Svengoolie horror TV shows – Page 6 – Go Retire Psychiatrist

Svengoolie Movie: “Invaders from Mars” and Zippers are Large!

I watched the Svengoolie movie “Invaders from Mars” last night. I saw this 1953 science fiction film last year but didn’t notice the extraterrestrials wore pretty obvious green velour body suits which zipped up the back.

Anyway, the movie was directed by William Cameron Menzies and starred Jimmy Hunt as the boy, David MacLean, who cried wolf, or at least that’s what everyone, including his parents, thought of his story about seeing a flying saucer land not far from their home, in a kind of sandy outlot which tended to swallow people whole after that.

Shortly after the saucer landed, people started to go missing and when they turned up later, they acted like zombies albeit with a new and nefarious purpose in life not their own.

There were many examples of leadership. Most of the good guys including the astronomer, Dr. Stuart Kelston and psychologist, Dr. Pat Blake fit the mold: respectful, congenial, and not prone to slapping David in the mouth like somebody I could name but who I’ll just hint he’s played by a guy named Leif Erickson, a Norse explorer who discovered America hundreds of years before Columbus and evidently found the fountain of youth.

Dr. Kelston has a theory about what’s happening and even speculates about the connection of the space exploration program he’s involved in which could be causing some extraterrestrials to be leery of its ultimate purpose, which is to build tall warped looking buildings with weird music piped in. Actually, Svengoolie revealed that the settings were purposely built large because the original plan was to shoot the film in 3D.

On the other hand, the leader of the Martians was this head in a glass globe that the guys in green jump suits (the Mutants) carried around, sometimes walking backwards so as to not expose how the costumes zipped up in back. But often they had to run through tunnels, which would have been tough to do backwards. That’s when you see the zippers. They had this stiff gait sort of rocking gait which I think I remember seeing when I was a kid when I saw these scenes on TV decades ago.

Anyway, the leader who was just a head in a globe never talked but communicated telepathically with the Mutants. It was the Martian Intelligence (the head, played by Luce Potter) who did all the thinking and gave all the orders, evidently driven by fear of the humans who were getting ready to shoot into space and ruin their neck of the space neighborhood.

There’s the usual Cold War paranoia but with a focus on inserting alien probes into earthlings that made me think of the X-Files mythology. There’s a fairly frequent inclusion of military stock footage given the us vs them dynamic.

A fairly large number of the actors were also in Perry Mason episodes, which seems to happen to a lot of actors who eventually appear in Svengoolie movies. I had a little trouble remembering a very young Milburn Stone who played Capt. Roth, and who could sling semi-scientific verbiage around pretty well. I remember him as Doc in the TV show Gunsmoke.

There was a disagreement between the United Kingdom and America about the ending of the movie. Was this invasion all just a kid’s nightmare or what? The British rewrote the ending to leave out the dream theme.

Except for the Mutant dress code, I thought the movie was pretty fair.

Shrilling Chicken Rating 4/5

Svengoolie Movie Next Saturday “Invaders from Mars” Triggers Memories!

The Svengoolie TV show movie next Saturday will be “Invaders from Mars” released in 1953 and it triggered some memories. One of them is when I was a little kid. I think I saw parts of it on TV while I was supposed to be down for a nap. I recall seeing these burly guys in green body suits trotting stiff-legged through tunnels. Their gait is something I can’t forget—no matter how hard I try. For a long time, I thought I had just been dreaming. But I’m pretty sure the nightmare was real because when we saw the movie last year on the Svengoolie show, those Martians looked familiar.

The other memory is of a TV public service announcement (PSA) commercial in the early 1970s. I managed to find a YouTube of it that reminded me of the leader of the Martians. He was in a clear globe and the green guys carried him around. He was just a head with tentacles. He was the leader and was very much ahead of his assistants in an evolutionary sense. At least I think that was the idea. He was basically the brains of the extraterrestrial population. He did all the thinking and planning—but he was stuck in this globe.

Anyway, the commercial is from 1971 and it’s a PSA from the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. The commercial shows how we’d be by the year 2000 if we didn’t shape up, literally. Richard Nixon was President; during his presidency Apollo 11 landed on the moon—and he resigned from office because of the Watergate scandal. Anyway, food for thought for the upcoming film, “Invaders from Mars,” which probably has a message about leadership.

Svengoolie Movie: “Return of the Vampire” Hits it On the Jugular

We watched the Svengoolie show movie, “Return of the Vampire.” I should say Sena watched about 10 minutes of it on the Internet Archive and said it was pretty good. The film was directed by Lew Landers. The writers were Randall Faye, Kurt Neumann (The Fly 1958), and Griffin Jay (Cry of the Werewolf 1944).

The movie was produced by Columbia and released in 1943. Bela Lugosi stars as the vampire Armand Tesla (no relation to Nikola Tesla) and never once says “Bluh, bluh!” This distinguishes him from Dracula, which you can’t even whisper by mistake without being ensnared in a net by lawyers who wouldn’t bat an eyelash at bleeding you dry of all your assets, so wear a garlic necklace.

He couldn’t be called Dracula in this production by Columbia because Universal had already made a few dollars on the Dracula name in their production and threatened Columbia to a thumb-wrestling match between top executives if they plagiarized the name Dracula. Soreheads!

You can’t miss Lugosi’s clawlike hands and the cobra-like sinuosity of his fingers as he mesmerizes his victims. If I tried to imitate that, I’d get cramps. Armand Tesla has all the customary power of vampires, and at least in this film, the producers get it right when we see he casts no reflection in a mirror. But he needs a valet named Andreas who is always bringing him a parcel, presumably with fresh capes from the dry cleaners.

The story spans two world wars; in WWI, Tesla gets bumped off with a spike; in WWII, he gets a new lease on undead life from the Nazi bombing and bungling civil servants (see below), regaining control over Andreas which he lost in WWI when he got spiked. Tesla’s new goal is to recruit a fresh vampire and try the new Wendy’s Frosty flavor, the Bloody Nicki.

Matt Willis plays Andreas Obry, the vampire’s hairy butler, a talking werewolf whose diction doesn’t fumble over his fangs. He’s pretty sharp in a suit but why he doesn’t complete the ensemble with a smart pair of oxfords is puzzling. He prowls barefoot across the graveyards, gardens, and sidewalk cafes (he ignores the signs “No shirt, no shoes, no service”). Watch for his pro wrestling moves in an alley with a couple of hapless detectives who can barely lay a glove on him.

Comedy bits are spaced at tolerable intervals, like the two civil servants in the graveyard who fumble about and do something with the spike that, without their scene, would make the film pretty short. That’s “spike,” not “stake.” They’re in England, after all.

Probably the peak moment in the film is when Andreas unexpectedly makes a different kind of transformation.

The little quarrels between Lady Jane Ainsley and Scotland Yard detective Sir Frederick Fleet (no relation to enemas) highlight the dumb male and smart female dynamic, a thread which runs throughout the movie.

Lady Ainsley: Sir Frederick, I declare I can’t abide it any longer; mud tracked all over the carpet, wolf hair on the toothbrush, and dust on the crucifix!

Sir Frederick: My dear Lady Ainsley, there is no such thing as dirt!

And how is all that fog getting into the house? You can barely see the walls—except for the fourth one.

We think the movie is pretty good!

Svengoolie Movie Tonight: “Return of the Vampire”

“Calling all stations, clear the air lines, clear all air lanes for the big broadcast!” (Svengoolie show intro).

Tonight’s Svengoolie movie is “Return of the Vampire.” I’m debating on whether to watch it because I’ve heard there’s a talking werewolf. Is that even legal?

Svengoolie Movie: “Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster”

So, this movie ‘Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster” is high in cheese content and don’t expect to see the Frankenstein made famous by Boris Karloff. It was released in 1965 and directed by Soupy Sales, no wait, it was Robert Gaffney. Marilyn Hanold played the big female lead, Marcuzan, the amazonian leader who looks nothing like the male Martians, one of whom, Dr. Nadir (played by Lou Cotell), reminds me of Yoda.

Seriously this Nadir to take we are? Fits him the name because at the lowest level his quality is! Hmmmm?

In fact, all the male Martians sort of remind me of Yoda. Marcuzan doesn’t resemble any of them. Other cast members include Jim Karen as Dr. Adam Steele, Nancy Marshall as Karen Grant, David Kerman as General Bowers, and Robert Reilly as Col. Frank Saunders, the android astronaut. You can watch the movie on the Internet Archive, but you’ll miss Svengoolie’s cornball jokes and commentary.

The gist of the story is that the Martians (who are never identified as such, by the way) lost an atomic war and somehow all the females on the planet got wiped out. So Marcuzan and Nadir and a bunch of Martians take off for earth to round up new females to repopulate Mars.

At the same time, scientists on earth have built an android named Frank who is test-driving a brand-spanking new NASA space capsule. Nadir boy and the gang shoot it down over Puerto Rico. Frank gets shot in the brain and goes off his nut, which can’t be screwed back on because none of the Martian repairmen know how to use the metric system in order to select the right size socket wrench.

Marcuzan and Nadir and the gang and Frank all cause mayhem in Puerto Rico. It’s kind of like parallel play until the Martians hustle out their hairy monster champion, called Mull, to thumb wrestle Frank and settle the matter. Guess which one is Frankenstein? That’s right—Marcuzan!

Anyway, if you’re looking for production value, you’re barking up the wrong tree. This is about extreme campiness, which is exaggeration and purposeful emphasis on bad taste. Even though the producers wanted a serious science fiction/horror film, according to Svengoolie and one of the original screenwriters who is still teaching at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virgina, the goal was to make a wild parody of the genre. While the producers insisted on the straight version, somehow the screenwriters obviously prevailed.

That explains the obviously botched makeup jobs, the stock footage making up 65% of the scenes, and the comical and jarringly timed soundtrack. One song called “That’s the Way It’s Got to Be,” done by The Poets seems like a sort of anthem for the movie’s real aim. In other words, don’t complain about the lack of production value because it’s a parody, hence (all together now), that’s the way it’s got to be.

The Martians used a weapon that was a popular toy for a short time, the Wham-O Air Blaster. It could shoot air 40 feet and was banned after the blast ruptured a kid’s eardrum.

Early on in the movie, right after Frank the android gets bunged up after being shot down by the Martians, he ends up looking like he’s got a couple of tubes hanging and bouncing around off his chest for the rest of the movie, so I couldn’t help thinking of him by the nickname “Tubular Teats.”

And for some reason this gets connected to the scenes of the bikini-clad women being rounded up for a weird technical assessment (reminiscent of a sliding cat scan table) of their suitability for repopulating the female population back on Mars. The women obligingly assist the Martians who lift them onto the table. This is bizarre considering the fate for some of them.

Anyway, I have to rate “Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster” using a different standard from that which was used by some to rate it as pretty high up on the list of the 50 Worst Movies Ever Made. That’s because I think it’s a parody and therefore not comparable to a serious science fiction/horror flick—because that’s the way it’s got to be!

Svengoolie Schlock Alert!

“Calling all stations, clear the air lanes, clear all air lanes for the big broadcast!” (Svengoolie show intro).

Fee Fi Fo Fum, something shlocky this way comes! Next Saturday the Svengoolie show will present the movie “Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster.” It’s not the Frankenstein’s monster you know and love necessarily, and it involves Martians looking to repopulate their planet’s female population. Can I even stand it?

Svengoolie Movie: “Village of the Danged Eyeballs!”

OK, so the name of the film is actually Village of the Damned, released in 1960 and directed by Wolf Rilla. It stars George Sanders as Professor Gordon Zellaby and Barbara Shelley as his wife, Anthea Zellaby. It’s based on a British Novel, The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham. The gist of the story is that the whole village of Midwich falls asleep, wakes up a few hours later and things are fine until two months pass. That’s when all the trouble starts. You can see the movie on the Internet Archive.

It just so happens that the Great Mutato (Izzy) from the X-Files episode, “The Post-Modern Prometheus” is running around the village impregnating all the women. OK, so Izzy’s not part of the plot at all but it sounds cool.

One morning, all the people of Midwich fall unconscious in the middle of whatever they’re doing, which might have been a community wide orgy (usually prohibited by Homeowner Association rules) based on what happens next. The Midwich women do all get pregnant at the same time which raises eyebrows, and leads to the men raising many glasses of beer because they’re not thrilled about it.

According to an x-ray, which happens to be that of a man, the pregnancy outbreak is indiscriminate. Actually, Svengoolie let the cat out of the bag on that, revealing the goof of using an x-ray of a man by mistake. Of course, the doctors point at the film and sagely remark that the fetus is developing normally. One of the doctors is a smoker. Maybe the x-ray of a man was used to avoid using an x-ray of a pregnant woman, which is not the greatest idea in the world.

This reminds me of our freshman medical school radiology teacher. Dr. Bill Erkonen was the nicest guy in the world and he always reassured us that we shouldn’t try to memorize anything for the radiology exams. He would advise, “Just learn it.” Of course, we were medical students and we knew there was no way to learn anything in medical school; memorization was the only path. We loved him.

Anyway, they (meaning the women) all deliver at the same time and the whippersnappers mature at a highly accelerated rate (males learn quickly to stay away from dangerous things like vacuum cleaners). And their eyes glow. All they have to do is stare at the adults who immediately buy them expensive cars, jewelry, and designer sunglasses. They also teach adults to avoid the self-checkout aisles at grocery stores.

But they can also force adults to do scary things. This becomes a world-wide phenomenon leading to drastic actions by governments to do something about the kids with the danged eyeballs. The solutions don’t include hiring them to work for the post office.

I thought this was actually a pretty good movie. It’s probably a film inspired in part by the post-WWII, Cold War era and the threat of attack from some outside unknown, malignant force. The title of John Wyndam’s book “The Midwest Cuckoos” is based on bird behavior, specifically that of cuckoos laying their eggs in another bird’s nest leaving it to be raised by another bird at the expense of its own. Brown-headed cowbirds do the same thing. The X-Files extraterrestrial-human hybrid mythology is another way to express the idea. The violence in the film makes it unsuitable for younger or sensitive viewers.

Svengoolie Show “Son of Dracula”Spelling Bee Game!

I saw the Svengoolie show 1943 film, “First Cousin Twice Removed of Dracula” last night. Sorry, that’s actually “Son of Dracula.” You can watch it colorized on the Internet Archive.

It starred Lon Chaney as Count Alucard, and that name didn’t fool anybody because it’s just Dracula spelled backward. The goof everybody already knows about occurs early in the show when Dracula transforms from a bat in front of a mirror and his reflection is clearly visible.

You don’t see that much of Count Dracula and you never see his fangs. He’s well-spoken and mostly polite. He didn’t cry out “Bluh, bluh” even once, but then neither did Bela Lugosi.

Maybe I was just overthinking Dracula’s overall plan for taking over America. Was he supposed to suck the blood of hundreds of millions of people one by one or what? Even with the help of Enirehtak, the Southern belle he hypnotized into being his wife, that would be a long-term project even for the immortal vampires.

That approach is probably what killed the movie “Attack of the Vicious, Loathsome, Depraved but Suave Vampire Anteaters with Denture Fangs from Saturn!” The solution to save the planet was to ban Poligrip. Theater staff had to wake up the audience members, but only occasionally.

In spite of what you might think about the flying bat special effects, there were no strings involved—just a decrepit bat.

There were a few elderly gentlemen in the film, Dr. Brewster being one. He had a great idea about how to protect a little boy from another attack by Dracula. He drew little crosses on the kid’s neck where the fang puncture wounds were. See there? You don’t need to carry a crucifix around! Just cross your fingers at vampires.

And Dracula (no spring chicken himself) suffered a mishap while carrying his bride across the threshold after their wedding. He fell and broke his hip. Vampirism doesn’t protect men from osteoporosis. The action shots got a little shorter after that. Using a walker tends to slow chase scenes down.

On the other hand, Dracula was otherwise well preserved for being hundreds of years old. He got a little perturbed when somebody threw out his bottle of Serutan. Remember, that’s Natures spelled backwards.

Svengoolie Movie A Cut Above: “Strait-Jacket”!

I saw the 1964 movie “Strait-Jacket” directed by William Castle, starring Joan Crawford for the first time last night on the Svengoolie TV show, and I have to say that it’s one of the better films I’ve seen. Movies that have a psychiatric angle also get my attention because I’m a retired psychiatrist. There won’t be any spoilers.

The quick synopsis is that Lucy Garbin (Joan Crawford) plays a woman who was committed to a psychiatric asylum for 20 years after murdering her husband and his girlfriend with an axe after she found them together in bed. Lucy’s young daughter Carol (Diane Baker), sees the whole grisly thing. Lucy is released from the asylum to the care of her brother Bill and his wife and Carol. Then, the axe murders of several people seem to implicate Lucy might be picking up old habits.

That’s when all the trouble starts, including a lot of references to sharp objects, which is joke fodder for Svengoolie. The film lends itself to that, including a shot of the Columbia film logo with the statue of liberty’s head off and lying at her feet!

Dissociation is an involuntary mental phenomenon that leads to feeling disconnected with one’s environment or one’s self. Time is distorted and flashbacks and hallucinations can occur. This is frequently portrayed by Lucy, even in front of her former psychiatrist, Dr. Anderson, who visits her while on some kind of vacation of all things. During his interview with her, he decides she’s not ready to live in the outside world and must return to the asylum.

This would not have been the procedure for readmitting psychiatric patients even back then, but you have to give Dr. Anderson credit for having a sharp sense of her mental state. He had a well-honed idea of what was happening to her clinically, especially while observing her fiddling with knitting needles.

Images of and references to sharp implements abound throughout the film. You get a sense of being on the razor edge of suspense throughout the film. This is especially evident in the interaction between Lucy and the seemingly dull-witted farmhand, Leo (George Kennedy). He offers her his axe to give her a try at beheading a chicken. You find out later that Leo is smarter than he looks. Carol describes typical work on the farm to Lucy, including name-dropping certain jobs like slaughtering hogs and butchering chickens.

I can mention gaslighting without giving away too much about the film. I never saw the 1944 movie “Gaslight” but the term gaslighting means psychologically manipulating someone into believing she’s insane so as to control her sense of reality. In “Strait-Jacket” the ingenious way this is presented made me think of psychopathy as well as dissociation.

I have to mention one interesting fact about the film which came to me about 3:30 am this morning. I swear this was before I looked it up on the web (see reference below). I noticed that the forty whacks rhyme for Lucy Garbin is taken from the Lizzie Borden rhyme in reference to the axe murders of her parents she was accused of in the 1800s, which is cited on the Encyclopedia Britannica website.

“The children’s rhyme chanted in the movie, “Lucy Harbin took an ax, gave her husband forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, gave his girlfriend forty-one”, is based on the famous rhyme about Lizzie Andrew Borden: “Lizzie Borden took an ax, gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, gave her father forty-one.” The Grindhouse Cinema Database (GCDb). Strait Jacket/Fun Facts. Retrieved June 8, 2025, from https://www.grindhousedatabase.com/index.php/Strait_Jacket/Fun_Facts

Lohnes, Kate. “Lizzie Borden Took an Ax…”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 5 Jun. 2017, Accessed June 8, 2025 from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lizzie-Borden-American-murder-suspect

I found the film entertaining and, although I had a fairly firm idea of who was doing what for which reason, a couple of times I had my doubts. I give the film 4/5 shrilling chickens rating. I had a reservation about the ending. See if you can figure out who has the biggest axe to grind by watching “Strait-Jacket” on the Internet Archive.

Comments Without Spoilers on the Svengoolie Movie “The Haunted Strangler”

Last night I watched the Svengoolie Show movie, “The Haunted Strangler” (1958), starring Boris Karloff as Dr. Rankin, which had psychiatric overtones, along with hints at demonic possession. This was evidently a rerun of a previous Svengoolie episode.

Without spoilers, I can point to a time setting goof you can see in two copies of the film on the internet Archive. It involves a line by the character Dr. Kenneth McColl (played by Tim Turner, in which he attempts to explain Dr. Rankin’s behavior using the term “projective identification.” The problem is that as far as the time setting of the film’s story (from 1860 to the early 1880s), this psychoanalytic term for a defense mechanism was not invented until the mid-1940s by psychoanalyst Melanie Klein.

The point in one of the Internet Archive copies of the movie “The Haunted Strangler” where “projective identification” is mentioned by Dr. Kenneth McColl (played by Tim Turner) as a way to explain Rankin’s behavior is at 1:03:28, added on 09/02/2019 by Amalgamated. It’s also at 1:28:44 on the Internet Archive copy “Creature Feature: The Haunted Strangler” which is actually a Svengoolie episode, added by “Uh? Want Entertainment” on 02/22/2022.

Another interesting feature pointed out on the Svengoolie show includes the lack of complicated makeup for the transformation of Dr. Rankin into a homicidal monster. Karloff just removed his dentures and grimaced. I’m pretty sure it saved money on production costs.

The other psychiatric connection of “The Haunted Strangler” to psychoanalysis is dissociation both as a mental disorder and a defense mechanism. It’s also connected to dissociative identity disorder. In fact, the character Dr. Kenneth McColl mentions “dual personality” in the movie “The Haunted Strangler.”

There’s an echo also to “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” which was a novella published in the mid-1880s by Robert Louis Stevenson, which was adapted from Freud’s concepts of the id, the ego, and the superego. And we got the 1920 film “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (which I’ve never seen) arising from the dual personality idea. I think Svengoolie showed “Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” which I’ve also not seen.

There were several warnings (more than I usually have seen) to viewers about the possibility some scenes in the movie might be too intense for younger or sensitive viewers.