Svengoolie horror TV shows – Page 2 – Go Retire Psychiatrist

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.

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.

Upcoming Svengoolie Movie: “Them!”

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?

Svengoolie Show: “The Ghost and Mr. Chicken”

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.

Upcoming Svengoolie Movie: “The Ghost and Mr. Chicken”

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!”).