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October 2020: Amazon Prime Swarms the Screen With Horror (On Topic)


I get the Amazon Prime streaming service and for this Halloween month of October, they have practically swarmed the screen with literally scores of horror movies -- theatricals, Made for TV movies...A's and B's.

Far too many to view, more than enough to "sample," and some thoughts:

The chintzy horror and SciFi movies that played on Los Angeles TV in the early sixties when I was kid -- and disappeared into total "unavailability" for DECADES -- are all back on Amazon prime. Keep in mind that in 1962 or so, these movies got full page ads in newspapers and in TV Guide, and played Saturday nights in prime time(against network fare) -- they were an important part of the cultural TV diet, mainly for kids, but I expect teens were watching, too.
Two "local independent channels" had these franchises to show these films: Channel 11 had "Chiller Theater" and Channel 9 had "Strange Tales of Science Fiction"(which mainly played SciFi, but occasionally allowed a William Castle movie like Macabre in.)

We're talking movies like The Giant Behemoth, Attack of the Crab Monsters, The Atomic Submarine, The Cyclops, Earth vs The Spider, Attack of the Puppet People...and more.

"Sampling" some of these(most of which were quite dumb) brought back some long buried memories. Like how, in Earth vs the Spider, a giant spider is gassed into unconsciousness and put on display in a high school's auditorium. Rock 'n rollers decide to bring in a band and the kids start dancing and damn -- they wake the spider up! (he wasn't dead, just sleeping.) One cherubic guy in the band keeps playing his bass with his eyes closed until he finally sees the Big Spider coming at him; he escapes in time. A security guard is not so lucky. (They never are.)

Attack of the Crab Monsters has such monsters who manage to eat their human victims and then speak telepathically in the victims' voices to new victims: "Hey, Harry, come over here!" and ZAP...the Crab Monster gets another victim.

"The Crawling Eye" is in a cloud atop a big snowy mountain in Switzerland. As the cloud creeps down the mountain to the town below, it starts killing -- and decapitating -- mountain climbers. Once the town is under siege, it turns out that there are a LOT of crawling eyes. What I remembered as a climax on the order of Mount Rushmore in NXNW THEN turns out to be a bunch of cardboard miniature buildings and crawling eye puppets.

The Amazing Colossal Man is a man who grows giant; Attack of the 50 Foot Woman(not on Amazon Prime right now, but relevant) is a woman.

Anyway, they are all there, and for fleeting moments, its 1962 again.

But the movies on display work their way through the decades:

Hammer Horror films of the 50's through the 70's (A female friend of mine, seeing some of these with me, remarked on how Britisher Terry Thomas in Mad Mad World attacks American men for their infatuation with "bosoms" - she said: didn't that guy ever see a Hammer movie.)

Several British anthology movies of the 70's (The House That Dripped Blood; Asylum) with screenplays by Robert Bloch -- aha, on-topic arrives . I'm glad that Bloch earned a living off of these films, but they aren't particularly good in the plotting -- its as if Hitchcock's Psycho helped elevate Bloch beyond his talent level.

Some "giallos" -- now, the "innocent" b/w kiddie horrors of 1962 yield to some really sick stuff.
Gorgeous women, often nude women, stalked and beaten at length(usually by a killer in a coat and hat) before being killed horribly. One (Black Belly of the Tarantula) had a very young Giancarlo Giannini as the cop hero -- right before he became an "art prestige star" for Lena Wertmuller. Also in the film, several beauties from Bond movies, including Claudine Auger(Thunderball), Barbara Bach(Spy Who Loved Me) and Barbara Bouchet( a cheat; she's in the Casino Royale spoof of 1967, but...a beauty.) One thing I liked about the end of BBOTT was that Giancarlo elects to beat the living hell out of the psycho at the end. Its the beating I always wanted that cowardly woman-killer Bob Rusk to get in Frenzy.

And a couple of TV movies, one bad and forgotten, one good and kind of famous: The bad forgotten one was "How Awful About Allen" with "Anthony Perkins in his first made for TV movie." Its 1970 and Perkins has longer hair than in Psycho a decade earlier, but looks even more handsome. Alas this movie is too cheap , too timid, and too predictable to register in the Perkins canon, and its a reminder that a star(here, Perkins) can't BE a star if the material is no good.

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Better: Trilogy of Terror, an NBC TV movie from 1975, starring Karen Black. Its three stories and nobody remembers the first two. The third though -- WAS memorable -- and managed to get a game room of collegians screaming when we all watched in on TV on debut(well, sorry, some of the GIRLS were screaming.) This third episode is about a little tiny killer doll with a knife, big razor sharp teeth, a horrendous screech -- and a desire to kill Karen Black by chasing her around her apartment, slashing her feet, tripping her to the floor, sinking his teeth into her neck, etc. For 1975 NBC...this was scary enough. (SPOILER: at the end, Ms. Black is possessed by the doll and now has a big knife and huge pointy teeth as she waits for her dominating mother to come over. The final camera move on Black's face and toothy reveal is an homage to the cell in Psycho.)

This about Trilogy of Terror: Its Karen Black in a TV movie the same year she tried to be a movie star in "Day of the Locust" and a year before she tried again for Hitchcock in "Family Plot." I think one of the reasons that Karen Black didn't "take" as a major movie star was that she seemed perfectly at home in a TV show.

I'm probably describing about 30% of what Amazon is running this month, but the sheer rocketing trip from childhood to teen years and young adulthood (ie from Attack of the Crab Monsters to How Awful About Allan to Asylum to Trilogy of Terror) has been kind of mind blowing.

I elected to watch one of the offerings all the way through: Peeping Tom, a British film from the 1960 year of Psycho and co-starring Anna Massey of Frenzy(12 years later.) There is a through line of Hitchcockian intersect among those three films and I'll save it for later.

In the meantime: what a lotta horror!

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