talk normal

Last night I re-watched the 1981 horror film, Evilspeak. It’s a piece of crap but I loved it. I first saw it when I was about 10 yrs old and it was on late at night. My memories of it were surprisingly accurate. It wasn’t scary at all but it was fun. Gore, Satan, tits, awesome old school computer graphics.

Anyway, I enjoyed it so much this time around that I started looking up more info on the film and found a neat 30-minute documentary on the making of it. I liked it but I noticed something that really bugged me: most of the actors interviewed talked about it like it was a real work of art. They talked about their craft as actors, how they got inspired for certain scenes, how they interacted with each other outside of filming so as to really cultivate the relationships between their characters, that sort of thing — total phony baloney bullshit. I mean, let’s be totally honest. We’re talking about a B-grade flop of a horror movie that was nothing more than a crappy ripoff of Carrie.

^{This is not high art. And this is a pretty crappy poster, too.}

Of course, it’s not just actors in lousy movies who take their shit too seriously. Lots of legitimate great artists are fucking annoying when they talk about it too. I understand that sometimes you need to get really serious when you’re making art (although it’s often not even necessary then) but just because you do that doesn’t mean you need to get really serious when you’re talking about it too. It is possible to talk about absolutely anything, including great art, without sounding like a pretentious fart-sniffing dickhead.

on lousy 80’s horror films that I want to like but can’t

Several times over the last year, I’ve forced myself to watch some cheesy old 80’s horror movies. I do it because they remind me of being nine, 10, 11 years old and watching any kind of horror I could get my hands on, and loving it. My standards were mightily low then so I would stay up until 2 am on a Saturday night (or early Sunday morning for you annoying sticklers) just to watch Evilspeak on Chiller Theater on KVOS. Those were wonderful times — life is pretty peachy when even the worst films seem awesome to you.

Anyway, that’s why I have nostalgia for horrors from that era now, but try as I might, the nostalgia just isn’t enough to carry these turds now. I’ve been trying to slog my way through Alone in the Dark over the last week but after multiple attempts, I finally pulled the plug on it tonight.

I love a lot of superficial qualities of 80’s horrors — the fashions of the times, the cars, the house decors, the warm analog film quality, the sexy babysitter tropes — but when the story is mind-numbingly stupid, when shots are needlessly, frustratingly long and drawn out, when the acting sucks shit, when there are like three kills over 90 minutes and none of them are remotely imaginative or even gory, I just can’t stick it out.

I want to love these flicks that remind me of my childhood but fuck man, some shit I liked as a kid just doesn’t hold up now that I’m an adult, and now I’m wondering what that means. I think it means that nostalgia without substance is empty, that stuff must be able to stand on its own without any nostalgia factor. That factor is just icing on the cake, and without a good cake for that icing to work its magic, icing is just a big gloopy mess that I don’t want to eat by itself.

That reminds me: I usually dislike the ‘icing on the cake’ phrase because it implies that cake is just fine to eat without icing, that icing is just something extra you might have on your cake if you’re lucky. Bull fucking shit. Cake without icing is utterly pointless, it’s dry and bland. I can’t think of anyone who eats cake without icing. So yeah, dumb phrase, but it sort of worked for my point above.

Chiller Theater and my childhood

 

I watched the biopic film Ed Wood a few nights ago. I saw it shortly after it came out in the mid-90’s and liked it then, even as a dumbass teenager, but wanted to revisit it as an adult because I thought I might appreciate it more now.

I’d say I liked it slightly more now, not much. I just appreciate the subtleties of Depp and Landau’s acting more than before but that’s about it. I basically ‘got’ the rest of the film on the first watch. It’s a good one, for sure. Man, Depp was great then. Why does he suck so bad now?

Anyway, Ed Wood got me thinking about the horror movies I grew up watching, or was at least aware of, when I was a kid. That got me thinking about Chiller Theater, and that’s what I want to write about now.

Chiller Theater was the name of a program that played horror movies at 2 am on Saturday night (or early Sunday morning, for you anal nerds) back in the early 90’s. My Saturday nights back then often went like this:

• lots of juice and popcorn
• 11:30 pm: Almost Live
• midnight: Saturday Night Live
• 1:30 am – 2:00 am: [killing time flicking channels, struggling to keep eyes open]
• 2:00 am – as late as I could manage: Chiller Theater

Chiller Theater had a campy title screen, and an Igor/Cryptkeeper-like voice that welcomed the viewer and introduced whatever flick was on that night. That’s it, but it’s all I needed for this to be the holy grail of my Saturday night — it was really all a horror movie fan could ask for.

I rarely made it all the way through a film on Chiller Theater. I know I watched all of Evilspeak (it was bad but I liked it), and I remember seeing the beginning of Rosemary’s Baby, and some flick about teens camping on a mountain and getting hunted down by a lunatic with a hatchet. I know there were others but I can’t remember them now. Usually, I’d only watch the first 10 or 15 minutes of a flick before I decided it sucked and that I was too tired to keep going, and I’d head to bed. Even though I thought most of the movies sucked, I still felt like a wimp for not sticking it out. I really wanted to stay up and watch that shit, no matter how bad it was.

I know that sounds lousy but I loved the ritual, and the trope of the late night horror show, and have incredible nostalgia for it. I’ve been digging online for more info on Chiller Theater but am finding multiple shows of the same name, and none of them seem to be the one I remember. The only one I can find that still ran in the early 90’s was one hosted by a guy named Ned the Dead but I watched a clip of that one and it definitely wasn’t the one I saw, so I don’t know. I think my Chiller Theater was on KVOS or some other Pacific Northwest-based channel of the time but I can’t find shit for that.

Oh well, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that I remember Chiller Theater, and that I loved it, even if it mostly sucked. I hope I meet other people someday who saw the show and remember it fondly too.

Not the Chiller Theater I’m talking about but damn it, it’s going to have to do for now.