Pop Culture Petri Dish

Once again, MGM/UA bows to Horrorpalooza. The Bat People , a favorite mid-seventies chiller of mine (and, yep, another special request from Horrorpalooza 2006 ), just made the digital translation on a nifty DVD double bill with the 1982 horror flick, The Beast Within . And both movies make for unpretentious good times. It had been a few years since I'd screened either. The last time I saw The Beast Within was as a horror-hungry adolescent during its initial theatrical run, and our dog-eared VHS copy of The Bat People hadn't seen the inside of a VCR since I lived in Tacoma six years ago. The Beast Within re-jiggers a classic sci-fi scenario, with a young woman (Bibi Besch) being assaulted by a giant monster. She gives birth to an apparently normal son (Paul Clemens), but once he grows up he develops an appetite for extremely rare meat and experiences an extra-traumatic growth spurt, if you know what I mean and I think you do. It's junk, but pretty entertaining junk, direc...

Rotten Tomatoes has posted its list of the 50 Best-Reviewed Horror Movies Ever , and like any Movie List, there are some bones to contend with. Just for fun, here's RT's Fearsome Fifty (with the occasional editorial blather), followed by my own completely personal and utterly subjective list. I shall cop out and put mine in no particular order... Rotten Tomatoes' 50 Greatest Horror Movies: 50) The Innocents (1961): No argument from this corner on its inclusion, but it should be way higher. 49) Dead of Night (1945) 48) The Dead Zone (1983) 47) Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) 46) A Tale of Two Sisters (2003): Haven't seen it. 45) Carrie (1976): Evilspeak is more fun, but if you've been slugging it out alongside me for the last two weeks you know that already . 44) Eraserhead (1976) 43) The Exorcist (1973) 42) Three Extremes (2005): Haven't seen it. 41) Fright Night (1985) 40) Ringu (1998) 39) House of Wax (1953) 38) Shadow of the Vampire ...

Some guys get a tie from their spouse for their fortieth birthday. I got monsters. Rita earned her cool-for-a-girl stripes once more by taking me to my first Fangoria Weekend of Horrors Convention in May . This entry from Rita's eminently worthwhile Blog covers the event with customary wit and aplomb, but in anticipation of my iminent blathering she deliberately omitted the Convention's rarest treat (and the personal highlight for me). Most of the guests at the Con were filmmakers and actors solidly rooted in current horror cinema--guys like Eli Roth , Rob Zombie, and Dog Soldiers/The Descent director Neil Marshall --with one fascinating exception: Fangoria editor/convention coordinator Anthony Timpone booked legendary Spanish actor/director Paul Naschy for a rare US visit. If you're not a horror obsessive, you've likely never heard of Naschy. He's been directing, writing, and starring in horror movies since the late 1960's, but most of his efforts wound up ha...

Unintentionally bad movie musicals hold an irresistible thrall for me, but (as has been intimated in these virtual pages before) I'm not much of a fan of the artform as a whole, especially the modern musical. Gloppy ballads (a trope of the genre) give me the heebie-jeebies, and the grunting rock dork in me involuntarily cringes at the slick and hyper-enunciated Broadway singing/composition style being wedged into a backbeat like Avril Lavigne throwing on a Sex Pistols T-shirt. So it's grand news to this musicals-loathing curmudgeon that Bat Boy the Musical , playing at the Artswest Playhouse in Seattle 'til November 10 , entertains so thoroughly. As the title indicates, this off-Broadway creation takes the late, great Weekly World News's favorite cover model as its inspiration. But rather than follow the WWN's increasingly outlandish printed reports for a plotline, Bat Boy the Musical keeps all of the action in Hope Falls, West Virginia, where the mysterious titl...

Emergency work stuff pulled me away from the 'Dish for the day, so Fate has bitch-slapped my solemn vow of one a day every day 'til Halloween. I am a broken man. Tonight I go to see Bat Boy the Musical ; I'm certain I'll commence to a' blatherin' tomorrow. Hey, I guess this is an entry. I didn't say each blog had to be an essay. Don't worry. No more cop-outs. See you tomorrow.

I've never been a big Brian DePalma fan. Most of his movies seemed to be pretending to be something more than they were, slickly-shot but still morally-grubby exploitation pictures with delusions of Godhood. Even when he locked onto a clever idea he'd club it to death with heavy-handed visual overkill, or self-conscious faux-Hitchcockery. So it's no wonder that DePalma's hugely influential horror hit, Carrie , leaves me pretty damned cold today, while Evilspeak --a trashy, ridiculous and artless ripoff of Carrie circa 1980--entertains the hell out of me. Bumbling Stanley Coopersmith (Clint Howard) endures endless humiliation, torment, and abuse from his fellow cadets at West Andover military academy. One afternoon he's put on punishment patrol, and gets assigned to help clean out the basement of the Academy Chapel. Whilst digging around, Coopersmith stumbles upon a Scary Spell Book, which he hard-wires into a computer to resurrect an evil de-frocked priest ( Night...

With all due respect to the late, great Bobby 'Boris' Pickett's immortal 1962 smash hit "Monster Mash," the greatest horror novelty song ever came out four years earlier. John Zacherley was one of the first wave of horror movie hosts on TV, a slicked-back cross between Lon Chaney's Phantom of the Opera and Colin Clive . At nearly eighty, he's still working the horror convention circuit with his trademark snarky wit thoroughly intact, but in the 1950's he was a big crossover celebrity. A trip to the studio to cut a record was inevitable. "Dinner with Drac," Zacherley's 1958 top ten gem, predates the rock-and-roll backbeat of Pickett's tune, and it arguably rocks harder, with an especially grimy stripclub saxophone punctuating the instrumental breaks. Atop the pre-garage rock strut is Zacherley's mordantly hilarious narrative..."A dinner was served for three at Dracula's House by the sea...The H'ors 'doeuvres were f...