Whoah… I actually think I remember that one, but I don’t remember what it was about. I would have seen it around the same time, though.
I went to a fundamentalist Christian high school, so we got a different assortment of films. I remember one really low-budget rapture movie, which ended with the evil Sheriff wandering around trying to shoot the Christians while the hot sun (shot in '70’s-aim-the-camera-at-the-sun-with-a-psychedelic-lens-vision) beat down on him. The amusing thing about the rapture back then was that I myself wasn’t raised fundamentalist and had never had any contact with any of that stuff, so whenever they talked about the rapture I would always think, “What is all this stuff? What’s going on with the sun? Why are ATM cards supposed to be evil?”
There was also an anti-abortion film which was so obviously staged that even I had some tiny inkling of its hokiness at the time. I remember at one point the stereotypical feminist libberul narrator interviews a pro-life doctor, who asks her if she would abort a baby if she had had one flipper baby, one baby with spinabifida, and her current fetus was deaf. She responded with a chipper, “Oh, of course!” (Smile, straighen back, square shoulders jauntily.) The doctor responds, “Well, ma’am, you just killed Beethoven!” The film culimated in the narrator watching a botched abortion, in which the patient started shrieking in agony while under general anaesthesia. During this horrorshow, you get reaction shots of the feminist squirming, while her voiceover says, “Oh, this wasn’t supposed to happen! They said people didn’t feel pain during an abortion!” The whole thing suffered from the “B. C. problem.” You know, like “If this coin is authentic, why does it say ‘52 BC’ on it?” How did they make this film, exactly? Did the feminist hire a camera crew to follow her around, just in case every pro-lifer she met delivered invincible zingers right before she witnessed a botched abortion?
Lissa beat me to the link. I read the review when MH came out. It made that year’s top 5 list of things I’d have bought if I wasn’t broke.
Hemo-
I genuinely enjoyed this film. Yes, it was cheezy in places. But it contains one of the greatest moments in all my education.
From the IMDB review
This begins a fascinating segment on exactly why animals have blood. One celled organisms got everything from seawater. Eventually, multicelled creatures evolved. But these could only be 2 cells thick. Each cell needed to be exposed to the sea. I haven’t seen Hemo in years or slept for a while so I won’t try to describe the rest of it.
The acting, writing etc were the quality you'd expect from a made for tv movie starring the title character of Charles In Charge. However, the message was great-'Alex is just like you, cept he's gay.' . In the extremely Christian conservative suburbs of northern Virginia, this was a shocking thing to hear.
Drunk Driving-
I recall 2 films that stood out. I can’t say for certain that they were good. It could just be that most of the films were so awful the mediocre competency of these 2 seems brilliant in comparison. I don’t recall the title of either.
The first(Final Journey? Final Guide? Last Stop?) takes place in the morgue. A man in a somber tuxedo plays death. He open’s a drawer and asks the occupant how they died. Each recounts a different tale of how they were killed in a crash. There are no road scenes. During each tale, the camera just stays on a close up of the teller’s face. Instead of over the top sounds and gore, there’s just one room and people talking.
The second uses the opposite approach. Things are loud, bright, and melodramatic. BUT, it’s all played as camp. The drinkers’ mistaken beliefs about alcohol(sweating sobers you etc) cause them to collapse before they can get behind the wheel. There are comedy sound effects. Each segment ends with the line “Sure, mac, sure.” Between segments are shots of a display that is a hybrid between a scrabble game, wheel of fortune, and the disco floor of Saturday Night Fever.
I’ve seen my share of such films, but the only one that’s stuck with me involved railroad safety. In a series of three stories, different kids ignore the rules of railroad safety and are all killed (presumably) and magically transported to a phantom train upon which, they learn in the end, they are trapped forever! It was like some fucked up Twilight Zone episode only with kids in polyesther bell bottoms. I’m still not even certain why my school showed it to us. It isn’t like there were any train tracks nearby.
Yes! Yes! That was the one. Of course, while the driverless bus goes off the road there are slo-motion shots of the interior of the bus with all the kids suddenly spouting blood, drenched in blood…
Maybe the difference between 3 or 4th grade and 5th or 6th allowed you to dismiss it as over the top but for us at that age it was WAY too intense.
Anybody else heard of this one? I saw it in medical school (yeah, the kind for doctors) in probably 1985-86. “Human Sexuality” class. Two beanbag frog puppets: one seersucker striped, one a cute flowered calico. They proceed to copulate in several rather mundane positions. At the climax (so to speak), Stripey is mounting Calico doggie-style, the pace picks up, then both simultaneously pause with little beanbag-toy eyes spinning like gyroscopes. It was hysterical!
I believe it was called “Love Frog.” We were cautioned solemnly to pay attention, because this was a film that the school could show only once and then immediately had to return to the supplier by special courier. No uninitiated eyes could be allowed even a glimpse.
I guess it fulfilled its educational purpose. I doubt if anybody there has ever forgotten it!
The Misties have collected and sell their short films from their website. Absolutely hilarious stuff. There are three tapes (or DVDs I guess) Shorts Vol1, Shorts Vol 2 and Shorts Vol 3. YOu can get them at the MST3K fan club site at:
I remember the Stranger ones. As well as some bicycle safety ones, which I didn’t appreciate until I got much much older.
They showed some scenarios for the stranger films. In one, a boy is playing around with his uncle. But then the uncle puts his hands down the boys’ pants, obliterating his trust in male relatives. Anyway, I don’t think they actually showed the boy getting touched. It was more a hazy flashback. The boy is shown talking about the incident to someone, I don’t remember who.
There was also one where a girl is walking home from school and her neighbor (a man, heaven forbid) invites her in for some lemonade because it’s such a hot day. She’s wearing a long sleeved shirt, and he says that her mother shouldn’t have sent her to school in that due to the weather. Then he starts unbuttoning her shirt, saying something about her changing into a cooler outfit. Smooth operator, that one. The girl gets suitably skeeved. I forget what happens next, but it was mighty thrilling, I have to say.
It’s kind of sad that I’ll never be scared, or freaked out by something like that again. Now if I read a book/see a movie, I can see a child molestor a hundred pages away. It’s just another facet to mystery/crime novels/films. But back then, it was so new, so…wow. I remember asking why someone would do that (in regard to the first one). I suppose even today, I don’t know why someone would do that, but back then I really was mystified. But also really really curious as to why “strangers” as they were called would do what they did.
As I recall, I was definitely in second grade for the second one. For the first one, I think I was also in second grade, but might have been in fifth. Not exactly sure.
I wonder if that’s the same as Red Asphalt III that I saw in high school… twice. Is there really a need for a long-running series here? Also remember Mechanized Death, although Red Asphalt III was waaaay more graphic. I recall quite clearly the EMTs scraping the brains off the, er, red asphalt to dump into the body bag along with the rest of Larry Leadfoot.
We got The Miracle of Life as well, urgh. That’s one of the ones you heard about before you got to it from all the other kids at school. I still believe the object was to instill a fear and loathing of women and sex.
I also remember a lot of “don’t dive into the pool and break your neck!” PSAs in the 80’s. And if I’d ever gone near an abandoned refrigerator…
I do, for some reason, remember one all about the “bad girls” who “park in cars”, although I’m definately too young to have gotten that particular one seriously… right?
We used to get the “stranger danger” type of films–ie, don’t get in a car with a stranger even if he offers you a lifetime supply of candy. Of course nothing was ever said about how Mom’s boyfriend or your funny uncle might mess with you…
This wasn’t an educational film, but I remember that when I was in the first or second grade the kids were taken to the auditorium to see “The Littlest Angel.” I was freaked out by it and started crying. Nowadays they probably couldn’t show that without risking the wrath of the ACLU.
We used to get the “stranger danger” type of films–ie, don’t get in a car with a stranger even if he offers you a lifetime supply of candy. Of course nothing was ever said about how Mom’s boyfriend or your funny uncle might mess with you…
We got a lot of “stranger danger” films, but there were a lot of commercials between cartoons when I was a kid about “bad touches” and how you should tell somebody if it made you uncomfortable even if it was Mom’s boyfriend or your funny uncle.
I remember the drivers’ ed films, probably produced around 1960 with the crash test dummies flying out of windshields. They were a hoot. I had tears running down my face, I was laughing so hard.
Does anyone else remember the early-mid 70s Robbie Benson after school special about drugs? It was in several parts and ended with his father shooting him and getting away with it because Robbie was always loaded and screaming at him.
Going to high school in Utah, I also got to watch Go Ask Alice for my drug education.
archive dot org sucks! None of the videos work…all you get is a lame ass error message. What’s the point of even having a site if nothing works. Whoever runs the site is a :wally :wally :wally
Ah, I must apologize for that outburst! Yes, it is frustrating to not be able to access things, but I should really not have gotten that pissed about it.
It had worked a while back but maybe they are having some troubles…
I say a Drining and driving movie in the 70s that made me really absolutely fear death up to today. I’m not talking about the normal fear of dying but the whole up all night in a sweat thinking about it if it crosses my mind kind of thing.
It was just a dopey movie shot in the point of view of a teenager after an accident. he is dead and they go through the whole taken to the mourge identified by parents in teh funeral home then buried thing. All the while this kid is doing a narration as teh corpse. As the coffin is lowering and the dirt is dropping you hear this kid pleading for a second chance… and crying and talking about how he doesn’t want top be here alone forever…
