Svengoolie TV Show – Go Retire Psychiatrist

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: “The Black Cat”!

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

What do you get when you cross a black cat with a rubber chicken? Something else Svengoolie has to dodge. Keep reading for the Artificial Intelligence (AI) attempts at this joke.

The upcoming Svengoolie show movie this Saturday will be “The Black Cat” which I’ve never seen before. One of the posters I see on the internet implies that it’s based on Edgar Allen Poe’s short story of the same name.

I never read the gory story until a couple of days ago and I’m hoping the film won’t be like that. It also reminded me of a novel about animal cruelty given to me as a gift when I was a kid. “Beautiful Joe” was written by Margaret Marshall Saunders and it emphasized how people can treat animals humanely. It was a true story about a dog that was rescued from a sadistic master who mutilated the animal by cutting off its tail and ears in a fit of rage.

Just for fun I tried to find out AI would come up with when I asked it about a joke which would start with “What do you get when you cross a black cat with a chicken?”

The AI answer: “Something which scratches the furniture and lays eggs.” Other answers were “Cluck-ty cat” or “Meow-ster Hen.”

And when I asked for the AI joke using “What do you get when you cross a black cat with a rubber chicken?” AI came up with:

“That’s a classic riddle! The answer is: A lucky squeak!” And the AI goes on to explain: “It plays on the idea that black cats are considered unlucky, and rubber chickens make a squeaking sound.”

See what he did there? Neither did I.

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: “The Crawling Eye”

I saw the movie “The Crawling Eye” last night. Sena gave up after about 15 minutes. It was almost 2 hours into the film before you see any of the giant eyesores—and they were in dire need of Visine treatment.

The movie was made in 1958 and it’s about an alien invasion of a fictitious mountain in Switzerland called Mount Trendelenburg, no wait, that’s an inclined position of a patient on an operating table; it’s actually Mount Trollenberg.

The aliens are giant eyes with pinpoint pupils. The hero, United Nations employee Alan Brooks (played by Forrest Tucker) manages to stab one with a secret weapon called a sty-letto. Brooks is apparently heavily invested in pushing cigarettes and booze on the various other characters, a few of whom for some reason get transformed into zombies, probably because they get so stoned on cognac. Brooks deals with them by blowing his whiskey breath in their faces.

Brooks has to be pretty stern to get others to cooperate to a new battle plan against the eyeballs after it becomes clear that dilation drops won’t work. I can’t remember exactly what he barked at them but it was something like, “Keep your eye on the highball!” Maybe it was “Do as your told!”

Brooks also directs them to make bombs, which look like Molotov cocktails, and that was a nice break from drinking the regular cocktails at the hotel bar. Brooks orders them not to fire until they see the whites of their eyes, but by now everybody ignores him. At first, they have a hard time hitting the creatures, I guess because they were eyeballing the distance.

When the crawling eyes get hit with the bombs, they get a severe case of floaters, which makes them realize that they’re now up against something even more irritating than the cigarette smoke Brooks blows at them. Unfortunately for the eyeballs, they left their safety sunglasses on their home planet.

The best part of the movie was the Sven Squad; their jokes were so cornea they saved the day.