Svengoolie horror TV shows – Go Retire Psychiatrist

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 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.

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.

Svengoolie Movie: “The Gorgon”

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

Well, last night I saw the 1964 Hammer Films movie “The Gorgon,” and the first thing to clear up is the name of the gorgon relating to the underlying Greek mythology which, incidentally, the Svengoolie show clearly did early on.

The gorgons were 3 ugly female creatures with snakes in their hair and if you looked at one of them, you’d turn to stone. The most well-known gorgon was Medusa, which Perseus defeated by only looking at her indirectly in a mirror and slicing off her head. Medusa was the only human gorgon and the other two were named Stheno and Euryale.

The problem is the gorgon’s name which is Megaera. Megaera was part of another trio of monsters in Greek mythology called the Erinyes (Furies). They also had snakes in their hair and their names were Megaera, Alecto, and Tisiphone (who is incorrectly identified as a gorgon in the film). They were the goddesses of vengeance who punished men for crimes like murder of relatives and lying. Gazing at them didn’t turn you into stone, but they could drive you crazy, and inflict disease if you didn’t laugh at your father’s Dad Jokes.

Moving right along, the movie begins with a lot of people in early 20^th century Europe being turned into stoners who smoke pot by the bongful, leading to Dr. Namaroff (Peter Cushing) noticing that many of them ended up getting institutionalized in the madhouse he runs in Vandorf, a small village in Germany, and where he occasionally removes the brains of some of the inmates and who also has a crush on his assistant, Carla Hoffman (Barbara Shelley).

Actually, the stoners literally turn into stone, presumed by some to be a result of the unbelievable potency of the local pot, but watch out, Prof. Karl Meister (Christopher Lee) has an amazing grasp of Greek mythology although even he can’t separate the Erinyes from the Gorgons.

There’s something weird going on and Meister gets a letter from Professor Jules Hetiz (Michael Goodliffe) who has a close encounter of the craggy kind which leads to Meister sending Paul Heitz (Richard Pasco) to dig into the mystery and also bring back some of that righteous pot.

However, Paul has a pretty bad trip on the stuff and ends up in Dr. Namaroff’s hospital for about a week convalescing. He and Carla really hit it off, which Namaroff gets pretty miffed about because Carla is his girl even if she is a little spooky. The local constabulary (the head of which is Inspector Kanof (Patrick Troughton, who was the second Doctor in Doctor Who in 1966) and is very protective of the secret which is behind all the broken furniture and homemade bongs in the forbidding castle in the neighborhood.

The gorgonizing secret of the whole affair gradually gets revealed in confrontation involving a snake pit in which a cobra bites Chuck Norris and after 7 agonizing days—the cobra dies.

I think the movie is fair but it gets the Greek mythology wrong. I give it a 2/5 Shrilling Chicken Rating. You can see it on the Internet Archive.

Svengoolie Movie: “War of the Colossal Beast”

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

I watched the movie “War of the Colossal Beast” last night. Sena saw only the first few scenes of it in the beginning because she took a bite out of a magical cake she got at Hy-Vee, grew into a giant (had to get a new roof), wandered downtown to the Ped Mall until she found a mushroom, nibbled on it till she shrunk down to normal size and didn’t get back home until the movie was over, so like always, I had to explain the show to her. Based on my Svengoolie movie “reviews” you can imagine how well that went!

Anyway, this movie was released by American International Productions in 1958 and it was a sort of but not really a sequel to their film “The Amazing Colossal Man,” released a year earlier. In that movie, a military man, Col. Glenn Manning got exposed to radiation in Las Vegas and grew to a height of 60 feet which meant he could hit the free throw shot from several miles away. He ran amok and the army lobbed bombs and shot bullets at him until he fell 700 feet off Boulder Dam and everybody assumed he died. Although there are restrictions on seeing this movie in certain venues because of a copyright restriction, you can find it on the web, including the Internet Archive.

In “War of the Colossal Beast,” the story picks up sort of where the not-really-a-prequel left off except, in the beginning of the movie, a lot of food trucks are disappearing from the roads. One of them belongs to John Swanson (George Becwar), a food truck owner whose truck got lost and says repeatedly to the police “Get the picture?” when he tells his account of what he knows about the theft. It doesn’t take long to “get the picture” that this is comic relief.

It turns out that Glenn Manning is filching food from trucks and he’s not sharing any of it with the 50-foot woman who has wandered over from a different movie set and is pretty hungry (partly because she drinks too much) after an extraterrestrial has zapped her with radiation leading to a sudden growth spurt.

A scientist, Dr. Carmichael (Russ Bender) and Maj. Mark Baird (Roger Pace) have “cooked up” a plan to catch Manning using Italian bread spiked with chloral hydrate and evidently, Manning’s sister Joyce (Sally Fraser) approves of this plan. Baird and Carmichael both taste the bread, and neither drops dead even though if there’s enough chloral hydrate in all that bread to knock out a 60-foot-tall man, there should be enough to kill a normal size man after just a small bite. Whatever.

After abandoning a plan to hire Manning to round up all the Bigfoot monsters in the country because he’s too brain injured to remember the details which is not to squash them beyond recognition and allow photographers to take photos of the operation, which may or may not have happened when the Van Meter Visitor (a huge pterodactyl) in Iowa hit town in the early 1900s and flew all over the place munching on the cattle until cowboys and farmers shot it down and then took pictures of it which people claimed they all saw in the local newspaper yet those issues are “not available” for some reason so I guess there’s some kind of Mandela Effect going on or some people are prone to telling “tall tales.”

In the meantime, Manning is being held down by ropes and chains and it’s obvious that he was brain injured in that 700-foot fall in the first encounter. His right eye is missing and some of his teeth are pushed to one side, possibly because of a roundhouse kick by Chuck Norris (himself) who caught him trying to steal his chloral-hydrate enriched Italian bread.

Somehow, Manning is able to pick the locks of his chains using the same hypodermic needle he harpooned somebody with in the first movie and which he hid in his giant adult diapers (yes, those would be Shorty’s Adult Diapers that Big Mo aka John Heim the KCCK radio wizard of the Big Mo Blues Show describes, “they’re ready when you aren’t!).

The action and the dialogue start to get more complicated towards the end, which I’m going to defer on revealing in order to avoid spoilers (OK, the butler did it).

This is an OK movie although the dialogue gets a little stilted toward the end. I give it a 3/5 Shrilling Chicken Rating.

Svengoolie Movie: “King Kong vs Godzilla”

I watched the 1962 movie “King Kong vs Godzilla” on the Svengoolie show last night and woke up this morning thinking it had to be a parody. So, I looked it up on the web and sure enough, there’s a Wikipedia article about the film stating director Ishiro Honda said it was a satire of the television industry in Japan.

This movie was pretty ridiculous and there was so much over the top slapstick comedy in it that I couldn’t believe anyone would see it as anything but satire. But the internet has many articles that don’t call it satirical.

I remember Sena watched some of it and asked me last night how I was going to rate it. I said “Zero!” at the time, before I found out it was satire. That was after I’d seen the two characters, Kinsaburo Furue (Yu Fujiki) and Keji Sahaka (Kazuo Fujita) encounter with the island natives who accepted gifts of cigarettes and a transistor radio as a bribe to gain their cooperation.

So, it seems superfluous for me to poke fun of it like I usually do with most of the films on the Svengoolie show. Even he joked about the poor dubbing in this movie.

I’m seeing this as satire and I’d give it a 2.5/5 Shrilling Chicken rating.

Upcoming Svengoolie Movie: “King Kong vs Godzilla”

I see the 1962 kaiju movie “King Kong vs Godzilla” is coming to Svengoolie this Saturday. I’m still trying to figure out if I’ve seen this one already. Maybe that’s because it looks similar to other kaiju films I’ve seen on the Svengoolie show, like “Godzilla vs Bozo the Clown,” another classic which I’m sure you’ve seen.

This may be the one where King Kong challenges Godzilla to a food fight at Wendy’s because Godzilla gulped down all the chocolate Frosty malts. It’s a pretty simple battle since all they do is throw the whole restaurant back and forth at each other which causes all the people trying to order burgers and fries to fall out of the building leading to both monsters skidding and slipping on the ketchup and cracking the streets open, which of course causes the storm and sanitary sewers to burst causing a messier flood of crap which doesn’t do anything to improve the taste of French fries. This just makes King Kong even madder because he can’t make his step over toe hold work because he slips in the slop. I think this is when Chuck Norris shows up because all the ruckus makes too much noise, distracting him from his sitar practice. Neither King Kong nor Godzilla dare look at Chuck the wrong way because the dinosaurs did that and you know what happened to them. Then, wouldn’t you know it, the Tall Man shows up, the same 10-foot-tall monster that allegedly haunted a small town and did some window peeking which scared all the townsfolk, an event which is described in the TV documentary, Paranormal Emergency. All three start doing their roundhouse kicks at each other, which Chuck Norris immediately stops by doing the same roundhouse kick in the time when in the beginning there was nothing and he kicked nothing and told it to get a job and…well, that’s probably not how this movie goes per se but you get my drift.

Sven Squad Movie: “Flight 7500”

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

So last night we both watched the Sven Squad movie “Flight 7500.” It’s the Sven Squad leading the way because they’re going to give Svengoolie a well-deserved break once a month. However, he did show up a couple of times. We thought the Sven Squad song “Cabin Pressure” was pretty awesome.

Flight 7500 was released in 2014 and the short story is that a lot of people on a big airplane start disappearing after a guy named Lance Morrel (Rick Kelly) nearly bites his hand off trying to remove some salted peanuts from his throat. Lance appears from time to time and even tries to costar in the seat back video presentation of the Twilight Zone TV in-flight movie, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.”

After Lance dies despite getting expert chest compressions from the CPR Bran Martin (Ryan Kwanten) gives him gets moved to the upper-level cabin where Lance and William Shatner have a stimulating conversation about how well gremlins and Shinigami dolls get along.

One guy, Jake (Alex Frost) who likes to steal watches and cell phones swipes Lance’s wristwatch and becomes the first to disappear. OK, there are way too many passengers to keep track of in this film, so don’t blame me if I mix them up or even leave them out.

There are so many passengers struggling with their soap opera lives on this plane that they step on each other’s toes (just like on a real flight!) as they are competing over which one disappears next while they vie viciously for who wins The Snarkiest Award.

There’s this Goth lady Jacinta (Scout Taylor-Compton) in mom jeans who may turn out to be the most well-adjusted of the group as she and the Shinigami doll have a great time playing 7-card cribbage just before Raquel Mendoza (Christian Serratos) finds out she’s not pregnant and throws a tantrum when the tall flight attendant Liz Lewis (Nicky Whelan) fails to bring her any salted peanuts.

The rest of the passengers take turns trying to breathe with the oxygen masks which don’t work and Lance turns into a huge hand, lunging for everyone in sight if they don’t immediately obey orders and accept death when they’re supposed to.

I can’t say much more about this movie without spilling the Boston baked bean snacks, so I’ll just have to say I would give it a 4.5/5 shrilling chicken rating, mainly because Sena would give it a 5/5.

Upcoming Svengoolie Movie: “Flight 7500”!

The upcoming Svengoolie movie this coming Saturday is “Flight 7500.” It reminds me of one of our vacation trips when Sena asked for an extra bag of peanuts from the attendant, who promised she would return with another bag—and never did. Sena’s never forgotten that.

I think that’s kind of how things go on airplanes. I’m not big on airline food and not keen on flying at all. I remember sitting next to an elderly guy (Har! Look who’s talking!) who was probably more nervous about flying than I was (as if that were possible).

As we were taking off, he pressed a little button on his hand or his wrist (can’t remember exactly) that was attached to a wristband. I remember thinking it might have had something to do with acupressure points. I looked this up today and it turns out that there’s a point called Union Valley and it’s in the webbing between your thumb and index finger. Or maybe it was the Inner Frontier Gate point, which is about 3 finger widths below your wrist. I know it wasn’t the Shoulder Well point because that can induce labor. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t pregnant.

Anyway, this movie looks like it could make you nervous. It was released in 2014, which is pretty unusual for Svengoolie. On the other hand, it’ll be the Sven Squad that’ll be in charge of it because Svengoolie is taking the night off. I gather he’ll be doing that once a month now. The Sven Squad members are Nostalgiaferatoo, Imp (Ignatius Malvolio Prankenstein who calls Svengoolie his uncle), and Gwengoolie. They usually do the 2^nd film of a double feature—which I can’t stay awake for.

I think Nostalgiaferatoo and Imp will play rock, paper, scissors more than 30,000 times to see who does most of the talking about the movie.

Anyway, the gist of the plot is that passengers start to feel a little queasy after their in-flight meal of beef jerky and turnip pastries and start hallucinating little monsters out on the wings which they keep telling the pilot about who is a little too busy to pay much attention because he’s distracted by the half-dozen or so UFOs zipping around just outside the front window which dodge the windshield wipers so fast it reminds him of the Men in Black movie in which Nick can’t clean off the bug parts of the big dragonfly that hits his window, so he has to take a break and orders his copilot to run back into the cabin and slap some of the passengers who are playing around with a Ouija Board and dousing rods, conjuring up demons who are demanding macaroni and cheese with Pepto-Bismol sauce, cheating at dominoes, and wondering when William Shatner is going to sign up for a sequel to the Twilight Zone smash hit, “And Don’t Call Me Shirley,” featuring a dozen or so nuns who are slapping the hysterical passengers who are unable to open the restroom door because Bigfoot is having THE USUAL PROBLEM of constipation from too much beef jerky…OK, I guess that’s not exactly how the movie goes, but I’m close!