Monday, October 7, 2013

What Do YOU, The Viewer At Home, Think?

Couple (okay, three) quick things:

1.  The Fabulous Stacia, of She Blogged By Night, has started another weekly movie serial recappin', and after the brutally funny Raiders of Ghost City and Phantom Creeps I wanted to give everyone a heads-up so you could get in on the ground floor, and not feel the way I did when someone told me -- midway through the third season -- that I should abruptly start watching Lost.  Particularly because this one, The Monster and the Ape, has it all -- a robot, a gorilla, George Macready (only one year away from his breakthrough role opposite Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford in Gilda, and a mere 20 years away from his thoroughly brokenthrough role opposite George Nader and Richard Kiel in Human Duplicators), and an ingenue named Babs Arnold played by Carole Mathews, only 11 years before her starring turn as a catfightin' undercover cop opposite the ever-noirish Marie Windsor, the ever-delightful Beverly Garland, and the ever-Mannix Mike "Touch" Connors in Swamp Diamonds.

2.  I'm thinking of writing a piece for the upcoming Chaney Blogathon: Two Men, Thousands of Faces, and wanted to ask your advice.  Since I don't believe that Lon Chaney ever made a bad movie, (mostly because I've heard that just disbelieving things, without considering, or even hearing any evidence either way is the new time-saving alternative to the Scientific Method), I was wondering...what do you think is the absolute worst movie Lon Chaney, Jr. ever made?

3.  Finally, what do you think this means?

Personally, I think it's a rare candid photo from the early days of the Borg, when their assimilation equipment was pretty bare bones, and consisted mostly of a wearable ViewMaster augmented with twin shuttlecock tails, and topped with a scale model of the Flying Sub from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.

But I could be wrong.

14 comments:

Stacia said...

Aw, thanks for the shout-out, Scott. I can only hope to be half as hilarious as the serial itself.

I have not seen it, but I have been told Hillbillys in a Haunted House (1967) is just completely rotten. And yes, "Hillbillys" is spelled that way.

In about 1977, I got a robot for Christmas that looked very much like the one in the picture... and it scared me to death. It almost walked right into my train set! So you can see my dilemma.

Ivan G Shreve Jr said...

You can't go wrong with any of the Lon Chaney, Jr. Inner Sanctum entries (well, with the exception of Weird Woman, which I do like). Prime fromage and entertaining badness to boot.

Dr.BDH said...

Can't speak to Lon Chaney, Jr (but Dick Cheney's worst movie was Iraq II: The Upfking).

However, that is a picture of the young Stephen Hawking, with the prototype of the cybercognitive mind controller that currently serves as his voice, propulsion and iTunes Radio.

culuriel said...

If that's not a childhood pic of Doghouse, I don't know what is.

grouchomarxist said...

1. George Macready? Now there's a ripe slice of ham, although he occasionally got a role which allowed him to show some real talent. The Monster and the Ape is a new one on me, and I thought I was pretty knowledgeable about serials. Sounds like fun.

2. I haven't yet subjected myself to Hillbillys in a Haunted House, but of Lon, Jr.'s films that I have seen, Bert I. Gordon's The Cyclops (1957) has to rank near the bottom in both their filmographies.

3. A Cyberboy, with an early Dalek prototype? An unholy experiment which went horribly wrong and gave us Batboy? An uncannily accurate depiction of my plan for world conquest?

Anonymous said...

3. My brother got that robot for xmas. Shuttlecocks in those olden days were feathers.

Tommy T said...

I had that toy as well. Robert The Robot.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTI-F2CuvWQ

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

I never got a RobertTheRobot toy.

wahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!
~

Unknown said...

Worst Lon Cheney Jr film: I'd say Spider Baby or the Indestructible Man are down there. He's pretty awful in Alligator People as well. And he was woeful in Son of Dracula but that was simply bad casting not his fault there.
the Picture means I have to go gouge my eyes out now.

Weird Dave said...

What Thunder said.

Tog said...

Whoa, don't be dissing Spider Baby, pally-boy. That movie is choice.

Worst movie with Lon Jr.? Easy: 1964's Mexican Face of the Screaming Werewolf.

grouchomarxist said...

I'm with Tog:Spider Baby is too genuinely weird to call bad.

And the title alone is enough to make me want to see Face of the Screaming Werewolf.

Anntichrist S. Coulter said...

Well shit. I could've SWORN that I piped-in with a too-brief "HAPPY HAPPY JOY JOY!" for yer birfday, Doctor! (these fucking comments always HAVE been out to get me, y'know, even when it was the far-too-demonic "Halo-whatsisface" --- and having the screen/font sizes constantly shrunken & blown-up by the cunt-fart known as "Chrome Teh Browser" DON'T FUCKIN' *HELP*!!!) At any rate, I sincerely appreciate YOUR good wishes and wish that MY good wishes had been here sooner, and that your birfday was an unrivaled bacchanalia the likes of which we haven't seen since '70s fur-filled porn!

XOXOXO
L,
Yer Ranty Aunty Annti

Anntichrist S. Coulter said...

Haven't seen enough Lon Chaney Jr. to comment upon that, but another ditto to Thunder's cry of deprivation!

"See Thru The Eyes Of The Future!"

"Put On The Magic Robot-Vision Goggles(C) & Enjoy First-Hand What Your Commands Create With Super-Destructo, YOUR Robot Drone!"


I'll bet anybody a dozen hot Krispy Kreme doughnuts that at least HALF of that was on the actual box! And it's prolly where Cheney got the idea for HIS flying drone program! Not real thrilled with "our" president continuing ANYTHING wrought by Halliburton & The Shaw Group, but he DIDN'T start that shit...

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