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.
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.
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.
Svengoolie Intro: “Calling all stations! Clear the air lanes! Clear all air lanes for the big broadcast!”
This big broadcast is about the upcoming Svengoolie show movie, “Them!” on October 11, 2025 at 7:00 p.m. One problem I have with this schedule is that the Iowa Hawkeye vs. Wisconsin Badgers football game starts at 6:00 p.m. on the same day. This happened previously with another Svengoolie movie last month, “The Bad Seed,” and I got around it by watching the movie on the Internet Archive. I may have to do that again.
Anyway, “Them!” is a 1954 classic atomic bomb testing leading to giant creatures film (in this case ants) terrorizing the desert southwest countryside. James Arness (who plays FBI agent Robert Graham although Arness starred as Marshal Matt Dillon in Gunsmoke a year later) who has run afoul with then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and heads to a New Mexico field office because he wanted to investigate the Mafia but Hoover didn’t think that gang existed, leading to Dillon’s famous quote heard around the world in many languages, “I gotta get outta Dodge!” As happens repeatedly in the 1950s, radiation-exposed insects grow to gigantic size, in this case ants who beat the living daylights out of grasshoppers running a protection racket on them for food (so much for Hoover’s dismissal of organized crime!) and in their headlong search for Insectopia, where the streets are lined with picnic baskets, trample on a tiny guy in a weird suit who is incredibly strong who charges the once oppressed lower class ants huge sums of money to defend them against the superior race of ants who have larger mandibles and shake down the lower class ants (leading agent Graham to write a letter to J. Edgar Hoover saying “That is why you fail!” which is yet another famous quote parroted by middle schoolers everywhere).
OK, so that’s not exactly how the movie goes, but I’ve never seen it so how should I know?
Both Sena and I enjoyed the Svengoolie show movie last night, “The Ghost and Mr. Chicken.”
This 1966 film directed by Alan Rifkin and starring Don Knotts as Luther Heggs, Joan Staley as Alma Parker, Liam Redmond as Kelsey, Philip Ober as Nick Simmons, and Dick Sargent as George Beckett is a horror spoof that we’ve seen before but it’s still really funny.
Luther Heggs is a typesetter for a newspaper in a little town who sort of agrees to spend the night in a haunted house where a couple of murders took place twenty years in the past which were never solved. Luther wants to be a reporter and gets his chance when Kelsey talks him into writing a filler story on the anniversary of the murders.
In fact, if not for Kelsey’s slick manipulation of the main characters including George Beckett the editor of the newspaper, a lot of the story wouldn’t take place. A big part of the action is related to bringing whoever killed the occupants of the house (who were related to Simmons) to justice.
A lot of the hilarity comes from Knott’s superb portrayal of the extremely nervous guy who does brave things despite his fears. Luther has a crush on Alma and despite his shyness, to impress her he shows her his karate moves which he has been learning entirely from a correspondence course he’s been taking for years and which has made his whole body a lethal weapon.
Luther convinces the town that he has seen supernatural events in the Simmons’ haunted mansion, which makes him a hero worthy of celebration in his honor. His bungles his acceptance speech and then gets a summons to appear in court to fight a libel charge from Nick Simmons because he doesn’t want the publicity about the haunting to interfere with his plans to demolish the house.
The trial is one of the funniest scenes in the movie, leading to a couple of witnesses inadvertently making things a bit more difficult for Luther to beat the libel charge by revealing that he has a lifelong track record of telling tall tales.
The detective part of this story involves the manipulation of Kelsey, the motive of Simmons to demolish the house, and the perseverance of Luther to confront his terror while confronting the mystery of what happened twenty years previously in the Simmons’ mansion.
I have given this very funny film the highest Shrilling Chicken Rating of 5/5.
Svengoolie Intro: “Calling all stations! Clear the air lanes! Clear all air lanes for the big broadcast.”
This coming Saturday, Svengoolie will show the 1966 comedy horror film “The Ghost and Mr. Chicken.” I think it’s pretty good and Sena likes the movie too.
I’ve seen this film before at least once and I thought one of the times was on the Svengoolie show. But you’d think I’d have blogged about it. I can’t find any posts about it, though.
The gist of it is that Luther Heggs (Don Knotts) is a typesetter for a small-town newspaper and gets into a position in which he has to solve a murder mystery. It entails spending some time in a haunted house. He’s chicken-livered but perseveres (“Attaboy, Luther!”). He has to nip it in the bud.
If you ever watched The Andy Griffith Show, then you’ll recognize the comedy antics of Barney Fife in this movie (“These hands are like steel!”).
I saw the 1973 made for TV movie “The Night Strangler” directed by Dan Curtis and starring Darrin McGavin as the investigative reporter Carl Kolchak. I’ve never seen the first Kolchak movie, “The Night Stalker.”
The gist of The Night Strangler plot is that some guy in Seattle is strangling women and getting a little blood from them. People are scared; Kolchak is putting clues together with a lot of help from a local newspaper archivist researcher Titus Berry (Wally Cox) while local police as well as Kolchak’s editor, Tony Vincenzo (Simon Oakland) spend a lot of time yelling at Kolchak—which just provokes him to yell back. Eventually Kolchak irritates everybody so much they all just haul him up to the top of the Space Needle and toss him through a window. He happens to land on top of the first of 6 belly dancers killed by the strangler.
She’s as white as a sheet, dead as a doornail and has decayed flesh around her neck. She’s so anemic as to be white as a fish belly though the coroner finds that only a few drops of blood were drained from her neck.
And that really gets Kolchak started. He’s an extremely annoying reporter who doesn’t take “no” for an answer from anybody, even the owner of the Pink Elephant car wash who refuses to let him run his old jalopy through it for free.
Kolchak always wears the same dingy suit no matter how many times he gets thrown from the Space Needle and ignores everybody who insists he have the suit dry-cleaned.
He takes pictures of cops being thrown around like rag dolls in an alley (not Post Alley where the Gum Wall is) by a bull strong man who apparently can also dodge speeding police cruisers like a running back.
However, the police confiscate Kolchak’s camera and put enough obstacles in his way to make me wonder if they’re in cahoots with the strangler who it turns out is also leading tours of the legendary Seattle underground and would give free tours to the cops who can get free box lunches from an old diner where human skeletons throw fish around just like they do at Pike’s Place Fish Market while letting rats crawl through their eye sockets.
Kolchak gets valuable insights from an old crone named Professor Crabwell (Margaret Hamilton, who also played the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz) about a youth preserving potion that the strangler might be making—and just when she gets to the good part, a house drops on top of her.
When Kolchak and a brave belly dancer (who is beginning to dislike him as much as everyone else does) get to the underground, he tells her to give him about 30 minutes before she calls the cops to come and rescue him. How does he know he can hold off the strangler for longer than 30 seconds?
The ending is pretty good, mainly because you know you won’t have to listen to Kolchak anymore. I’ll give it a 3 shrilling chicken rating.
Svengoolie Intro: “Calling all stations, clear the air lanes, clear all air lanes for the big broadcast!”
This coming Saturday, the Svengoolie show movie will be the 1973 horror flick, “The Night Strangler” starring Darrin McGavin who plays an investigative reporter/detective named Carl Kolchak, which I’ve never seen. Neither did I see the first movie, “The Night Stalker.”
The setting is in Seattle. Apparently, there’s some monster serial killer who’s really, really mad about getting chewing gum stuck all over him whenever he goes hunting for victims on Post Alley. He’s written dozens of letters to the city about cleaning up the Gum Wall, which they actually do periodically, but hey, sticking chewing gum wads on the wall is a time-honored tradition, which Sena and I noticed when we were visiting Seattle on vacation about 9 years ago. Don’t lean up against the Gum Wall.
Anyway, the killer has come up with a plan to blow up the Gum Wall with dynamite to spite the Seattle city council, which Kolchak can’t figure out without consulting Artificial Intelligence (AI) until late in the movie. AI instructs Kolchak to build a rudimentary time machine which is this really souped-up car which, when it reaches warp speed, can send Kolchak back in time to the scene of the crimes and with the assistance of a kid named McFly, he can…no wait, that’s a different movie.
I watched the Svengoolie show movie “Tarantula” last night, although I fell asleep for what turns out to have been about 20 minutes or so during the second half hour of this 1955 film about radioactive nutrient producing a giant tarantula. I had to catch up on what I missed on the Internet Archive.
Don’t get me wrong, the movie didn’t put me to sleep; in fact, there were various segments that reminded me of various tangents I’m about to go off on.
Anyway, the film was directed by Jack Arnold and starred John Agar (Dr. Mass Hastings), Mara Corday (Stephanie ‘Steve’ Clayton), and Leo G. Carroll (Prof Gerald Deemer, who I guess was in a lot of Hitchcock films including North by Northwest, which Sena has seen). Raymond Bailey (Townsend, Arizona dept of agriculture scientist) had an interesting line I’ll mention later. Bailey also played the banker Milburn Drysdale in the Beverly Hillbillies TV show in the early ‘60s-early ‘70s.
The short summary of this film is that it’s one of several related to the fear of radioactivity-linked science gone bad leading to the creation of really big bugs running amok in tiny towns in the desert southwest. The main angle here is Prof Deemer’s scientific work on preventing world starvation from overpopulation by creating a nutrient that would, if mixed with the evil radioactive isotope, cause hungry tarantulas to grow to enormous size, in turn leading to cattle mutilations that would prevent long wait times for motorists waiting for cows to cross Route 66, consequently unblocking the path to McDonald’s restaurants, although the food chain interruption from the beef shortage caused by tarantula predation would eventually result in the loss of big macs leading to cannibalism, thereby cancelling world hunger by population reduction.
Scientists never think this one through.
But there are other things to talk about with respect to this movie. One of them is the word “acromegalia.” I know about acromegaly, but the term “acromegalia” was a new one to me, although it turns out to be an old term. Acromegaly is the usual name for the medical condition. Why the writers chose this word is a mystery. Both mean a rare pituitary gland problem which produces too much growth hormone leading to gigantism in which the hands, feet, and face grow bigger.
Another fascinating thing about the film is that I think I can hear Dr. Deemer call the radioisotope a specific name, something that sounds sort of like “ammoniac.” In the internet archive version, see if you can hear it at about 27:47.
Sena can hear it too. But I can’t find any reviewers who mention it and even AI denies that the radioisotope is given a name in the movie. Also, if it was made just for the movie, it doesn’t make sense because most isotopes’ names end in “-ium,” so no made-up word for it should sound like “ammoniac” which makes you think of ammonia, something somebody would wave under your nose to smell if you fainted from the sight of the giant tarantula.
Another interesting thing is the dialogue between Dr. Hastings and an Arizona Agricultural Institute scientist, Dr. Townsend (played by Raymond Bailey). The gist of the interaction is that Dr. Hastings brought a specimen of giant tarantula venom for Dr. Townsend to analyze, but when he says he found giant pools of it, Townsend is incredulous and accuses Hastings of either having a nightmare or being the biggest liar since Baron Munchausen. On the internet archive this exchange happens at about 59:07.
This is priceless. I know about Baron Munchausen because, as a consulting psychiatrist for many years I saw patients who had the syndrome which used to be called Munchausen’s Syndrome (now called Factitious Disorder) which is essentially a mental disorder in which patients claim to have diseases which they don’t actually have but fake them and lie to doctors about it. I gave lectures about the syndrome. There’s a fascinating literature about it and, the odd thing is that the real Baron von Munchhausen was a famous adventurer and raconteur—but he was not a liar.
What many people don’t know is that it was actually a fellow named Rudolf Erich Raspe, a German scientist and scholar who wrote a book about the baron which was mostly made up. Raspe was the liar, not Baron Munchhausen.
A person with Factitious Disorder was hospitalized at University of Iowa Health Care back in the 1950s and a long case report about it was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Further, a physician named William Bennett Bean, MD in the Department of Medicine at the University of Iowa wrote a very long poem about this which you can access. There was also a fascinating case report published in 1980 in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) by medicine residents claiming they had seen a patient who lied about having Factitious Disorder (Factitious Munchausen’s Syndrome). The residents later admitted that they made up the story. I summarized most of this in a blog post a few years ago.
Finally, there is a line by Dr. Hastings at about 1:04:45 which reminded me of a Verizon commercial years ago: “Can you hear me now?”
I think that’s more than enough about this movie, which I would give a rating of 4/5 mainly because it evoked so much from the deep recesses of my memory.
Addendum: I couldn’t shake an urge to comment on a gesture of earlobe tugging that Dr. Matt Hastings engaged in while asking Prof Deemer about how quickly Jacobs developed his physical malformations. You can find this on the Internet Archive at time 28:36. Deemer dismisses it as acromegalia and nothing more but finally suggests Hastings could see that an autopsy be performed on Jacobs. I suspect Hasting’s earlobe tug might be dismissed as simple overacting, but there could be other interpretations.
Svengoolie Intro: “Calling all stations, clear the air lanes, clear all air lanes for the big broadcast!”
This Saturday’s Svengoolie movie will be “Tarantula,” about a giant tarantula in the Arizona desert who developed a huge brain and invented a brand new barbecue-flavored meatballs dish made out of humans and marketed to extraterrestrials who are pretty hungry after traveling from a far-away galaxy and abducting thousands of people who are just looking for a fun new ride on a spaceship and the giant tarantulas have 8 arms and are trying to learn how to juggle 32 persons because it’s well known that people can learn how to juggle 8 items and they have only two hands and—OK, so that’s not quite the story line but fun to think about.
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