"A ragtag group of Pennsylvanians barricade themselves in an old farmhouse to remain safe from a bloodthirsty, flesh-eating breed of monsters who are ravaging the East Coast of the United States."
Yes, it's campy. But this low budget 1968 zombie film by George Romero has a surprisingly large and passionate fanbase. With a budget just over 100K, the film grossed 12 million dollars domestic and 18 million in international theaters.
It's the kind of late night horror fare that Ghoulardi would have loved to deliver on his Friday Night Shock Theater in Cleveland. Even if you can't take the zombies seriously, the film does have some seriously interesting features.
The storyline is basic. Johnny and Barbra do their annual visit to their father's grave to place flowers there when they are suddenly set upon by cannibalistic zombies. Johnny, who was making fun of his sister for being scared, ends up himself being killed. Barbra runs for her life.
Chase scenes are always dramatic but in this case the pursuit is relentless. She manages to find a farmhouse and manages to get inside. No one is home it seems. Then Ben shows up, looking to fill up his vehicle with gas. Aware that the house is being surrounded by zombies, he keeps them at bay with fire, and proceeds to board up the doors and windows.
Before social media, this was the best way to find out what was happening
in the outside world. Duane Jones as Ben.
Don't look now, but there goes the neighborhood.
The big reveal is that there are five people hiding in a "safe room" in the basement, a family of three and another couple They emerge and a series of conflicts begin as regards the best course of action against this deadly coronavirus, I mean, zombie infestation.
And there it is. A lockdown. A quarantine. And a lot of tension due to their various opinions on how to respond to the life and death situation.
Here are some excerpts from imdb.com
The Shining, The Exorcist and The Omen are all films that owe some of their stylistic approach to this film. This is the film that re-wrote the rules of the horror genre as it went along, whilst acting as both social critique and fond homage to 'The Birds' as well.
And... This is "the" film that changed the way zombie films were created - more horrifying than ever before. Almost all zombie films that came after this one were patterned after this movie. "Night of the Living Dead" is the most iconic zombie film ever made.
Much of the world is in lockdown and quarantine and while it's true that DUIs are down, domestic violence is up. Way up. Just as Night of the Living Dead seems to have foretold.
* * * *
Here's another 60's throwback... or at least a parody of one. Revised for our contemporary Safe Zone focused modern times... Have a party.
You can catch it when you're at the grocery store You can catch it off the handle on a door You can catch it from a friend that's droppin' by You can catch it like a baseball from the sky I know that you feel so alone But everybody Must Stay Home.
* * * *
The Message Here: Still in lockdown? Make music. Don't have fights. We really don't want to see anyone getting killed. * * * *
This past week I received the most delightful and unexpected gift, a detour back in time to some precious childhood memories from my early years in Cleveland. There's really nothing quite like those unfiltered early experiences, especially when we've spent a lifetime away from that pristine time. So it was that Citizen Kane's last words pertained to early memories of his sled Rosebud.
My early feel-good recollections might include a white rubber football, playing Geography (the game) with my parents, and catching snakes in the woods. But there was little to compare with staying up late on Friday nights to watch B-grade monster movies on a television show hosted by none other than the incomparable Ernie Anderson, a.k.a. Ghoulardi.
What a treat then when I opened the package and found this book by Tom Feran and R.D. Heldenfels about the one and only, subtitled Inside Cleveland TV's Wildest Ride.
Indeed, the Ghoulardi show really was one wild ride.
These were the early days of television in which every major city had its local programming. We didn't know then that what we experienced was extremely regional. When I was on the Barnaby Show as a child, I had no idea that in the Twin Cities those kids were watching Toby's Playhouse. (Actually, when I was a five-year-old I didn't really know there was a Twin Cities or pretty much anything else beyond my neighborhood and the shows on out television set.)
It's hard to imagine now, but at one time Cleveland was the fifth largest population center in the U.S. By 2015 Cleveland sat 51st... a dramatic descent due chiefly to the collapse of America's Rust Belt economy.
When I was a kid, Cleveland was the world. The Cleveland Indians, the Cleveland Browns, and Cleveland television. In writing about Ghoulardi, Feran & Heldenfels put Cleveland television in perspective because Ghoulardi's schtick included making fun of Clevelnad television and its personalities. I'd forgotten about Captain Penny, Woodrow the Woodsman and Barnaby the elf's pointy ears. In those days, local TV stations assumed responsibility for generating much of their content.
What made Ghoulardi so unique? Perhaps it was the context that brought out the best (or worst) in Ernie Anderson. It was Friday night Fright Night and the late 50's monster film phenomenon was in full swing. Ghoulardi, however, took it to another level.
I remember watching The Creeper at my cousin's house in Cincinnati, and House on Haunted Hill when we moved to New Jersey in 1964, but these were nothing like the Ghoulardi show. What Ernie Anderson did was make fun of the flicks because they were so comically poor in their production values and story lines. This was not Masterpiece Theater where the host sits in an elegant room describing the high art quality of significant literature interpreted in film by masters of the craft. Instead, Ghoulardi would introduce a film by saying, "This film is so bad you should just go to bed."
True!
Ghoulardi was half beatnik, half mad scientist, all a put-on by the eccentric Anderson who only got away with his antics because the fan mail was simply so excessive. He developed his own vocabulary, reversing the word Fink to become Knif. "You're a K-nif" he would say. Another saying was "Turn Blue" which I think must have been a twist on the phrase Drop Dead. I doubt it meant, "become the color of sky" or, "get depressed."
The most memorable feature of his shows was that he would splice comic interruptions into the films we were watching. Here's a memorable example. One of the films was about a giant brontosaurus attacking a city (a low-budget Japanese horrorshow) and just as the monster turns the corner to step on a crowd of people, our show host is spliced in, catching the monster's foot, struggling to keep it from crushing him. After catching a whiff of the beast's smelly feet Ghoulardi looks atthe camera and pinches his nose. "Phew." The monster needs to wash his feet.
In other words, when the tension mounted, Ghoulardi intervened, providing comic relief. Another way to put it, he saw the films themselves as a joke -- Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, The Cyclops -- so why not join the fun.
Here's a clip that Ghoulardi routinely had his team splice into the middle of our favorite monster movie scenes. Naturally we would crack up.
Another thing Ghoulardi liked to do on the air was blow things up. That is, he would take firecrackers and light them underneath plastic models and other kinds of inanimate things. He called them "boom-booms." His fans would send boom-booms to the show and he would set them off, creating quite the sitr... until on one occasion he blasted such a forceful boom-boom that he set the studio on fire.
Essentially, he was all about pushing boundaries. And being entertaining. The films were fun, but he made them even moreso.
Not everyone loved him, though. The TV station had to deal with angry parents who thought he was a bad influence. Or too unkind. By the latter I mean he would poke fun of some of the other local personalities who were featured on Cleveland television, including Captain Penny, or the fledgling Mike Douglas. As a result of his popularity he got away with most of it.
One part of the book lists many of the films we watched on Ghoulardi's show. I remember observing my brother Ron's expressions of terror as we watched the film Caltiki: The Immortal Monster, a film similar to The Blob, only better. That is, from the perspective of a ten-year-old. As I read through the list I'm surprised at how many of these monsters were "created" as a bi-product of nuclear radiation. How many of us remember Attack of the Crab Monsters, or The Giant Behemoth?
Many of these films were written about in the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland, a rag designed to whet our appetites for more B-films of the horror genre.
The book contains a lot more than what's encapsulated here. Ernie Anderson's relationship with Tim Conway, for example, is worth a blog post of its own, which may or may not ever happen.
The bottom line is that in show business, or any business for that matter, when something is good cherish it. On this side of eternity nothing good really lasts for ever.
THIS DAY IN HISTORY The Great Chicago Fire started in 1871. In 1934 Bruno Hauptman was indicted for the murder of Charles Lindberg's baby. In 1956 Don Larsen of the New York Yankees pitched the first and only prefect game in World Series history. In 2004 Martha Stewart began her prison sentence at Alderson Federal Prison Camp. And in 2008 the following blog posted was shared here at Ennyman's Territory: "If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
When I was a boy growing up in Maple Heights, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, I used to get an allowance each week of twenty-five cents. I knew precisely the value of a quarter back then. One quarter could buy a Mad magazine. Four quarters would get me a Revell plastic boat model. To get that boat model I'd have to save for four weeks and then go to the Southgate mall. By the time we left Ohio for New Jersey in 1964, I had a whole shelf of boat models including a very cool German U-boat, battleships and destroyers.
But fifty cents... that was pretty much the coolest purchase of them all. That's what it cost to buy a copy of the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland. Holding on to that first quarter till you got the second was a lesson in deferred gratification, an invaluable principle with a lifetime of applications.
My brother Ron and I loved those old monster movies, and we especially looked forward to Friday nights because that was when the Ghoulardi show would come on. According to Wikipedia it was called Shock Theater, but we called it the Ghoulardi show. Ghoulardi was Cleveland's late night horror film host, airing B-grade monster movies every week with his unique and totally engaging style.
The guy was incredibly inventive and hilariously over the top. His beatnik look and jabber were just the beginning of it. "You're a k-nif" he would say, meaning "Fink" spelled backward.
During the movies he would insert humorous clips of an old Irish man gurning, and other silly cut ins. In a film about a giant Brontosaurus smashing a city, with people screaming in terror in the streets, he cut in a few seconds of himself holding a giant brontosaurus foot up, trying not to be crushed while holding his own nose because the monster's feet smell.
Ultimately it was the movies themselves that we lived for. The Creeper, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, TheHunchback ofNotreDame, The Mummy, Phantom of the Opera, The Invisible Man, Caltiki the Immortal Monster, The Blob.... every week we had something to look forward to.
But that mag, Famous Monsters of Filmland... what a treasure! My convictions about the power of print advertising in enthusiast magazines can be partially attributed to this early passion. The television show was here today, gone tomorrow. But the magazine could be carried with you everywhere you went. Every page captured your eye. The images and stories could be revisited as often as you liked.
The mag was also a great source for background dope on all your heroes, the roots of all their stories. For example, one of the great actors of the monster film genre was Lon Chaney, nicknamed "The Man with a Thousand Faces" due to his remarkable range of portrayals. Famous Monsters told the inside stories of how he contorted his body to appear one-legged, deformed, etc.
Dracula was another favorite. My brother Ron and I liked the Bela Lugosi version of Dracula at that time. I think it was the alluring quality of his accent. Once I read a Dracula story from the magazine to Ronnie (he was about eight at the time) and he woke with nightmares for a week straight. My mom forbid any further readings.
But the greatest of them all was Boris Karloff, especially in his role as Frankenstein.
I still remember an incident on a family vacation in Florida when we first saw the film Bride of Frankenstein. Our family was at a motel on Miami Beach, but my parents had gone out for the evening. We were fairly young and with a TV in the room we decided to see what was on, a memorable event for sure.
Last year, near five decades later, I asked my mom about that night. It seemed they were gone a long time. She said it was the one major fight my parents had in their fifty-plus years of marriage. They'd gone off somewhere to work things out away from us kids. Alas, every picture tells a story. The Bride of Frankenstein memory revealed this one from my mom.
My personal favorite was Son of Frankenstein, probably only because I'd scene it the most often. For many of us, Karloff was synonymous with the monster.
I don't really keep up on the monster movie scene these days, but if you are interested, here's a link to theFamous Monsters of Filmland website. (Turn your sound down if you're in the office.)
As for Ghoulardi, he was a dude ahead of his time... or travelling outside of time, I'm not sure which. You can find more about Ernie"Ghoulardi" Anderson and his influence in this 2013 article titled 50 Years Later TV's Ghoulardi Lives -- In Punk Rock.
Make the most of your day. Tomorrow it will likely be gone.
"If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
When I was a boy growing up in Maple Heights, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, I used to get an allowance each week of twenty-five cents. I knew precisely the value of a quarter back then. One quarter could buy a Mad magazine. Four quarters would get me a Revell plastic boat model. To get that boat model I'd have to save for four weeks and then go to the Southgate mall. By the time we left Ohio for New Jersey in 1964, I had a whole shelf of boat models including a very cool German U-boat, battleships and destroyers.
But fifty cents... that was pretty much the coolest purchase of them all. That's what it cost to buy a copy of the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland. Holding on to that first quarter till you got the second was a lesson in deferred gratification, an invaluable principle with a lifetime of applications.
My brother Ron and I loved those old monster movies, and we especially looked forward to Friday nights because that was when the Ghoulardi show would come on. According to Wikipedia it was called Shock Theater, but we called it the Ghoulardi show. Ghoulardi was Cleveland's late night horror film host, airing B-grade monster movies every week with his unique and totally engaging style.
The guy was incredibly inventive and hilariously over the top. His beatnik look and jabber were just the beginning of it. "You're a k-nif" he would say, meaning "Fink" spelled backward.
During the movies he would insert humorous clips of an old Irish man gurning, and other silly cut ins. In a film about a giant Brontosaurus smashing a city, with people screaming in terror in the streets, he cut in a few seconds of himself holding a giant brontosaurus foot up, trying not to be crushed while holding his own nose because the monster's feet smell.
Ultimately it was the movies themselves that we lived for. The Creeper, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, TheHunchback ofNotreDame, The Mummy, Phantom of the Opera, The Invisible Man, Caltiki the Immortal Monster, The Blob.... every week we had something to look forward to.
But that mag, Famous Monsters of Filmland... what a treasure! My convictions about the power of print advertising in enthusiast magazines can be partially attributed to this early passion. The television show was here today, gone tomorrow. But the magazine could be carried with you everywhere you went. Every page captured your eye. The images and stories could be revisited as often as you liked.
The mag was also a great source for background dope on all your heroes, the roots of all their stories. For example, one of the great actors of the monster film genre was Lon Chaney, nicknamed "The Man with a Thousand Faces" due to his remarkable range of portrayals. Famous Monsters told the inside stories of how he contorted his body to appear one-legged, deformed, etc.
Dracula was another favorite. My brother Ron and I liked the Bela Lugosi version of Dracula at that time. I think it was the alluring quality of his accent. Once I read a Dracula story from the magazine to Ronnie (he was about eight at the time) and he woke with nightmares for a week straight. My mom forbid any further readings.
But the greatest of them all was Boris Karloff, especially in his role as Frankenstein.
I still remember an incident on a family vacation in Florida when we first saw the film Bride of Frankenstein. Our family was at a motel on Miami Beach, but my parents had gone out for the evening. We were fairly young and with a TV in the room we decided to see what was on, a memorable event for sure.
Last year, near five decades later, I asked my mom about that night. It seemed they were gone a long time. She said it was the one major fight my parents had in their fifty-plus years of marriage. They'd gone off somewhere to work things out away from us kids. Alas, every picture tells a story. The Bride of Frankenstein memory revealed this one from my mom.
My personal favorite was Son of Frankenstein, probably only because I'd scene it the most often. For many of us, Karloff was synonymous with the monster.
I don't really keep up on the monster movie scene these days, but if you are interested, here's a link to theFamous Monsters of Filmland website. (Turn your sound down if you're in the office.)
As for Ghoulardi, he was a dude ahead of his time... or travelling outside of time, I'm not sure which. The following YouTube footage offers an example of his late night rampage across the Cleveland television landscape. When the monster is closing in for the kill, just before the shrieking starts, fifteen seconds of this would break into the scene.
Tomorrow, stay tuned for more details about the cultural influence of Frankenstein.
