Part 4 - The Horror Host
November is half-over, but I am going to finish this if it takes me until January. My post-memorial/pre-Winter depression sends me into a cleaning and landscaping frenzy, and it can be difficult for me to sit down and collect my thoughts. While I am on my feet in my spare time, pruning branches or raking leaves, I spend much of the month listening to episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000, episodes that amass a hearty selection of laugh-out-loud comfort movies. I have seen most of these episodes dozens of times, so I can listen to the audio while I work and enjoy the movie playing in my head. My MST3K mood turns most of November and December into a marathon re-watch of most of the series.MST3K became a special part of my life when it debuted, but my fortune was not such that I could keep track of it all the time. My first experience was early in season 3 with Gamera, and I almost hate to say that it was not a good experience. I came very close to casting off the series entirely in that moment. I had grown up watching the movies featured on the show and loved them all for what they were, and I was a bullied child with a little bit of confusion about what was going on exactly. My gut instinct was that this guy and his robot puppets were making fun of what I loved. They were bullying my favorite movies. I was not happy, but a Gamera movie was on. I was not going to change the channel. If I had to tune these jokers out, I would, but I stayed tuned. I did it often enough with kids in school who picked on me. I could endure the "trauma" and enjoy the movie if that was what it took. Then, suddenly, this guy and his robots left the theater and walked out into the "lobby" where one of the robots sang a song about Tibby, the pet turtle in the movie. It was a fun little tune, and it made me think of just how easily I almost hated MST3K and dismissed it entirely. This heartfelt little departure from talking during a movie was a way to show me that these jokers were not just jokers. They had personality and sensitivity, and they were paying attention to the movie they were watching even though they were making jokes. That is an important distinction that I am thankful I caught early on, but it did not happen right away. I had to think about it for a few days and, eventually, watch a couple more episodes to see what was happening. I began to see that my poor first impression of the show was a reflection of myself and not a reflection of the performance. This was not a low form of mocking nor was it poor comedy or bad film criticism. At least one renowned and published film critic, who will go unnamed, never came around to that conclusion and instead developed a hatred for it after some personal experiences very similar to my own: people who did not get the concept and thought that they were suddenly allowed to talk and wisecrack in a movie theater because MST3K "told" them they could. We always had to remember that someone out there would not grasp that it was not excusing an erasure of etiquette regarding film critique or enjoyment of the theater experience, and we would inevitably encounter them at some point with the worry that our enjoyment would be tainted somehow. Like the guy who sat a few rows in front of me at RiffTrax Live!: Manos: The Hands of Fate and kept reciting quotes from the MST3K episode during the show. Not cool, man. Not cool.
As Joel often said, "The right people will get the joke." I was happy to be one of the right people, but I still remind myself that I almost was not. This may sound like I am taking the fandom too seriously and putting myself on a pedestal, but this is simply whether or not someone gets a joke or takes the words to heart too much to find it funny. MST3K became a profound learning experience for me of the difference between bullying and good-natured ribbing, and the latter was what they did. And they did it well. Their humorous references to other movies, literature, music, and popular culture proved to me that they could call a movie "bad" and still show it some love and respect. Despite their pain on the screen, it was obvious that they studied every inch of these movies as professionals and film fans. Just like me, they could quote the works of Orson Welles and Roger Corman in the same breath, and I needed comedy like that in my life.
Riffing. The concept goes back a long way. I first heard it as a musical term, and I think most credit its definition in comedy to Groucho Marx. The definition varies, but as I came to understand it, riffing means to provide an insightful commentary to a subject, usually but not exclusively a humorous observation or retort. Riffing could make you the straight man or the second banana, ad-libbed or scripted, depending on the context, but the best part of the definition is that it finds a way, if timed properly, to flow with the conversation or even start a new one. That is the essence of comedy. A laugh is a great way to start a conversation, and laughter is important. Groucho riffed life itself, and his observations shined a light on a lot of things that most of the audience probably missed or dismissed. With regards to MST3K, no matter how many dozens of times I have seen any given episode, I continue to get new jokes every time and develop a greater understanding of the context of references. Riffing is a way to show you pay intimate attention to the world around you. It makes a show like MST3K timeless for me, and it inspires me to focus my observational lens on any given thing from a hundred different angles to improve and expand my lexicon. I never tire of it, and I always laugh.
MST3K provides perhaps the most appropriate introduction because the show may not have existed at all if not for the point of this entry. When I got to travel to Dallas to see one of the first public screenings of Cinematic Titanic, MST3K creator Joel Hodgson's short-lived attempt at reviving the form, a 20th anniversary MST3K reunion clip show and Q&A panel preceded it. While The Omega Man and Silent Running were blueprints for the theme of the show, Joel himself said that movies like Gamera were MST3K's chief inspiration. Joel told a brief story that sounded so familiar that my heart dropped: he had grown up with that same love of broadcast TV movies that I had as a child. He watched the same kinds of late night and weekend afternoon monster movie matinees that I did, and, just like me, they helped to shape him as a movie fan. More importantly, Joel knew of another aspect of television I held dear to my heart: the horror host.
(If you have not read it yet, then I would recommend pausing here to read my review of Elvira, Mistress of the Dark for more detail on my childhood history with broadcast television horror movies. I have a bad habit of being repetitive, and I am going to try not to copy most of that entire thing from memory here. It is not an easy task, but the bulk of that review takes up a large chunk of what I planned to talk about here. In hindsight, the entire first half of that review would have been better off here in the first place because it is just a long-winded lead-in. The review itself came out of current events and a new appreciation for the movie, but I think it lost some of its impact when I got sidetracked in anticipation of this writing. While we are at it, go and watch the documentary American Scary. You are likely to get a lot more out of that than reading any of this. Not that I intend to stop here.)
As I mentioned in my review for Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, I, like Joel and Gilbert Gottfried, was fortunate to be born in a generation before paid programming and the broadcast restrictions of the DMCA. The golden age of television needed a lot of filler, and theatrical movies on the small screen at home provided a large chunk of that filler. Original programming and sitcoms? Yeah, sure, that was television, but even the growing concept of the rerun could not keep a television station running twenty four hours a day.
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| And I still could look forward to seeing this late at night well into the 1990s on some stations. |
And some local stations took advantage of their filler in the best way possible: creating community involvement and fostering new and renewed appreciation for old movies through their television broadcasts. I still remember the first time I saw a movie in 3-D. It was Gorilla at Large, and the local 7-Eleven sold 3-D glasses to promote the broadcast. I lost those glasses, but I never forgot the experience. It was an extension of the appreciation I had developed already from It Came From Hollywood and the multitude of television B-movie broadcasts I had seen up to that time, and it was airing in prime time! A local television station was going to this much effort to promote a movie made thirty years earlier, one I had not seen yet but the sort of movie I loved watching on television all the time, and I could not have been happier. Well... I could have been happier, but I did not know how at the time. I would learn a few years later that some local stations had the likes of Elvira and Svengoolie and Zacherley to promote and present these movies. I even found a VHS recording of Zacherley hosting Gorilla at Large in 3-D in collector circulation from what looks to be the same year I saw it. These movies broadcast nationally in most cases, but several local markets added their own extra flavor with a horror host. When I was little, the best I could get was a short local news report on the upcoming movie and perhaps a few commercials. Elsewhere, the horror host stood on a platform to hype these movies with gusto. The horror host was a combination of a carnival barker, a commercial pitch figure, and a film-loving friend to a lonely kid watching the tube, and I did not realize how much I needed a friend like that until my family moved to a new home in a new town where such a friend existed. For me, that friend was Dr. Paul Bearer in Tampa, FL.
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| "I'll be lurking for you." |
Dr. Paul Bearer (the late Dick Bennick, Sr.) is an annual October staple in my home, but the surviving collection of his shows is sorely limited and seldom has video quality as well-preserved as the screen grab pictured above. A circa-1987 or -1988 broadcast of Dr. Paul Bearer hosting Legend of the Dinosaurs remains my holy grail as a collector of horror host shows because that was the show that made me a fan forever. The movie itself is a personal favorite, and I would come to learn that Dr. Paul Bearer shared much of the same movie distribution package in the late 1980s that MST3K had for its first local season. I was not able to watch the movies with Joel and the Bots on KTMA in Minneapolis, but Dr. Paul Bearer had me covered in Tampa. Unbeknownst to me, around the same time I was first exposed to Legend of the Dinosaurs with Dr. Bearer, MST3K featured it on their local network season finale. When I finally tracked down the KTMA season of MST3K many years later, they became some of my favorite episodes of the series, especially Legend of the Dinosaurs, because they captured the essence of the local television horror host. They are less-polished and somewhat removed from what MST3K became in cable syndication, but I am firmly in the camp of people who would buy a commercial release of MST3K "Season Zero" in a heartbeat.
Competition became fierce in the late 1980s with cable television with my introduction to horror hosts. I still checked the TV guides on a weekly basis, with highlighter in hand, to mark down which movies I wanted to see. On Saturday afternoons, I had the added dilemma of choosing which of three horror hosts I wanted to see talking about a particular movie. I could watch Commander USA on the USA Network, Grampa Munster on TBS, or Dr. Paul Bearer on WTOG, but I had to pick one. On occasion, I would skip the afternoon movie and take advantage of the fair Florida weather to fish or root around for tadpoles and other wildlife, but, more often than not, I was planted on the living room floor watching Dr. Paul Bearer every Saturday at noon. Any channel or host showing a Japanese monster movie specifically won the contest, and I was not leaving the house that day.
Losing horror hosts entirely with the move back to Texas from Florida was painful, and I wish that I had had a recording VCR at the time to preserve some of that material. Some others did, fortunately, but the fruits of those efforts still remain obscure and sometimes difficult to track down. My discovery of the Internet opened up a new world to me as I tried to rekindle my love for the horror host. "Keep circulating the tapes" was the MST3K motto, but the concept of preserving television expands out into every corner of broadcast history. YouTube does not even scratch its surface, and, sadly, often is no different than watching a third-generation VHS copy with the quality loss that can occur when uploading some old footage to a video website. Still, this is where one can find much of this material easily. Other sites like FuzzyMemories.TV go to great effort to preserve broadcast material as historical artifacts, and I wish that there was a greater effort to do the same outside of Chicago and beyond YouTube. The sad fact is that most of the master tapes from a lot of these areas no longer exist. They were erased or destroyed to make room for other material, the same thing that happened a number of Doctor Who episodes and other BBC television shows of the 1960s. Even into the 1970s and 1980s, local station heads did not think this material was important. It could not be sold to the home market, and many horror host shows aired only once before disappearing forever. If you were not at home in time for broadcast, then you missed it. It only had value for a brief moment in its time slot.
YouTube has made it possible to see some of those old horror host shows like Commander USA, and it also has allowed some contemporary horror hosts to thrive with the benefit of movies in the public domain. There remain, however, hundreds and hundreds of recorded broadcasts of past horror host shows from around the country, and I managed to get my hands on a few that I have enjoyed a great deal. The best recording preservations are the ones with the commercials still intact. The nostalgia factor is a big part of the experience, but there is added fun in seeing local commercials from other markets and the subtle differences in how broadcasting functioned in different cities across the country.
Every year, I have to dig out a few of those horror host shows to watch for the October season. This year, I did not get to as many of them as I wanted, but I covered a few of the essentials. First, however, I need to talk about my kickoff show, The Uncle Floyd Show's Halloween Trick or Treat.
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| Zacherley, among many special guests, drops by for a visit. |
Although not a horror host, Uncle Floyd Vivino was deep in the local TV host trenches. The few shows of his that I had the chance to see were sort of like The Bozo Show for much older kids. I first discovered Uncle Floyd courtesy of Nickelodeon's sketch show Turkey Television, and I had all but forgotten him until several years ago when an online acquaintance from New Jersey pointed me in the direction of a few surviving shows. I kept racking my brain trying to remember why this man in the checkered shirt and hat looked familiar. I had not seen Turkey Television in almost thirty years. As soon as Uncle Floyd sat down at his piano, it clicked. It all came flooding back to me. I remembered his songs and his "Julia Stepchild" parodies that were a staple of Turkey Television sketches. I remembered looking forward to them almost more than I looked forward to seeing sketches by Christine McGlade, Les Lye, and other veteran cast members of You Can't Do That On Television.
Uncle Floyd is a hell of a showman and a piano player, and there are times when his sketches seem to be an anti-variety show, deconstructing notions of how magical television looks from the family couch side of the screen. Things went wrong, lines were missed, equipment failed, sets collapsed, and at least one show derailed completely when a visiting pet unexpectedly took a squat right in the middle of the stage on live television. These things did not happen all the time, but they were not edited out. There was no outtake reel. Any bloopers became part of the show, so you had to expect something to snap you out of the fantasy world of television every now and then. Uncle Floyd's Halloween special was not a prime example of some of the chaos that could take place on Uncle Floyd's show, but it is no less a classic and laden with guest stars. Zacherley, Peter Tork, David Johansen, Jon Mikl Thor with his exploding hot water bottle trick, and even a live performance by Blue Oyster Cult. And no, they did not perform "Don't Fear the Reaper." That would have been perfect for the season, though, right? They performed "Burning for You." The anti-variety aspect of Uncle Floyd came in with the assortment of guests from the punk and metal side of music. Their rebellious nature became the chaos that would pick the show apart at the seams the most. A comedian like David Johansen or Peter Tork could crash a sketch and keep it going for several minutes, but a punk rocker had no patience for nonsense. Stiv Bator showed up with a bag of stolen candy, interrupting a PSA on trick or treat safety. A bit earlier, Joey Ramone found himself in the most (deliberately) boring and lackluster comedy sketch ever performed on television, and he walked off the set in a huff. It looked awkward, uncomfortable, and authentic, as if it was not part of the script. Was it? That was part of the beauty of the show. Ramone remarked that he had been on Uncle Floyd's show numerous times, so this must have been a set up. Still, you could look at that or almost any other sketch and wonder if they ever went in the direction they intended. I am not sure where one would go now to find some of these rare shows as it appears that the Captain Fork website no longer exists, but I would recommend looking up some Uncle Floyd if you can find it.
Of course, horror was not a strict guideline for a TV movie host. Throughout most of the 1990s, one of the staples of my late night weekend movie viewing was USA Up All Night, hosted by Gilbert Gottfried, Rhonda Shear, and "late-night movie gal-pal" Caroline Schlitt. I did not catch Gilbert hosting on Friday nights that often, but I was tuned to the USA Network almost every Saturday night. I would not say that puberty had everything to do with it, but the selection of movies on Up All Night typically came from the sexploitation and T&A sex comedy genre.
I am still seeking out a movie that appeared on Up All Night and have not been able to identify to this day because I only remember two scenes. In the first scene, the owner of a van talks with a girl about the concept of having sex in automobiles. I may not have the quote entirely correct, but I remember the guy saying, "It can only be done in a van." He put extra emphasis on the word "done." A few minutes later, we see the van rocking, and the parking brake gives out. The van rolls down a hill and comes to rest in a large puddle, but it made me laugh because it did not seem like they were going to do more than get their feet wet when they came out. It was not a deep puddle. I have no idea what this movie was, but my memory feels like it must have been from the 1970s. In a later scene, the same girl is almost raped (or is raped but the scene was cut short by censors) by some ne'er-do-wells but is rescued when her friends fight them off. That traumatic moment is etched in my mind, making it difficult to bring up in conversation to try to identify it when a near-rape is one of the only scenes I remember from it.
Horror still had a place on Up All Night, and those were some of the nights I enjoyed the most. Puberty or not, T&A was censored, and I needed a fun plot to keep me entertained. When it came to horror, a large assortment of movies featured on Up All Night came from Troma. I have a few things to say this year about Troma and am saving that for the end of my highlights entries, so stay tuned for that. Troma and sexploitation abound with movies like Class of Nuke 'Em High or I Was a Teenage Sex Project (AKA Dr. Alien), it was not uncommon, however, to see some higher-budget theatrical horror on the show, and I could count on seeing all-time favorites like Creepshow, Shocker, or A Nightmare on Elm Street as well as gems like Basket Case and Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death. For this October, I went with Rhonda Shear's Up All Night presentation of Fright Night. Rhonda decides to get married, and she hosts the entire night in a wedding gown despite not having picked a husband yet. Through the course of the night, she begins to wonder if she needs a husband at all. This show took place closer to the end of USA Up All Night's broadcast run, but it remained entertaining until it went off the air. It was the end of an era, and all of the late night movie hosts were on their way out.
Fright Night was one of those special '80s horror movies like The Lost Boys that held a deep love for the classics but succeeded mostly because they did not take themselves too seriously. They were a blend of horror and comedy that poked fun at the horror genre, but there was that distinction I mentioned between mocking and respect. These movies could not be funny without exhibiting love, respect, and knowledge of the subject matter. All of the tropes were there with a focus on the rules, and the kicker was that this was supposed to be the real world. This was a world where vampires and ghouls were works of fiction, but guess what? It turns out all of it was real after all, and its connection to the real world is downright eerie in its subtext with regard to film and television. Fright Night is the ultimate love letter to horror movies and even horror hosts, a horror parody of Rear Window, and it is sadly prophetic of the direction that television would take to phase the horror host out almost completely. In the movie, the blame is placed upon the slasher movie. The '80s generation wants to see Michael and Jason, Freddy and Pinhead, blood and guts. They do not have the taste for Lugosi's Dracula, Karloff's Frankenstein, or Cushing's Van Helsing anymore, according to the depressed horror host and former horror star Peter Vincent, played by Roddy McDowall. The argument unfairly dismisses filmmakers like Mario Bava and Lucio Fulci and even Dario Argento, but it does present a valid debate over changes in the tone of horror in the '80s. This would become, sadly, predictive of what would happen to amazing channels like American Movie Classics, which took a radical turn in 2001 toward a new format and is nothing like it once was. Prior to 2002, AMC was a haven for classic film and classic horror in October, making it worthy competition for and even better than Turner Classic Movies in most respects. Their annual MonsterFest showcased the best of the best and the most well known of the B-movie creatures, even putting Roger Corman in the host chair in 1999.
The unedited and commercial-free MonsterFest eventually would become the heavily-edited-for-television and commercial-laden FearFest, and gone were the likes of Karloff's Frankenstein in place of Michael Myers and the contemporary monsters like Predator and the Xenomorphs. Peter Vincent was right all along, but even worse, he predicted the death of the traditional horror host in place of ad revenue and paid programming. The state of cable was shifting. TCM became the home for those classic monsters while AMC became the home for movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I still get confused sometimes when someone abbreviates "TCM" because I have to decipher whether they are talking about the channel or the movie. But even Turner Classic Movies does not pay some of the classics the respect and recognition that AMC used to offer. On a few occasions, it felt like the TCM hosts were reluctant to talk about some of these movies at all, but they smiled through it, taking a few subtly worded shots at the lack of production value and commenting all-too-often that a film like Night of the Lepus or The Blob did not deserve to be on the same channel as Harvey or Vertigo. Therein exists the debate about taking films either too seriously or not seriously enough, and the happy medium can be hard to find. At least we can count on Svengoolie every week to give some of these films the love they deserve with some appropriate riffing.
Among my favorite horror hosts of all time and one I have to revisit annually is the late Bob Carter, Sr., better known to his audience in Indianapolis as Sammy Terry. Of all the horror hosts I have seen, Sammy Terry was the true poet. Even when he was promoting the Indy 500, you had to listen carefully to make sure that you were not hearing the works of Edgar Allen Poe. His scripted monologues were macabre perfection, but Sammy Terry could put a smile on your face with an unexpected punchline.
I watch Sammy Terry's presentation of Phantasm every October, but it seemed only fitting to follow up my USA Up All Night feature with Sammy Terry's broadcast of Fright Night: Part II. These two broadcasts aired nearly fifteen years apart, Phantasm around 1987 and Fright Night: Part II just before election night in 2000, and you can feel the divide between them and the inevitable waning of the horror host genre that Peter Vincent prophesied. Svengoolie remains an example of that fight between the programmers and the film-lovers, the constant struggle to make a unique and entertaining show around a movie while taking care to pay attention to how much time was devoted to the sponsors. The movie itself, of course, was the point, but the hosts progressively had to fight for their own space in their own show. Svengoolie managed to keep a basic weekly formula, but some hosts began to see their role diminish more and more from host segments to seconds-long bumpers between commercials. Of course, hosts like Sammy Terry and Svengoolie have been on the air long enough to see this battle shift back and forth several times, but most, sadly, lost out to changes in the broadcast market and hung up their capes and fangs. Still, Sammy Terry was able to use his time to provide fright and delight to his audience. I have not seen Bob Carter, Jr., in the mantle, but I would like to think that he does his father proud in keeping the tradition alive.
Speaking of those classic black and white horror movies, my viewing this year was far below the norm. I usually watch the classic Dracula and Frankenstein this time of year, but I went in several alternate directions. I came back to the black and white with Fritz The Nite Owl hosting The Ape Man on Nite Owl Theatre. Fritz is a different breed of horror host. He is not a creature of the night nor did he do a standard straight host routine like Bob Wilkins. Fritz' character is the overnight radio DJ, the smooth and debonair voice you expected to hear burning the night away with the hits. His show felt more like a radio show than television. Often, he was reading trivia or narrating details of the movie without being on screen at all. Many times, his suave voice and musical accompaniment played over a still frame or some 1980s style video graphic, and every once in a while he would do a green screen gimmick with his head superimposed on a piece of Frank Frazetta artwork.
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| And sometimes Fritz just walked on screen to talk at length about the movie or its cast. |
I have a couple more hosts to cover on this subject, but I am going to devote Part 5 to them. Stay tuned for the next installment in which I show some love for Incognito Cinema Warriors XP and the work of the great Mel Welles.
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