It’s funny, I remember it from hearing Silverstein’s own recording of it on Dr. Demento. A couple of years back, I searched and searched for the lyrics and could not find them. Now a half-dozen sites have it. Not sure if they’ve ever been formally published - or if maybe they came out in a recent collection of leftovers.
Singing is not my strong point the way slam-dunk shots aren’t Danny DeVito’s, but I can still belt out a pretty fair take of the lounge-lizardy theme song. I once had this conversation with a co-worker and got to this point and our short duet ending “…CAAAANNNNNN DOOOOOOOOOOO!” brought the entire office running.
Lenny’s Inferno, starring Mr. Mephisto.
Not just horror movies.
Don’t forget those badly dubbed martial arts movies!
I still recall one where the “hero” was in a full splitz, with his groin flush to the dirt, but he was still sliding along the ground blocking blows with both arms. What was he using to propel himself? His pecker?
USA Up All Night movies kept me company when I was a teenage babysitter.
Early years in the DC area during the 60s we had something on at night (Creature Feature?) where I saw Ghidrah the 3 Headed Monster, Creature from the Black Lagoon, and few of the weaker monster flicks. We also had Jungle Theater there on Saturday afternoons that had Tarzan movies, and I saw one Bomba movie and one Jungle Jim movie on that also.
Outside Philadelphia in the 70s there was various late night programming that initially included Dr. Shock in one of his horror movie shows, but then he soon moved to Saturday afternoon and took the bizarre twist of using his real life baby daughter as his mascot instead of some Igorish character. Around Halloween the classic monster movies like the original Frankenstein and Dracula were shown, and I saw the real King Kong for the first time there as well. The cheap monster movie sequels like Frankenstein or the Wolfman meet anybody played a lot.
Moving to New York was a blessing for a movie lover before the gods graced us with cable. They had more channels and more late night programming. There was a Sunday late late movie on one channel that showed anything inexpensive to air, including some lost treasures like Prisoner of Zenda with Ronald Coleman, but also some movies I’ve never seen or heard of since, and one that I’m sure was just some project from one of the film schools, but it was filmed right around where we lived.
Later with cable came USA’s Night Flight. They ran the same shows over again a lot, but there was intersting stuff on there until it devolved into some kind of nonsense with Ronda Shear.
I Was a Zombie for the FBI, perhaps?
Here it is: The Acorn People (TV Movie 1981) - IMDb “The Acorn People”, 1981.
My little-kid mind confused George C. Scott with Dolph Sweet - but there is a resemblance.
LOL. I bought the Gene Pitney 45 for my mom some years back, but you won’t catch me singing it.
New York in the early 1960s was paradise for this kind of thing. Channel 9 showed Million Dollar Movies, mostly from the '30s and ‘40s. Channel 5 and Channel 11 also showed late movies. Not horror movies, usually (except in terms of quality) but fun.
Pigskin Parade with Jerry Colonna, tons of Abbot and Costello movies, even Hellzapoppin’ which I bought on tape and which is even better than I remember.
Zacherley on Ch. 11 showed horror movies, but not at midnight so it doesn’t count.
No. Really weird one about a search for Yeti-like snow monster, and some exotic food delicasy called ‘Sim Dum’. It was filmed at at local restaurant and park.
Big surprise, Sim Dum is made from the dead bodies of the people believed to be killed by the snow monster.
Holy crap! I’d searched several times on IMDB in the past and couldn’t find this, but here it is, Shriek of the Mutilated. This must be it, it’s listed as filmed in Croton where the there’s a park at the dam for the Croton Reservoir, and the restaurant was in the town of Yorktown, once called the Windmill because it looked like a windmill with a real spinning blade that once came loose in a wind storm.
No, the copyright lapsed the next year. The station had a series of classic movies running on Saturday night that summer. I wanted to see it because I had read the short story and wondered how Capra would flesh it out.
We had the “Creature Feature” with “Sir Cecil Creep” in Nashville, late Saturday night in the early 1970s. Lots of fun old horror movies!
We also had “The Big Show” in the afternoon Monday to Friday. This one was more of a “grab bag” of genres – Horror, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Comedy. From Godzilla to Abbot and Costello!
Does “Big Trouble in Little China” count? I loved that movie, still do, and am sure to sit through the whole thing anytime it comes on TV
Hey, my grandmother is in that. I really should buy it for my dad.
Remember, before All In The Family and MASH mixed things up, prime time TV really sucked (unless Green Acres was on). So it could be advantageous to work swing shift and watch TV after midnight.
Everything black & white was disparaged, and dumped to be shown while running cheap ad time for local merchants. So you’d see an awful lot of junk like:
Beach movie knock-offs, below the artistic standards of the Frankie and Annette originals (but still with poor old Buster Keaton)
Pre-war British quota quickies. These were where the trope of the police inspector in the trench coat comes from. He’d just stand in front of the camera in that coat, talking with the other characters for 90 minutes.
(Shot in color but run in B&W) Italian Hercules movies. Yes, I know that one lyric from Rocky Horror forever established these as homoeroticism, and there is that. But that denies the fact that post-war Italian cinema had some torturously magnificent women.
Past all the dreck, you’d encounter wonderful films like Night of the Hunter before they achieved cult status. (But this is why, when hipsters start in with “I was into X before it was cool,” I filter it through the memory of not having a car and no girlfriends either, and the time that allowed to cultivate ones tastes)
The Hell of it was, even with all the B&W junk & jewels dumped onto the air, there was no recognized market, no time slot even more remote, that could absorb all the old silent films, so that all dissolved on the shelf while channel 13 ran Rat Fink a Boo Boo.
Not any specific movies, but I grew up with Chiller Theater and Chilly Billy Cardille…
Ahh, yes. On the old WIIC-TV, channel 11 from Pittsburgh. I remember old Chilly Bill and Terminal Stare.
Saturday night was Chilly Billy’s night. He also hosted Studio Wrestling with all the old stars such as Bruno Sammartino, Gorilla Monsoon, and Killer Kowalski.
Really? That’s awesome! A major part or one of the party goers?
Though I’ve seen claims of it being on DVD, the only one I found was a VHS tape.
My mother saw it on Broadway. The audience played the part of the audience at the final revue, and got stuff dumped on them and had people and things flying over them.
While not as good as Night at the Opera, the destruction of the production was better than the opera scenes there by far.
Yea, happened 16 years ago. I was flipping the channels at around midnight, and a *really *bizarre film caught eye, so I decided to watch it. It looked like it was made in the late 1960s. The sets were psychedelic & quite extravagant, and it starred a very scantly-clad woman. Just the weirdest thing I had ever seen. I later learned the title of the movie was Barbarella, and the beauty was Jane Fonda.
The character Durand Durand from that film inspired the name of a certain British rock group.
“Her name is Rio and she dances on the sand…”