Svengoolie – Go Retire Psychiatrist

Svengoolie Show Movie: “How to Make a Monster”

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

Will the real monster please stand up? That’s the question I asked myself last night while watching the 1958 American International film “How to Make a Monster” directed by Herbert L. Strock. The principal players are Robert H. Harris as Pete Dumond (the bully makeup artist); Paul Brinegar as Rivero (Dumond’s servile assistant); Gary Conway as Tony Mantell (teenage Frankenstein); Gary Clarke as Larry Drake (teenage Werewolf).

Dumond is an aging prima donna makeup artist specializing in movie monster creation who gets taken down a few pegs and basically fired by new studio executives who tell him monster movies are passe and they are all in on the new craving audiences have for musicals and comedies.

Dumond takes exception to this and he takes revenge by stealing a mind-control chemical (grape Nehi) that is definitely not FDA-approved and mixing it with makeup for Drake and Mantell while hypnotizing them into knocking off the enemies who are destroying his career.

This, of course, shows overweening pride (also known as hubris) which is a common film attitude we got from Greek mythology. One obvious, relevant connection is the episode in which Odysseus blinds Polyphemus by poking his eye out with a knitting needle and then taunts him for being unable to find his golf balls. This is where the idea came from for the scene in which teenage Frankenstein collides with the film’s only black bit player Paulene Myers (Millie) who remembers him because of a “missing” eye.

Anyway, Dumond is forever cutting down his assistant, Rivero who gets really nervous when the police browbeat him about the 12 or so murders that happen in the studio lot café, which is a mistake because the cook never cleans the grill and most customers die from food poisoning.

The part that puzzled me about this movie was towards the end when Dumond has been evicted from his office and he’s cleaning up. He’s packing a few things and then looks at a couple of items that look like they could be incriminating pieces of evidence that could lead the cops to him.

He just tosses them into a wastepaper basket in his makeup room. Excuse me! The makeup and LSD that he used to hypnotize the teenage monsters to kill for him are in plain sight? Hey, I’m not the only one who thought of that. After I got the idea last night, this morning I saw a full-length YouTube of the movie. See the comments below it. One of them says, “Had Pete not thrown away that stuff he could’ve gotten away.”

So, to return to the opening line of this so-called review, who’s the real monster in this film? Right, it’s the sketch Svengoolie made of his self-portrait, turning it into the face of a werewolf!

I thought the movie was fair. I give it a 3/5 Shrilling Chicken Rating.

Svengoolie Show Movie: “The Car”

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

We’ve never seen the 1977 movie “The Car” and it’s spooky because that’s the year Sena and I got married and only a few years later we got a big 1980s vintage Chrysler New Yorker that had an Electric Voice Alert (EVA) system. Not that the car in the movie talks, it just kills people—mainly good people. And the car in the movie was a Lincoln Continental.

There aren’t many demonic car jokes so I had to come up with one that fits the movie because there’s one out there which you can overthink. I had to make the car talk and you have to imagine it has an EVA system installed. You also have to be old enough to know what those old Chrysler New Yorkers usually said. Furthermore, you have to know that a priest uses something called a sprinkler (usually called by the Latin-derived name “aspergillum”) to apply holy water.

What did the demonic car say to the Catholic priest trying to exorcise it? “Your holy water fluid level is low!” Sorry.

Anyway, the movie stars James Brolin (Wade Parent, chief deputy), Kathleen Lloyd (Lauren Humphries, Wade’s girlfriend), R.G. Armstrong (Amos Clements, the dynamite guy; oh, my name is in this movie; that’s spooky!), Ronny Cox (Deputy Luke Johnson), John Marley (Sheriff Everett Peck), Eddie Little Sky (Denson), Margaret Willey (Navajo woman), among others.

Chief Deputy Wade Parent, a divorced guy with two daughters, and Lauren Humphries are sweethearts who plan to marry. The gist of the scene following the opener in which the car runs down two bike riders is that Amos Clements, the dynamite contractor who is abusing his wife, witnesses a guy get run over by the demonic car but then can’t come up with enough specifics about how to identify the car or its driver, which really makes Sheriff Peck mad, because he knows that Clements is abusing his wife, who Peck was sweet on in high school and has wanted to rescue her from the bad marriage.

The car is very choosy about who it kills—mainly good-hearted, kind, decent people. In fact, it spares the one baddy in the town, which is Clements, and instead runs over Sheriff Peck.

The only way you know this is that the one witness to the Sheriff Peck murder is the Navajo woman, whose story is mis-translated by the deputy Denson (later corrected by the dispatcher), who leaves out the part that the car swerved to miss Clements and went straight for Sheriff Peck, and that the Navajo woman didn’t see a driver.

Nobody ever “sees” the driver until the end and this review will not have spoilers. The car’s menacing approach is always preceded by a big wind which is sort of a mini haboob, after which people are knocked off.

The only place where people are spared is in the town cemetery, which the car never enters although it knocks down part of the entrance while Lauren makes a big show of jeering at it, calling it names, and just generally insulting it, for example:

“Nyahh, your window washer fluid level is low!”

“Your stick shift is crooked!”

“You’re too fat for your seatbelt!”

“Because you have no door handles, your door is ajar!”

This movie is OK, although there are some scenes in which overacting gets a little tedious. I give it a 3/5 Shrilling Chicken rating.

Svengoolie Movie: “An American Werewolf in London”

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

Let me get this off my chest first. Sena and I watched the Svengoolie show the 1981 movie, “An American Werewolf in London” directed by John Landis last night and neither of us remember hearing Sam Cooke’s version of the song “Blue Moon” during the transformation scene when David Naughton (David Kessler) turns into a werewolf. We found other videos in which Cook’s smooth delivery of “Blue Moon” is clearly playing while David is morphing into a monster.

But neither one of us remembers hearing it on the Svengoolie show last night. Anyway, IMDB has a short paragraph which says director John Landis wanted the Sam Cooke version of “Blue Moon” playing during the transformation scene because he wanted to contrast the sadness of the song with the horror of the transformation. The composer, Elmer Bernstein, made an alternate music for the scene which never got used because Landis vetoed it.

That said, this is not going to be my usual tongue-in-cheek fake review with a lot of fibs and dad jokes. I should also mention that Sena watched the movie in a different room from mine because she doesn’t like the number of commercials on the Svengoolie show and switches channels a lot.

The movie is supposed to be a mix of comedy and horror and I liked that. Sena was a bit ambivalent about it but overall thought parts of it were pretty funny.

The movie opens with David Naughton (David Kessler) and Griffin Dunne (Jack Goodman) ignoring the advice of patrons at a tavern with the cheerful name The Slaughtered Lamb to stick to the road and avoid the moor. A werewolf attacks them, kills Jack but David is hospitalized with wounds. Jack appears to David periodically (each time more decayed) to tell him he needs to commit suicide in order to stop the werewolf bloodline so that Jack can die because he’s now undead.

Alex Price (Jenny Agutter) is David’s nurse in the hospital. She gets a crush on him and takes him home with her when he’s ready to leave. David’s doctor eventually gets the idea that he might be delusional about being a werewolf. David tries to convince Alex that he’s a werewolf by explaining the 1941 movie “The Wolfman.” The key is that he can be saved from his fate only by someone who loves him. Alex doesn’t get it—at first.

David’s transformation scene was pretty intense, which may be why neither of us actually heard Sam Cooke’s smooth delivery of the song “Blue Moon.” That might speak against Landis’s idea that a sad song might moderate the horror of David’s terrifying metamorphosis into a huge, demonic wolf. However, I did find out that the film’s composer, Elmer Bernstein, wanted to use a scary music. Landis wanted to use Cooke’s rendition of “Blue Moon” and prevailed. However, there’s a clip with Bernstein’s music, which is pretty intense. I didn’t much care for it, although Sena thought it fit better with the transformation.

There were actually three versions of the song “Blue Moon” in the movie: one by Bobby Vinton, one by Sam Cooke, and the third by The Marcels. Neither of us heard “Blue Moon” by Sam Cook. We couldn’t find evidence on the web that the Svengoolie version edited out the song. On the other hand, neither did we hear the sexually suggestive noises in the porno theater when David’s slaughtered victims give him helpful advice about how to commit suicide so that they can get out of limbo. Again, that’s because they’re undead and David has to kill himself in order for them to move on. Even his friend Jack, who was killed by the werewolf who attacked him and David early in the movie, supports this effort—although he scoffs at the idea of a silver bullet being the weapon of choice.

The link between the 1941 movie “The Wolfman” and “An American Werewolf in London” becomes clearer late in the film. Readers can figure it out.

There’s an Easter egg in this movie and it’s the Piccadilly Circus adult film theater marquee, “See You Next Wednesday.” This is a recurring gag in many films by John Landis. It’s a line from the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

“See You Next Wednesday” is a line from the 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey.” It is the last line spoken by Frank Poole’s father during Poole’s video message from his parents.

Sena and I both think the movie is pretty good and give it a Shrilling Chicken rating of 4.5/5.

Svengoolie Show Movie: “Dracula”

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

I’ve never seen the 1931 Universal production of Dracula and it was a film to marvel, mainly to marvel at Bela Lugosi’s ability to contort those famous hands into spell-binding patterns while commanding hapless victims “I command you; come here!” He didn’t say “bluh, bluh” even once.

I tried to mimic Dracula’s hand gestures and ended up going to the ER to get them unraveled.

Instead of Jonathan Harker (David Manners) traveling to Transylvania according to the Bram Stoker novel, it was Renfield (Dwight Frye) who was the real estate agent making preparations for Count Dracula (Bela Lugosi) to rent out the Motel 6 room (“We’ll leave the spider snacks out for you!”) in London.

Renfield is Dracula’s first victim shortly after his arrival at the castle in Transylvania. You never see fangs on the vampires in this movie, which is pretty refreshing actually. Fake fangs interfere with delivering one’s lines, such as when Dr. Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan) holds up a mirror to Dracula (which shows he has no reflection), who then smacks it out of his hand:

Dracula: Tho thorry, Doctor Van Helthing. My humble apology. I dithlike mirrors.

There’s this ongoing debate about why wolfsbane instead of garlic was used to ward of Dracula. The explanation is pretty simple really. Nobody could find enough garlic to use because most of it was in the spaghetti sauce often served to the actors for lunch.

There is a little humor in this dark movie. Martin the asylum nurse (Charles K. Gerrard), who’s always chasing after Renfield and taking away the dead chipmunks he insists on eating, has a funny exchange with one of the maids when they’re talking about someone else in the house:

Maid: He’s crazy!

Martin: They’re all crazy except you and me. And sometimes I have my doubts about you.

Maid: You got something on your face, dude!

I think right after this is when Dr. Van Helsing hires Count Chocula with a plan to arrange a cage match with Dracula.

It’s not very well known, but if you noticed that most men in the movie have their hair styled in a way which makes them look like they’re wearing helmets, that’s because they were all using Brylcreem, which was invented in 1928 in Birmingham, England by County Chemicals at the Chemico Works which was shipped to California with the warning label “A Little Dab’ll Do Ya” which Universal obviously ignored.

I think this is an OK movie and I give it a Shrilling Chicken Rating of 3/5.

Upcoming Svengoolie Movie: “Dracula” (1931)

So, the upcoming Svengoolie movie is “Dracula” released in 1931 starring Bela Lugosi. They tried to get George Burns to star in it, but he refused to take the cigar out of his mouth long enough to put the fangs in.

I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen this classic vampire flick in which the story differed from the Bram Stoker novel in that Soupy Sales was substituted to play Renfield who traveled to Transylvania instead of Jonathan Harker to sell real estate to Count Dracula. This, of course, could only be accomplished by contacting the extraterrestrials to create a wormhole in which time travel could be accomplished by bending the wormhole tightly enough to snatch Soupy from the future, which was lucky because it prevented him from making the disastrous on-air joke in 1965 in which he “suggested” to kids to get “green pieces of paper” (money) from their parents and mail it to him.

If you don’t remember the story that way then you’re either suffering from the Mandela Effect or the ETs got to you as well.

Anyway, except for the switch in characters, the action goes pretty much to plan the way Stoker wrote it up except for the ironic issue of Lugosi actually being quite fond of garlic which led to him eating the stuff while filming in addition to filching it in between takes and taking it back to his trailer to share it with Lon Chaney, who was feeling pretty bad for not getting the Dracula role in the first place because, despite it being offered to him first, he was later rejected because he couldn’t stop turning into the Wolf Man at inopportune moments during the screen test when the cue card person kept turning the card upside down. His growls sounded inside out, which struck the director as silly, which got him laughing so much he got the hiccups.

Anyway, Lugosi got the part and he’s remembered for unforgettable lines like the ones below:

Count Dracula: This is a very old wine. I hope you like it.

Renfield: Aren’t you drinking?

Count Dracula: I never drink since I took the pledge.

Well, I may have got a couple of details wrong, but that never hurts anything.

Svengoolie Movie: “The Gorgon”

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

Well, last night I saw the 1964 Hammer Films movie “The Gorgon,” and the first thing to clear up is the name of the gorgon relating to the underlying Greek mythology which, incidentally, the Svengoolie show clearly did early on.

The gorgons were 3 ugly female creatures with snakes in their hair and if you looked at one of them, you’d turn to stone. The most well-known gorgon was Medusa, which Perseus defeated by only looking at her indirectly in a mirror and slicing off her head. Medusa was the only human gorgon and the other two were named Stheno and Euryale.

The problem is the gorgon’s name which is Megaera. Megaera was part of another trio of monsters in Greek mythology called the Erinyes (Furies). They also had snakes in their hair and their names were Megaera, Alecto, and Tisiphone (who is incorrectly identified as a gorgon in the film). They were the goddesses of vengeance who punished men for crimes like murder of relatives and lying. Gazing at them didn’t turn you into stone, but they could drive you crazy, and inflict disease if you didn’t laugh at your father’s Dad Jokes.

Moving right along, the movie begins with a lot of people in early 20^th century Europe being turned into stoners who smoke pot by the bongful, leading to Dr. Namaroff (Peter Cushing) noticing that many of them ended up getting institutionalized in the madhouse he runs in Vandorf, a small village in Germany, and where he occasionally removes the brains of some of the inmates and who also has a crush on his assistant, Carla Hoffman (Barbara Shelley).

Actually, the stoners literally turn into stone, presumed by some to be a result of the unbelievable potency of the local pot, but watch out, Prof. Karl Meister (Christopher Lee) has an amazing grasp of Greek mythology although even he can’t separate the Erinyes from the Gorgons.

There’s something weird going on and Meister gets a letter from Professor Jules Hetiz (Michael Goodliffe) who has a close encounter of the craggy kind which leads to Meister sending Paul Heitz (Richard Pasco) to dig into the mystery and also bring back some of that righteous pot.

However, Paul has a pretty bad trip on the stuff and ends up in Dr. Namaroff’s hospital for about a week convalescing. He and Carla really hit it off, which Namaroff gets pretty miffed about because Carla is his girl even if she is a little spooky. The local constabulary (the head of which is Inspector Kanof (Patrick Troughton, who was the second Doctor in Doctor Who in 1966) and is very protective of the secret which is behind all the broken furniture and homemade bongs in the forbidding castle in the neighborhood.

The gorgonizing secret of the whole affair gradually gets revealed in confrontation involving a snake pit in which a cobra bites Chuck Norris and after 7 agonizing days—the cobra dies.

I think the movie is fair but it gets the Greek mythology wrong. I give it a 2/5 Shrilling Chicken Rating. You can see it on the Internet Archive.

Svengoolie Movie: “War of the Colossal Beast”

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

I watched the movie “War of the Colossal Beast” last night. Sena saw only the first few scenes of it in the beginning because she took a bite out of a magical cake she got at Hy-Vee, grew into a giant (had to get a new roof), wandered downtown to the Ped Mall until she found a mushroom, nibbled on it till she shrunk down to normal size and didn’t get back home until the movie was over, so like always, I had to explain the show to her. Based on my Svengoolie movie “reviews” you can imagine how well that went!

Anyway, this movie was released by American International Productions in 1958 and it was a sort of but not really a sequel to their film “The Amazing Colossal Man,” released a year earlier. In that movie, a military man, Col. Glenn Manning got exposed to radiation in Las Vegas and grew to a height of 60 feet which meant he could hit the free throw shot from several miles away. He ran amok and the army lobbed bombs and shot bullets at him until he fell 700 feet off Boulder Dam and everybody assumed he died. Although there are restrictions on seeing this movie in certain venues because of a copyright restriction, you can find it on the web, including the Internet Archive.

In “War of the Colossal Beast,” the story picks up sort of where the not-really-a-prequel left off except, in the beginning of the movie, a lot of food trucks are disappearing from the roads. One of them belongs to John Swanson (George Becwar), a food truck owner whose truck got lost and says repeatedly to the police “Get the picture?” when he tells his account of what he knows about the theft. It doesn’t take long to “get the picture” that this is comic relief.

It turns out that Glenn Manning is filching food from trucks and he’s not sharing any of it with the 50-foot woman who has wandered over from a different movie set and is pretty hungry (partly because she drinks too much) after an extraterrestrial has zapped her with radiation leading to a sudden growth spurt.

A scientist, Dr. Carmichael (Russ Bender) and Maj. Mark Baird (Roger Pace) have “cooked up” a plan to catch Manning using Italian bread spiked with chloral hydrate and evidently, Manning’s sister Joyce (Sally Fraser) approves of this plan. Baird and Carmichael both taste the bread, and neither drops dead even though if there’s enough chloral hydrate in all that bread to knock out a 60-foot-tall man, there should be enough to kill a normal size man after just a small bite. Whatever.

After abandoning a plan to hire Manning to round up all the Bigfoot monsters in the country because he’s too brain injured to remember the details which is not to squash them beyond recognition and allow photographers to take photos of the operation, which may or may not have happened when the Van Meter Visitor (a huge pterodactyl) in Iowa hit town in the early 1900s and flew all over the place munching on the cattle until cowboys and farmers shot it down and then took pictures of it which people claimed they all saw in the local newspaper yet those issues are “not available” for some reason so I guess there’s some kind of Mandela Effect going on or some people are prone to telling “tall tales.”

In the meantime, Manning is being held down by ropes and chains and it’s obvious that he was brain injured in that 700-foot fall in the first encounter. His right eye is missing and some of his teeth are pushed to one side, possibly because of a roundhouse kick by Chuck Norris (himself) who caught him trying to steal his chloral-hydrate enriched Italian bread.

Somehow, Manning is able to pick the locks of his chains using the same hypodermic needle he harpooned somebody with in the first movie and which he hid in his giant adult diapers (yes, those would be Shorty’s Adult Diapers that Big Mo aka John Heim the KCCK radio wizard of the Big Mo Blues Show describes, “they’re ready when you aren’t!).

The action and the dialogue start to get more complicated towards the end, which I’m going to defer on revealing in order to avoid spoilers (OK, the butler did it).

This is an OK movie although the dialogue gets a little stilted toward the end. I give it a 3/5 Shrilling Chicken Rating.

Svengoolie Movie: “Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb”

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

So, you can give me credit for watching the Svengoolie movie “Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb” last night instead of the Seattle Seahawks vs San Francisco 49ers football game. Sena watched a little of it and probably not enough to rate it. You need to know there is such a thing as scalp psoriasis to get the joke in the featured image.

Before I get into this Hammer horror flick, I need to have a little fun at Svengoolie’s expense about his Too Drawn Out picture. You have to know that this is a puzzle game. Svengoolie draws a few cartoons, gives some hints about what the pictures suggest, and puts them together to make a word that is connected to the movie. Some fans give him a hard time about them because, frankly, the clues occasionally reach a little too far.

His first picture in this bit would be familiar to people mainly in my generation or older. Although it’s a bit unfair to kids, you have to give him credit as an artist. The figure actually did resemble a character in a popular (to some of us) TV sitcom years ago. I guessed this one right because we watched The Honeymooners. It was Ed Norton climbing out of (or into?) a sewer because that was his occupation. Art Carney played Norton. Jackie Gleason played the “bus driver” that Svengoolie gives as another clue. The main goal is to name the common underground drainage feature in cities, which was “sewer.”

The next drawing is of a guy either sneezing or coughing and Svengoolie makes it clear that it’s not the former. The clue was “cough.”

The drawing after that was of an ugly old crone, which was a bit difficult to get but turns out to be “hag.”

The last drawing was of some guy with a speech balloon with the cartoon symbols often used to indicate foul language or swearing. This clue was “cuss.”

The final answer? It’s “sarcophagus.” Sewer-Cough-Hag-Cuss. OK, almost there. I’ve done my own version of these in the past and I thought of this one for “sarcophagus.” The word “sewer” is a stretch, especially if you’re not from my generation, given the hints. I use different clues with different hints:

Sir: the drawing is that of a soldier saluting. What do soldiers often say when they salute? “Sir!”

Cuff: the drawing is a shirt cuff with a cufflink. What is this part of a man’s shirt called?

Hog: the drawing is that of a big sow. A large pig, either sow or boar, is often called a hog. What is this large farm animal?

Gust: the drawing is of gusts of wind blowing a flag. What is making the flag fly and flap? A “gust” of wind.

It ends up as Sir-Cuff-Hog-Gust. You’re supposed to say these fairly fast, running the words together to solve the puzzle. If you sound this out right, you get…that’s right, Art Carney!

Moving right along, we need to discuss this 1971 Hammer production movie which doesn’t really have a mummy in it. The gist of the story is that a group of archeologist explorers go digging around somewhere in Egypt and find this tomb with the beautiful but blurred Queen Tera (Valerie Leon) who is more mammarized than mummified, which accounts for the blurring of her chest area. In fact, even the ancient drawings of women on the tomb walls blur their boobs.

The film makers go to a lot of trouble hiding parts of Queen Tera’s anatomy, yet could not come up with a way to prevent Ms. Leon from flinching when one of the priests shoves what looks like a nasal irrigation device up her nose. I mean he really jammed it in there and she reacted by nearly jumping off the table, sneezing blood repeatedly and cussing like a stevedore! In general, this is not the way dead people behave…unless they’re in a Hammer film.

Anyway, after the nasal sinus irrigation leads to the flushing of about a pint of blood and a fairly large mosquito from her nose, the priests proceed to cutting off her right hand, along with a ring with a huge ruby (although not nearly as big as other parts which I will not mention and which are massively blurred in any case). The ruby contains a replica of a constellation of 7 stars which do not include Art Carney.

Actually, the seven stars thing is adapted from Bram Stoker’s novel “The Jewel of Seven Stars,” although, technically, only seven stars would not count as a galaxy, according to Zed from the well-known documentary film, “Men in Black” who had to school Agent J that the galaxy was not on Orion’s Belt, as anybody knows.

The group of explorers take Queen Tera and a lot of artifacts from the tomb, which turn out to be very bad for their health, including the daughter, Margaret (also played by Valerie Leon) of one of them named Fuchs (Andrew Keir). Margaret apparently has a partial exemption from the blurring clause.

Margaret seems to have no fear of the groping chopped off hand (played by Thing from the Addams Family, if you’re curious) of Queen Tera. But the explorers get their throats torn out either by Thing or the Pharoah Hound (also lifted from Bram Stoker), which has an annoying tendency to bark along to “Who Let the Dogs Out” by the Baha Men.

I’m not going to reveal the ending although I can tell you that it involves the only scene which reveals anything that even remotely looks like a mummy.

I think the movie is OK, but a bit blurry in places. I give it a Shrilling Chicken Rating of 3/5.

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 Movie: “Duel” Roaring Road Rage!

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

Well, we watched the 1971 film “Duel” on the Svengoolie show last night. This was Sena’s second time seeing it and it was my first time watching this truly gripping movie, which was either Steven Spielberg’s first or second feature-length directing effort, depending on whether you believe Wikipedia or Artificial Intelligence (AI).

It started off as a TV movie and was later made into a movie for theaters, although it was inspired by a short story of the same name by Richard Matheson about a man vs machine cat and mouse game, published in a 1971 issue of Playboy. You can find copies of Matheson’s full story on the web, which is puzzling given copyright laws, but I guess some people are getting away with it.

Anyway, Dennis Weaver starred David Mann as a traveling salesman or maybe it was the rust bucket satanic semi-tanker truck which hunts Mann (a name that makes me think of “man” in the general sense of humankind) down on dusty two-lane highways through the California desert in an apparent act of the worst road rage you ever saw, triggered by Mann simply passing it.

At first, I wondered if there was any person actually driving the truck; maybe it was just a driverless demon truck. But on occasion you see a guy’s arm waving to allow Mann to pass him although one time this was into the path of an oncoming car coming from the opposite direction.

Early in the movie, I thought Mann’s radio in his car, which is a Plymouth Valiant (does the car model’s name Valiant signify something?) there is a goofy-sounding radio question and answer show with some guy complaining about a census question asking who is the head of household. The guy sounds really insecure and he obsesses about not being the head of household because he’s not the breadwinner because his wife is, and I think this set the stage for one of the ideas behind the movie, which is male anxiety about not being the “man of the family” and, by extension, this might point to nagging doubts in general about masculinity and the place of men in society.

This is typically where the TV commercials appear with Frank Thomas and Doug Flutie pushing Nugenix Total-T man-boosting snake oil elixir, guaranteed to grow your package 10 times “normal” size, which should make you ask what was going on with those Popeye cartoons in which he swells up after wolfing down a can of spinach and kicks Bluto’s ass followed by Olive Oyl swooning over him.

This radio program almost counts as a character in the film because almost everything that happens afterward is about who is more of a man—Mann or machine. Is that why some of us are anxious about AI?

By the way, were it not for Svengoolie pointing it out, I would never have noticed that what looks like a highway patrol car, which Mann swerves toward but avoids at the last second is actually a pest control vehicle with the name of the company “Grebleips Pest Control”—which is Spielberg spelled backwards.

One of my favorite scenes is the roadside café where Mann gets paranoid about all the guys in there wearing boots similar to those he saw when the guy driving the truck gets out and walks around. The boots are the only parts visible. There are several boot-wearing guys in the café who act like typical non-Nugenix Triple Total Titanic-T needing men who talk with their mouths full, drink beer, scratch their scrotums, and snicker at Mann—who just wants aspirin. He neurotically wonders which one he should confront and when he does—it’s the wrong guy.

I don’t want to overfocus on it but when the radiator hose fails and steam billows all over, engine temperature rising leading to Mann’s car slowing down, overheating and actually shutting down while the raging truck chases him, Mann is able to restart his car. Is that even mechanically possible? I think he stopped, shifted to neutral and coasted for a while, but he never stopped to make temporary repairs. By the way, is it true you can crack an egg over a busted radiator hose as a stopgap fix?

Would taking a dose of Nugenix Whopping Hairy Total-T help at all? Would a satanic truck politely quit chasing you long enough to allow you to do that? Did Mann buy any groceries at the roadside rattlesnake place including eggs?

Is Nugenix Whopping Whackadoodle Walker Texas Ranger Chuck Norris Plays Jenga with Stonehenge Totally Triple T enough to reverse what is happening to American males so that we can see the sequel to Duel—which would be Double Dammit Duel?

Don’t answer that. In any case, I think this is a pretty cool movie and I give it a Shrilling Chicken Rating of 5/5.