#GHWP Live Tweet Fridays - Metalder and the Road to Year One

     After a few months of "succumbing to my own gaping head wounds" (i.e.: suffering through the winter holidays for another year after the loss of so many loved ones in recent past), I'm trying to pick this back up again.

     A little part of me always wanted to be a TV horror host. When Mystery Science Theater 3000 came along in my early teens, I watched the horror host dynamic altered right before my eyes. Not only was there hosting going on, but there was live and humorous commentary to boot. I love watching television and movies and talking about them. It's perhaps the only time I feel comfortable and confident with myself in a public or even a pseudo-public setting like Twitter. If I had the opportunity to do it in costume and make up, all the better. Twitter and #GHWP gave me the virtual opportunity to make that dream come true and to give me some learning experiences along the way, and I set aside the costume and make up for a make-believe gorilla suit and chest plate. It started as a lonely little riffing venture on my part with a few random movies I simply wanted to see and didn't want to watch alone, and it took a little while to settle on a hashtag. But it wasn't really the hashtag that did it: it was the material I knew best and the great people I met that decided to stick around for the ride with their own observations and humor.

     #GHWP owes everything to the people of #DriveInMob and their viewing of Space Giants for inspiring the five-year-old kid in me to revisit Spectreman, and they are one part of a big group of funny and kind riffing folks deserving of my thanks including #TrashTue, #BMovieManiacs, #MondayActionMovie, #WarBonds, #Riffotronic and #BNoirDetour. I jumped into this headfirst and just started throwing ideas at these once-random strangers, and they were good enough to play along. Spectreman became sort of the mascot of #GHWP, and the whole thing might have faded away in the early stages if not for Spectreman's instant success. At peak, I think a few Spectreman episodes had around 20 people attending a couple of nights. For me, even 3 people would have been a success, and that's usually the number I have on a Tuesday night. If no one shows at all, sure, I get a little bummed out (I know my time slots aren't the best), but I love doing it anyway. I'm adding more depth to the experience of watching something.

     When Spectreman ended (a little disappointingly with its final episode), it was a hard struggle to find something to take its place. I could name in a snap any number of shows I would have chosen to take its place, but there was the problem of availability in online streaming. I tried my hand at just about everything I could find, and despite how well some of it went over with the audience, all of it was sorely limited to a small number of episodes. Smash hits like Kikaider and Robot Detective K only filled the time slot for a couple of weeks with just the first few episodes available, and the English language Ultraman series didn't get the attention I expected. I kept sifting through material on YouTube to the point that all I was trying to do was keep #GHWP going for one more week. I'd run out of ideas and couldn't find anything to fit the mood for extended periods of time. I needed a new series that could run for a while and keep drawing a crowd, and I stumbled upon Choujinki Metalder. I thought little of it because I'd never seen any of the series before, and if the first episode or two didn't go over then no big deal. Metalder, however, became the perfect spiritual successor to Spectreman, and it became an instant favorite series of mine as well.

When Ryusei Tsurugi's emotions hit their peak, he transforms into Superhuman Machine Metalder.

     The instant hook was the assortment of villains, the action, and the fact that Metalder's nemesis God Neros threw his entire army at Metalder in the first episode. Metalder broke away from some conventions and even set aside the standard kick-explode-the-monster-of-the-week a few times to deliver something that was more a modern day feudal samurai drama mixed with a little bit of Pinocchio, and I came to find out that more than a few of the enemies in the story were based on real Japanese folklore. Good villains are what make a good superhero story, and the God Neros Empire really knows how to party with their gladiatorial death matches, arm wrestling competitions, fancy dress dancing balls, disco parties and women's slavery. Okay, well... they had me ready to sign up until that last one. Don't tell me you weren't at least a little intrigued up to that point, too... and, um... maybe a couple of you still are anyway... um...

     Metalder managed to keep going strong for more than half the series until a few viewing setbacks came along, and I was afraid it was going away for good. The upside is that I can keep going through alternative means. The downside is that I'm going to have to skip about a half dozen episodes with poorly scripted subtitles. I spent an entire weekend re-editing the subtitles for those episodes, but there is no way to implement them into the viewing at this point. Maybe someday down the line I can go back and fill in those gaps. The remaining Metalder episodes last exactly long enough to shift right into the first anniversary of #GHWP the week of May 12, 2016. When that day comes, we're going to get nuts with a few oddities I had to pass up for a while, and I have a few special plans to revisit the things that helped get Gaping Head Wound Playhouse off the ground including, of course, Spectreman. Fans have clamored for his return, and the void left by the absence of Dr. Gori and Karas has been palpable. Even better, there is now opportunity to feature their return to the screen as alien invaders in another more recent movie.

     I want to thank everyone for riffing along with me and for reading my little collections of nonsense here. It's been both therapeutic and something that induces the need for therapy depending on the week... but somehow I have managed to keep this going for almost 52 weeks straight at almost two nights a week. I just enjoy sharing my own joys, so I hope you'll stick around to celebrate this little milestone.

     #GHWP presents Choujinki Metalder courtesy of KissAsian.com from April 1-29, 2016, with the final 9 episodes as well as the theatrical movie. #GHWP nestles snugly in between the fine riffing programming of Friday Love which begins at 8PM EST with #TGIRiff and finishes out with #Bmoviemaniacs at 11PM EST. If you don't dig what I host on a Friday night, one or more of those folks more than likely have something to strike your fancy.

A GHWP Christmas Memory - The Monster's Christmas

     That magical period between the age of three and four. One's first real memories start to take hold, and one begins to look back at experiences for the first time and cement some of those moments in vivid detail... or allow some of them to skew until you almost convince yourself that some of them were just in your imagination. For me, that year was 1981, and I have a little of both in the memory department. Since the original Star Wars was before my time, it wasn't until 1981 that I saw it for the first time in theatrical re-release, and my first memory of it-- perhaps the earliest memory I have of anything-- is a towering C-3PO and R2-D2 cardboard standee in front of the theater. I stared at it while my mother complained to the ticket seller that the traffic had made us late to the start of the movie. I think she was afraid that the theater wouldn't let us in or that it might have sold out. I remember the packed house. It took a minute or two to find seats, but I wasn't paying attention to that. As my mother led me by the hand, my eyes were locked on the vast expanse of Tatooine as Threepio and Artoo wandered through the desert. Mom claims she took me to see The Empire Strikes Back a year earlier, but I have no recollection of that. She often told me that she never would have given the movies a chance at all if not for having a child, and she remained a fan for the rest of her life, glad that she hadn't passed it off forever on looks alone (she found the prequel trilogy "terrible," by the way... her word).

     And so this is Christmas, and my memory goes back once again to 1981. My mother had remarried someone who seemed like a successful and loving man (AT FIRST), and I was having what would be the last few moments with my biological father that I would have for the rest of his life. But this is a happy time, so I'll forego the sad stories of what went on in my family most of the time and focus on the point: that sponge phase when a child wants to soak in the entire world. I didn't watch television as much as one might think I did as a child despite my vast memories of movies and shows, but when I did, I had the benefit of early 1980s premium cable in my home. It was, indeed, a time of great privilege (i.e.: starry-eyed parents of poverty living beyond their means and unable to see it would come back to bite them in a couple of years after the honeymoon was over). Cable was dying for programming in those days, and they still didn't run on a 24-hour schedule yet. Premium cable used to go off the air, folks. Believe it. Even in 1981, a lot of theatrical movies hadn't made the jump to television, so many stations turned to low-budget films and foreign programming to pick up the slack. Channels like HBO had been around for a decade already, but premium cable was just starting to find its place by 1981. When it came to children's programming on cable in the early '80s, I can't think of a single program that came from the United States. I had Romper Room and Friends and Sesame Street, but those were on public broadcasting. I got most of my enjoyment in children's programming from cable, and perhaps it was that multicultural and international diversity that lured me into it. HBO had Babar (Canada/France), Nickelodeon's Pinwheel came out of Canada and featured cartoons and shorts from no less than a dozen foreign countries (Denmark, Italy, Sweden, France, Norway, Germany, Finland, just to name a few), and The Movie Channel and other premium outlets were filling their prime youth hours with animated shorts like Hungary's Állatságok (AKA Animalia, not to be confused with the 1986 children's book or the 2007 Australian CG-animated series) Animalia has an IMDB entry and aired as filler on HBO, but I have yet to find any video or other information about it. I used to have one episode on VHS, but it is long since lost. Finding a complete set of the series is one of my holy grails. Many of these cartoons were open to the domestic market because they had no dialogue, but the foreign market also drew in English language programming from Britain, Australia and New Zealand, which brings us to our live tweet feature.

     Memories of annual Christmas specials like A Charlie Brown Christmas are a dime a dozen, but my memory of The Monster's Christmas was so vivid and yet so hard to substantiate that I almost had myself convinced that it never really existed. I saw it a total of one and a half times on a premium cable channel in December 1981, possibly 1982, and then it was gone. All I had was the memory of it for thirty years until I found it again, and it was exactly as I remembered it. The Monster's Christmas was filmed in New Zealand, and it gave audiences an early view of the magnificent landscape that would become a standard filming location for Power Rangers, Hercules - The Legendary Journeys, Xena - Warrior Princess, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, among many others. In a sort of Wizard of Oz/Alice in Wonderland style, The Monster's Christmas tells the tale of a little girl who must become a champion and save the denizens of the land of monsters. A wicked witch has cast a spell and taken away all of the monsters' voices, reducing them to creatures capable only of grunts and groans. Only the power of a magic scepter and the actions of a human with the power of speech can break the spell. Journeying across the land, the girl meets a number of different monsters that aid her in her quest while the witch's rat-like servant attempts to steal the scepter and foil the monsters' chances of being free to sing again.

     I'm glad places like YouTube and the Internet exist so that obscure little gems like this don't disappear forever, and I hope you'll join me as we send the 2015 holidays off into their own corner of well-deserved obscurity on Twitter with The Monster's Christmas at 10PM EST on #GHWP, following a special 8PM EST presentation of the 1974 classic Black Christmas hosted by one of the great folks of #TrashTue, @SullaBlack.

REMINDER: #GHWP kicks off its Star Wars celebration Sunday, December 27, at 4:45PM EST with the Toei classic Message from Space.

GHWP Tuesday Movie Dec. 8, 2015 - Monster in the Closet

     I've steered away from the blog promos for a little while since Spectreman ended, and the holidays, frankly, just aren't my favorite time to be social these days. I felt like dusting off the blog this week in an attempt to shed a little light on how I feel about Troma movies, and I think I might have left with more confusing questions than answers. I'm not a big fan of Troma movies. I don't say this to be controversial or to start a fight with Troma fans, and I have to say that I'm not a fan of Troma movies because I AM a fan of Troma movies. I like the movies, but I almost never watch any of them for some reason. I never thought I would find an opportunity to unpack that, but I'll try. Troma films look like they are more fun to produce than to watch. I feel like I'm looking through the window of a great party, and my invitation was lost in the mail (or I just didn't have the nerve to go through the door because there was some embarrassing social hang up holding me back). I certainly don't like to watch them alone because fans of Troma movies are my kind of wacky people, but I also never found myself riffing on them very much even when I did. The only way I found myself able to watch some of them in their entirety was with the help of Gilbert Gottfried and Rhonda Shear on USA Up All Night. Horror/movie hosts made me feel like I had a friend sitting with me, and I've made it no secret that I had a lonely childhood surrounded by kids who just didn't get my movie tastes. People like Elvira, Grampa Munster, and Commander USA were the only real friends I had.

     This Tuesday night at 8PM EST, #TrashTue will be live tweeting The Toxic Avenger, which is, for all intents and purposes, the Troma standard. At 10PM EST following Toxie, #GHWP features my favorite of the Troma bunch: Monster in the Closet. I first saw this one on late night television, most likely Up All Night or perhaps Saturday Nightmares. I count this one as my favorite above all because it stands as a spoof of 1950s-era science fiction and horror movies. It is entirely tongue-in-cheek and features a load of celebrity guest stars from the best corners of film and television like Claude Akins and Henry Gibson, and I hold it in high regard with the likes of Airplane!, Matinee and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. I wouldn't say it's as "good" as those by any stretch, but it delivers an impressive monster while taking some good-natured jabs at the social sensibilities of Cold War-era irradiated creature movies by the likes of Roger Corman and others (as well as poking fun at a superhero trope or two such as how a mild-mannered man can become an irresistible Adonis just by taking off his glasses). If you grew up on movies like It Conquered the World, The Monster That Challenged the World, Beginning of the End, From Hell It Came, or Attack of the Crab Monsters, then Monster in the Closet should be an amusing treat. It likely is one of the tamest movies Troma ever put out in terms of subject matter, and even the trailer boasts it as a horror movie for the whole family. Still, a few spots in this movie spooked me, particularly the death scenes early in the movie that leave everything to the imagination. It's just a bit jarring to hear a lot of screaming and monster roaring just off camera and not knowing what's going on. Your mind starts wandering to some dark places, and that's how real horror movies are supposed to get you in the first place. Then again, my sensibilities are a bit off when it comes to movies. I can watch an Italian horror movie where a person gets his/her throat slashed, but I have to turn my head and cringe if someone gets their knuckles smashed in a door. Go figure.

     Interesting note: Monster in the Closet marks the film debut of the late Paul Walker, star of the Fast and the Furious franchise, and his child genius character reminds me more than a little of the Japanese kids with top level security clearance in any given giant monster movie.

     The following biographical passage is stream-of-consciousness nonsense rant as my eight-year-old inner child proceeds to bitch at his peer group and the ridiculousness of his elders in the 80s. It has no real bearing on the point of this blog other than for me to discover I was more a Troma fan than I thought before I sat down to write. I already plugged the movies, so I'd skip the rest if I were you... unless you're that twisted.

      In defense of my childhood peers, I was too quiet and shy to find out if any of them did share my movie tastes, but I found out firsthand in elementary school that I spent too much time at opposing ends of the spectrum and not enough time in the boring middle of the mainstream popularity contest road like they did. When the seasonal vote came for a holiday party movie in my 3rd and 4th grade classes, anything I would have picked would have been either too wildly inappropriate for an elementary classroom or so childish that it would paint a bullseye on my chest. Of course, I was optimistic and hopeful (i.e.: dumb) enough to pick at least the latter of the two for being responsible and kid-friendly to my classmates and think that a room full of children that largely teased and ignored me would believe that it was worth more than dumbfounded glares and raucous laughter to suggest the direct-to-video My Pet Monster movie over the hugely popular mainstream classic Labyrinth.
     I know what you're thinking. I enjoyed Labyrinth, but I loved that painful obscurity of dark corners of the direct-to-video world. Don't try to tell me it wasn't perfectly normal for an eight-year-old to watch My Pet Monster, and don't try to tell me you don't know exactly why a classroom full of little eight-year-old sheep voted for Labyrinth. Labyrinth was everywhere, and our teacher was none too happy to show it in the first place because it had "cuss words" in it. She actually had to find out exactly where those words were in the movie so that she could fast forward past them. I think Jennifer Connelly said "damn" twice in the movie, and that was it. That apparently would have been enough to warrant a PTA fiasco if any of our innocent ears heard it in our most holy temple of learning.
     I was a shy and bullied little kid, but I'm just now realizing that I was an elitist little punk when it came to movies. It gives my inner child a relieving sense of superiority to drown out some of the childhood trauma of those popularity-driven little posers. I may not have your movie tastes, but I could still sit down and discuss, at unimaginable length, the nuances and brilliance of Sesame Street Presents Follow That Bird like George Plympton hosting friggin' Masterpiece Theater. I will, however, admit that Alyson Court was one of my first childhood celebrity crushes while most of the boys around me were trying to propel themselves into early puberty with Jennifer Connelly. Court was in both Follow That Bird and My Pet Monster, and it was hard not to love her voice in the Beetlejuice animated series among her many, many credits.
     Did any of my childhood peers care to understand the real reasons I watched such a diverse blend of movies and television? Of course they didn't because the bandwagon hate of film demographic splits starts early with that "only little babies watch Sesame Street" playground logic. Children are dumb little lemmings that want attention and pretend to have taste in anything, saying they like or dislike anything that makes them part of the crowd. They're too dumb to realize that there are mere months between the little cutoff periods they invent in their minds when they become "too old" for something and decide with great irony that "too old" means "expert on cool," and a lot of them grow up into adult "experts on cool" that think it's fine to ridicule a subjective concept just because a lot of other people expressed some displeasure with it. I followed that logic against my own integrity for survival because I didn't want to get beaten up on the playground, but I'd be damned if I stopped watching what I wanted to watch on television because someone else told me it wasn't cool. That's why everyone likes to shit on the Twilight saga today, and family movies end up with some of the worst IMDB scores for the same reason: people commenting are not part of the intended demographic. I'll defend Twilight for that reason alone because that sort of criticism is dismissive and borders on mob mentality. This may sound hypocritical to anyone reading this from a movie-riffing standpoint, especially when I won't extend that same defense to any cartoon adaptation Michael Bay gets his hands on, but I assure you there is a difference. You know the difference between good-natured ribbing and bullying, or at least you should by now. I don't like that sort of ganging up on even a bad movie any more than I liked being the only one who tried to defend one emotionally disturbed kid from the entire population of third grade boys every day at recess while the teacher aide chaperones turned their heads because they didn't like the kid either. But I digress. Somehow, I took this conversation completely off the rails and became unusually bitter. I don't dislike children, but 1986 was a difficult year for me as one.
      Even my best friends didn't really get it, but I won't make any claims I could wrap my head around it either. Well, one of them sort of got it, but that was an awkward sleepover watching Gator Bait II with his mom. She didn't have a problem with her eleven-year-old son and three of his friends watching a blatant I Spit on Your Grave ripoff, yet she almost turned it off when one of the actors said the word "fuck" more than three times in the span of ten seconds. This was still the 80s, and moral parental inconsistency was mind-numbing. For most kids I knew, the closest thing to daring adventures into naughtiness was a poster of a nude model covered in soap bubbles (she might as well have been wearing a floor-length wool coat because you couldn't see anything). That poster was hanging on a closet wall hidden behind a mass of clothes, and it required a flashlight to see because his mother didn't know it was there. For me, I guess there was a parental effort to distinguish that nothing I saw on television was a big deal compared to the real world, but for the most part it felt like my elders didn't supervise anything I watched at all. I almost went off the rails again biographically with a few more real world stories that proved them right, but I'd rather not publish those little tidbits for the sake of good taste. Irony, I'm sure, in a blog about movies with deliberately bad taste, but decorum is important and blah blah. My apologies to any Troma fans reading this for denying you the benefit of tales of my disturbing neighbors and extended family. Some other time.

     As much as I love a sitcom like The Goldbergs for how accurately it relates to some of those parts of my childhood, it's a show on a network that loves to leave out gory details. The family television demographic is a world of talking unicorns and happy endings, and how dare you make incest jokes about the Brady Bunch. Troma, on the other hand, takes no prisoners, and its movies don't take themselves seriously. They delve freely into those weird and outrageous corners without any hang-ups, and I guess one small part of me couldn't let go of all my inhibitions. I suppose a part of me wanted to hold on to a little bit of what I called sanity, and now I'm having a therapy session instead of talking about movies.

     I don't know if I successfully made a point anywhere in all that gibberish, and I wouldn't blame you if you didn't believe me when I say that I am completely sober when I write this stuff down. If this were a cop action movie, my commanding officer would have told me I was out of control and demanded my badge somewhere in the middle of the second paragraph.

     If you're still reading this far and haven't backed slowly away, tune in for the Troma double feature Tuesday night starting with The Toxic Avenger at 8PM EST on #TrashTue. Then stick around for #GHWP at 10PM EST with Monster in the Closet.

GHWP Live Tweet November 2015 Tuesday Movie Line Up & New Friday Time

     With Spectreman behind me, I'm looking to the horizon for... something to do. For what the show offered in entertainment and zany dubbing, I'm not sure I can top it on Friday nights, but I'll try. It was sad to give our cyborg hero and his space ape enemies a final sendoff, but a soft spot in my heart has chosen to believe that Dr. Gori and Karas escaped their fate and opened a little bed and breakfast in Indiana.

Throw pillows, Karas! Just think of what my ultimate genius can do with throw pillows!

     The Japanese Wikipedia page for Spectreman had an interesting notation on Gori and Karas, labeling them as having a master-slave relationship so strong that they couldn't live without each other. The final episode came off as a little anti-climactic, but after looking at the show from this angle, it strengthens my belief that Gori and Karas were perhaps the most unique villains in any Japanese superhero show.

"Why did you save me, master?"              "... because you complete me."

     #GHWP Tuesday Movie Line Up for November 2015: 

                    November 3 - Terror Train

    On November 3, it's like Halloween never ended with one of my all time favorites, Terror Train. An early 1980s slasher, Terror Train got its hands on Jamie Lee Curtis just before slasher movies became cliche and Curtis moved on to other roles. It didn't take long after Halloween for that to happen, but Curtis would squeeze four horror roles in between her career as Laurie Strode in the first two Halloween films before moving on to other genres: The Fog, Prom Night, Terror Train, and the amazing Australian-produced film Roadgames (co-starring Stacy Keach). Terror Train, produced in Canada in 1980, is standard slasher fare and was not highly acclaimed, but it does have the significance of being one of the first horror movies I ever saw as a child. It's become a habit for me to repeat the statement that "I first saw this movie at the age of four," and that is turning out to apply to a lot of movies. I might have seen it at age two when it premiered because my parents, being movie nuts and having a child born knowing to shut the hell up in a movie theater, took me with them to movies all the time, but my memories of it are, like many movies, cemented in that age four bracket of 1982 when my family first decided to get premium cable. For me, the draw was not only Halloween's Jamie Lee Curtis but also celebrity magician David Copperfield, making his first feature film appearance in Terror Train and his only film acting credits outside of his many illusionist television specials in which he did not play himself (but let's face it... he really was playing himself in Terror Train anyway).
     The story revolves around a pre-med school prank gone horribly wrong. Curtis' character reluctantly takes part in luring a fraternity pledge named Kenny Hampson into a dark room for a romantic interlude, but Kenny unwittingly gets into bed with a woman's corpse. I guess pranking friends with cadavers is the logical equivalent of dentists having Nitrous oxide parties. Kenny suffers a complete mental breakdown from the experience and is institutionalized, and the story cuts to three years later as the people responsible begin to drop off one by one during a train-chartered New Year's costume party.

Watch my film career closely. Now you see me. Now you don't. Mindfreak!

      November 10 - Android Kikaider (1972) episode 1 and Mechanical Violator Hakaider (1995)

     Tuesday night, November 10, we go back to Japan for a special Keita Amemiya-themed movie and a show with the first episode of the 1972 Japanese superhero series Jinzou Ningen Kikaider and the 1995 film starring a former Kikaider villain elevated to the role of anti-hero in Mechanical Violator Hakaider. Created by one of the fathers of Japanese manga superheroes Shotaro Ishinomori, Kikaider is the story of an android's struggle against evil to protect his creator and his family. Kikaider and Hakaider might seem more familiar to some from their recent appearances in an anime series as well as a new 2015 film called Kikaider: ReBoot. Hakaider would show up in the 1972 series as a major enemy in the story, but action/sci-fi director Keita Amemiya had something different in mind for Hakaider's starring film role. Amemiya cut his teeth in tokusatsu with Toei in the 1980s with a number of Super Sentai and Kamen Rider series, and he made the transition into feature films in 1988 with Mirai Ninja. Amemiya would go on to produce the successful live action adaptation of Zeiram and its sequel as well as the underrated Moon of Tao: Makaraga.
     Mechanical Violator Hakaider, released in 1995, is a post-apocalyptic tale sure to make any religious studies major question his/her life choices. This world of the future focuses on Jesus Town, a Utopian city ruled by the supposed holy angel Gurjev and his android right hand Mikhail. Suffering from a fragmented memory and rumored to be a prophesied dark savior of the people, Hakaider is released from a centuries-old prison and cuts a path through Jesus Town straight to Gurjev's doorstep.

I am the law... I think. I'm fuzzy on the details, so I'll just shoot everyone until I figure it out.

               November 17 - Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious (1946) (my contribution to #noirvember)

      Yes, Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious. With all the flashy costumes and giant monsters and talking eyeballs, you didn't think I liked "good" movies, did you? I like a little bit of everything, but it wasn't until recently that I took part in enjoying some of the classics with #TCMParty. It was that little Twitter social group that drew me to Twitter again after several years when I saw a few of them showcasing their favorites on a Turner Classic Movies fan favorite Saturday matinee. Before I knew it, a new door opened up to enjoying both ends of the movie spectrum. I love every aspect of movies, but older dramas and thrillers are somewhat new territory for me. As a kid, I loved black and white movies and television, but my experiences were limited mostly to comedies like The Three Stooges, nearly the entire catalog of Abbott & Costello films, and horror/sci-fi like Frankenstein and THEM! I had to grow up and develop a little more maturity and sophistication before I could watch the likes of The Stranger, the first black and white drama I ever watched with any attention span courtesy of an old double feature VHS set with The Trial. I would follow this up a few years later with Touch of Evil after its first DVD release coincided with a heavy focus on the film in a film literature class I took in college, but I soon found myself swept away from the genre again as I developed tastes in more Japanese films by Akira Kurosawa and Italian westerns by Sergio Leone. Old time radio dramas from the 1940s were my true first love of drama, and it took me a little while to move from the stories of The Shadow and Boston Blackie to screen drama with Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte, Shadow of a Doubt, Casablanca, Attack, Key Largo, Suddenly Last Summer, Gaslight, and Laura, just to name a few (but the list is still pretty short). I still have not seen most of the real classics, and part of my reason for picking Notorious is that this will be my first viewing of it. I have seen a number of Hitchcock films, but, in my entire life, I haven't seen a Cary Grant film. Not a single one. I'd never heard of #noirvember until just a day before this writing, so it's serendipity that I already had this one in mind months in advance. I had hoped it might be on TCM's schedule sometime, but this offers a better guarantee that I don't just push it to the back of my DVR list and accidentally delete it again before getting to watch it. My DVR is always full to bursting with movies from TCM, but I seldom get around to watching any of them. I run out of time and space too quickly, and I end up making a note of film titles in a list that never stops expanding. I only know the basic plot of Notorious, so I'll leave it up to you and Google to find out more about it if you wish. It's classic Hitchcock, Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains, and I have no doubt it is an amazing film. But of course this is a riffing group, and I don't hesitate to pick even the best movies apart piece by piece to heighten my enjoyment.

For this, however, I have no comment other than "Awwwwww."

                    November 24 - Mega Monster Battle - Ultra Galaxy Legend The Movie

     And directly from Hitchcock majesty, we go immediately back to men in rubber suits.

    I would like to take this time to offer a disclaimer. The word "Ultra" appears several times from this point, so I highly recommend you avoid using it as a drinking game word. I take no responsibility for any alcohol poisoning that may result from ignoring my warning.

    Ultra Galaxy Mega Monster Battle was the unique 24th entry in the Ultraman franchise in 2007. Rather than introduce a new Ultraman, Ultra Galaxy focused on an amnesiac man named Rei. He joins a mining expedition crew known as ZAP SPACY, and their travels through space bring them into a number of encounters with giant monsters on numerous planets. Rei, however, has a trick up his sleeve in the form of the Battle Nizer, a mystical device that summons giant monsters from thin air to fight his battles for him, but before you start shouting, "that sounds too much like Pokemon," remember one important detail: the Pokemon franchise might not exist today if not for the inspiration of "Capsule Monsters" introduced in Ultraseven way back in 1967. The Ultra Galaxy series put the monster summoning at the forefront of the plot, digging into its classic catalog of monsters from past Ultraman shows and reviving them for new stories. One kaiju that would find a place on the side of heroes was Gomora, an ancient Earth dinosaur species and the first giant monster to fight the original Ultraman to a standstill in 1966, and he cemented a new role as an ally of justice after years of appearances as one of the Ultra family's most popular adversaries.
     After Rei regained his memory and learned of his alien heritage (he was not a member of the Ultra family but a similar alien race called the Reionyx), Tsuburaya decided to create a story that would tie together all of the past aspects of their Ultra franchises and offer an explanation of some of the Ultra universe's theology with the revelation of the Monster Graveyard, a dimensional warp in time and space that serves as the final resting place for all of the giant monsters, aliens and even Ultramen that have fallen in battle in multiple parallel worlds. The Graveyard had been mentioned several times in past series, but this film expanded upon it as a crucial plot setting. The Ultra series of the late 90s (Ultraman Tiga, Dyna, and Gaia, respectively) took place in a parallel universe, and the same was true for Ultraman The Next and its television sequel Ultraman Nexus. Ultra Galaxy Legend The Movie also introduced the first evil Ultraman, Belial, who escapes his ancient prison and seeks to lay waste to the Ultraman home planet of M-78 and take over the universe with an army of one hundred monsters from the Graveyard. Virtually every member of the Ultra series is incorporated into the story including the Ultramen of the parallel 1990s universe, the 1987 animated Hanna Barbera Ultramen (from Ultraman: The Adventure Begins), Ultraman Great (from Australia's Ultraman: Towards The Future), Ultraman Powered (from the USA's Ultraman The Ultimate Hero - see new Friday details below), and the former anniversary spoof hero and "runt of the litter" Ultraman Zearth, and the film was notable for introducing the impetuous son of Ultraseven, Ultraman Zero. Mega Monster Battle - Ultra Galaxy Legend The Movie was designed to appeal to Ultra franchise fans of all ages. Anyone unfamiliar with the Ultra series might want to do a little homework because they threw all of it into a blender and hit puree, but I would like to hope that some of the time I have taken to familiarize my audience with the series will have paid off by the time this film is featured.

Join me on the dark side, Luke, er... Ultraman Zero.

                    New Friday Schedule starting November 6, 2015, 10PM EST
 
      Starting Friday night on, November 6, 2015, at a new earlier time, 10PM EST in between #Kolchak and #bmoviemaniacs, the henshin (transforming) hero adventures travel a new path to some obscure corners of the Ultraman universe, and we're going to Japan by way of Hollywood for a little while. Hollywood adaptations of foreign franchises generally are not considered happy occurrences. The notion of live action American versions of stories like Akira and Ghost in the Shell personally make me cringe, and we already have a decent list of horrors with movie adaptations of Japanese video game franchises such as  Street Fighter, Resident Evil and even Super Mario Brothers. One particular Japanese franchise, however, managed to achieve a decent level of success, Toei's Super Sentai franchise which, when licensed to Saban in the early 1990s, became known as the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.
     With any successful product, everyone else wanted to get into the act. The USA Network cranked out its own Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters from Beverly Hills, UPN got its hands on the digital world Japanese superhero Denko Choujin Gridman and adapted it into Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad with Tim Curry as the voice of the lead villain. Saban tried their hands at off more Toei franchises with Masked Rider (Kamen Rider), Big Bad Beetleborgs (Juukou B-Fighter), and VR Troopers (a stock footage mishmash of Uchu Keiji Shaider, Choujinki Metalder, and Jikuu Senshi Spielban) as well as a few original series such as The Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog.
     As most of these shows would reveal, the concept of live action Japanese superheroes was best left to the originators. Before Power Rangers achieved its fame, however, Tsuburaya Productions decided to cross the ocean to co-produce a new Ultraman series in Hollywood following the American reception of the Australian-produced Ultraman: Towards The Future (known in Japan as Ultraman Great), which some could argue was a logical inspiration for Saban to grab up the Super Sentai franchise. Towards The Future had notable exposure in the US with a line of Dreamworks toys, home video releases, television broadcasts, and one of the first video games released for the domestic Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Teaming with an American production company called Major Havoc Entertainment, Tsuburaya produced the 13-episode English-language series Ultraman: The Ultimate Hero (known in Japan as Ultraman Powered).

We've got Hollywood behind us. What could go wrong?

     What? You never heard of it? Well, there's an explanation for that. Despite its roots, Ultraman: The Ultimate Hero never aired in America. Although it did broadcast in Japan, the entire project was considered less than a success due to delicate costume construction that forced action scenes to be toned down ("Made in USA" isn't what it's cracked up to be when it comes to Japanese products), and it would be three years before Tsuburaya would revive their own Ultra series for a new generation with Ultraman Tiga.
     Ultraman: The Ultimate Hero focuses on the members of the WINR (Worldwide Investigation Network Response) as they try to protect the Earth from the invasion of the Baltans (an insectoid alien race resembling cicadas). A number of classic Ultra series kaiju are summoned by the Baltans (classic Ultra foes themselves) including the ancient space dinosaur responsible for defeating the original Ultraman, the monster Zetton. The human race has renewed hope when Ultraman Powered (voiced by renowned Japanese martial arts actor Sho Kosugi) forms a bond with WINR member Ken'Ichi Kai (played by Sho Kosugi's son and veteran stunt actor Kane Kosugi) to transform and combat the alien threat.
     Depending on the reaction to this series, I will be sprinkling in a few other odds and ends or possibly shifting gears to something else entirely. Hopefully this will be enough to fill the void Spectreman left behind just a little. I know nothing will fill it completely.

    #GHWP kicks off a new post-Spectreman journey on Friday, Nov. 6, 2015, with the first two episodes of Ultraman: The Ultimate Hero at 10PM EST following #Kolchak on Twitter. Don't forget the new earlier time.

GHWP Live Tweet Oct. 27 - Halloween Bookends Week 1 - Girls Nite Out

     Non-sequitur #1: As I write this, I have just learned of the passing of the great Maureen O'Hara. She will be missed greatly, and at least three of my favorite movies (The Quiet Man, McLintock!, and Only The Lonely) likely would not be favorites at all if not for her talent.

     Non-sequitur #2: I lost sleep over the Spectreman finale. I must have tossed and turned in bed for two hours with the whole thing hazily repeating itself in my mind. Being on the edge of a dream state, it felt like a lot of other difficult life experiences were intertwined with it, so it was hard to let it go. It was a somber and rather quiet occasion, and a couple of people couldn't bear to stick around to see it end. I almost regret featuring the final episode at all, but we had to push through and get past it. It gave me some insight into the characters that I'm not sure was discussed in past live tweets or even fan discussions of the series elsewhere, and I think some of those conversations will come up when I start live tweeting the series all over again. I will live tweet the series again, but I'm going to let it have some time and rest. Depending on where life takes me in the next year, I'd say to keep an eye out for May 2016, the first anniversary of GHWP, to take the journey again. In the meantime, there will be a Halloween Spectreman special on October 30 as well as a New Year's tribute.

    Now on with the scares. Back in May 2015 when GHWP was just starting out and before Spectreman helped me get my foot in the door and draw an audience, I tried my hand at hosting a few random movies here and there, always falling somehow on mutant fish and killer shark movies such as Bruno Mattei's Cruel Jaws and Roger Corman's Screamers. When I hosted Mako: Jaws of Death, I opted for an obscure choice with a 1987 USA Network broadcast version hosted by the great Commander USA. The original 80s commercials turned out to be a bigger hit with the crowd than the movie itself. A number of trailers for USA Network and theatrical premieres stood out, and one of them was for our first Halloween bookend pick. On Tuesday night, October 27, 2015, at 10PM EST, GHWP presents the 1982 college slasher Girls Nite Out.

     Originally filmed as The Scaremaker, the film wasn't released until two years later in 1984 after receiving a new distribution title. Hal Holbrook pops up fresh off the set of Creepshow for the first feature film role of his son David Holbrook (who would go on to have a role in Creepshow 2).

No, I will not say the "Billy" line again. I've moved on, and so should you.

     If you know slasher movies, then you have a pretty good idea of what's going to happen. A bunch of young people are going to be offed one by one, and this time around, it's a killer in a bear mascot costume doing the dirty deed.

Oops. Sorry. Wrong killer bear mascot photo.

     Starting at 8PM EST Tuesday night, October 27, 2015, #TrashTue will be presenting Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. Then, stick around with #GHWP at 10PM EST for Girls Nite Out.


     Write-up to come for the second Halloween bookend feature for November 3, Terror Train. One of my all time favorites.

GHWP Live Tweet Oct. 23, 2015 - Spectreman Finale

     I have Rod Stewart's "Faith of the Heart" playing in the back of my mind as I write this, and I must confess I'm welling up just a little. Full disclosure: before I began these live tweets of Spectreman, I had not seen beyond episode 24. That's right, folks. For all of you journeying through the show for the first time, I was on that same journey with you. You and I both will be watching the final episode of Spectreman together for the first time, and it might have an impact on my delivery of witty high comedy.
     When I was five years old, Spectreman was on the tail end of its 5-year syndication run, and I only saw a few episodes after Kindergarten before it went off the air. I never forgot it, and I was fortunate enough to find a few VHS releases at local video rental stores through my childhood until I finally managed to get my hands on those first 24 VHS episodes in my early 20s. I knew those stories well, but traffic monster Kuruma-Nikuras was the end point for me in Spectreman's adventures because I didn't have access to the complete series until about seven years ago. Even then, I didn't really get beyond those first 24. I read a little about the episodes to follow and saw a lot of pictures of monsters and stories, but part of me didn't want to see it end. I knew inevitably that Dr. Gori would be defeated and that Spectreman would bid farewell to the Earth someday, but I didn't expect to reach that point in this manner.
     Live tweeting Spectreman has been an uplifting experience for me. Enjoying the shows and laughing with others' observations pumped some much-needed positive thinking into me, and it renewed a childhood joy that I had all but abandoned during several years of depression and family difficulties. As much as I owe the origins of that youthful happiness to the likes of Godzilla, Gamera, Ultraman and Jet Jaguar, the real credit for that first exposure to wonder belongs to George, Dr. Gori, Karas and Spectreman. On the creative side, I owe the same thanks to Mel Welles, who never expected that the English dub project he supervised would have had as much of an effect on anyone as it did on me. On the riffing side, I have to thank #DriveInMob. It was their live tweets of P Productions' Spectreman predecessor The Space Giants that put me in the mood to look at Spectreman's adventures again, and I didn't want to do it alone. I'm glad I didn't have to, and I'm thankful for the dozen or so people that have been with me almost every week since episode 1 as well as reruns of the first one-third of the series (and four or five people who have never missed a single live tweet). I also can't offer enough thanks to the OnlineFilmCollection for uploading the entire series to YouTube. For anyone reading this that has not seen the Spectreman series and wants to do so, that is your best source (except for the case of episodes 5 and 44, which require alternate viewing methods). Unfortunately, Spectreman may never get a restored DVD release with subtitles let alone its original English dubbed version. Spectreman has achieved cult status all over the world, with some of his greatest and most dedicated non-Japanese fans coming out of France, Brazil, and the United States, and it was those late 70s/early 80s syndication years that cemented him in our minds forever. And now... on with the show.

Episode Selections:
61 - The Terrifying Monster Show
62 - This Is It - Gori's Final Death-Match
63 - Goodbye Spectreman

     Single-episode stories in Spectreman were a rarity. In fact, episode 61 is one of only three single-episode stories in the entire series. Serving as a retrospective, the story flashes back to George's past experiences with Dr. Gori's schemes and monsters as he investigates an alien invasion hiding in plain sight at a local carnival. A race of former galactic slaves decided to focus their efforts to serving their new master Dr. Gori (I think they missed the point of being free from slavery), and they infiltrate a popular children's monster stage show. Their sinister plan? To lure humans into a transformation chamber-- disguised as an innocent carnival attraction-- and turn them into monsters.

Go on in, kid. We have liability insurance.

     While George and a crowd of children enjoy a live stage show recycling some of the monster suits from past episodes, the aliens succeed in turning a young boy into a chicken monster and blackmail him into breaking up the stage show and attacking the crowd. After putting the hurt on the entire squad of G-Men (including Otto... yay), the chicken monster convinces everyone that this isn't all part of the show, and the alien invaders reveal themselves. George and his friends are captured, but the chicken monster is still just a little human boy at heart and wants his normal life back.

Thank you for not killing me indiscriminately, Spectreman.

     After the circus ends, Dr. Gori is at the end of his rope. In past preview blogs, I have provided a preview synopsis of the story, but I'm not doing that this time. That would force me to skim through the episode and spoil it for myself, and I don't want that Baby Ruth in my swimming pool. Dr. Gori is out of monsters and out of alien allies willing to aid him in his conquest of the Earth. For all his genius, his track record is no different than any other alien invader in a Japanese superhero television series, but he has one final experiment up his sleeve that will combine all of his past failures into what he believes will be an ultimate success.

A fancy lab coat and big science goggles! This is serious!

    
     #GHWP faces Dr. Gori's final assault and Spectreman's spectacular farewell this Friday night, October 23, 2015, at 1AM EST. The story might be coming to an end, but the memory will live on. And if you missed out on the experience the first time, then don't worry. Spectreman live tweets with #GHWP aren't dead. On October 30, we revisit the weirdest Spectreman story for Halloween with the alien vampire Kyudora, and Spectreman returns on New Year's with a special tribute live tweet.

GHWP Live Tweet Oct. 16, 2015 - Spectreman

     The final five are upon us. This week, Dr. Gori is almost out of ideas, out of monsters, and out of genius plans to take over the Earth. Before he embarks on his final assault against Spectreman, the mutant genius of Planet E has one more ally from the depths of space.

Episodes:
59 - Alien Genos: The Messenger from Hell
60 - Deadly Dance of the Monster Dokuron

      Hailing from the Planet Genos, an emissary that sounds a lot like Edward Everett Horton arrives in a pick-up truck (?) to discuss a new plan for world conquest with Dr. Gori: Operation Genocide.

     When Dr. Gori asks for a demonstration, the swashbuckling Genosian is happy to oblige... by killing Karas! The Genos alien runs Karas through with his sword, and Karas falls lifeless to the ground. But before Dr. Gori can take his revenge, the Genosian proclaims that he can bring Karas back from the dead. Pouring a special formula through the hollow center of his sword's blade, he revives Karas, but Dr. Gori doesn't have time to celebrate. The Genos formula has turned Karas into a mindless killer who only obeys the Genosian's orders, and Karas assaults his former master with blood lust. The Genos alien calls Karas off, and Dr. Gori seems more than willing to lose the obedience of his most faithful servant in exchange for a plan that will bring him closer to his goals. So much for loyalty.
     Meanwhile, a young psychic boy named Johnny has a premonition of the coming threat, but only George is willing to listen to his worries. The Genosian and Dr. Gori begin to infect people with the berserker formula to create an army of mindless killers, and Gori ups the ante by raising a demonic monster from the dead with the same formula: the skeletal beast Dokuron.

     Will Karas come to his senses and serve his idol and master once again? How will George fare when he falls into Dr. Gori's torturous clutches, and how can Spectreman kill a monster that's already dead? Is one little psychic boy enough to tip the scales of justice in the cyborg hero's favor and put a stop to Operation Genocide for good? Tune in to the #GHWP hashtag on Twitter at 1AM EST Friday night, October 16, to find out what happens.

Next Friday, October 23, #GHWP will be here for the final first-run Spectreman live tweet with the final three episodes of the series.