Tuesday, November 09, 2021

VIDEO RENTAL STORES, BEST BETS FOR HALLOWEEN, BLACK SUNDAY


ADJUST Your TRACKING.  Obsessive dudes with tattoos collect trashy low brow VHS tapes, paying as much at $670 for “Tales from the Quadradead Zone” and even Toxic Avenger, which I had and gave to a friend in Cottage Grove on Halloween. This fan-produced documentary includes an interview with an owner of a video store that rents VHS and also a member of the subculture that recreated a video store in his basement.  I have a very small VHS collection and 3 VCRs.  Some titles are hard to find on DVD. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mu0L8i63E8M 

BEST BETS FOR HALLOWEEN: “Zombies on Broadway” (1945, RKO) combines two popular genres — musicals and horror with comics Wally Brown and Alan Carney who are ordered by Sheldon Leonard to find a zombie for a failing Broadway bar where singer-dancer Anne Jeffreys performs.  The hapless duo take off for a tropical island in search of zombies where (to everyone’s surprise) they stumble upon a crazy “scientist” played by Bela Lugosi.  Zombieness is catching much to the chagrin of Brown and Carney.


BLACK SUNDAY (1966) — a bit of witchcraft by Gothic horror master director Mario Bava where the fog machine works overtime.  The witch played by British actress Barbara Steele (Pit and the Pendulum) was paid for her efforts in wine and free lodging during the filming in Italy.  To say it is atmospheric is a gross understatement.  No doubt Lugosi’s Dracula inspired much of this but it’s classic Gothic horror.


Don’t say that Hollywood never made a bad movie until you see “Teenagers from Outer Space” where “teens” who look post K-12 annex earth as a food source and let loose their monsters: lobsters magnified on the rear screen.  Quite unexpected one of the invaders falls in love with the rather hapless local Betty.  Also, the space invaders are quite adept at driving standard transmission cars which is a task that overwhelms most of us earthlings.  They also have ray guns that turn humans and pets into skeletons. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053337/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0 

1 comment:

Mike Barer said...

Welcome back to the blogging world.