Yeah, he’s not religious about running horror movies, but the majority of his films are. And he’s stuck on re-runs at the moment, as he had a heart attack in November and is still recovering.
I grew up near DC. If we had a horror host, I missed them completely.
But trips to relatives in Philadelphia meant I got to watch a scary movie with Stella, the man eater from Manayunk on Saturday Night Dead. Her movies ranged from Frank Langella’s Dracula, to Puma Man, to what I’m reasonably sure (I only remember the last scene) was Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein.
Later, when cable came around, I appreciated Commander USA and his Groovy Movies.
The names of two local oddballs have remained in my brain for 40+ years now: Desiderius X. Zong, and his friend, El Repugno.
Bob Wilkins’ Creature Features was the first place I ever saw Night of the Living Dead. On the other hand, I also saw several flix that would later show up on MST3K: Horror of Party Beach, and The Creeping Terror amongst others.
I’d actually forgotten about his wrestling show. I watched it when I was over at my grandmother’s house. Weird. Though my grandmother never watched it herself, it was just something that was on one of the 3 or 4 channels that would keep me occupied.
I loved The Gargoyles.
Took me years until I found a DVD of it.
“Nuna- umm . . . Nunataiya!”
“A winged one! A breeder!”
Before my time. My guy (80’s) was Count Scary, granted he was more a once in a while guy than a regular weekly host.
More recently (just a few years back) we had Wolfman Mac’s Chiller Drive-In (originally Nightmare Sinema until some lawsuit over the name), first on a local station, then on an RTV subchannel, but after the RTV subchannel got replaced with some stupid other subchannel that was it.
Oh, I LOVED Night Flight, and USA “Up All Night”, which featured bad movies with host segments by Gilbert Gottfried, Rhonda Shear, and Caroline Schlitt. That was several years later than Night Flight, but for some reason, I remember them as being near contemporaries.
Out of Kansas City there used to be the “ghostess with the mostest” Crematia Mortem. She dressed up kind of like Elvira, with a Transylvanian accent. Crematia had an unseen servant named Rasputin.
I remember once when she was showing a movie about sacrificing virgins to a volcano god. Crematia mentioned she was having trouble with the spirits in her basement so she called out “Rasputin, go find me a virgin!” During the next commercial break she asked him if he’d found a virgin yet and you heard his reply “In this town? I went to the Plaza and they’d never heard of virgins!”
The above is a link to the opening sequence of one show.
They typically played such movies in my market in the middle of a weekend afternoon.
Never heard of it, but I enjoyed that. Fun to see how things were done in other cities. Here’s a bit about Pittsburgh’s Chiller Theater.
In the Milwaukee area, we had no host, buy lots of late night horror.
Gamera, The Giant Turtle was a common choice.
Also, they serialized King Kong as afternoon kidvid.
In the 60’s here, after “Hootenany”, we had late night scary movies hosted by the Baron - Baron Daemon - a klutzy low-rent vampire played by a local newsman. He developed such a cult following! Later, he expanded to hosting a 4 p.m. kiddy show, they showed serials like Flash Gordon and The Cisco Kid. The Baron also showed up on a teen dance party show and would drag off one of the girls on the dance floor. And he made a hit record with a local group, The Transylvania Twist. People are always begging the station to show clips of him and his sidekick, Very Hairy, but a fire at the TV station destroyed most of the film. Fun times!
We used to get Wolfman Mac on one of the local independent stations up until about a year ago. Is his show still on somewhere? FYI----to put myself in the mood this weekend, at 10:30 Friday night my wife and I stayed up to watch “The Witchfinder General” starring Vincent Price (more CBS Late Movie fare, but still a part of the Friday night horror movie lineup just the same). However, once it ended I had to put myself in the mood for what would be Moona’s Midnight Madness, so I watched “Crack In The World” starring Dana Andrews. So last night (Saturday) I sat up and watched “The Ape Man” starring Bela Lugosi while I munched on Doritos and enjoyed a 7-UP. Now I admit that it’s not quite the same as it was back in the old days since I’m nearly 50 now, and no, we don’t have the crazy Hosts and Hostesses that populated our local horror and science fiction films that were often broadcast so late. Nonetheless, that does not stop me from enjoying such silly revelry just the same. Does anybody here still try to recapture the magic of the old horror and science fiction shows on late weekend nights?
I remember we had afternoon horror shows too. The Sunday Super Movie used to have those AIP Roger Corman classics at two o’clock such as “It Conquered The World” “Panic In The Year Zero” and of course “The Beast With A Million Eyes.”
I recall on Saturdays at noon there was something called The Incredible Picture Show which used the opening bars of Tocata In Fugue In D Minor as its opening theme. Yes, I too watched “The Deadly Mantis,” “Tarantula” (look for Clint Eastwood as a pilot at the end as they drop bombs on the monster); all three movies about “The Creature From The Black Lagoon” and of course, “It Came From Outer Space.” On a side note: after that broadcast, the stations had Abbott & Costello movies at two, followed by the Bowery Boys at four. I never missed “Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein” when it was on. I must admit, Lou Costello’s antics don’t hold up today the way they did back then, but every once in awhile on a Saturday afternoon at two o’clock, I will STILL put this movie in my DVD player, open a bag of potato chips and then start munching away while washing it down with whatever soda pop was on sale that week.
Re: “Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things” I saw this when my father (R.I.P.) took me and my sister and my cousin to a rundown movie theater/local firetrap that used to show those low budget horror movies and others that bordered on soft core porn but just managed to escape the X rating. I want to say that it was on as a double feature with either “Devil’s Nightmare” or “Curse of the Vampires” or something of that nature. Believe it or not, I have “Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things” on DVD and I watched it with a younger friend who’d never seen it before. Good Times…
WOW I never knew the 1933 King Kong would be serialized. I first saw that on a Friday night and loved it. Yes Gamera was a staple of the Saturday night Creature Feature.
We had something similar hosted by Baron Von Crypt. What was “Hootenany?” Was it anything like “Hee Haw” was back in the day?
Hootenany was a show featuring folk music performed in front of enthusiastic audiences, filmed at college campuses in 1963-64. There was a lot of controversy over just who would be featured - lefties like Pete Seeger were banned, and Peter Paul and Mary and other popular folk acts boycotted the show in solidarity. Then the Beatles and other British bands invaded the U.S. and that was the end of Hootenany.
Here is a creepy open from a local late night TV horror show I grew up watching back in the 70’s.
In the DC area, it was Count Gore De Vol, who was pretty much like Count Floyd from SCTV. He was also Captain 20 during the cartoon hour after school, and I think he read the news. As a little kid, half his camp jokes went over my head, but who cared? We were staying up late.