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Svengoolie Movie: Island of Terror!

The Saturday night Svengoolie movie was Island of Terror. This one was released in 1966 and starred Peter Cushing as one of the scientists who battle monsters who are snacking on the skeletons of humans. The monsters are also silicon-based.

These two elements reminded me of a couple of other things. One was the short horror story “Skeleton,” (often miswritten as Skeletons or The Skeletons). It was published by Ray Bradbury in 1945. It involves a weird doctor, Dr. M. Munigant, who treats Mr. Harris’s hypochondriacal preoccupation with his painful bones—by slurping all the bones out of his body, leaving him alive but like a jellyfish.

OK, so Bradbury’s story is really not closely related to the film—except they both involve feeding on skeletons.

The other thing Island of Terror reminds me of is the X-Files episode “Firewalker.” That’s because both conveyed the idea that life could be based on the element silicon. The fungus that took over the characters in “Firewalker” were silicon-based. The skeleton-munching monsters on the Island of Terror were silicon-based lifeforms and are called silicates in the movie.

And that leads to speculations about how the Island of Terror silicon-based, skeleton-eating monsters were defeated by the scientists. Nothing kills them but Strontium-90. But they don’t attack them directly with the isotope. Instead, they feed it to cattle, which the monsters then scarf down. Eating the Strontium-90 kills them.

Strontium-90 is an isotope that comes from nuclear bomb radiation fallout and nuclear accidents. The radioactive waste in nuclear reactors contains a lot of Strontium-90 and exposure to it can cause leukemia and—bone cancer. Bullets, bombs, and dynamite don’t harm the silicates.

Why does Strontium-90 destroy the silicates? As near as I can tell, because they get ultra-rapid progressive bone cancer from eating too many skeletons with bone-seeking Strontium-90. Or maybe they get radiation sickness.

Anyway, the movie itself was entertaining. The location of the action was on an island off the coast of Ireland. That might explain why most of the landscape looked Kelly green. The creature effects were pretty odd. The silicates moved very slowly, yet were able to catch humans easily, sometimes by climbing trees and dropping on their victims from above. I’m not sure how they were able to climb trees.

They also reproduced by fission, which revealed a chicken noodle soup-like substance between the two new silicates. This apparently violates the universal law that chicken noodle soup cures everything. It also promotes the typical Svengoolie Dad jokes, such as:

How do the silicates promote STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math)? They divide and multiply.

Leave a comment if you have a bone to pick with me about this post or a good Dad joke (is that a contradiction in terms?).

Solar Eclipse Around the Corner So We May Need to Protect the Cicadas!

The solar eclipse is just around the corner! We’re hoping for decent weather. We’re also hoping that everyone views the event with safety in mind.

University of Iowa Health Care ophthalmologist Dr. Ian Han has great tips on how to observe the solar eclipse on April 8, 2024. He pointed out that eclipse glasses that pass muster for safe viewing of what will be a partial eclipse in Iowa are typically on a list of approved eyewear and often have an ISO (that stands for International Organization for Standardization) number stamped on them. Our glasses have the right stuff!

However, animals sometimes get confused by solar eclipses, including cicadas (see my other post about cicada weirdness posted today). Cicadas might stop singing or maybe their gonads drop off a little sooner than usual, I don’t know exactly. But the zombie cicada gonad apocalypse timing probably makes that a non-issue. I did say “probably.” But how could we protect them if necessary?

There might be a scientific way to custom fit the cicadas with solar eclipse glasses using groundbreaking technology first used in the 1989 documentary film, “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,” which I have not personally watched but which could be featured on Svengoolie. We’d have to scale up production for possibly trillions of bugs. And I guess we can’t protect their gonads.

But we can all protect our eyes.

Update: I found a very good web site which tells you how to check if your solar eclipse glasses are genuine and protective. In addition to the information above, you can test the eclipse glasses indoors by putting them on. You shouldn’t be able to see anything but the brightest light bulbs and those just barely. You can test them outside as well. On a sunny day, look around at any reflective surface. You shouldn’t be able to see much at all. I tested ours and they passed with flying colors.

Cicada Zombieland

I’m sure you’ve heard the zombie cicada horror movie-like story in the news which sounds like it would make a great episode for the Svengoolie TV show. “Attack of the hallucinating zombie cicadas without gonads” would make a good title. One possible torrid scene suggestion would open in the “living” room (although zombies are not really alive), female (Alice) and male (Fred) cicadas seated on the sofa, lava lamp on the coffee table:

Fred: Alice baby, what’s your sign?

Alice: Your gonads are off, hon.

Fred: Oops. Did I leave them at the racquetball court?

Alice: Hmmm. Have you had your…shots?

Fred: What do you mean?

Alice: You’re not carrying any sexually transmitted diseases, are you?

Fred: I hardly see how that’s possible, since my gonads fell off somewhere. Have another drink of my psychedelic fungus urine, which I am able to shoot out stronger and faster than an elephant!

Alice: Not erotic enough in my book. I’m leaving, Fred.

Fred: Wait a minute, Alice. I’m sure my gonads are around here somewhere; let me check between the sofa cushions!

Cicadas are those bugs which make extremely loud buzzing noises every 13 or every 17 years or whatever, when they dig their way out of the ground to climb trees, molt, and find mates. Sex is the main event for them and possibly trillions of them will be looking to get lucky in the biggest invasion in over 200 years, at least in the southeastern United States.

On the other hand, there is something seriously wrong with some of them. A parasitic fungus with an LSD-like or amphetamine-like substance takes over the males and their sexual equipment just falls right off, replaced by fungus gobs which stick on to other males or females, infecting them and turning them into sex-crazed zombies which kill each other off faster than Woody Harrelson can slaughter the walking dead in Zombieland (a movie I never saw).

This reminds me of a couple of X-Files episodes, as I’m sure it reminds you. One of them is Firewalker in which a silicon-based fungus infects a crew of scientists and kills them off by making them zombie-like spreaders of it, complete with a long, strangely phallic-like sprout which explodes out of their necks, after the victims gradually become psychotic.

The other X-Files episode is Field Trip in which Mulder and Scully get trapped underground covered in a giant gooey fungus which makes them hallucinate their brains out. At the same time, it’s digesting them. Yum.

I don’t think the X-Files producers got the idea for the episodes from the cicada zombies.

Svengoolie Chicken Juggler Insanity!

Here’s yet another take on the Svengoolie TV show fan insanity. Maybe we’ll get over it someday, but for now I doubt it.

Sena gets in on the act this time as she throws the chicken at me after I tell cheesy jokes Svengoolie style before I juggle the Shrilling Chicken along with a couple of glow balls while wearing my brand new Svengoolie glow in the dark T-shirt. It’s a total fart—I mean gas.

I’m wearing gloves for a couple of reasons. Number one, the first time I tried to juggle the chicken, it dropped awkwardly on my right hand and made my index finger swell up. I had to let that heal up for a few days and I don’t want to reinjure myself. Number two—they just look cool.

Juggling items of different shapes, sizes, and weights is much harder than I thought. I never knew which way that chicken was going to fly. Catching it was total luck.

Doing stand up was a new thing for us. I never knew how hard it is to get your lines right. We had to do several takes to get the joke routines down. Muffing my lines was almost as funny as getting the jokes right.

But those jokes are so lame they’re great! The rim shot sound effect was a free download on pixabay.

Just another plug for Svengoolie. It’s a MeTV channel cheesy horror flick fan favorite. The show airs every Saturday evening at 7:00 PM. Svengoolie has been hosting it for decades and he introduces the movie and shares interesting background about the films and actors. He also tells these really groaner-style jokes which triggers the audience to throw chickens at him.

Tomorrow night’s movie is The Time Travelers.

Svengoolie Triggers Memory Lane Trip to the Drive Ins

Both Sena and I stayed up to see the cheesy 1972 horror flick The Gargoyles last Saturday night. No kidding, Sena stayed up for the whole thing! The show runs from 7-9:30 PM but the actual movie is only a little over an hour long. It’s about a clan of gargoyles that every 500 years hatch from eggs and wage war on humans to take over the planet. They never get the job done, probably because humans have all the guns and all the gargoyles have are claws and flimsy wings which you don’t see used until the very last scene. Like all of the Svengoolie movies, all of the jokes are so bad they’re good.

You can ask a fair question, which would be what else is on in addition to the movie? There’s a lot of commercials, of course, as well as the corny jokes and skits. But the other features last Saturday were excerpts from the Flashback Weekend Chicago Horror Con, in August 2023. I think it’s an annual historical horror convention that takes place in Rosemont, Illinois.

One of the attractions was a panel presentation about the history of the 90^th anniversary of the drive-in theater hosted by Svengoolie and Joe Bob Briggs. It was arguably better than the feature flick. I have heard the history elsewhere about how the drive-in theatre began (I think it was on the travel or history channel).

The most interesting part of the history is how the Covid-19 pandemic influenced the recent history of the drive-in theaters. The point was that, when the pandemic hit the country, all indoor theaters closed, leaving the drive-ins the only place to watch movies for several weeks. They did pretty good business.

Moreover, horror movies and drive-ins go together like cheese and crackers (see what I did there, cheese as in cheesy movies?). OK, fine.

Anyway, horror films were mainly linked to low budget projects that big stars and big directors avoided like the plague. Mainly, those movies were played at the drive-ins—which is how they got a tarnished reputation. That led to cherished stories by older people who used to sneak their friends into the drive-ins by stowing them in the trunks of their cars. That probably did happen, even in the old Mason City Drive-In Theater in Iowa where Sena and I grew up. It was demolished in 1997.

As far as The Gargoyle movie goes, the one thing I couldn’t find out was exactly why Bernie Casey, who played the head gargoyle, didn’t voice his own lines. The web references I found just mentioned briefly that it was because his natural speaking voice didn’t fit the character. They were dubbed in by Vic Perrin who did the voice-over for the introduction to The Outer Limits.

Maybe the funniest scene was when the head gargoyle placated and playfully slapped the fanny of the female head breeder gargoyle after she noticed he was flirting with the human woman he kidnapped. The breeder was obviously really jealous. Maybe this means that the battle between gargoyles and humans will always come to a stalemate because we’re too much alike.

Attack of the Demonic Shrilling Chicken!

Remember that rubber chicken Sena ordered as a joke for what looks like my transformation into a Svengoolie fan? Svengoolie is the longstanding host on the MeTV channel which shows old, cheesy TV horror movies every Saturday.

Svengoolie always gets a lot of rubber chickens tossed at him after he tells a few jokes. Well, the rubber chicken arrived. Actually, I think it’s plastic, about which I’ll have a lot more to say. It’s called Shrilling Chicken. Sena ordered it from Wal-Mart. We’re still waiting for the Svengoolie glow-in-the-dark T-shirt, which she ordered through the Svengoolie web site.

The chicken is about a foot long and squeals when you squeeze it. It’s sold as a dog toy. It’s red and yellow and the first thing I did was to try to juggle with it along with two juggling balls. I thought it would be cool to get a YouTube video of it, especially while wearing the Svengoolie T-shirt.

I was trying to get the hang of juggling a linear chicken with juggling balls and was just getting to where I could do 3 or 4 throws while also squeezing it to make it squeal. And then it happened: the demonic chicken bit me (or is “pecked me” a better way to put it?)! That’s pretty spooky given the connection to Svengoolie, the horror show host.

OK, so it didn’t actually peck me in a satanic manner, but I caught it awkwardly in my right hand. My right index finger swelled up and it got a little sore. It’s healing quickly although it did leave a faint bruise.

Then I looked up Shrilling Chicken on the web. What a rabbit hole! I found warnings seemingly all over the web against getting within 100 yards of the thing because of allegations it contains toxic chemicals. In fact, pretty much all the warnings came from a group called Ecowaste Coalition, with the chief spokesperson being someone named Thony Dizon, Chemical Safety Campaigner.

Thony’s main message is that Shrilling Chicken contains unacceptable levels of “toxic plastic additives.” He cites a long list of European countries that have banned Shrilling Chicken, despite the labels on the package, one of which is “CE” which means that it meets European Union standards.

The warnings go on to say that children should not be allowed to even touch it, although there are dozens of ads on the web showing where you can buy it for kids, with one image of a child hugging a Shrilling Chicken as tall as he is. I didn’t know they made them that big.

Thony also goes on to cite an “FDA Advisory No. 2020-042” which clearly is opposed to Shrilling Chicken being on this planet. I spent quite a while looking for that FDA Advisory in the U.S. FDA website. I couldn’t find it.

If you don’t look closely, you’ll miss the part at the bottom of the page indicating that the “FDA” referred to is the one in the Philippines.

The Shrilling Chicken label also indicates that the toy is approved for kids 6 years and older. It also has the Green Dot symbol on it. Wikipedia says it’s “…to indicate to consumers who see the logo that the manufacturer of the product contributes to the cost of recovery and recycling.” The Shrilling Chicken is made in China.

On the whole, I would say Shrilling Chicken is less than demonic in any sense of the word. However, given what happened to me, I probably would not toss it at Svengoolie.

Also, I would suggest you not try to juggle with it. I had to lay off juggling practice briefly so I can heal up.

Transforming Into A Svengoolie Fan

We’re on a Svengoolie roll lately. I watched the Svengoolie show last Saturday and the made for TV movie was Dan Curtis’ Dracula. It was made in 1974. I thought I’d never seen this film before but that final scene in which Dracula (played by the phenomenal heavy, Jack Palance) gets skewered looked familiar. I may have seen part of it a long time ago.

I read the Bram Stoker novel, Dracula years ago when I was just a kid. It’s a scary book. I haven’t seen many movies about Dracula. I think we saw Bram Stoker’s Dracula produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, which came out in 1992.

In fact, Dan Curtis’ Dracula (produced and directed by Dan Curtis) was at first called Bram Stoker’s Dracula, although the title had to be changed so they wouldn’t be confused with each other. I got one joke from Svengoolie:

What’s Dracula’s favorite ice cream? Veinilla.

When you look at Svengoolie’s comments section about the movie, it’s astonishing to see there are over 3,900 comments (still counting) and over 3,000 just during the movie.

I thought Jack Palance was riveting as Dracula. Sena didn’t watch the show with me but she remembered Palance’s antics during the 1992 Academy Awards when he got the Oscar for best supporting actor in City Slickers. After he got the Oscar, he moved away from the podium, dropped to the floor and did one-arm pushups—and he was 72 years old at the time. I never saw that, probably because I was on call as a first-year psychiatry resident.

This upcoming Saturday, the movie will be Gargoyles, which I’ve never seen or even heard of before. Svengoolie is known for cheesy films, but many of the stars in some of them went on to have successful careers.

Sena plans to watch it with me! And she ordered a glow in the dark Svengoolie T-shirt as well as a rubber chicken for me. Svengoolie does a lot of dad jokes and he gets rubber chickens tossed at him. I’ll probably try to juggle using the rubber chicken.

Closing the Loop on All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office Search for Extraterrestrials?

Just in case you haven’t already heard, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) revealed the lack of evidence proving the existence of extraterrestrials from the reports about what we used to call UFOs.

And NASA has said basically the same thing.

So, is there anything left to say about this? Probably not from the official side of the issue. But I don’t think this will be the end of reports of UFOs from the public.

Fake Snakes Saga Slithers On

The fake snake saga continues with not much change in scaring off birds, evidently. Bird poop calling cards are still being left.

I repositioned them and we’re hoping for the best.

This reminds me that the other night I was awakened by what I was pretty sure was an owl and dogs raising a ruckus at each other. I thought there was either one or two dogs trying to imitate the owl.

I don’t think it was the other way around. There is an owl that barks like a dog, but I believe it’s found only in Australia. I think it barks because it can’t stop eating vegemite, which makes it think it’s a dog.

Snakes don’t make noises generally, other than hissing sounds unless they’ve been abducted by extraterrestrials. The ETs conduct genetic experiments on them and that’s how they came up with the reptilians—who bark like owls.

Make or Break Escape Plan When Your Car is in a Flood

Sena and I saw a Weather Channel segment on how to escape your car if it is sinking during a flood. It’s mainly a reminder to turn around, don’t drown. However, there were a couple of interesting things about it. One was the quiz, in the format of a “how would you survive?” quiz with 3 choices: Fasten the seat belt securely, shatter the window, or call 911. The right answer is to break the window and I’ll have more on that because there was no guidance at all about how to break the window. We thought that was an important omission.

The interesting thing about the video clip is that I thought I recognized it from a paranormal TV show, The Proof is Out There with Tony Harris. Most of the time, the conclusions tend to lean toward skepticism regarding paranormal explanations, but in this one, Tony called it a “Possible Miracle.”

In both the Weather Channel and The Proof is Out There, the vehicle was red and looked like it was bigger than a compact or standard size car. The way it moved in the flood water was very similar in both. The YouTube on The Proof is Out There was from Season 3 and it was posted on October, 2023. I’m pretty sure I saw it long before that. The video on the Weather Channel looks like a clip from the full video, and it stops early before the rest of the action.

In fact, there are a few news report videos (from the same news agency, the archives of which no longer have the video for some reason) of the incident, which happened in 2006 and which involves a woman in a red SUV in Pueblo, Colorado who drove into flood waters. The SUV sank, but not before attracting the attention of rescuers, reporters and camera crews. The SUV went underwater with windows rolled up and when it was later pulled out, the windows were still rolled up, unbroken, and all the doors were closed. It has never been clear how she escaped, although many speculated that it was a miracle.

Sena noticed that the windshield wipers were still working, something I had missed. A couple of YouTube viewers (in The Proof is Out There video) mentioned it, but nobody responded to the implication that the electric controls to the lower the windows might still have temporarily worked as the vehicle went under. That still doesn’t explain how they got rolled back up.

It’s also noteworthy that, despite the news story mentioning the driver’s name, where she worked, and that she had called her brother while the SUV was sinking, there doesn’t seem to be any record of anyone asking her how she’d gotten out of the vehicle.

This post is going to contain several YouTube videos, but I’m trying to keep them to the relevant minimum. I think, in all fairness to The Weather Channel about omitting how to shatter the vehicle window in order to escape sinking and drowning (during the TV episode mentioned above), they have posted a video in the past which does provide excellent guidance.

In this video, they mention something Sena knew about but which I was not familiar with—the little tool called a seat belt cutter and glass breaker. You can buy them just about anywhere, often for less than $20. The AAA web site has clear instructions for what to do in situations where this tool would come in handy. In that same web page, there’s a link to the AAA research study done in 2019 about these tools, which contains more helpful advice, such as that the spring-loaded tools work better than the hammer type, and that they work on tempered glass, not laminated glass.

In any case, we’re sold on the glass breaker and it’s on order. However, we would prefer to turn around, don’t drown.