They Paved Blog-o-ween and Put Up a Parking Lot

Welp, kiddies, it is that time o’ year again. Time for the days to start getting shorter. Time for the leaves to turn the colors of a 1970s basement game room. Time for your cardigan sweaters to be taken out of the cedar chest at the foot of your bed.

It is — you guessed it — time for Spooky Season.

And that can only mean one thing: it’s time for me to spend the next thirty-one days spewing forth a whole bunch of gobbledygook about my favorite scary books, movies, old time radio programs, podcasts, music, and whatever other format you can think of. 

I’ve spent the month of October for the past four autumns blogging about all things Halloween. It’s a lot of work, but it’s also a lot of fun. By the time I fall across the finish line of my annual thirty-one day marathon of the macabre, I am pooped — but also pretty proud. I look back at past Blog-o-weens and think, “Well done, sir. Well done.”

For the past four years, I have been rarin’ to go a good week before 1 October. Sometimes — as was the case with last year’s Lots of Salem’s Lot (my thirty-one day trip through Stephen King’s 1975 novel of vampires in small town Maine) — I have a majority of my posts locked and loaded by the beginning of September.

Alas, this year, I’ve got nothing.

Not an overarching project, not a particular subject, not a single post. Not even a goofy gif. I got nada, niente, nichts, rien — in short (and in English), nothing.

I wracked my brain for much of this year looking for an “in” — some overall structure that would grab ahold of me the way last year’s day-by-day, chapter-by-chapter reading of Salem’s Lot did. No such luck. Sadly, nothing stood out to me, and (sadder still) nothing excited me. Finally, as the time to begin drew nigh, I had to ask if I wanted to subject myself to thirty-one days of dreariness, if I wanted to spend a month trying to hit a thousand words a day on topics that left me cold. That’s not how I want to enjoy my favorite time of year.

It’s not all doom and gloom, however, Blog-o-weeners. There is another, more important, factor in my decision to give Blog-o-ween a pass this year: I’m busy writing a novel. As I type these words, I am hard at work on the third draft of my giallo. This is a work that has been in progress for what seems like forever. Indeed, I’ve been working on it so long that each of the past four Blog-o-weens have felt like a sort of vacation from the characters and situations of my book. This year, I feel like I need to keep my momentum going and plow through to the end (of this draft, at least). I am hip-deep in all the chapters that I promised myself during the first and second drafts I was going to fix later. Well...it’s later!

But old habits die hard and all that, and I don’t want to let October go by without at least writing something scary, so I’ll tell you what...if you promise to stop back here a little later on in October, I’ll promise you a mini Blog-o-ween.

As many of you know, I am a great admirer of Tommy Lee Wallace’s Halloween III: Season of the Witch. (It should never have been saddled with the Halloween franchise moniker and the expectations that come with it. It’s its own thang.) A good friend of mine back in Pittsburgh (hello Gil!) is also a fan, and he loves to celebrate what he calls “Silver Shamrock Day.” This day falls on the date that H3:SOTW opens: 23 October. So here’s what we’ll do...beginning on 23 October, we will celebrate the 9 Days of Blog-o-ween. From the 23rd through to the 31st, we will try to cram thirty-one days worth of love for ghouls, ghosts, zombies, vampires, mummies, werewolves, and whatever the heck else we can grab hold of into those nine days. It’s better than nothing, no?

In the meantime, take care of yourselves and look out for each other. It’s getting crazy out there, but you’ll be okay if you keep one thing in mind...

30 October: Chopping Mall

 

It’s 30 October. We are 24 hours away from the big day - Halloween!

Then, it’s all downhill from there. The rest of the year will circle the drain in an orgy of consumerism and gluttony. Shopping malls and big box stores will fill with mindless zombies wandering from aisle to aisle in search of needless things. If only there was some way we could cure ourselves of our need to buy stupid stuff. If only there were, say, some machines that would patrol the malls and protect us from ourselves.

Look no further! For today’s Cinematic Void 31 Days of Voidoween movie challenge topic, “Robots,” we’re going shopping, but not just at any ol’ mall. We’ll shop ‘til we drop...dead!...at Jim Wynorski’s classic Chopping Mall!

The Park Plaza Mall has a new security system. Roaming the floors after hours, three Protector-series robots safeguard the likes of Chess King, Gadzooks, and Deb. Unfortunately, a lightning storm gives the robots a little too much juice, and soon they aren’t differentiating between shoppers and robbers (as if there’s really a difference). This wouldn’t be a problem (I mean what’s a few dead technicians and janitors?), if four teen (teen?) couples weren’t using the furniture store as their personal overnight party palace. Soon, the robots track the kids (kids?) down and begin neutralizing them. Will Ferdy and Allison get together? Will Mike ever chew gum with his mouth closed? Will that cute top still be on sale at No Name in the morning?

Chopping Mall (originally released as Killbots) hits that sweet spot that, in my personal opinion, all horror movies should shoot for. There’s a campiness to the proceedings that make the movie seem like a party you actually want to be at. The characters are likeable - even the aforementioned Mike whose constant gum chewing will give those suffering from misophonia the heebie-jeebies. The action is well-lit so you can see what is actually happening and moves quickly so you’re not constantly checking your watch, wondering when it’s all gonna end. (The lighting and pacing of modern horror movies are pet peeves of mine - sorry!) Best of all, when it’s time to get down and dirty, the film doesn’t hold back. Leslie getting chased down by a killbot and losing her head - literally - is especially fine.

The cast of Chopping Mall is filled with 80s horror vets. Kelli Maroney (Night of the Comet), Barbara Crampton (Re-Animator), and Russell Todd (Friday the 13th, Part 2) will have you going “Oh, it’s that actor!” throughout the movie. Also be on the lookout for cameos from Mary Woronov, Paul Bartel, and Dick Miller. Director Jim Wynorski, like 90% of Hollywood it seems, got his start thanks to Roger Corman. He wrote and/or directed numerous 80s exploitation fare like Sorceress (1982), Screwballs (1983), Deathstalker II (1987), and Not of This Earth (1988).

Watch Chopping Mall and remember to have a nice day!

28 October: Deadly Messages

 

When you’re a kid, and you are too young to go see spooky movies on the big screen (or your parents are too square to take you!), it’s great when the scary movies come to you on the small one. Nowadays, with streaming services being what they are, it’s easier than ever to see anything you want, whenever you want. Back in the day, however, it usually took at least a year before a movie was played on TV or released on video. Luckily, TV networks created their own movies to fill all those programming hours and to quench the thirst of genre film fans. Made-for-TV movies, while not as graphic as films in the theaters, were often quite inventive with their scares. What they lacked in bloodshed, they made up for in suspense and all-around strangeness. For today’s Cinematic Void 31 Days of Voidoween, I want to talk Jack Bender’s 1985 made-for-TV movie Deadly Messages.

While Laura Daniels (Kathleen Beller) and her boyfriend Michael go out on the town, a young woman who is staying with the couple, Cindy (Sherri Stoner), finds a ouija board. Using it alone, Cindy contacts the spirit of a young man who claims that he was murdered. When Laura returns home, she’s forgotten her keys. She climbs the fire escape to her apartment’s window and witnesses a man in dark glasses strangling Cindy. Laura calls the police, but when they arrive and enter the apartment all signs of the crime have vanished -- including Cindy!

Laura uses the ouija board and contacts the spirit of Mark, the same spirit Cindy spoke to. Mark tells Laura that he killed Cindy and that he is going to kill her, too. Soon, Laura is being stalked on the streets of the city and the food court of the mall by a killer. Unfortunately, Laura is unable to convince anyone else, including Michael, that what she is experiencing is real. Will the killer get her? Will Michael believe her before it’s too late?

On the face of it, Deadly Messages is your typical made-for-TV fare. You got your woman-in-peril storyline and your nobody-believes-her storyline stitched together by a is-she-really-crazy storyline. Where Deadly Messages pushes the envelope is in the development of Laura Daniels’s past. I don’t want to give it away, but the truth about Laura is discovered and revealed in a really novel and charming way. It was such a pleasant surprise, and it opened the story up to new and weird possibilities.

Kathleen Beller was a staple of the made-for-TV landscape. She’d starred in such films as Are You in the House Alone?, No Place to Hide, and The Blue & the Grey. She was also a part of the cast of Dynasty for many years. Jack Bender had a heck of a year in 1985. In addition to Deadly Messages, he made Letting Go (with John Ritter) and The Midnight Hour.

Deadly Messages isn’t as over-the-top crazy as Dark Night of the Scarecrow, Trilogy of Terror, or Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, but I think it’s got a great energy that drives it to a satisfying denouement.

24 October: The Cat and the Canary

 

“On a lonely, pine-clad hill overlooking the Hudson, stood the grotesque mansion of an eccentric millionaire----”

Only seven more days until that most wonderfullest time of the year. That’s right: we are a week out from Halloween, people! Time to get right with the Great Pumpkin and make sure you’ve got full-size candy bars to give out on the big night. I’d hate to hear that anything bad happened to any of you because you skimped where it counted.

Until then, let us continue our daily celebration of All Hallow’s Eve via Cinematic Void’s 31 Days of Voidoween movie challenge. Today’s topic is “Silent Horror,” and I’ve chosen Paul Leni’s 1927 comedy-horror classic for Universal Studios, The Cat and the Canary.

The Cat and the Canary is the prototypical “old dark house” mystery. Based on John Willard’s 1922 play, Leni’s film contains all the tropes and trappings that fans of the genre relish: on a dark and stormy night, a group of would-be heirs meet in the aforementioned ODH to hear the reading of a will. The interior of the house is dusty, covered with cobwebs, and filled with hidden passages. The lone heir named in the will, Annabelle (Laura La Plante), becomes the focus of ire of the other, spurned family members. Everyone seems to be after Annabelle. In another turn of the screw, however, a lunatic known as “The Cat” has escaped a local asylum. A guard from the asylum has tracked The Cat to the ODH. He may be hiding somewhere on the grounds...or in the house itself!

The Cat and the Canary is a hoot. It’s a silent film that holds up really well. This is due partly to its feeling so familiar to genre film buffs and partly to it being so well made. Paul Leni imbued The Cat and the Canary with a lot of energy. The performers, while exuding the histrionics typical of silent era acting, also wouldn’t seem out of place in a more modern film like Clue (1985). The camerawork and editing, too, feel more modern. There are certainly scenes that have the stagey, long takes of the silent era, but for the most part, the camera and the actors move freely around the sets. The editor mixes wide shots and close-ups nicely giving the whole a nice rhythm that never bores the viewer.

All in all, The Cat and the Canary is a wonderfully funny and spooky film that’s perfect for the whole family during the Halloween season.

22 October: Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter

 

Slow burn horror is fine and dandy, but sometimes you just want your horror movie to feature a fanfare of trumpets on the soundtrack and a lot punch-ups on the screen. Today’s movie challenge for Cinematic Void’s 31 Days of Voidoween is “Action Horror,” and I’m all about Hammer Studios’ 1974 swashbuckling classic Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter.

Captain Kronos is a straightforward tale of derring-do. The good Captain (Horst Janson) is called by an old army buddy of his, Dr. Marcus (John Carson), to help investigate a lot of strange deaths happening in his village. The victims have been found prematurely aged before popping off this mortal coil. Kronos and his road buddy, the hunchback Professor Hieronymus Grost (John Cater), suspect vampires are afoot (as you do), and they begin the process of snuffing them out. Along the way, Kronos and Grost free a young gypsy woman from the stocks. Her crime: dancing on the Sabbath! Carla (Caroline Munro) joins the duo in helping to rid the land of its bloodsuckers infestation.

Captain Kronos is a romp, a hoot, and a real humdinger all rolled into one. There’s swordfighting, bodices, and creepy old age make-up. Horst Janson is a pleasant hero who can swing a sword and toss off a bon mot with a flourish. Caroline Munro is, as always, beautiful and feisty as the gypsy girl Carla. Director Brian Clemens keeps everything moving at a quick clip. (Sadly, this would be his only film as director.) The look of the picture screams “Hammer!” with its muted colors (except for the red stuff, if you know what I mean), outdoor forest scenes, and 18th century British village sets.

Captain Kronos was to have been the first in a series, but unfortunately that never happened. Hammer was falling on tough times, and soon closed up shop. There’s been a novelization and some comic book adaptations that furthered the tale, but we never got more of Kronos, Grost, and Carla on the big screen, to which I say “Boo!”

20 October: The Bay

 

Today for Cinematic Void’s 31 Days of Voidoween, we’re talking the much-maligned genre of the “Found Footage” film. Though there were earlier examples of the genre - namely Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust - when you mention found footage most people tend to think of The Blair Witch Project. These films are usually chock full of first-person perspective, official news footage, surveillance camera footage, and/or pre-existing footage of some sort, all of which are presented in a faux-documentary style. Oh, and shaky-cam. Lots and lots of shaky-cam.

(I am fighting the urge to go off on a tangent about my hatred of shaky-cam. It works well if you are showing someone being chased through the woods, but not so well if you are showing someone crossing the room to get a drink of water. Buy a tripod and leave the darn camera alone, folks.)

Anywho...where were we?

Oh, yeah...found footage movies.

Let’s talk Barry “Diner” Levinson’s 2012 f-f, eco-horror picture, The Bay. And let’s do it quickly, because it creeps me the heck out!

The bay in The Bay is Chesapeake Bay, a 64,000-square-mile watershed that covers parts of six states along the mid-Atlantic coast of the United States. It’s a beautiful area of the country, but thanks to the chicken industry, it’s become one of the yuckiest and most dangerous. Due to the use of steroids to make the chickens bigger (bigger = more money, natch) and the dumping of the chickens’ droppings into the bay, the water of the Chesapeake around the town of Claridge, MD, has become toxic.

But the toxicity of the water is only one of the problems facing the good people of Claridge. It seems the chicken-poop infected water has affected a tongue-eating louse, Cymothoa exigua, in the bay. These isopods are a normal part of the environment, but thanks to the toxins in the water, their life-cycle has sped up. They are no longer willing to settle for feeding on fish...they want bigger, two-legged game now.

Not only is The Bay a great found footage horror movie, it is also another variant of one of my favorite movie genre: the “We aren’t closing the beaches!” picture. Yep, it seems Claridge’s mayor, John Stockman (Frank Deal), took a page from Amity Island’s Mayor Vaughn’s playbook. He doesn’t want anything to get in the way of tourist dollars, even if that means that the streets of his town fill with corpses.

Who’da thunk that Barry Levinson would be able to bring the yucky, horror goods the way he does here in The Bay? Using pre-existing material that he’d shot for an actual documentary on the problems facing Chesapeake Bay, Levinson constructs are really creepy-crawlie film that’ll have you brushing imagined (or are they?!) isopods from your arms, neck, and legs.

19 October: Tales of Terror & Twice Told Tales

 

We have an anthology of anthologies, so to speak, lined up for Cinematic Void’s 31 Days of Voidoween. Both films were made in the early 1960s, both starred that doyen of Gothic cinematic horror, Vincent Price, and both were released together on a M-G-M Midnite Movies double-sided disc. We’re talking Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Terror (1962) and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice Told Tales (1963).

All in all, you get six spook-tacular stories for your Halloween buck, a not too shabby return. From Poe, you get "Morella," "The Black Cat," and "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar;" from Hawthorne, "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment," "Rappaccini's Daughter," and "House of the Seven Gables." While the Roger Corman-directed Poe picture is the better of the two, Sidney Salkow does a fair job with Hawthorne’s material, especially the first tale, "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment."

The cream of the crop is a toss-up between “The Black Cat” and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” In the former, screenwriter Richard Matheson combines Poe’s “The Black Cat” and “A Cask of Amontillado” into a single black comedic tale. Vincent Price and Peter Lorre engage in a campy wine-tasting contest for the ages. In the latter, Basil Rathbone plays a mentalist who hypnotizes a dying Price. Caught between the worlds of the living and the dead, Price’s Valdemar has a bit of a meltdown when Rathbone finally releases him.

Both of the these pictures have stunning visuals and that bright color palette that screams early-1960s horror. Both are also a wonderful gateway to early American Romanticism. Watch the movies, then seek out the stories they were based upon. It’s a great way to pass the night during this spooky season.

18 October: Kingdom of the Spiders

 

Today is all about animals for Cinematic Void’s 31 Days of Voidoween.

Uh...not quite.

No, not him either.

Now we’re talking!

It’s time to celebrate those movies that show us just where humanity stands in Mother Nature’s view. When we’ve gotten too big for our britches, ol’ Mom sends a horde of the creepy-crawlies to put us back in our rightful place. I can take an animal attack movie that uses big critters like lions and tigers and bears, but when movies start using our six- and eight-legged friends, that’s when I say, “Oh, my!” In 1977, one of the creepiest of the “animals attack” movies was released to theaters, but it wasn’t until it started showing up in video stores and on cable TV did the nightmares really begin. We’re talking John "Bud" Cardos’s classic Kingdom of the Spiders.

The film’s events take place in rural Arizona. Local veterinarian Dr. Robert "Rack" Hansen (played by none other than William Shatner) is asked to look at an ailing prize calf owned by local farmer Walter Colby (Woody Strode). The calf dies for unknown reasons, and Rack sends the animal’s blood to the university to get checked out. The test results come back: it’s spider venom!

Soon, spiders are attacking more than cows. People are found cocooned in webbing in their homes and vehicles. What’s more, these aren’t just the attacks of one kind of spider. Nope! It seems that for the first time ever, all spiders are putting aside their differences and working together, as the giant spider mound in the Colbys’ backyard makes apparent. Rack and university Professor of Arachnology Diane Ashley (Tiffany Bolling) try to figure out why this is happening while also trying not to let it happen to them.

Kingdom of the Spiders is not only an “Animals Attack” movie, it’s also a proud member of that post-Jaws genre: the “We’re not closing the beaches” movie. That’s right - not only are spiders attacking people, but the powers-that-be won’t deal with the problem in the manner that Dr. Ashley (an actual, honest-to-goodness expert on the subject) suggests because it would interfere with the County Fair! Sorry folks, spiders are oogie, but business is business!

This is also one of those movies that I saw on TV as a kid, and it gave me all sorts of nightmares. Tarantulas crawling all over the place - in basements, in cars, in planes - gave me the willies, but it’s the movie’s final shot that sent me over the edge. I won’t ruin it for you if you haven’t seen it, but I’m sure you’ll feel the same way when you do. It’s the perfect downer ending, maybe one of the better ones the 1970s served up. You'll sleep with the lights on for a month, unless...

12 October: Big Trouble in Little China

 

“When some wild-eyed, eight-foot-tall maniac grabs your neck, taps the back of your favorite head up against the barroom wall, and he looks you crooked in the eye and he asks you if ya paid your dues, you just stare that big sucker right back in the eye, and you remember what ol' Jack Burton always says at a time like that…”

Today is all about “Martial Arts” on the Cinematic Void’s 31 Days of Voidoween, and I am very excited to see what other people taking part in this challenge choose, because I was hard-pressed to think of a horror movie that comes with a kung fu chaser. So, I went with my gut and picked the first movie that popped into my head: John Carpenter’s 1986 fantasy-fu classic Big Trouble in Little China.

Yeah...I know, I know...I can hear the grumblings already: Big Trouble in Little China isn’t a horror film! I have the same misgivings, but here’s my rationale: Big Trouble was directed by John Carpenter (big time horror director, no?), it stars Kurt Russell (who starred in Carpenter’s The Thing), and it’s got great special effects. Bonus reason: I feel like Big Trouble in Little China is the Call of Cthulhu RPG adventure my players would create if I ever set a scenario in San Francisco.

Horror films have monsters, don’t they? Well, Big Trouble has got monsters galore! Hairy beasts that kidnap pretty ladies…

...big bugs that live underground that we are promised will come out no more…

...and chubby blobs made of eyeballs that float in the air...

Big Trouble has got it goin’ on monster-wise. And who can forget this guy...

...and this guy…

What can I say? It’s a slow news day ‘round these parts. I think I’ll just kick back and enjoy the schtick-fu of Big Trouble in Little China. Think of it as a palette cleanser for the horrors to come.