paperback edition of “Mythology” by Edith Hamilton back in the mid-1970s. The original copyright year was 1942, renewed in 1969.

One of the interesting stories about Prometheus is that he cooked up a fake steak dinner for Zeus by tricking it out with a lot of fat, bone, and gristle and gave fire to men so they could barbecue the best cuts so Zeus took revenge on Prometheus by tying him to a rock where a huge eagle snacked on his liver every day which regenerated making the torment a regular thing. Prometheus also cautions against the threat of unrestrained scientific progress and hubris (overweening pride).

Anyway, “Son of Frankenstein” is a 1939 Universal Films movie starring Basil Rathbone (Baron Wolf von Frankenstein), Josephine Hutchinson (Elsa von Frankenstein), Donnie Dunagan (Peter von Frankenstein), Boris Karloff (the monster), Bela Lugosi (Ygor), and Lionel Atwill (Inspector Krogh).

The theme of revenge is strong in “Son of Frankenstein.” Ygor takes revenge on the two living council members who hanged him after the elder Frankenstein first let the monster loose. Lugosi is both creepy and funny at times. I think the makeup job on his neck made him look like he has a chicken bone caught in his throat when viewed in profile.

I was pretty impressed by Frankenstein’s gradual transformation from a gentle husband and father to a high-strung, sarcastic, and extremely irritable and driven mad scientist.

The dart game between Inspector Krogh and Frankenstein are almost surreal, occurring at a time when the mood is very tense when the action going on elsewhere in the castle is dire enough to demand their attention to something else other than playing darts. I got the sense Frankenstein threw darts because it’s cheaper than therapy.

The monster’s behavior varied from being a dumb randomly violent beast to a calculating criminal methodically setting up one of his brutal murder scenes to make it look like an accident.

I think this movie is pretty good and I give it a Shrilling Chicken Rating of 4/5.

Svengoolie Show Movie: “The War of the Worlds”

We watched the 1953 movie “War of the Worlds” last night. I can vaguely remember seeing the remake starting Tom Cruise years ago. I ran across a free pdf of H.G. Wells novel “The War of the worlds, published in 1898 and quickly read it today for the first time. Apparently, it was a pretty racy book not suitable for children as this quote shows:

The War of the Worlds by HG Wells quote in Book One, The Coming of the Martians, Chapter 14 In London pg. 129: “He heard footsteps running to and fro in the rooms, and up and down stairs behind. His landlady came to the door, loosely wrapped in dressing gown and shawl; her husband followed ejaculating.”

You won’t see anybody ejaculating in this movie.

Contrast this with Book Two, The Earth Under the Martians, Chapter 2: What We Saw From the Ruined House, pg 202: “In the next place, wonderful as it seems in the sexual world, the Martians were absolutely without sex…” Apparently, they reproduced by budding.

I was surprised to see one of the main characters in the movie, the scientist Dr. Clayton Forrester (Gene Barry) square dancing with the other star Sylvia Van Buren (Ann Robinson). That’s when I knew this was going to be a real horror flick, because I remember being required to learn how to square dance in grade school. What a nightmare! Anyway, in the movie they were do-si-dosing and allemanding left all over the joint. Check out the video of the scene below:

It quickly got scarier when the Martians arrived. The space ships were modeled by imitating the shapes of cobras and manta rays, but the actual Martians who drove them reminded me of little E.T. The Extraterrestrial in the movie of the same name.

By the way, Orson Welles was not related to H.G. Wells but he did perform the radio show adaptation of it in 1938, which led to many stories reporting that the listeners peed their pants in widespread panic, but that didn’t really happen. Most people didn’t listen to the radio and preferred to play video games on their cell phones. H.G. Wells met with Orson after that and taught him how to spell his name right.

The attitude in the 1950s toward women actors was atrocious and Ann Robinson was required to have two or three episodes of hysterics and at least one near-fainting spell per scene with Gene Barry. However, her hair was never mussed and her makeup never smeared, even after she beat the crap out of a Martian who tried to square dance with her.

The Martians were really out of shape and flabby so they used their technology to make copies of Chuck Norris, who round-house kicked the entire military force into next week. Of course, the Pentagon was still trying to back-engineer UFOs that crashed in places like Roswell, New Mexico so they were naturally ill-equipped when it came to battling the Martians.

However, what the Martians didn’t know about earthlings was the strength of our immune systems. In fact, they didn’t know what immune systems were (which even some earthlings don’t understand). They were unaware of the power of snot, which some people are able to focus, aim, and fire with pinpoint accuracy.

On the other hand, according to a reliable scientific opinion from a well-documented, unimpeachable source (Men in Black movie 1997): “Human thought is so primitive it’s looked upon as an infectious disease in some of the better galaxies.” On the other hand, we can do-si-do when properly motivated.

I think this movie is OK, outside of square-dancing special effects. I give it a 3/5 Shrilling Chicken Rating.

Svengoolie Sven Squad Movie: “The Mist”

Last night the Sven Squad presented the movie, “The Mist” on the Svengoolie show. This one is hard to simply poke fun at. It’s also hard to compare to Stephen King’s novella of the same name published in 1980 because I’ve never read it.

The graphic violence throughout the film and the ending left me cold. I think even the Sven Squad had a difficult time making jokes in between scenes.

That said, the story and characters reminded me of certain kinds of people and certain themes. One kind of person is the cult leader. In the film this would be Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden). She was this hyper religious person who acted crazy, yet managed to convince a large number of people that she was the savior who could deliver everyone in the grocery store from the horrible fate lurking in the mist. This turns out to be human sacrifice, which is what some ancient cultures did to appease the gods and also gave them a sense of control over nature.

For some strange reason, she was not eaten by one of the monsters, despite the fact it landed on her chest, climbed up on her neck and sprinkled salt, pepper, and oregano on her face.

It also reminds me of cult leaders who managed to persuade many people to commit suicide, e.g., Jim Jones (Peoples Temple) in the 1970s, Marshall Applewhite (Heaven’s Gate) and David Koresh (Branch Davidians) in the 1990s.

I wasn’t sad about Mrs. Carmody’s fate.

One theme I think of from this movie is hubris. Sure, it’s something that will trigger bad memories for some people of their undergraduate college days, but I think it explains why the military decided they could safely open a portal between dimensions. Hubris is overweening pride and means you’re tempting the gods to destroy you when you think you can get away with sticking your chewing gum under your seat at the movies. People think they can control whatever monsters they find in the universe and can stuff trouble back in Pandora’s box.

Another common idea nowadays is that some otherwise unexplainable creatures you almost never see in real life and never find fossils for (like Bigfoot) might be because they are interdimensional beings. Hey, that works for some people.

So, you can go ahead and keep looking for wormholes and portals that open up the gates of hell and there you go. You just let a mosquito the size of an SUV in the house. Are there doorknobs on portals? Did you listen to your mother when she told you to shut the screen door behind you?

No, and you know who you are.

I got a kick out of Ollie Weeks (Toby Jones) who could shoot a monster by turning his back on it and using a mirror and firing backwards over his shoulder, blasting it into next week. How many bullets did that gun have? I thought it was ten but it seemed like there were more, even though it misfired once. Ollie was a hero without hubris.

I didn’t get the ending and I’m not going to put in a spoiler on it. But it’s another place where the number of bullets in the gun gets to be the focus of some reviewers who have horrible suggestions.

This movie is tough to rate because it takes itself too seriously. The acting was riveting in some scenes and just overdone in others, in my opinion. It’s not for kids, yet there was a little kid who played a big role in it. The ending seems to lend itself mainly to instructions on how to commit homicide and suicide. The cavalry arrives too late. It’s packed with action but it lacks heroes to admire, except for self-effacing, deadeye Ollie.

I’m giving this movie a Shrilling Chicken Rating of 3/5.

Finally Saw the Movie “The Day The Earth Stood Still”

We watched the movie “The Day the Earth Stood Still” today. It was made in 1951 and I’d never seen it. Sena thinks she did a long time ago. You can watch it on the Internet Archive. Similar movies didn’t make much of a splash, some of which you might remember:

“The Sacking of Punxsutawney Phil”: An expose of how the groundhog gets fired because it can’t reliably predict when spring begins.

“The Loser Always Pays the Bill”: A delightful comedy about two guys who play Rock, Paper. Scissors 30,000 times to decide who pays for lunch.

“Let’s Get Stewed to the Gills”: An experimental film in which 3 college freshmen find ways to cope with higher education by pouring beer in everything they consume.

Anyway, the movie is about an extraterrestrial named Klaatu and his robot Gort who land in Washington, D.C. to warn everybody that it’s best not to blow up Earth and other nearby planets with nuclear weapons unless you want the robot cops like Gort from Venus to spank everybody in sight.

I can’t poke fun at this movie like I do with all the Svengoolie films. The story is fascinating, the acting is superb, and it’s been called one of the 12 greatest science fiction films of all time by none other than Arthur C. Clarke (according to Wikipedia). The cast includes Michael Rennie as Klaatu, Patricia Neal as Helen Benson, and Sam Jaffe as Professor Jacob Barnhardt.

It was based on a short story “Farewell to the Master” by Harry Bates, which you can read in its entirety on the web because the person who posted it says there’s no record of copyright currently on file.

I read “Farewell to the Master” and I can say I’m glad the movie used the name Gort instead of Gnut for the giant robot.

Now that I’ve seen the movie, I’m still inclined to speculate that maybe Frank E. Stranges got the idea for his book “Stranger at the Pentagon” from it, but there’s no way to prove it. If you google the name of the character Valiant Thor in Stranges book, you’ll get photographs back of a man who happens to be an Australian actor named Cody Fern who was on a TV show I’ve never seen, “American Horror Story.” He played Valiant Thor and this contributes to the lore surrounding a fictional character and tends to give it a sort of semblance of reality. Stranges contributed to the mystique by presenting the events in the story as historical fact.

But the importance of the movie “The Day the Earth Stood Still” is the warning to the leaders of the nations of the world in the early days of the Cold War (and even today) that playing with nuclear matches is a bad idea.

Svengoolie Show Movie: “Dracula”

Svengoolie Intro: “Calling all stations! Clear the air lanes! Clear all air lanes for the big broadcast!”

I’ve never seen the 1931 Universal production of Dracula and it was a film to marvel, mainly to marvel at Bela Lugosi’s ability to contort those famous hands into spell-binding patterns while commanding hapless victims “I command you; come here!” He didn’t say “bluh, bluh” even once.

I tried to mimic Dracula’s hand gestures and ended up going to the ER to get them unraveled.

Instead of Jonathan Harker (David Manners) traveling to Transylvania according to the Bram Stoker novel, it was Renfield (Dwight Frye) who was the real estate agent making preparations for Count Dracula (Bela Lugosi) to rent out the Motel 6 room (“We’ll leave the spider snacks out for you!”) in London.

Renfield is Dracula’s first victim shortly after his arrival at the castle in Transylvania. You never see fangs on the vampires in this movie, which is pretty refreshing actually. Fake fangs interfere with delivering one’s lines, such as when Dr. Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan) holds up a mirror to Dracula (which shows he has no reflection), who then smacks it out of his hand:

Dracula: Tho thorry, Doctor Van Helthing. My humble apology. I dithlike mirrors.

There’s this ongoing debate about why wolfsbane instead of garlic was used to ward of Dracula. The explanation is pretty simple really. Nobody could find enough garlic to use because most of it was in the spaghetti sauce often served to the actors for lunch.

There is a little humor in this dark movie. Martin the asylum nurse (Charles K. Gerrard), who’s always chasing after Renfield and taking away the dead chipmunks he insists on eating, has a funny exchange with one of the maids when they’re talking about someone else in the house:

Maid: He’s crazy!

Martin: They’re all crazy except you and me. And sometimes I have my doubts about you.

Maid: You got something on your face, dude!

I think right after this is when Dr. Van Helsing hires Count Chocula with a plan to arrange a cage match with Dracula.

It’s not very well known, but if you noticed that most men in the movie have their hair styled in a way which makes them look like they’re wearing helmets, that’s because they were all using Brylcreem, which was invented in 1928 in Birmingham, England by County Chemicals at the Chemico Works which was shipped to California with the warning label “A Little Dab’ll Do Ya” which Universal obviously ignored.

I think this is an OK movie and I give it a Shrilling Chicken Rating of 3/5.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Pentagon

So, just for laughs I sometimes watch Ancient Aliens (you know, the UFO show with the hair dude). Last night, they were talking about some guy named Valiant Thor as if he were a real person. Maybe some of you know about the book, “Stranger at the Pentagon,” which you can read for free on the Internet Archive. I just quickly clicked through the pdf of it and it’s pretty interesting. The one I saw had sections about Men in Black (MIB) in it, which of course means Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones are even older than we think.

It was written in 1967 by Dr. Frank E. Stranges and it’s supposedly a story of an extraterrestrial named Valiant Thor who presented to the White House in the 1950s and spoke to President Eisenhower and others, giving the urgent message that Earthlings need to shape up or the planet would be destroyed.

OK, the spoiler is that there’s no evidence this ever happened, although many people, like Fox Mulder, want to believe.

I want to believe, too but there’s no official record Vai (as Valiant Thor is sometimes called in the book) ever lived at the White House, although maybe he snorted something you can sometimes find in the White House but nobody officially will admit that ever happens either.

One person stated that the idea for the book might have come from the 1951 film “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” Artificial Intelligence (who always butts in to my web searches) doubted it’s ever been on the Svengoolie TV show, but I found a Facebook post from 2025 which called it a “Sven fan favorite.” It’s probably never been on Svengoolie because it’s far too classy. There’s an interesting article about it on Turner Classic Movies but I don’t know if TCM ever showed it.

As near as I can tell from just from what I’ve read on the web about this movie is that it was made in the early Cold War days and it’s really sending a message to mankind warning them away from killing everybody and the planet and instead strive to establish peace in the world. It’s long been regarded as a cinema masterpiece.

Did it influence Dr. Stranges to write the book “Stranger at the Pentagon”? I don’t know, but some people think so, judging from one social media comment. I think that person might have been put off by the attempt to make it sound like it was historically accurate, which is what many people seem to think.

In my opinion, the whole yarn about Valiant Thor is fiction that, while not historically accurate, is compelling enough to make you think about how important it is for national leaders and people who live on the planet to try and clean up our act. Efforts to make this story seem like it actually happened backfires and misses the point.

By the way, none of this has anything to do with Bigfoot.