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Svengoolie Movie: “Devil Doll”

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

Well, I watched the Svengoolie movie, “Devil Doll” last night and was that creepy! It’s a British 1964 film directed and produced by Lindsay Shonteff (although I don’t know him from Adam. What do you take me for, a legit movie reviewer?).

Anyway, I noticed right away that I recognized one of the stars, William Sylvester (Mark English) who played a reporter trying to figure out what gives with the Great Vorelli (Bryant Halliday) a really sleazy ventriloquist and hypnotist whose stage act includes stealing Mark’s girlfriend Marianne (Yvonne Romain) and humiliating his dummy Hugo in front of an audience full of well-to-do people who smoke unfiltered cigarettes like they were going out of style.

Anyway, William Sylvester starred as Dr. Heywood Floyd in the 1968 blockbuster film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Who can forget the scene of him puzzling over the long sheet of instructions for using the Zero Gravity Toilet! I don’t think there’s a free copy of it, so it’ll set you back at least twelve bucks.

But what a contrast between the elegantly cryptic Heywood Floyd and Mark English, who is a hard-nosed, cynical journalist trying to figure out whether there’s a little guy inside the Great Vorelli’s wooden dummy Hugo, mainly because Hugo can get up and walk, even sing and dance a few show tunes like Puttin on the Ritz better than Frankenstein’s monster in you-know-which movie! Mark even gets an opportunity to examine Hugo using a set of Stanley tools, x-rays, and X-Acto knives but doesn’t get any reaction from the dummy unless you count a little sawdust.

But the tough-minded Mark gets a surprise visit from Hugo who gives him a few tips on woodworking and a hint that there’s more to him than sawdust.

The Great Vorelli has a master plan and hypnotizes Marianne which leads to a pretty complicated plot twist which involves the hypnotist learning ancient techniques for messing around with peoples’ souls which Dr. Heller (Karel Stepanek) dismisses in favor of a clinical diagnosis of catalepsy (although he didn’t directly imply Marianne was cataleptic) when Mark tries to convince him that Marianne’s personality change and delirious appearance was brought about by Vorelli.

You can check the catalepsy comment on a 16mm film of the full movie at about 1:05:40.

This catalepsy reference fascinated me because I’m a retired psychiatrist and I’ve seen patients with the syndrome. I guess there were no expert consultants available to the director.

There is a fight scene between Hugo and the Great Vorelli, full of switchblade knives, a hybrid chess boxing match, and tag team with Chuck Norris although the roundhouse kick was ineffective.

You didn’t think there’d be spoilers, did you? There were a lot of ventriloquist dummy jokes during the Svengoolie show and my featured image is my stab at it. Anyway, the ending is surprising.

I think the movie is pretty creepy and dark enough that it might not be a good flick for children. I give it a 3/5 Shrilling chicken rating.

Svengoolie Show Movie: “Curse of the Undead”

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

I watched the Svengoolie show “Curse of the Undead” last night. Sena watched some of it. I guess I had more stamina. This is a 1959 vampire cowboy flick directed by Edward Dein and starred Eric Fleming as Preacher Dan (if you’re old enough you might remember him as Gil Favor in Rawhide in the 1960s) and Michael Pate as the vampire Drake Robey who could withstand full daylight without turning to mush. Kathleen Crowley plays Dolores Carter, the woman who owns the ranch where Robey does a lot of the biting.

My favorite line from the movie was Drake Robey’s comment about the dead When Dolores Carter asks him if living near a cemetery would bother him: “The dead don’t bother me; it’s the living who give me trouble.”

Once I got past the idea of the vampire not immediately bursting into flames in the daytime, I was pretty much OK with Robey, a man in black gun for hire whose attire reminded me of Johnny Cash. I half expected him to whip out a guitar and start singing “The Ring of Fire, “only Robey didn’t sing because this movie was not a musical.

The action starts in a small western town where everyone smokes cheroots, so popular in Spaghetti Westerns where all the cowpokes eat Italian cuisine lightly seasoned with cigar ash. Young females are dying off from anemia and nobody notices the two small puncture wounds in their necks except Preacher Dan, who wears a lapel pin festooned with a tiny cross made of the wood from the original cross. Something really special happens to this little cross.

One of the major conflicts in the film involves a guy named Buffer (played by Bruce Gordon) who is giving the Carter family a hard time by squatting on hundreds of acres of their land and planting marijuana on it, which his henchmen (yes, the stooges of the boss evil guy are always called henchmen) steal to stuff their bongs, homemade from cattle horns and then try to play poker but can’t win even a single hand because they forget how to play and get the munchies just looking at the chips (“Wow, man, I didn’t know they made potato chips different colors!). Buffer eventually kills two members of the Carter family.

After that, Dolores makes a bunch of help wanted signs advertising her need for a hired killer in order to get revenge on Buffer. The Sheriff (played by Edward Binns) just tears up all the signs citing her for spelling errors and tries to team up with Preacher Dan to strong arm Buffer into a scheme to make a new headache medicine they promised would be named after him if he would just cool his jets.

About this time, the man in black, Drake Robey, arrives in an exquisitely tailored outfit of slim fitting jeans with matching leather vest who evidently has no aversion to sunlight but takes exception to Preacher Dan’s assertion that suicide is a sin punishable by God, which you’ll have to figure out by watching the movie. Obviously, there’s more to Robey than meets the eye because he’s a killer for hire who always seems to win every gunfight even though his opponents always swear they shot first and hit him—just before they die.

Robey’s lack of sensitivity to light can also be inferred from one of the first scenes in which he appears. He “sleeps” during the daytime but with the coffin lid open. Claustrophobia comes to mind.

The big battle between Preacher Dan and Robey begins with a preliminary 2 out 3 fall hybrid chess boxing match in which Preacher Dan gets knocked out despite winning the chess match. The final struggle takes place in the street and you’ll just have to watch the movie because there are no spoilers here on that. However, several members of the cast had roles on episodes of a popular TV show, which is a longstanding joke on the Svengoolie show.

I think this movie is OK and I give it a 3/5 shrilling chicken rating.

Svengoolie Show Movie: The Valley of Gwangi!

I watched the Svengoolie show 1969 movie, “The Valley of Grungi” on Saturday. Sorry, that’s Gwangi. That was a pretty good day for TV. I saw “Men in Black” on cable, which is rare. We also saw the Iowa Hawkeye vs Oregon Ducks football game. Too bad they lost, and by only 2 points.

Anyway, “The Valley of Gwangi” was released in 1969, was directed by Jim O’Connolly, and featured the stop motion wizardry of Ray Harryhausen. It starred James Franciscus as Friar Tuck (oops, different movie), I mean Tuck Kirby, Gila Golan as T.J. Breckenridge, and Laurence Naismith as paleontologist Professor Bromley. Franciscus and Bromley both won Academy awards for “Whitest Teeth on the Planet.” Sena watched the show intermittently while flipping channels but noticed the brilliant white teeth.

But really white teeth were not the only bright spots in the film. I’ll let you know if I think of any others.

The main idea of the story is that Tuck and T.J. have this dysfunctional relationship based on Tuck’s inability to settle down and stop being a jive hustler, which happens to also be T.J.’s problem, frankly. T.J. is in this decaying wild west rodeo show which barely supports a living and Tuck is chasing a dream of a ranch in Wyoming and wants T.J. to team up with him.

But they get distracted by a paleontologist, a little horse (Eohippus) from the dinosaur age millions of years ago, and a valley containing giant lizards like an Allosaurus, a Styracosaurus, and a Pteranodon.

But they left out the dinosaur the remains of which were recently found in Montana: the dreaded dome-headed dinosaur, Brontotholus harmoni, a frequent combatant in mud-wrestling contests with Fred Flintstone.

But Bromley has his eyes set on capturing the Eohippus for scientific study (hah!), scheming to raise a corral full of Eohippi (is that the plural?), apparently to sell to people like Tuck and T.J. who have a fixation on ranches and wild west shows but can’t get along with each other long enough to run a lemonade stand.

Most of the action involves cowpokes falling off their horses while attempting to rope the dinosaurs with lariats clearly not strong enough to hold a 2-ton Allosaurus. Yet they manage to subdue it and drag it back to the wild west show arena where they make it dance to the tune Putting on the Ritz, which it apparently hated.

One of the characters in the movie is a boy named Lope, who is smart enough to stay out of some trouble than the boy Juanito in the movie “The Black Scorpion” but still manages to get nabbed by the Pteranodon, from which he has to be rescued. He is also pretty much cut from the same cloth as Tuck and TJ in that he’s a clever hustler and a matchmaker as well. Later, both Juanito and Lope team up in the combination sequel to both of these movies, “Misfit Monkeyshines and the Dome-Headed Dinosaur.” More stop action magic that you should not miss!

This movie is just a bit better than fair and I give it a 3/5 shrilling chicken rating.

Svengoolie Show Movie: “The Fly”

We watched the Svengoolie show 1958 movie “The Fly” last night and Sena says she’s seen it before. I can’t remember seeing the full movie, but for some reason the final scenes when the tiny creature in a tiny voice keeps screaming “Help me!” sounds familiar. I don’t know why I would “remember” only that scene.

That brings up something Sena alerted me to and which I’ve mentioned before in an oblique reference to the non-review I did of the Svengoolie movie, “Young Frankenstein” a week ago. It’s the Mandela Effect.

Some trivia about “The Fly” included the Mandela Effect about whether it was made in black and white—which didn’t happen. It was made in color. But many believe it was made in black and white.

Anyway, as a guy who writes parodic reviews, I can say that I have a couple of issues about this film directed by Kurt Neumann and starting Vincent Price (Francois Delambre), David Hedison (Andre Delambre), Patricia Owens (Helene Delambre), Charles Herbert (Phillipe Delambre), Herbert Marshall (Inspector Charas) and a white-headed fly as himself.

Andre is a dedicated scientist who develops the early version of the Star Trek transporter for which he gets no credit and his brother, Francois, who secretly loves his brother’s wife, Helene, eventually tricks her by lying about having the white headed fly locked in his desk drawer next to his shaving kit, convincing her to tell him the whole story about how and why Andre can apparently see just fine to use a typewriter, write on a black board and operate all the knobs and dials in his lab despite wearing a black beach towel draped over his head, which essentially makes this movie a very long flashback about the original theft of the x-ray vision technique from Superman, who already had a patent on it for about 20 years.

That’s one thing I don’t get about this film. Flies have compound eyes, but they don’t see in the dark any better than humans do, partly because they’re not related to bats who use sonar to guide them in dark caves where they zero in on your hair because you’re fool enough to blunder into the Bat Cave in order to find out just how Alfred keeps Bruce Wayne’s suits so nicely pressed.

Another thing that “bugs” me (Har! See what I did there?) is why do I not remember seeing Andre ever talking to his son, Phillipe. Is that some other variant of the Mandela Effect, only, of course, if my experience is similar to that of anyone else who has seen this movie? I know I didn’t fall asleep during the movie and miss the scenes of heartfelt interactions between father and son. Phillipe and his mother get along just fine and discuss the finer points of capturing white headed flies with Zagnut bars, which Beetlejuice described in the materials and methods section of his article published in the Lancet some time ago.

Svengoolie mentioned something pretty funny about the only scene which I seem to remember, which is the white-headed fly (which is you know who!) incessantly screaming “Help me deepen my voice so that Herbert Marshall and Vincent Price won’t bust out laughing at me!”

I think this movie is OK, and I give it a shrilling chicken rating of 4/5.

Upcoming Svengoolie Movie: “The Fly”!

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

We got the 1958 classic bug flick “The Fly” with Vincent Price coming up this Saturday and boy can I wait…no, sorry, I mean I can’t wait. I’ve never seen this particular film, but I did see the one made in 1986 in which Jeff Goldblum played the fly and developed superhuman strength, busting a man’s arm in a wrist wrestling match.

Until now, the insects we’ve seen on the Svengoolie show have been atomic bomb testing created giant insects like spiders and ants. Now we get to see a dead guy who survived the black plague, went to Harvard Business School and Julliard, and saw the Exorcist 167 times trick a giant fly by tempting it with a Zagnut bar, and drag it into his dining room where he has built the well-known transporter room with only limited help from chief engineer Scotty and also they’ve modified it to rearrange the atoms of creatures including humans and extraterrestrial giraffes, enabling them to prevail in stomping combat with the army of the planet of the apes who are just looking for a decent banana split for crying out loud and…well, that’s probably not how this movie goes, but I’m not in charge here.

Tried Watching Young Frankenstein on Internet Archive but No Go

OK, so I tried watching the movie Young Frankenstein on the Internet Archive just now, but it’s a no go. The choices are watching it formatted in a different language or sitting through endless buffering. So, I’m choosing to watch it on the Svengoolie show when it’s scheduled tomorrow at 7:00 p.m. That means I’ll miss the Iowa Hawkeye vs Penn State football game, which comes on at 6:00 p.m.

So be it.

Protecting the Universe from the Scum of the Earth

The title of this post might sound familiar to those who have seen the movie Men in Black way too many times, like me. There’s a trailer poster from the 1997 MIB movie showing Agents J and K holding huge space guns and the title is “Protecting the Earth from the Scum of the Universe.”

There are reasons to invert the title; all you have to do is read the news headlines. And one of them is on a story posted in the Guardian entitled ‘Bored aliens’: has intelligent life stopped bothering trying to contact Earth?

Whoa! When exactly did they start?

In a nutshell, the author is citing an astrophysicist’s notion that we should consider embracing a novel idea called “radical mundanity” which in this context says that maybe extraterrestrials are not much smarter than earthlings. That could be one explanation why nobody has seen what the majority of humans would call clear and convincing evidence that advanced civilizations exist out in the galaxy.

I guess “clear and convincing evidence” means ETs should be walking up to us and asking for directions to the nearest good rib joint.

I guess terms like “radical mundanity” and “radical empathy” are in vogue because radical rationalization is an old earthling habit that fathered both.

In fact, common sense suggests that something like radical practicality might explain one pretty funny quote from MIB. It’s the one in which Agent K is demonstrating the universal translator to the soon to be Agent J and confides that earthlings are not supposed to have it, and then goes on to explain why:

“Human thought is so primitive it’s looked upon as an infectious disease in some of the better galaxies. That kind of makes you proud, doesn’t it?”

Interesting why Agent K says that the low opinion some ETs have of humans is something to be proud of. Maybe that because of radical admiration, which is what we often have for slick villains clever enough to steal something like the universal translator—since radical criminality is so rampant everywhere on earth.

That would pretty much be the end of this line of thought (if I had any sense). But if you reason that most ETs would be leery of earthlings, why would so many of them travel to this planet? Part of the answer (of course) is in MIB. It’s Agent K’s explanation for why so many of them do.

Agent K: “Back in the mid-1950s the government started a little, underfunded agency with the simple and laughable purpose of establishing contact with a race not of this planet… They were a group of intergalactic refugees wanting to use the earth as an apolitical zone for…creatures without a planet. Did you ever see the movie Casablanca?”

“Today there are approximately 1500 aliens living and working Manhattan and most of them are decent enough; they’re just trying to make a living.”

OK, that’s only part of the story, maybe mostly the radical empathy part. Getting back to radical mundanity, which is how we got started on this crooked tale, where does this put earthlings and ETs? Maybe we’re headed toward realizing that every bright dot in the sky is not evidence for visitors from somewhere out in the galaxy or beyond. Maybe trying to get to Mars is not such a hot idea. Maybe we can try to get along with each other on earth without waiting for ETs to stop us from slaughtering each other. I don’t know as much about this approach as I should, but I think it’s called radical acceptance.

Svengoolie Show Upcoming Movie: “Young Frankenstein”

Here we go again with the conflict in schedules of the Svengoolie movie, the 1974 Mel Brooks Young Frankenstein this coming Saturday and the Iowa Hawkeye football game. On October 18, 2025, the Iowa Hawkeyes play Penn State starting at 6:00 p.m. Of course, that interferes with the Svengoolie show which starts at 7:00 p.m.

I saw the Svengoolie show movie “Son of Frankenstein” last year and blogged about it. I can’t remember if I’ve ever seen “Young Frankenstein” before, but I think so. It was a long time ago. I’m probably going to watch it on the Internet Archive. Yes, believe it or not, it’s on the Internet Archive!

I think one of the funniest scenes is the dart throwing game between Dr. Frederick Frankenstein (pronounced “Frankensteen”) and Inspector Kemp.

Svengoolie Movie: “Them!”

OK, so because I didn’t want to miss the Iowa vs Wisconsin football game (Hawkeyes won 37-0!), I watched the hit science fiction movie, “Them!” on the Internet Archive.

This is a 1954 film directed by Gordon Douglas and which won an Oscar for best special effects! At the time, creature effects must have been considered pretty special.

I thought this film was great! I thought I would be bored, but there were a lot of reasons to enjoy it. We recognized a few actors who later became big stars. I’m not going to openly spill the beans, but I can give you a few hints. One of them is now immortalized as part of an exhibit called the Voyage Home Museum in Riverside, Iowa, which is a short drive from Iowa City. Another later became known as king of the wild frontier. Yet a third couldn’t stop telling certain persons to “Get outta Dodge!”

I guess I have to tell you that the third guy was James Arness, who played FBI agent Robert Graham. He has a pretty important role which consists of his not knowing what to do about the invasion of someplace in New Mexico by giant ants resulting from the atomic blast test in White Sands in 1945. He also never gets to first base with Dr. Edmund Gwenn’s daughter (Joan Weldon), see below.

There were other film heavies including Edmund Gwenn as Santa Claus, tasked with giving Christmas presents to the giant ants in order to coax them into the post office where drunken postal workers would immobilize them with brown wrapping paper and tape, stamping labels marked Santa Not Available Right Now; Please Leave a Message. No wait, that was a different movie. Actually, Gwenn played the scientist Dr. Harold Medford who was in charge of designing a huge ant farm to keep the insects away from picnics. His devotion to ants probably kept him from adapting to normal life. He was as resistant to learning how to use the helicopter military radio headset in this movie as Brooks Hatlen (James Whitmore) was resistant to living outside of prison in The Shawshank Redemption.

Speaking of James Whitmore, he played a cop named Sgt. Ben Peterson who partnered with FBI Agent Graham to teach the giant ants how to play cribbage just well enough to lose most of the time whenever Peterson or Graham played them in penny a point games.

After a big meeting to plan the strategy for conquering the ants in which everybody smoked cigarettes producing a big haze that made it hard to get visible closeups, there was a flurry of hilarious comic relief scenes about an hour into the film which had us laughing ourselves silly.

I was pretty impressed with the amount of information about ants, which was pretty convincing and likely accurate about how strong, ruthless, and persistent ants are as a species. If they ever did grow gigantic, humans would be extinct in no time—a message Dr. Gwenn seemed to enjoy giving every 10 minutes or so.

There are some dad jokes in this “review” but there are no spoilers because I highly recommend seeing this film. I give it a 5/5 Shrilling Chicken Rating.

What’s Up with the Van Meter Iowa Visitor?

OK, so last night I watched Don Wildman’s Van Meter Visitor (supposedly a mysterious Van Meter, Iowa cryptid) episode first seen over 100 years) from his show Beyond the Unknown. The season 3 episode first aired in October 9, 2021, and I’d never seen it before.

Wildman said that somebody investigated the history of this creature who was spotted in 1903 in Van Meter, Iowa and concluded that the 8-foot-tall monster with a huge shining beak was actually a great hornbill—a pretty big bird but hardly 8 foot tall (more like 3-4 foot).

Supposedly, according to some experts, this big bird escaped from an exotic pet enthusiast. It’s never seen in America and is native to India or Southeast Asia.

I can’t find anything on line that says anything about this explanation. By most accounts, the Van Meter Visitor is a cryptid that is unexplained to this day. I think there’s still an annual festival for it in Van Meter.

The cast of Expedition X (season 4, episode 2) also did a TV episode about the Van Meter Visitor on September 9, 2021. I might have seen it, but I don’t remember the conclusion. I’m pretty sure the team didn’t think it was just a big bird. I don’t know why the Expedition X episode appeared about the same time as the Beyond the Unknown episode. Maybe Don Wildman and Josh Gates joked about the Van Meter monster over lunch one day and decided they’d both do a show about it.

Hey, I’m open to the great hornbill explanation, but so far, I can’t find any links to web articles that agree with it. Heck, even AI says “There is no connection between the great hornbill and the Van Meter Visitor.” I didn’t ask AI; it just pipes up because I can’t block it.

If any readers know about the great hornbill explanation for the Van Meter Visitor, drop a comment!