Svengoolie movie – Go Retire Psychiatrist

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 Show Movie: “The War of the Worlds”

We watched the 1953 movie “War of the Worlds” last night. I can vaguely remember seeing the remake starting Tom Cruise years ago. I ran across a free pdf of H.G. Wells novel “The War of the worlds, published in 1898 and quickly read it today for the first time. Apparently, it was a pretty racy book not suitable for children as this quote shows:

The War of the Worlds by HG Wells quote in Book One, The Coming of the Martians, Chapter 14 In London pg. 129: “He heard footsteps running to and fro in the rooms, and up and down stairs behind. His landlady came to the door, loosely wrapped in dressing gown and shawl; her husband followed ejaculating.”

You won’t see anybody ejaculating in this movie.

Contrast this with Book Two, The Earth Under the Martians, Chapter 2: What We Saw From the Ruined House, pg 202: “In the next place, wonderful as it seems in the sexual world, the Martians were absolutely without sex…” Apparently, they reproduced by budding.

I was surprised to see one of the main characters in the movie, the scientist Dr. Clayton Forrester (Gene Barry) square dancing with the other star Sylvia Van Buren (Ann Robinson). That’s when I knew this was going to be a real horror flick, because I remember being required to learn how to square dance in grade school. What a nightmare! Anyway, in the movie they were do-si-dosing and allemanding left all over the joint. Check out the video of the scene below:

It quickly got scarier when the Martians arrived. The space ships were modeled by imitating the shapes of cobras and manta rays, but the actual Martians who drove them reminded me of little E.T. The Extraterrestrial in the movie of the same name.

By the way, Orson Welles was not related to H.G. Wells but he did perform the radio show adaptation of it in 1938, which led to many stories reporting that the listeners peed their pants in widespread panic, but that didn’t really happen. Most people didn’t listen to the radio and preferred to play video games on their cell phones. H.G. Wells met with Orson after that and taught him how to spell his name right.

The attitude in the 1950s toward women actors was atrocious and Ann Robinson was required to have two or three episodes of hysterics and at least one near-fainting spell per scene with Gene Barry. However, her hair was never mussed and her makeup never smeared, even after she beat the crap out of a Martian who tried to square dance with her.

The Martians were really out of shape and flabby so they used their technology to make copies of Chuck Norris, who round-house kicked the entire military force into next week. Of course, the Pentagon was still trying to back-engineer UFOs that crashed in places like Roswell, New Mexico so they were naturally ill-equipped when it came to battling the Martians.

However, what the Martians didn’t know about earthlings was the strength of our immune systems. In fact, they didn’t know what immune systems were (which even some earthlings don’t understand). They were unaware of the power of snot, which some people are able to focus, aim, and fire with pinpoint accuracy.

On the other hand, according to a reliable scientific opinion from a well-documented, unimpeachable source (Men in Black movie 1997): “Human thought is so primitive it’s looked upon as an infectious disease in some of the better galaxies.” On the other hand, we can do-si-do when properly motivated.

I think this movie is OK, outside of square-dancing special effects. I give it a 3/5 Shrilling Chicken Rating.

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!

Svengoolie Movie: “The Skull”

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

I watched the Svengoolie movie, “The Skull” last night and it was fairly interesting in that the heirs of the Marquis de Sade, (whose skull the movie was about) actually forbade his name and title be mentioned in the 1965 advertisements in the French territories because he was never involved in devil worship. However, he was not innocent of other badness and spent much of his life in and out of prisons and insane asylums.

Despite that, various people want his skull, the first of which was Pierre, a phrenologist (Maurice Good), who ended up getting killed shortly after he stole the head of the corpse of the Marquis de Sade, boiled off the skin, and after finding a few bumps and dips indicative of the guy’s craving for kale and turnips, ended up dying in the boiling peanut oil used to clean off the skull.

I guess the Skull (played by a skull) had supernatural powers connected to four statues of demons whose names are Moe, Larry, Shemp, and Curly Joe, which are bought at auction for a heck of a lot of money by Sir Matthew Phillips (Christoper Lee) who outbid Christopher Maitland (Peter Cushing), and the latter tried to win them from him in a long game of what looked like snooker. Neither could play worth a tinker’s damn yet one of the statues (Shemp) ends up in the hands of Maitland anyway because the skull can evidently move things around if you play spooky music while pointing a camera at it.

But an unsavory guy with a sinus problem (probably from snorting Copenhagen) named Anthony Marco (Patrick Wymark) winds up with the Skull and tries to sell it to Maitland for a 1000 pounds, an asking price which he quickly reduces to 500 pounds when Maitland refuses to lay out that much cash for a skull when he could order a full skeleton from Walmart for a fraction of the price. It turns out that Marco got the Skull because Sir Matthew Phillips allowed it to be stolen from him because it seemed to stare at him no matter where he stood in his parlor, putting him off his aim whenever he tried to play snooker.

Things get progressively creepier as the Skull is capable of hypnotizing everybody, especially Maitland, who hallucinates an endless game of rock, paper, scissors with a couple of fiends and a judge who tries to settle the situation by flipping a coin transforms it into a Star Trek phaser used in a Russian Roulette thing until Spock puts the Vulcan nerve pinch on the judge.

The showdown with the Skull comes to a head (see what I did there?) when it plays the song “Bone to be Wild” on its favorite musical instrument, the xy-lo-bone, with its chin.

So, this movie’s pretty dark but they do a fair job with the only prop, which is a skull. It could have been funnier. I give it a shrilling chicken rating of 2/5.

Svengoolie Movie: “The Brides of Dracula”!

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

It’s almost Christmas and while I was watching the Svengoolie movie “The Brides of Dracula” last night, it struck me that the chief vampire Baron Meinster’s eyes reminded me of holly berries. Yo, Hondo, somebody needs to break out the Extra Strength Visine!

You probably don’t remember the sequels to this film:

The Rides of Dracula, about a vampire’s collection of fancy horse drawn carriages; he’s sort of like the Jay Leno of wealthy car collectors.

The Double Wides of Dracula, about a vampire who’s the landlord of a mobile home park and charges extravagant “rent” (several pints of blood).

Just to clarify, despite the title of the 1960 British bloodsucker movie from Hammer Film Productions, the boss biter is not played by Christopher Lee (because he wanted too much money) but by David Peel so he’s not Dracula but both vampires roll their bloodshot eyes at every girl they meet.

What’s refreshing about this flick is Baron Meinster the monster actually talks, which Dracula didn’t. In fact, Meinster is articulate and suave, as befitting the wealthy nobleman who just happens to sharpen his fangs on the necks of pretty girls.

And Peel actually gets a sarcastically funny line you might miss unless you listen closely. It’s when Baron Meinster meets the headmaster of the Transylvania School for Ladies Who Want to Cultivate Longer Teeth. Herr Otto Lang (Henry Oscar) gets his comeuppance after he threatens to throw Baron Meinster (whose real identity is at first unknown to him) off the school property when he comes to woo the new teacher Marianne Danielle (Yvonne Monlaur). But after the gracious Meinster reveals who he is, which is the baron who owns the property on which the school sits (after which Herr Lang abruptly changes his tone), the baron reminds Lang that his school does a great job “for such low rent.”

There’s a fair bit of comedy in the few scenes in which a local country medical man, Dr. Tobler (Miles Malleson) meets Dr. Van Helsing (Peter Cushing). When Tobler reads Van Helsing’s business card, he discovers that Van Helsing is a doctor of many disciplines—except medicine. Earlier, Dr. Tobler prepares a quackery-type vaporizer steam therapy home remedy for himself, which includes myrrh of all things. It turns out you can inhale things like frankincense and myrrh via vaporizer; it sounds so three-wisemen-Christmasy that it fits the season!

On the other hand, Dr. Tobler doesn’t buy Van Helsing’s vampire explanation for why so many villagers are dying (in the undead sense), though he is open to taking a cut of the fees for applying the usual remedies like stakes, garlic, crucifixes, and the occasional self-branding with hot coals that goes way beyond vaporizers.

The bats look arthritic, but other than that the movie is OK. I give it a 2.5/5 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.

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.

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.

Svengoolie Show Movie: “The Night Strangler”

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.

Upcoming Svengoolie Show Movie “Tarantula”!

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.