“Kingdom of the Spiders” (1977) was yet another 70’s bug-apocalypse flick that aired from time to time on 1980’s television. As I recall, this one was kinda good … or at least it was scary enough to impress me as a grade-school kid. The movie wisely made use of a truly frightening adversary (and used live tarantulas for filming). And it had the kind of jarring, open-ended final scene that I hadn’t seen before for a sci-fi/horror film.
The only thing that detracted from its creep-factor was the presence of William Shatner as the lead. It wasn’t that Shatner did a poor job with the role — it was just that he was indelibly linked in my young mind to his iconic role in the original “Star Trek” (1966-1969). I simply couldn’t get past the idea that Captain Kirk was an ordinary veterinarian; it took me out of the movie. I’m willing to bet that Shatner was helming the cop drama “T.J. Hooker” (1982-1986) at around the time that I saw “Kingdom of the Spiders,” but that was a show I didn’t watch.
Anyway, if you want to catch the flick in its entirety, you can find the whole thing over at Youtube right here.
I remember being fairly unimpressed with “Squirm” (1976) as a kid, but maybe that’s because I saw it on television in the 1980’s. (It might have been a bowdlerized version deemed safe for broadcast.) The movie was just a disposable, lower-budget 70’s monster flick with a what seemed like a hastily conceived plot device — some downed electrical lines had the unlikely effect of turning ordinary earthworms into wriggling man-eaters that attacked en masse.
“Squirm” evidently scared at least some people, though. A pal of mine on Facebook said it really got under her skin when she was a girl. She couldn’t eat spaghetti for weeks after seeing this movie.
Hey, if the film wasn’t exactly terrifying, you’ve got to admit that its plethora of international marketing posters was damned artistic. Check ’em out below. I believe they’re what today’s kids would describe as “metal AF.” That second one has some genuinely discomfiting Freudian undercurrents, but still.
This is just a smattering of the early “Godzilla” movies that thrilled me as a kid. They played on television in the late 1970’s and the early 1980’s. Hot damn, was I happy when these came on. It was the next best thing to a holiday.
The first trailer that you see (and the photo below) is for the original “Godzilla” in 1954. That scene where he tears through the high-tension powerlines made a big impression on me as a little boy. I never forgot it. I should point out that I (like most of the world) saw the Americanized version of the movie, which was heavily re-edited and released in 1956. (That is indeed Raymond Burr that you see in the trailer.)
“Godzilla vs. Megalon” (1976) is another that I remember well — probably because I saw it as an older child.
Am I crazy, or does the “Son of Godzilla” trailer from 1969 mention “Frankenstein” for some reason? Something got lost in translation.
I am still a little surprised at the harsher criticism I’m hearing of this year’s “Godzilla: King of the Monsters.” (It was indeed brainless, as its detractors point out, but it was still fun enough for me to give it pretty forgiving review.)
Hey … if you think the new movie was goofy, you should see the Godzilla movies that I grew up with. No, I wasn’t alive in 1969, but these movies ran periodically on television in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. I was utterly awed by them when I watched them with my older brother.
But they are cringeworthy to any sane adult. Take a look at the trailer below (sorry I couldn’t find one in English), and the two clips that follow it.
Okay … this wasn’t technically a “Godzilla” movie because the radioactive (?) lizard is absent. (It might have actually been set in a different fictional universe.) This film’s putative good-guy is the eponymous “Gamera,” who is a giant, space-faring turtle with … rockets that can deploy from the rear of his shell … from the leg holes. And he employs gymnastics to fight his enemies. (See the second video below.)
There was one part of this movie that scared the heck out of me as a little kid. You see the two little boys? They’re abducted by some sexy lady aliens whose nefarious plan is to eat their brains, thus absorbing strategic knowledge of the Earth they wished to conquer. Seriously, they give the kids drugged donuts and plan to open their skulls, and that scared the $^%# out of me.
Legit question for rural Australians — how do I kill the 30 to 50 feral hogs that run into my yard within 3 to 5 mins while my small kids play?
If you’re anything like me, you’re endlessly regaled by all the viral jokes this past week referencing “30 to 50 feral hogs.” (And if you’re nothing like me, then you’re an intelligent adult and I congratulate you. But you can google the new trope, which I have paraphrased above, if you want to. It is the very height of preposterous predatory animal political humor.)
The jokes made me remember this little disappointment from the 1980’s — the Aussies’ own feral hog horror movie, 1984’s somewhat lethargic “Razorback.” If memory serves, I rented this sometime around 1986, I suppose. I got it on VHS from my nearest shopping center’s sole mom-and-pop video store, before Blockbuster Video’s invasion reached my area.
There are people out there who fondly remember “Razorback.” You can find some nice compliments about it over at Rotten Tomatoes. People enjoy its “atmosphere.” People like Gregory Harrison a lot.
I didn’t like it. Sure, it had a pretty neat electronic score that seemed trippy and cool to me as a young high school student. But that was its only redeeming quality. It started off with its depressing plot setup, which you can see in the first video below — the titular wild boar absconds with a baby boy. (The boar also thoughtfully burns the child’s house down as it departs, to underscore that fact that it is an asshole.)
The rest of the movie is boring, because it’s yet another one of those monster movies where you never get to see much of the monster — right up until the movie’s poorly lit climax, which takes place in a slaughterhouse, I think? Which is supposed to be ironic or something? Don’t quote me on this stuff; 1986 was a long time ago. For comparison, think of the legion zombie “thrillers” always available on Netflix where the zombies are always outside, and the movie just follows the indoors arguments among three very-much-alive people inside a windowless warehouse. I want to invoke the inevitable “wild bore movie” pun, but I’m holding back, because my friends tell me that they have enough of that sort of thing.
I used my own money to rent “Razorback,” probably earned from either my confusing stint at McDonald’s (they just didn’t get me there) or my summer job cleaning boats and lobster traps. (I lived on an island, people.) I remember being slightly disgruntled that I’d wasted my hard-earned cash.
Honestly, though, I was a credulous kid when it came to a movie’s marketing. When I read the back of the VHS boxes, I took things at face value. I also had my heart set on something called “The Alien’s Deadly Spawn” (1983), which I realize now was just a no-budget early mockbuster ripping off Ridley Scott’s “Alien” (1979). (It was always out. I finally caught snatches of it on Youtube this past spring, and it looks pretty unwatchable.)
I was actually very surprised when I discovered this week that Carvel Ice Cream wasn’t a small, local chain that inhabited only my native Long Island. I hadn’t heard word one about Carvel since I was a kid; I always assumed that the strange, ubiquitous TV and radio ads for “Cookie Puss” and “Fudgie the Whale” were strictly a New York thing. But there were 865 stores throughout the United States in 1985; my friend in Texas even recognized the name.
I think my confusion is easy to understand, considering the weird ads that I mentioned above. The first thing that most people remember about Carvel usually isn’t the chain’s crude looking novelty ice cream cakes. The first thing they remember is founder Tom Carvel’s voice, which you can hear in the videos below. It … did not please the ear. Polite people almost always describe it as “gravelly;” the less charitable remember it with descriptors such as “phlegm-filled.”
The latter folks are not wrong. Seriously. I cringed when I heard it as a kid, no matter how much I loved the store’s wares. (And I did love it; it was an absolute treat when my parents took me there.) It sounded like a man dying of a chest cold was trying to sell me ice cream. I even remember my parents talking about it.
Carvel was a independent personality who insisted on recording the ads himself since 1955, and he recorded them unrehearsed — even going so far as to set up a production studio at his company’s headquarters, according to Wikipedia. Carvel Ice Cream was a true small-business success story, and many credit the brand’s popularity with Carvel’s extemporized, conversational voiceovers — even if they were awkward.
And that kind of makes sense. The commercials were memorable. Maybe the owner’s voice evoked images of Stephen King’s superflu in “The Stand,” but that didn’t dissuade you from visiting a store for its trademark soft-serve ice cream. (You figured he wasn’t actually working the counter, where he could cough into your dessert.)
If you’re acquainted with this blog at all, then you’re already aware of the sheer reverence I have for Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” (1982). So I won’t belabor that subject yet again in order to note Rutger Hauer’s passing this past Friday.
Hauer was a prolific actor, and his fans can remember him fondly from any number of roles. Below are the trailers for my three favorites.
The first is 1986’s “The Hitcher,” which might have been the first modern, adult horror film that I truly loved. (This is leaving aside Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 “The Birds” and various monster movies aimed at kids.) I’m a little concerned that the trailer below misrepresents the movie, though. “The Hitcher” aspired to be a serious film, and was truly a great horror-thriller, in my opinion. It was moody, atmospheric, thoughtful and methodically paced (although it didn’t lack blood and violence either). It was far better than the 80’s action-horror boilerplate movie that the trailer seems to depict.
Hauer was terrifying. (If you are wondering, that is indeed C. Thomas Howell and Jennifer Jason Leigh costarring. And if you watch the trailer very closely, you can see Jeffrey DeMunn — who contemporary audiences will recognize as Dale from “The Walking Dead.”)
The second is movie is 1985’s “Ladyhawke,” which saw Hauer co-star with none other than Matthew Broderick and Michelle Pfeiffer. It had far more mainstream appeal, and it reliably kicks up nostalgia every time it’s mentioned on social media. (Seriously, go try it.)
The third is one that far fewer people will remember –1989’s “Blind Fury,” which rode the tail end of the decade’s martial arts craze. It was zany stuff, and it didn’t hold back on the 80’s-era cheese, but it had a lot of heart and was surprisingly earnest. Some of the action sequences were damned impressive too. (And if you were a nut for 80’s ninja movies, you’ll of course recognize Sho Kosugi as the acrobatic villain here.)
This is from sometime in the late 1990’s. I can’t remember which one of you guys sent me this photo, or its date. But I’m running it primarily because of that old red t-shirt, which I loved so much that it nearly fell apart before I threw it out.
It was the “official” t-shirt of the Mary Washington College Department of Psychology, and I thought it was for one of the academic years I attended. But … it looks like it says 1989-1990, and I feel like I even remember that. (It’s a little hard to make out.) I went to MWC just afterward, between 1990 and 1994. I”m not sure what the story is here; maybe an upperclassman gave it to me?
The t-shirts were sold by psychology majors to raise funds for … something. Was it a picnic at the end of the year, or a trip or something? God, I’m getting old.
My only disappointment with that shirt was that I wore it for years without hearing a single relevant “Star Trek” joke.
“Pitfall!” was quite the hit when Activision released it in 1982. (I’m a little unclear on what I’m reading about the relationship between Activision and Atari … it looks like the former was a group of defected employees who were then sued by latter, but who then inadvertently pioneered the third-party-developer arrangement for video games.)
“Pitfall!” hit the shelves the same year that the priceless “Raiders of the Lost Ark” galloped through theaters, which I’ll bet helped with the popularity of the jungle adventure game. But the game became a bestseller because of its own merits. Wikipedia informs me that its took a lot of innovation by its creator, David Crane, to get his newer, more advanced graphics stored and operable on a 4-kilobyte game.
And I could kinda see that, as a kid. “Pitfall!” was far sleeker and seemingly more complex than other Atari games my family had, like “Combat,” “Missile Command,” “Frogger” and “Donkey Kong.” And it was a lot of fun. See for yourself; you can play the original game for free right here at the Virtual Atari website. (Seriously, the people who set up that site did something really cool for the rest of us.)
When I sat down to write this, I actually got my memories of “Pitfall!” confused with a later, more advanced side-scrolling PC game called “Impossible Mission.” I played that in high school, and I loved it even more than “Pitfall!” The two games look pretty similar; I wonder if anyone else gets them confused.
By the way, does that kid in the pith helmet in the ad below look familiar to you? That’s because he’s none other than Jack Black, age 13.
Here’s some more early Tom Hanks weirdness … he starred in ABC’s cross-dressing comedy “Bosom Buddies” between 1980 and 1982. The show ran for just two scant seasons. I’m surprised at that, because I seem to remember it being a much bigger deal in the 1980’s — maybe just because it was a big hit at my house, when I was in second and third grade. I wanted to be like the guys in the show, albeit without the cross-dressing. I wanted to be grow up to live in New York City with my best friend and a beautiful blond girlfriend name “Sunny,” and get into zany hijinks.
I remember thinking that Hanks’ co-star, Peter Scolari, was the cool and funny one. I thought Hanks was annoying, even if he did look like Billy Joel, whose music my older sister had taught me to really like. (Joel’s “Glass Houses” album was stacked vertically with the others beside the living room record player, not far from where I watched this show on the family’s color television.) And that is indeed Billy Joel’s “My Life” playing as the show’s theme song — but it had a different vocalist, for some reason. (No matter how many times I hear it, that song will always take me back to the 80’s.)
Scolari’s career following the short-lived “Bosom Buddies” certainly hasn’t paralleled Hanks, but he’s still done a hell of a lot of television. (Among many other things, he surprisingly starred as Commissoner Loeb in “Gotham” in 2015. I didn’t see that one coming.)
As you can see from the opening credits below, the central plot device for “Bosom Buddies” was that the two guys had to pretend to be women in order to live at an all-women’s apartment building. It only occurs to me now as I’m writing this that the show’s title was a double entendre. I actually asked my Dad what the word “bosom” meant when I was a kid, and he gave me an answer that was accurate, if incomplete. (He explained the colloquial meaning of the expression — a “bosom buddy” was a best friend, who you figuratively held close to you. I subsequently told my best friend next door that he was my “bosom buddy” at one point.)
Yeah, I know it’s strange that I can remember a conversation from 39 years ago about an obscure TV show. It’s weird what people remember.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 