Two from the Samuel Z. Arkoff Files

When I was a kid, WXIA Channel 11 showed a wild menagerie of sci-fi/horror features every Saturday afternoon. This was back in 1979 and 1980. I remember going to the city pool, listening to ELO songs on the top-40 radio station, and heading back home in time for the creature feature on 11-Alive! The film catalog on this program was stuck mainly in the late-50s through early-70s. So I would tune into Unearthly Wife one Saturday and then The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant the following weekend. What I didn't notice at the time was the American International Pictures logo at the start of the black and white movies. It was AIP that provided such WXIA doozies like The Beast with a Million Eyes and The Amazing Colossal Man. I was particularly fond of the latter, a tale of a man who survives a plutonium blast only to grow 10 feet a day. I also got a kick out of the giant grasshopper thriller Beginning of the End, with Peter Graves stopping the onslaught of marauding mutant insects in Chicago. I remembered seeing stills from The Amazing Colossal Man and Beginning of the End in my brother's Starlog a couple of years earlier. That was an article all about Mr. B.I.G. - Bert I. Gordon, who helmed these pictures and many other giant monster movies. Recently I borrowed the Samuel Z. Arkoff Cult Classics double feature DVD from a work friend and exposed my kids to the enjoyment of B movie monster mania from the AIP vault -- War of the Colossal Beast and Earth vs. the Spider (both from 1958)

Both War and Earth were featured prominently in Famous Monsters of Filmland when I was a kid (late 70s). There was a Castle Films ad for both movies in the Captain Company section. The Colossal Beast ad had a closeup of the disfigured mug of the Beast (probably when he was picking up the bread truck). Spider had a chilling spider with a skull head climbing down its web. Oh, for want of those Super 8 gems in the back of FM! I had to wait until the early 90s to see the Colossal Beast's rampage in Los Anglele, and that was on Mystery Science Theater 3000. I didn't see Spider until a few years ago, even though this was on tape at Blockbuster and Wal Mart back in the early-90s (even on Cinemax during that period). So I had a blast taking in the 50s drive-in (or Saturday matinee) monster rampage with my kids, who gave the films a formidable 4.2 out of 5!

War of the Colossal Beast is probably the better of the two. This one is a sequel to the MIA on DVD 1957 cult classic The Amazing Colossal Man. In Amazing, Glenn Langan played Colonel Glenn Manning - the unfortunate 60' man pulverizing Las Vegas (thanks to Bert I. and Flora Gordon's special effects). The big guy got blasted by a bazooka and fell to his "death" in the Boulder Dam. A year later, food trucks are going missing in Mexico and one of the drivers screams out something about a giant while lying in his hospital bed. Glenn's sister travels down from L.A. to help look for her brother, who is missing an eye and half of his face due to scar tissue from the fall (or not being able to get Langan to reprise the role). Glenn is now an amnesic, snarling, roaring menace, who gets tranquilized and flown to LAX for observation. Whoa - bad move! Fortunately, it's not a bad movie, despite a few lulls and slow start. The Beast makeup is iconic and was applied by Harry Thomas onto bald Dean Parkin.

Earth vs. the Spider (or The Spider, as it was originally released) is AIP's take on Universal's Tarantula. The humungous bird spider roosts inside a condemned cave, only to come out at night looking for meals on wheels. Teenagers get involved in the hunt for the hairy arachnid when a girl's father goes missing on the dark, desolate highway. Once it is "killed" and put on display in the high school near the 30 minute mark, you know this town is going to be in trouble. It's rock and roll that sets this beast off for the rampage. This picture has the nice ambience of a small 50s town, complete with bakeries, mattress plant, homey sheriff's office (with out of shape sheriff and deputy), and a movie theater showing Attack of the Puppet People! There are even multiple posters of The Amazing Colossal Man! Both pictures are from Mr. B.I.G.'s amazing colossal film catalog.

Now if we could only get The Amazing Colossal Man on DVD!

CBS Late Movie Hall of Fame...and Plea for Comments

Hello out there! This is my first post since February, but I'm surprised the Blogger counter registered so many visitors to my site. I don't know if people got transported here by mistake or if visitors actively seeked some ripe old monster movie talk. Unfortunately, I had the comments set so that only registered users could leave feedback. So I don't know what sort of potential conversations I put a kabosh on because of my ignorance. But please please PLEASE, try to leave a comment here if you like what you're reading. Please offer up comments on what you like and what could use a little more work. Even if it's something like "Cool Giant Gorilla Photos" and nothing else. I just want to make sure this thing works and I'm not writing to an empty space in the cybersphere.

Now on to the crazy creature mayhem on the late show. Back in the mid-70s, the country was full of horror movie programs with hosts in capes and grease paint makeup or with no hosts and sponsors like Ginsu, Ronco, and K-Tel. The shows would come on late, usually after the 10:30 news, and you had to beg for permission to stay up if it was a school night. The stations in each market would split up the various monster movie packages, so that you could see Godzilla battling King Kong on one VHF channel while Colin Clive was stitching together cadavers further up the UHF band. The pictures were mostly in magical monochrome on a flickering phosphor tube with each station lending its unique presentation of the film. Alas, there was one resource for chilling and fantastic cinema that was a shared experience. It was the CBS network, bouncing its signal all around the States with gruesome fright flicks and psychedelic sci-fi - nearly all of it in vibrant color!

The CBS Late Movie was a nightly ritual during the summer and a Friday night tradition the rest of the year. After the weather recap on the 10:30 news, the colored stars would come out and multiply -- marching toward the screen in their spiraling multi-hued glory. Those colored stars were part of the 70s graphics that CBS also employed during their prime time movie programs. The calvacade of stars was accompanied by a bombastic horn section. Then the announcer would say "Tonight..." and follow it up with a one-sentence description of the movie followed by a list of the main actors. Sometimes the announcer would be lighthearted and giddy, like when he'd introduce a Jerry Lewis or Elvis Presley movie. Sometimes he would be straighforward and give you the plot synopsis of a western or war film. But I always got a tingling sensation in my spine when he would talk in an ominous tone while the theme music seemed to turn more sinister. Then the music drew to an abrupt close and The CBS Late Movie seemed to crash into the screen and halt. Then my heart skipped a beat as the teaser trailer would start, giving a spooky sample of the frightening picture about to roll. Then I had to keep watching.

Here are some of the horror and science fiction movies that stand out in my memories of staying up until the CBS station signed off with the National Anthem (or I got tired of the PSAs that clogged the airwaves as the movie drew to a close):

It! (1966): I saw this one around 1975 on a Friday night and it sparked my interest in monster movies. I saw the preview the week before and I was entranced with the awesome pointy head statue that would come to life and go on a rampage. I kept talking about the "monster statue" movie up until I finally got to see it. This was a couple of years before I learned about the Golem in Dulan Barber's Monsters Who's Who book at the local library. When I later read an article in Famous Monsters about the golem, it brought back sweet memories when I saw a shot of the It! statue walking along a shoreline in the water. When I first saw this clay monstrosity, it made me uneasy waiting for it to become mobile and go about its spree of destruction. But later I came out from behind the curtain separating the living room from the dining room and took a couch for the rest of the movie. It! came on twice on the CBS Late Movie. The first time had to added thrill of containing previews of Hammer's The Mummy during the commercial break. Sadly, I forgot to stay up late for that one. It! was shot in Great Britain for a company called Goldstar, which didn't attain the staggering heights of Hammer or the modest reputation of Tigon Pictures. Their only other film release was The Frozen Dead.

The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971): Oh boy! What a wham-bang mixture of the darkest comedy, diabolical vengeance, and old style pursuit of the villain who's always one step ahead of Scotland Yard. My dad would stay up with me to watch the Dr. Phibes flicks, and he never cared much for the horror genre. As a matter of fact, he absolutely detested those kinds of movies (with the other exception being House of Wax...must had really admired Vincent Price). This one - probably Vincent Price's finest - seemed to come on at least once a year, along with its follow-up Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1972). This was before I got into learning about horror cinema, so I thought Price was the guy who played Captain Kangaroo commiting all the heinous murders. I was wondering where Mr. Green Jeans was during all of this. The expressionless automatons in Phibes's swing band seemed fascinating in a weird sort of way, as was Phibes's method of talking through a cord piped into a hole in his neck. The kills with the rats and the locusts made me cringe and the locust murder left me kind of sad after getting to know the nurse a little bit. All in all, this is still one the movies I go back to and it made me look forward to anything that started off with that early-70s American International Pictures logo (something that popped up frequently on the CBS Late Movie).

House of Dark Shadows (1970): This was the first movie that terrified me (outside commercials for movies like The Exorcist). When Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid) turned ancient and bared his terrible fangs after some blood therapy didn't go as planned, it felt like my hair stood up and my jaw came crashing to the floor. I actually locked my bedroom windows and door, something that got me a lecture the next day on how my parents wouldn't be able to get to me if the house caught on fire. Obviously, my parents must have seen too many of those Dick Van Dyke fire prevention PSAs on the CBS Late Movie -- the ones where Van Dyke would instruct us to "Stop! Drop! and Roll!" if we catch on fire. This movie made me curious about the TV show from the 60s, which was broadcast late at night on Atlanta's WTCG-17. The sequel - Night of Dark Shadows - came on the CBS Late Movie in the summer of 1977. However this was the beginning of CBS showing an episode of an old cop show before the main feature. So I fell asleep during Kojak and never got to see Night of...which isn't a such bad thing from what I hear.

The Green Slime (1969): This Japanese-American co-production from MGM graced my TV screen late one Friday night. This was yet another movie I got psyched up over after I saw the CBS Late Movie preview of coming attractions. A sci-fi monster extravaganza with alien muck that gets in the space station laundry and soon grows into tentacled monstrosities that burn their victims with their touch. My brother and I couldn't get enough of this way out deep space action-thriller and we talked about it for weeks. I even impulsively bought an issue of Psychotronic magazine in 1996 because of this cover:


Frogs (1972): Ray Milland, Joan Van Ark, and Sam Elliot co-star in this nature-gone-amuck environmental thriller featuring killer lizards, snakes, butterflies (at least as accomplices in the mayhem), and of course the onslaught on frogs bent on revenge. While this isn't the most exciting eco-thriller to me now, back then it fostered my fear of snakes and left me watching out for slithering creatures in the backyard. This is yet another AIP drive-in production that made its network television debut when I should have been in bad.

The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967): Dan Curtis's Dracula was really popular during its run on the CBS prime time movie. I remember my grandmother filling me in on vampire lore while I was watching it. Around the same time, my parents let me stay up and watch Roman Polanski's take on blood drinking creatures of the night. But here the aristrocratic Count was intermingled with the loathesome commoners with the propensity for biting necks. A couple of bumbling vampire hunters - an absent minded elderly professor and his young protege - go lurking about the snowcapped countryside and a lavish castle in search of the undead scourge. There's even a ball filled with ghastly fanged guests up for some dancing. My family had several chuckles at the expense of the clueless duo packing stakes and holy water.

Shock Waves (1977): This one came on a school night in fall of 1978 and I had to do all my homework and try to sleep during the prime time hours to get to watch it. This is undoubtedly the creepiest of the Nazi zombie subgenre that John Carradine kicked off in the 1940s. White faced, bleach-haired zombies with dark goggles terrorize Peter Cushing and the stranded vacationers in an abandoned estate on a desolate island. And it was John Carradine who took the bickering couples out on that ill-fated cruise. The TV Guide played this one up with a picture ad showing Brooke Adams in a terror-stricken pose. But I remember the newspaper ads with the undead soldiers rising from the ocean. That was what drew me to this terrific 70s cult classic.

Some honorable mentions are the man beast flick The Bat People (also from AIP), the Kolchak: the Night Stalker reruns on Friday night, George Pal's The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (for a little bit of that MGM big budget luster to counteract the grindhouse element), and the "what the heck" antics of giant bunnies in Night of the Lepus (with Dr. McCoy in it!). I'd probably better stop my rambling, even though there are many more great creature features that graced the late show screen on our CBS affiliate. Please let me know your favorite CBS Late Movie memories and monster movie memories in general. Thanks for reading!