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!
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