Tag: Svengoolie horror TV shows

Svengoolie Movie: The Tingler!”

We saw the 1959 movie “The Tingler” starring Vincent Price on the Svengoolie show last Saturday. Price plays a prison pathologist, Dr. Warren Chapin, who’s trying to scientifically study a parasitic creature called the tingler (tingles up and down your spine means you’re scared right out of your mind!).

It sits on your spine and feeds on fear by clamping down on it, eventually breaking it unless you scream. Then it’ll just let go. However, if you’re mute, scared speechless, or it grabs you by the throat—you’re done. So, the tingler lives on fear, although if you express fear vocally by screaming, you escape it.

OK, so I’m going to spoil the opening scene, which shows a prisoner being dragged to the electric chair, screaming all the way until the executioner throws the switch. When Dr. Chapin does an autopsy, he finds the prisoner’s spine is cracked. He says it wasn’t caused by the electrocution, but by the tingler.

Huh? But the prisoner screamed bloody murder (murder was why he got the death penalty by the way) hardly stopping to take a breath. Shouldn’t that have weakened or killed the tingler? You can find examples of inconsistencies like this in any cheesy movie, but where’s the fun in that?

One web article says the tingler creature was modeled after the velvet worm, which looks pretty creepy. In reality, the velvet worm is harmless to humans, but is a predator of many invertebrates. Just keep telling yourself, “I’m a vertebrate.”

You can watch the full movie on the Internet Archive. The most interesting part of it for me was the use of what was called “acid,” (meaning the hallucinogen LSD) by Dr. Chapin. He wanted to experience and record the actual experience of being scared by the tingler, just to see what it’s like apparently. He mainlines himself with a fairly stiff dose of LSD although I can’t remember how much.

Incidentally, an article in JAMA notes, “Doses of 20μg/kg of body weight are known to have been taken without a lethal outcome.” (Materson BJ, Barrett-Connor E. LSD “Mainlining”: A New Hazard to Health. JAMA. 1967;200(12):1126–1127. doi:10.1001/jama.1967.03120250160025). I don’t know how much Dr. Chapin weighs.

This was about the same time as a lot of people in the U.S. were experimenting with the hallucinogen in various ways, including mainlining it. There are web references to psychiatrists using LSD recreationally (this was when it was legal). Bad trips were and still are common, although there is a growing body of clinical studies that involve using the psychedelics as adjuncts in psychotherapy. It’s not for everybody, although tinglers might have a different opinion.

Anyway, Dr. Chapin has a bad trip, gets really scared of hallucinations and screams. Web articles say that killed his tingler, but I didn’t see it flop out of his mouth.

There you have it. Another really cheesy and fun Svengoolie movie. I’m a vertebrate.

Ahm a Fan of the Svengoolie Movie The Land That Time Forgot

We watched the Svengoolie movie, The Land That Time Forgot last Saturday night. Doug McClure stars as Bowen Tyler. He and others passengers of a ship are taken prisoner by the crew of a German U-Boat (World War I era) which torpedoed the ship.  Officers of the torpedoed ship and Tyler overpower the U-Boat crew. They all end up on the island of Caprona somewhere in the South Atlantic.

The island is crawling with thunder lizards of every kind including diplodocus. The dinosaurs are evolving alongside primitive humans who evolve by migrating north on the island “…instead of by natural selection” according to Wikipedia). Various humans both primitive and modern are casually slain and eaten and the rapidly evolving primitive humans pick off the moderns at random.

Only one primitive doesn’t seem to evolve beyond being a goofy guy named Ahm, who has trouble operating a handsaw and who refers to himself in the third person:

“Ahm out of breath!”

“Ahm goin’ back down

To Kansas soon

Bring back the second cousin

Little Johnny Coocheroo

Ahm a man

Spelled M-A-N

Man

Ohoh, ah-oh…” and so Ahm and so forth.

Ahm is very loyal to the moderns, even after he supposedly evolves to the status of the Galoo, who hate the moderns and try to kill them at every opportunity. But Ahm saves Tyler from being snatched up by a pterodactyl—sacrificing his own life, yelling “Ahm a loser and Ahm not what Ahm appear to be,” waving his arms and legs helplessly in the pterodactyl’s bill as it flies off into the great blue yonder.

I couldn’t remember what actor played the evil German who ultimately was responsible for getting the U-Boat destroyed at the end during a volcanic catastrophe. But he was the same guy who was the 4th actor to play the role of Doctor Who’s major archenemy, The Master. Svengoolie revealed that the actor’s name was Anthony Ainley and he played Major Dietz in The Land That Time Forgot.

The reason I bring that up is not just because he looked vaguely familiar to me because I used to watch Doctor Who. I searched the web for his name and the first answer that appeared at the top of the page was the Artificial Intelligence, now called Gemini, (not Google Assistant as Gemini claims), the artist formerly known as Bard), which is crazy wrong: “Doug McClure, an actor known for his cowboy roles, plays one of Dr. Who’s greatest enemies in the 1974 film The Land That Time Forgot.”

This is why you should be skeptical of almost everything AI says.

How evolution is affected by migratory patterns is not well explicated in The Land That Time Forgot although it probably does play a role. When somebody invents a time machine, we could just go back and ask Darwin.

Svengoolie Movie Trilogy of Terror!

Last Saturday we watched the movie Trilogy of Terror on the Svengoolie show. Well, we tried anyway. There were a lot of interruptions from severe weather warnings. We didn’t mind them because you ignore them at your peril. It’s hard to forget the 2020 derecho in Iowa, which affected a lot of Iowans, including us.

Trilogy of Terror had some psychiatric aspects to it that reminded me how Hollywood frequently gets it wrong when portraying them in films—but sometimes hits the nail on the head.

Although we missed parts of the first and second parts of the movie, it wasn’t difficult to figure out the psychological angle. Both “Julie” and “Millicent and Therese” made me think of antisocial personality disorder (ASPD). The male college graduate student was a pretty good example of a predatory guy lacking any conscience and feeling no remorse for his bad behavior against his apparently meek and defenseless teacher, Julie.

But then the tables were turned and it was Julie who was actually the convincing, coldly calculating and remorseless psychopathic serial killer. She kept a scrapbook of the newspaper stories about her many victims.

One of my colleagues wrote the book about ASPD. Dr. Donald Black, MD, is the author of Bad Boys, Bad Men: Confronting Antisocial Personality Disorder (Sociopathy). In it he recounts the story of serial killer John Gacy. He was diagnosed with ASPD at the University of Iowa. He collected a great deal of data about antisocial men and also acknowledges that women can be diagnosed with ASPD. He has also co-edited and published the Textbook of Antisocial Personality Disorder.

The “Millicent and Therese” part of the movie displayed how a woman can be diagnosed with ASPD. This was the character Therese—who was also Millicent, a very strait-laced alter personality, which makes this also a case of what you could call dissociative identity disorder (DID), which may be related to severe trauma. This used to be called multiple personality disorder. What was interesting about this part of the movie was that both identities were being managed somehow by a family physician, not a psychiatrist—which is not at all plausible.

The last part of Trilogy of Terror is “Amelia,” in which Amelia buys a Zuni fetish doll (named “He Who Kills”) which she intends to give to her boyfriend. However, she’s in a hostile, dependent relationship with her mother who controls her and interferes with every aspect of her life. Of course, the doll comes to life and tries to kill her.

The struggle between Amelia and the doll makes me think about her internal struggle with angry and probably murderous feelings about her controlling mother. Amelia finally internalizes the doll’s rage (actually her own) when he emerges from the oven where she shoved him in an apparently futile attempt to burn him to a crisp. What it looks like is that she inhaled the smoke, finally owning her own rage by internalizing the doll’s smoky remains. This transforms her into a vengeful killer (now grinning with the sharp teeth of the doll) who calls her mother to invite her over to her apartment with the obvious plan to cut her to pieces with a large knife.

This is probably not a movie for kids or sensitive adults, which Svengoolie acknowledges several times during the show. This is why I like the segment with Kerwyn, the dad joke telling chicken with teeth who is voiced by Rich Koz, who also plays Svengoolie. Usually during that segment he tells a series of jokes, repeating the lines a couple of times, seemingly in an effort to teach you how to tell dad jokes. There’s also a Kerwyn joke of the week event, in which he tells a joke submitted by a fan. The joke video takes a few seconds to load, so be patient.

Svengoolie Saturday Night Movie: The Wolf Man 

Here’s a suitable sort of dad joke Svengoolie style for the 1941 horror movie classic, The Wolf Man:

What do you call a dirty joke about the wolfman given at the strait-laced werewolf convention? A howler.

See what I did there? It puns on the word “howler” defined as an embarrassing mistake that evokes laughter, and also puns on the werewolf’s habit of howling. So, the mistake is the dirty joke being told to a convention audience of strait-laced (strictly moralistic) werewolves. OK, whatever.

I’m not great at telling dad jokes, although I like to hear them. I almost bought a book of dad jokes the other day, but when I read the copyright notice, I decided against it:

The notice of copyright for this book of dad jokes is to inform the purchaser that it is hereby forbidden to share these jokes in written, spoken, whispered, or telepathically delivered form to anyone else. Only the purchaser may whisper the jokes to himself as long as no other person is within earshot although it is preferable to read them silently. If this copyright notice is violated (and we will know because of the cleverly hidden monitoring device inserted in the text on each and every page), the publisher has the right to pursue every legal action necessary to extract money and suitable vengeance on the perpetrator, which means you.

I’ve been to the bookstore which sells several dad joke books and they all have this kind of copyright notice in them, regardless of who writes the books. I end up not buying any of them. Consequently, I never learn how to tell dad jokes. But that probably won’t stop me from trying.

Anyway, we saw The Wolf Man last Saturday and it’s a classic B horror movie. It was our first time seeing it and Lon Chaney, Jr. was a great werewolf. He didn’t like being called junior. We found out his father was a movie star too. I don’t think anybody called him Lon Chaney, Sr.

You can find attempts on the web to attach psychoanalytic interpretations of the Wolf Man, but I don’t buy them. On the other hand, there are some quotes from the film that sound like psychological observations:

Dr. Lloyd, the family physician: “I believe a man lost in the mazes of his own mind may imagine that he’s anything.”

Sir John Talbot (Larry the werewolf’s father): “Larry, to some people, life is very simple. They decide that this is good, that is bad. This is wrong, that’s right. There’s no right in wrong, no good in bad. No shadings and greys, all blacks and whites…Now others of us find that good, bad, right, wrong, are many-sided, complex things. We try to see every side but the more we see, the less sure we are. Now you asked me if I believe a man can become a wolf. If you mean “Can it take on physical traits of an animal?” No, it’s fantastic. However, I do believe that most anything can happen to a man in his own mind.”

You can see The Wolf Man on the internet archive. You can make up your own mind about it.

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?).