The Horror of It All

First, there was the sound--a long, groaning, creaking sound that could only issue forth from a centuries-old coffin lid.

Then came the music--an eerie, bass-driven tune punctuated by shrill, specific guitar notes and accentuated by strings and, perhaps, a harp.

Then the string of black & white images from classic Universal horror films like Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man and The Mummy flowed across the screen.

Finally, the title card bearing the freehand-drawn visage of a man with long, flowing hair, a formal top hat, bulging eyes and a smile that seemed to show dozens (if not hundreds) of razor-sharp teeth displayed the name of the program as the voiceover man (initially Carl Greyson, later Marty McNeely, both newscasters handling the late shift) announced the evening's feature presentation.

So began nearly every showing of Creature Features, the weekly WGN horror-movie showcase that stirred the imaginations--and haunted the dreams--of children and adults alike from its premiere on Saturday, September 19, 1970 until May 1976. (The very first and very last movies shown on Creature Features were one and the same: the Tod Browning/Bela Lugosi version of Dracula.)

In my memory, such as it is, Creature Features lasted at least two years longer than that, and I could swear that I ran across a late-night version of it that eschewed the usual montage and just presented the title card with the line drawing of Lon Chaney from London After Midnight (ironically, a long-lost silent film that therefore could never be shown on Creature Features--or anywhere else, for that matter) and the spooky Henry Mancini theme lifted from Blake Edwards' Experiment in Terror (also ironically, not a horror film and therefore something that would never be shown on Creature Features).

Regardless of how long the show was actually on the air, it made a deep impression on me and much of my generation growing up in Chicago in the 1970s. It also gave me my first introduction to many of the classics of the genre--in addition to the aforementioned Universal horror classics of the '30s and '40s, Creature Features also ran selections from Warner Bros. (Doctor X), Columbia (The Black Room), 20th Century Fox (The Lodger) and even Japan's Toho Studios (the Americanized version of the original Godzilla and my all-time favorite daikaiju classic, War of the Gargantuas).

As I've mentioned before, I was lucky enough to have grown up in Chicago, where we had many TV stations with lots of programming time to fill, even in the days before all stations ran all 24 hours. (In the 1970s, most stations were off the air by one o'clock in the morning.) And what was one of the most cost-effective way to fill that time? Movies. That meant just about every channel had at least one regularly scheduled movie program. Some, like WGN, had several. So we were lucky enough to have more than one horror-film showcase on the air at the same time.

In fact, the other high-profile monster show in Chicago in the 1970s officially started just one day before Creature Features first stalked the airwaves. Well, sort of.

That Friday night, September 18, 1970, WFLD launched their own horror movie showcase, Screaming Yellow Theater. At first, it didn't really have a host--not even a line drawing standing in for a host a la Creature Features. It just had the voice of staff announcer Jerry G. Bishop doing a Bela Lugosi impersonation--appropriate enough, since the first feature that first night was Ghosts on the Loose, an East Side Kids comedy with Lugosi as a menacing guest star.

According to Chicago TV Horror Movie Shows: From Shock Theatre to Svengoolie, the very entertaining history of our fair city's horror movie showcases by Ted Okuda and Mark Yurkiw, Bishop continued hosting Screaming Yellow Theater off-screen for several months, maintaining the Lugosi impression while adding smart-ass comments about the movies, which weren't nearly up to the fare over on WGN. There were a few certified classics, like the original Night of the Living Dead and Mario Bava's Black Sunday and some unsung gems like Night Tide (starring a young Dennis Hopper) or The Haunter Strangler (starring an old Boris Karloff), but most of the movies on Screaming Yellow Theater were low-budget, no-star garbage that needed all the help they could get. And come that following summer, boy would they get it. When Bishop finally debuted on-screen as Svengoolie, Screaming Yellow Theater completely stopped being about the movies and was now all about the green-haired hippy vampire with the Transylvanian accent. the movies were still there and still bad, but the jokes were worse, which made them that much funnier. Bishop was basically doing stand-up prop comedy (most of the props being rubber chickens hurled at him whenever he made a bad pun, which was often) on a decidedly shoestring budget. He was also obviously having a blast with the gig.

For all good things, though, there is an end, and the end for Svengoolie came rather unceremoniously in the first week of September 1973, when the new owners of WFLD decided to save some money (like they were spending a whole lot of cash on the show anyway), cancel Svengoolie and use the horror host they already had on their payroll in Cleveland and Detroit: The Ghoul, successor to Ghoulardi (a.k.a. Ernie Anderson, father of director P.T. Anderson).

I tuned in the next Saturday, fully expecting to be entertained by the green-haired hippy vampire telling corny jokes and making silly puns, only to find a new guy dressed as a gangster and toting a Tommy gun. (Because he was on in Chicago now. And we think gangsters are hilarious.) At least that's how my nine-year-old mind recorded the event. (Remember what I said above about memory.)

Whatever actually happened that night, three things were verifiably clear: Svengoolie was gone. The Ghoul was here. And the Ghoul was just not amusing to me. (Apparently, it wasn't just me. He only stayed on Chicago airwaves for a few months, though he's been on and off the air in Cleveland and Detroit ever since and even has his own website. More power to him.)

Even as good things end, other good things begin. After a few years without either Creature Features and Screaming Yellow Theater and only a few quieter, hostless shows (one of them ironically named Creature Feature and even more ironically on WFLD, former home of Svengoolie) to feed our need for monster mashes, WFLD changes ownership again--in fact, changed back to the previous ownership, which wanted its own horror host again. That's how they wound up with Son of Svengoolie (a.k.a. Rich Koz) in June 1979. That lasted until 1986, but there was life in the ol' Goolie yet: he rose from the dead on New Year's Eve 1994 and has been showing bad movies (and telling worse jokes) ever since.

So this weekend when the 40th anniversaries of Creature Features and Screaming Yellow Theater are upon us, raise a pint (of blood) in celebration and watch a bad movie. Something with Bela Lugosi would do just fine.

Review: Destination Truth (2nd season premiere)

(NOTE: The following review was originally written back when I was one of a large number of critics for a website that reviews movies and TV shows. The review was rejected by the editor of said site, and my relation ship with them subsequently ended. The review has been sitting on my computer ever since--time to clean house.)

These days, cable TV is overrun with investigative reality shows, with lots of crawling around in dusty old houses that may or may not be haunted, traipsing through forests in search of Bigfoot or donning scuba gear in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the Loch Ness Monster--all seen through the eye-bleeding green haze of night vision photography.

Sci-Fi Channel’s Destination Truth tries to differentiate itself from the rest of the pack by displaying a more wise-ass, snarky attitude while still approaching its subjects--in the case of the second season premiere, the focus is on the Abominable Snowman--with a semi-serious, semi-scholarly approach. The results are sometimes funny, sometimes irritating and only occasionally interesting.

Host Josh Gates, who looks like a scruffy slacker dude and sounds like Harold Ramis in Ghostbusters with a hint of Ray Romano thrown in, takes his group of investigators to Katmandu, Nepal, where Gates wanders the streets asking passers-by (who clearly don’t speak much, if any, English) if they believe the Abominable Snowman exists. Meanwhile, his “crack team” (his words, not mine) are so anxious to spot a Yeti that just about anything gets them excited, like spotting movement of a distant hill that turns out to be...a cow.

A brief stop at a monastery to check out a reputed Yeti scalp is momentarily exciting, mostly because one of the monks (dressed remarkably like an American deer hunter) threatens to smack Josh with a rock if he doesn’t turn the cameras off. After a mysterious woman negotiates a truce between the investigators and the monks, we finally get a close-up look at the scalp, which is kept in under lock and key in a glass display case and only taken out for ceremonial use. Unfortunately, the monks won’t let Josh and crew take a hair sample--which might have, you know, proven something.

Finally, the group treks out into the thin air of Mount Everest to try and track down some physical evidence of the Abominable Snowman’s existence. They stumble around in the dark (night vision cam--ah!) on slippery rocks and through thick brush with thermal imaging equipment. (Snatches of movement are seen in the distance, but nothing distinct or even identifiable.) Josh sticks his head in various caves and only gets a face full of bugs for his trouble.

Eventually, though, something exciting actually happens: Josh finds huge footprints made by something with an enormous stride. Unfortunately, the excitement quickly dissipates because every single member of the team is shown coming up to the footprints and shouting "Oh my God! Footprints!" before anybody gets around to casting the evidence in plaster. Once back in the states, Josh takes the footprints to an expert, who compares the alleged Yeti print with alleged Bigfoot prints and says that they’re remarkably similar, which only goes to show that Josh’s “discovery” is really nothing new without an actual Yeti, alive or otherwise, to go along with the impressions in the ground.

But is the objective of a show like Destination Truth to actually find the truth, or is it more about the journey than the destination? If the latter is the case, it would be nice if the journey were more entertaining or informative than what Destination Truth has to offer.

Holidaze Review: Mr. Krueger's Christmas (1980)

For years, WGN-TV aired Mr. Krueger's Christmas, a half-hour holiday special starring James Stewart as an elderly, lonely man and produced by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, better known as the Mormon Church, but they aired it at odd times, often burying it in unpredictable timeslots (as if they really didn't know what to do with it) and making it difficult to find from year to year.

I had seen Mr. Krueger's Christmas a few times over the years and always found it an odd, even weird, program. (Not nearly as weird as The Star Wars Holiday Special, but nothing else could ever be quite that weird.) I last happened across Mr. Krueger's Christmas on a Saturday afternoon sometime in the mid-1990s and, luckily having a videotape handy, recorded it for posterity, or perhaps to prove to later generations that it existed at all.

As it turned out, that videotape came in handy a few years later, when I described Mr. Krueger's Christmas to a coworker who refused to believe any such thing had ever aired. Even after I proved the program's existence via its listing on The Internet Movie Database, she doubted that I had a copy of Mr. Krueger's Christmas. Now it had become a matter of pride--I don't just make shit up. Of course, it might have helped my cause somewhat if I'd actually labeled the tape. However, after about a week of determined searching through what must have been at least a couple dozen videotapes, I found my copy and presented it to her. She watched it and found it to be just as strange and unintentionally unsettling as I had.

Fast-forward to this Christmas weekend. I was to spend the Saturday before Christmas (technichally Christmas Eve Eve Eve) at JB's apartment for dinner, presents exchanged with him and Dee, and holiday movies. JB doesn't have as many DVDs as I do--I don't think anyone does, outside your local Blockbuster--so he asked me to bring along a selection of movies and TV specials to watch. One of the 10 or so DVDs jammed into my big burgundy shopping bag was Mr. Krueger's Christmas, now upgraded to a 25th anniversary DVD issued a couple of years ago by the Mormon Church. To my surprise, neither J.B. nor Dee had seen it before. So beneath the soft light of J.B.'s large white Christmas tree, warm and glowing in the gathered twilight, we watched this seemingly forgotten holiday oddity.

Stewart, a natural choice for a holiday special (having already starred in a couple of Christmas classics, The Shop Around the Corner and, of course, It's a Wonderful Life) plays the title character, an elderly building custodian. When we first meet Willie Krueger, he's just finished sweeping the lobby, only to have a resident trundle through the lobby with a Christmas tree, leaving pine needles in his wake. Mr. Krueger doesn't mind sweeping the lobby again, though--he loves the season, even if people walk straight past him without a word when he wishes them a Merry Christmas on the street. He stops beside a family looking in a toy store window and asks a young boy if what he sees in the window is what he wants Santa to bring. The mom, seemingly horrified by the vaguely creepy old man, drags her son away.

Willie continues down the street and looks into the window of a men's clothing store, where he sees himself, clean-shaven and sharply dressed, being attended to by store clerks and doffing his hat to a pretty young woman. Meanwhile, back out on the street and in reality, Mr. Krueger has taken his hat off, only to have a passer-by assume that Krueger is begging for money and drop a dollar in it. Even this can't dampen Krueger's Christmas spirit--he gives the dollar to a decidedly lackluster Salvation Army singer and continues on his way, buying a tiny pine tree for his apartment and looking longingly at the families shopping for their own Christmas trees.

Mr. Krueger returns to his apartment, greeted only by his calico kitty, George (named after Stewart's Character, George Bailey, in It's a Wonderful Life, maybe?). Willie puts down food for George, wishes a Merry Christmas to the photo of his long-dead wife, and puts on an album of carols sung by--who else?--the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Willie falls asleep in his chair as the album plays, leading to a dream sequence where he conducts the Choir, then goes out frolicking with them in the snowy country (a dream within a dream?), only to return to conducting and, at the end of the song, receive a standing ovation from them.

Mr. Krueger awakens to find that the album has finished, but there's still singing--live carolers are coming down the street. He hurries to his window and calls to them, inviting them in for some hot chocolate. The lead caroler, a middle-aged woman, isn't too sure this is a good idea, but agrees to come down anyway. Willie dashes about his apartment, winding garland around his little pine tree and slipping into yet another dream/vision/hallucination in which he's living in a mansion, welcoming the carolers (now dressed in Victorian finery) and kissing the lead caroler's hand. When he comes back to his senses, he's really kissing the lead caroler's hand, which she with draws with a look of horror before launching into a very awkward rendition of "The First Noel" in Willie's living room.

Willie notices a shy little blonde girl peeking from behind her mother and smiling at the old man. She sets her fuzzy mittens down and checks out Mr. Krueger's Nativity scene, lifting the Baby Jesus out of his place. Mom comes over and makes the little girl put Jesus back on the table, even as Willie protests that "I was gonna rearrange it like that anyway."

The carolers file out Willie's apartment, even as he practically begs them to stay. "Please don't go," Willie pleads. "I was gonna make some hot chocolate. I have a new Christmas album--wouldn't you like to hear it?" Guess not--the carolers move on down the snowy street, leaving Willie and his cat George alone again.

George walks around the underdecorated tree and meows at Willie. "I guess you're right, george," he says. "We'd better trim that tree. If we don't hurry, we'll be too late." So he starts to string lights on the tiny pine and, sure enough, another dream/hallucination kicks in. This time, Willie is decorating a huge outdoor tree (with the help of the help of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir) while dancers twirl around the tree and the little blonde girl is lifted high enough to place the topper on the tree and light the whole thing up brilliantly.

A loud clanging brings Willie back to reality, such as it is. "Mrs. McClain" is banging on her pipes, demanding more heat. "She'd freeze to death in the Sahara Desert," Willie grumbles initially, then concludes that nobody should be cold on Christmas Eve and heads off to stoke the furnace. When Willie returns, he discovers that the little girl left her mittens behind. He drapes them on the branches of his tiny Christmas tree, smiles and starts rearranging the Nativity scene.

Willie picks up baby Jesus and regards him for a moment. You know that that means--another dream sequence! This one isn't just a flight of fancy, though. This time, he's in a cave with a bunch of people dressed in Biblical clothing crowded around a manger...yep, Willie is now IN the Nativity scene, talking to Baby Jesus himself! "I'm Willie Krueger, custodian at the Beck Apartments...but you know that, don't you?" Willie quickly realizes that Baby Jesus is the only one who can see or hear him, and thanks Jesus for always being there for him, especially in those first few hours after his wife died. "I love you," he tells Jesus tearfully. "You're my closest, my finest friend, and that means I can hold my head high."

Willie awakens from his revelry, wiping tears from his eyes and blowing his nose. Someone's at the door: the little girl, Clarissa, and her mom are back in search of the missing mittens. Clarissa thinks it's pretty weird that Willie hung the mittens on the tree, but then goes ahead and invites him to come sing with them after Willie gives Clarissa the Baby Jesus from his tabletop Nativity scene.

Mom looks fairly dubious at first, then grants that the group could use a bass and that Willie would be obligated to join them for a turkey dinner afterward. When Willie tries to protest that he needs to stick around and keep George company, Clarissa calls him out, point out that the cat is asleep on the couch. Willie concedes that George sleeps a lot, so he rushes to grab his coat and hat and heads out into the cold winter's night with his two new friends.

Outside in the snow, Clarissa looks down at the Baby Jesus, then back up at Willie and says, for no apparent reason, "I love you, Mr. Krueger!" Then a previously unheard narrator tells us, ""I love you.' That's what Christmas is all about. Clarissa said it to Mr. Krueger. Mr. Krueger said it to Jesus. And Jesus, in so many ways, has said it to all of us." The end.

It's easy to be snarky and cynical about Mr. Krueger's Christmas--see any (or all) of the comments above--especially with the dream sequences eating up so much of its slight running time (without the commercial breaks, it's just over 20 minutes long). It's not as easy, however, to dismiss Jimmy Stewart's performance. He approaches the role with absolute sincerity, and even when Willie retreats into fuzzy-edged fantasy, he remains entirely sympathetic because Stewart plays the part completely straight and wrings emotion out of the potentially silliness, especially in the hallucinatory "Willie talks to Jesus" scene.

Maybe I'm just being hard on Mr. Krueger's Christmas because it depicts what my life could very well be 20 years from now. Or 10. Or now.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

RIP: John Callaway

This past Halloween, one of our local Public Television stations, WTTW, was to run an interview with Rich Koz, better known to local TV viewers as Svengoolie. (Yes, we have more than one PBS station. We're Chicago. That's how we roll.) In the course of the interview, Koz was asked detailod questions about his lengthy career; at one point, the interviewer even tossed one of Svengoolie's signature rubber chickens at Koz.

The interviewer was John Callaway.

Callaway was a local broadcast journalism legend who, for 15 years, hosted WTTW's weeknight public affairs program, Chicago Tonight, which features interviews, stories and commentary on local and national news, sports, entertainment and history.

When Callaway retired from the program in 1999, he didn't fully "retire"--he continued to host Chicago Stories, a documentary series covering major events and places in the city's history such as the Eastland disaster, in which an excursion ship capsized in the Chicago river, killing hundreds, or Riverview, the North Side amusement park that entertained children of all ages until its closing at the end of the 1967 season (it was demolished the following year).

Callaway also continued conducting interviews for Chicago Tonight, including many for The Friday Night Show, a half-hour segment within the weekly Chicago Tonight: The Week in Review in which Callaway spoke with newsmakers of all kinds: Politicians, actors, athletes, writers and fellow journalists.

The interview with Rich Koz didn't air as scheduled on Halloween--it would up being broadcast weeks later--because Studs Terkel, the legendary Chicago author, had died that day, and WTTW reran Callaway's last interview with Terkel instead.

Now Callaway, unquestionably the most thorough, insightful and intelligent interviewer I've ever seen, has himself died of an apparent heart attack while shopping in Racine, WI. He was 72.

Friday is Bring Your Robot to Work Day

Bob May, the man in the Robot suit for 84 episodes of the TV series Lost in Space, passed away this week of congestive heart failure at the age of 69.

It's fitting and appropriate, therefore, that even though the toy for this week's Bring Your Action Figure to Work Day does not speak with Bob May's voice (that was provided by announcer Dick Tufeld, who is still alive), it functions as a tribute to Mr. May nonetheless when it screams "DANGER! DANGER, WILL ROBINSON!" (much to the "delight" of my co-workers).

Hey! I Know Them!

My friends Amy and Will are featured in the Showcase section of today's Chicago Sun-Times, talking about how their mutual love of the TV show ER brought them together over the then-newfangled thing called the Internet. (We're talking 1995 here, kids.)

You can read the interview here.

"I am not a number! I am a free man!"

Patrick McGoohan has passed away in Los Angeles.

He won a couple of Emmys for his work opposite Peter Falk on Columbo and starred in dozens of movies like Ice Station Zebra, Escape from Alcatraz, Silver Streak and Braveheart, but was best known for his highly influential TV series, The Prisoner. It ran only 17 episodes, but it was a politically astute, socially aware mindfuck flickering before our bewildered eyes years before David Cronenberg, David Lynch or Guy Maddin ever filmed a single frame.

It's a shame, of course, but more so because the so-long-in-the-"development"-stage-that-no-one-ever-thought-the-damn-thing-would-get-made remake/update of The Prisoner, with James Caviezel as Number Six and Ian McKellan as Number Two, due to air later this year.

Patrick McGoohan was 80.

ETA: Ricardo Mantalban died today, too. Dammit. (Or, more appropriately: "KHAAAAAAAAAN!")

Spaced Out

Some of you who've read this site or its predecessor for some time might remember how much I love Shaun of the Dead--not only is it a cinematic love letter to the films of George Romero and a laugh-out-loud romantic comedy, but it's a sly social satire, with characters so narcissistic that they can't stop navel-gazing long enough to notice the dead rising all around them.

What I didn't know at the time was that the creators of that film--director Edgar Wright and actors Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and Jessica Stevenson--had done a sitcom together in the UK called Spaced, in which Pegg and Stevenson played flatmates who found themselves in all sorts of zany situations with their circle of oddball friends, including Frost as some weird army dude.

Unfortunately, knowing something exists and actually finding it are two different things.

It hadn't run on any of my local PBS stations (since I live in Chicago, I have access to three) like most British comedies do--why could I find endless reruns of Are You Being Served?, As Time Goes By and Monty Python's Flying Circus, but no Spaced? It popped up briefly on BBC America in an odd timeslot--somewhere south of 10 p.m.--and I only found it long enough to catch a couple of episodes before it vanished again, replaced the following week by Coupling, which had in fact run on at least one of my local PBS stations and about which I could not have possibly care less short of being declared legally deceased.

What little I saw of Spaced on BBC America was smartly written, sharply acted and laced with more pop culture references than you could look up on Wikipedia in as much time. This made me want to see the whole series that much more.

Spaced was also frustratingly just out of reach via DVD--it was available in Region 2 format (which works in the UK), but not Regions 0 or 1 (which work here). I could When I found out an old friend was watching the Region 2 DVDs (maybe she had an all-region player?), I posted on her MySpace page: "Why isn't this available on DVD stateside yet? Who do I have to blow to make this happen?"

The answer, as it turns out, was "no one"--an American DVD release of Spaced was already in the works. In fact, it was released yesterday.

You would think this would put an end to the quest. Not quite.

I tried looking first at actual stores like F.Y.E. and Laurie's Planet of Sound, but neither had it in stock. Borders did, but at 20% off--sounds good, until you consider that Cook County now has the highest sales tax in the country, so that's really only 9.75% off. Not good enough.

To avoid the drastically high sales tax while still getting what I want in a more-or-less timely manner, I ordered the Spaced box set off of Amazon. Free shipping. No sales tax. And it shipped today. Sweetness.