Last night I was watching the groovy 70s Nazi zombie classic Shock Waves and all the great memories of staying up late to watch the CBS Late Movie and WOR-9's Fright Night came lumbering back to me. That is where I first caught the white faced, bleach blonde SS soldiers rising from their watery graves before the advent of VHS and DVD. But even before that, I loved finding a black and white gem from the Universal Shock Theater package while flipping through the UHF stations after the 10:00 news. Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney, Jr., and even Cedric Hardwicke and J. Carroll Naish felt like old familiar friends as I sat before a flickering phosphor tube in a darkened living room on a Saturday night. Last night as I watched Peter Cushing running through the forest as the Nazi elite closed in on him, I looked up at the clock and saw it was 10:30...always the moment the creature feature would start running during my childhood years.
It wasn't always smooth going. I remember staying up late in 1977 to watch Dracula vs. Frankenstein on Shock Theater on WTVC-9 in Chattanooga. I reveled in the thought of seeing my two favorite movie fiends go at it in what seemed like the ultimate duel to the death. I was only familiar with the Karloff monster and stills of Lugosi as Dracula. But this was a drug hazed 1971 picture with horror greats Chaney and J. Carroll Naish during their waning years. I wasn't prepared for the LSD freakout, the Dracula that looked like a mime with an afro, and the Frankenstein monster with a face like a bubbled up pie crust. I didn't make it past the second commercial break, but I did see it much later with a newfound appreciation for schlock cinema of the 60s and 70s. That love of classic and campy horror and science fiction carries on to this day, thus giving me the impetus to create this blog.
Some of what you can expect to see here include: golden age gothic monsters and mad doctors from the Shock! and Son of Shock! film packages distributed to TV stations around the country long ago, Godzilla and kaiju films from Toho, 50s sci-fi and giant insect movies from the atomic age, dubbed 60s European horror imports featuring masked phantoms or spooky castles with dungeons and snake pits, the Hammer pantheon of fantastic cinema, 70s animals on the rampage movies, AIP drive in classics, and even some great episodes of science fiction/horror/fantasy TV shows that filled up the waning hours of the UHF programming schedule way back when. Also, there will be monster movie memories involving Famous Monsters magazines, Captain Company ads, 70s horror movie books, and pop culture involving fantastic cinema during the 1970s (things like Vincent Price doing TV commercials and the notorious Magic and Suspiria commercials that freaked us kids out big time). Hopefully, I'll have something to write about all the fantastic cinema I watch from this point forward.
Thanks for reading my blog and please let me know what you think. Have a very good day and wish me luck on this project.
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