Svengoolie movie – Page 2 – Go Retire Psychiatrist

Svengoolie Movie: “The Black Scorpion” Subtitle: “Stay Out of Trouble Juanito!”

Hey, I watched the Svengoolie show “The Black Scorpion” last night and I think a subtitle could have been “Stay Out of Trouble, Juanito!” Every time I woke up, that seven-year-old kid was getting himself into another jam.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. This is a 1957 film starring Richard Denning as Hank Scott, Carlos Rivas as Artur Ramas, Mara Corday as Teresa Alvarez, and Mario Navarro as the irrepressible Juanito. Perry Mason has a bit part as a scorpion.

Hank and Scott are geologists who get roped into investigating the cause of a disaster in Mexico City after a volcano blows its top, waking up a gang of giant scorpions who can’t stop drooling partly because they’re hungry for human flesh, but vitamin B12 deficiency can’t be ruled out. The scorpions are stop motion animation creations which look pretty good, actually.

Right away, Juanito starts messing around getting attached to Hank, opening doors for him, shining his shoes and just making a general nuisance of himself, especially when he starts ignoring his safety from the scorpions—which in turn necessitates his need for being rescued dozens of times. I think this is just attention-seeking after the first few times, one of which involves wandering around and dropping dead fireflies behind him to get the giant arachnids to follow him within shouting distance of Hank, who has to constantly snatch him away from danger.

Juanito: “Hank, help, Hank! The scorpion is about to catch me!”

Hank: “Thunderation, Juanito! What the heck are you doing down here in the cave?”

Juanito: “Save me, Hank! And then I will shine your shoes for only 11,436 pesos!”

Hank (after getting out his exchange rate calculator): “That’s 600 dollars you little hustler!”

Juanito: “Hurry, Hank, before the rate changes; and now the scorpion is close enough to drool on me!”

I found out one thing on the web about one of the items (which was tequila) that Dr. Delacruz wanted to run further tests on with the corpse of one of the scorpion’s victims. Of course, he was joking about the tequila but I guess there is such a thing as a scorpion drink from a bottle of tequila that contains a scorpion. It turns out that the scorpion shot tequila is a macho thing which the giant scorpions hate and destroying mankind is their revenge for it. Just so you know.

Juanito: “Help, Hank! The scorpion is inches away from me now that I’m in their cave after sneaking down here in the bucket with the weapons and the press cameras!”

Hank: “What on earth made you do a stupid thing like that, Juanito?”

Juanito: “I was bringing you this bottle of tequila with a little, edible scorpion in it because I know you’re a macho guy! Then you could waste your time chewing the little scorpion instead of wasting your time taking pictures of the giant drooling scorpion with the old-fashioned big clunky press camera with the huge bulb.”

Hank: “Shut up, Juanito, and bring me another bulb!

The movie could have been shorter if it had ended after the good guys exploded the rocks into the cave. But no, there was a long segment of a guy explaining in pseudoscientific language why Hank and Artur had to return after they left thinking they had finished off the bugs. The guy used a map and PowerPoint slide presentation, carefully explaining while using a laser pointer to indicate various places that provided an implausible escape route for the scorpion which did not clearly show why the giant scorpion had not been killed in the explosion. So much for PowerPoint!

But it did prolong the movie and provided more gruesome footage of scorpions snacking on various human hors d’oeuvres. None of them managed to catch Juanito.

I fell asleep very briefly only a couple of times during the film, so overall I thought it was OK. I believe there’s a sequel in which Juanito, now a teenager, challenges a giant inchworm to a thumb wrestling match.

Upcoming Svengoolie Movie: “The Black Scorpion”

Svengoolie intro: Calling all stations, clear the air lanes, clear all air lanes for the big broadcast!

I plan to watch the upcoming blockbuster Svengoolie movie this Saturday night, “The Black Scorpion” and so far, I haven’t read much about it except for a couple of lines from a synopsis or two. A volcano erupts and all of a sudden, a little town in Mexico is infested with giant scorpions.

I bet you, just like me, remember the TV series Meerkat Manor. Why would I say that, since probably none of you will fess up to it? Because meerkats eat scorpions! Not to mention the meerkats were often not much bigger than the scorpions. But could a mob of meerkats tip the scales? You’d need more than a mob to take down a bed of giant scorpions.

So, can you use bug spray on them? I mean the scorpions, not the meerkats. It turns out that scorpions are arachnids, not insects—but that doesn’t mean some bug sprays won’t work. On the other hand, you could just stick them in a freezer to kill them—not yours, of course. You’d need a freezer the size of a warehouse.

By the way, a bunch of scorpions is called a bed (see above). And so, I guess you can figure out a punch line for a Chuck Norris joke with the lead-in: What does Chuck Norris sleep on when he camps out in the desert?

Svengoolie Movie: “The Black Cat” vs The Weather Report

The atmosphere for the Svengoolie TV show airing of the 1934 movie “The Black Cat” was nothing short of electric—as in electrical storm. I thought the mood of ambivalence in the film was firmly set for about the first half hour of the movie. That was how long the TV station weather alert was on screen, shrinking the viewing size of the movie somewhat to make room for a map of the counties at risk and the scrolling warnings about which east central Iowa counties were affected by the flood watch and guidance about what to do.

Anyway, the film is not related in any way to Edgar Allan Poe’s short story of the same title. The movie was directed by Edgar Ulmer and starred Bela Lugosi as the Hungarian psychiatrist and ex-WWI POW (that’s right, I said “psychiatrist”), Dr. Vitus Werdegast; Boris Karloff as the satanic and necrophiliac Hjalmar Poelzig, the former WWI commander of the Fortress Marmorisch and a famed architect who built an ultra-modern mansion on top of the grisly site where thousands of soldiers were killed. Vitus and Hjalmar play chess for the souls of the aspiring novelist Peter Alison (David Manners) and his wife Joan (Jacqueline Wells) who, unfortunately get stranded there along with Vitus after the bus carrying them crashes on the way from the train station to various hotels and Disney World.

The mood of ambivalence I thought was evident, contrasting the creepiness of Hjalmar and Vitus grimly gambling in a chess match for the lives of Joan and Peter and the comicality of the two policemen interviewing the Alisons and the two heavies about the bus accident. The lieutenant and the sergeant arguing with each other in a “My hometown’s better than yours” exchange reminds me of Abbott and Costello. I recommend you see it for yourselves on the Internet Archive; it’s about 35 minutes in.

Contrast this with the hysterical cat phobic Vitus (despite being a psychiatrist) throwing a knife at one of the many black cats prowling around the house after it ejects a hairball on the floor! Or Hjalmar thumb wrestling with Vitus until the latter chooses to pick up what looks like an emery board from an array of much larger knives and bazookas on a large table—and prepares to flay Hjalmar with it. This would only make Hjalmar look even more excruciatingly well groomed, along with the precisely trimmed haircut carefully smeared with a pound of Brylcreem.

I think “The Black Cat” is a hoot. It’s a litter box full of nuggets of melodramatic ailurophobia with here and there a hairball of ambivalence but hey, nobody’s purr-fect!

Shrilling chicken rating 4/5

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: “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.

The Most Interesting Thing About the Svengoolie Movie House of Frankenstein

We saw the movie House of Frankenstein last Saturday night and, spoiler alert, everybody dies!

Anyway, the main impulse we had when listening to Boris Karloff (who played Dr. Gustav Niemann) was to think of something I’m not even sure I can say on this blog due to the strict copyright laws governing even the utterance what I’m going to call NAME. I’m using only the word NAME because I’m afraid Dr. Sues Enterprises will track me down and sue me for copyright infringement if I actually say NAME.

Yes, Dr. Sues Enterprises is intentionally spelled that way because I’m not even sure I can say their name without getting slapped with a lawsuit.

No kidding (and this is no joke by the way), I read a lot of scary stuff on line about how NAME is not in the public domain and what can happen to you if you even say it out loud.

I think I can get away with saying that Boris Karloff was 79 years old when he voiced NAME in the movie which I guess will have to remain nameless.

There are people who get away with it, though. Maybe it’s because they pay for the privilege of uttering NAME.

Here’s an interesting thing. Pixabay has a lot of pictures that are royalty-free. You want to guess what I found there? Pictures of NAME! I don’t know how they get away with it. OK, so maybe it’s because they don’t charge a fee for use.

On the other hand, there’s this guy who wrote in to some kind of ask-a-lawyer website that he sells a tee shirt that has NAME printed on it. He got a copyright infringement notice and asks why he can’t get away with it. All the lawyers who answered said he can’t sell shirts with NAME on it because Dr. Sues Enterprises has a federal trademark registration on NAME.

Anyway, that’s the most interesting part about the movie House of Frankenstein.