We'll be right back...

Space Dust candy commercial:

We'll return after these messages...

K-tel mood ring commercial:

Viva Knievel!

"One fine day a man came to town, a king of the road with a helmet for a crown, a motorcycle bird who is never comin' down..."

--From the Ballad of Evel Knievel, Anonymous, c. 1776 BC, translated from the ancient Babylonian text by Abed "Fred" Alhazred

Warning: spoilers ahead!

Without resorting to hyperbole, Viva Knievel! (1977) is the greatest action-adventure film of all time.

My history with this film goes back to the spring of 1977 when your humble host was traveling in South America "researching" the hallucinogenic properties of certain psychoactive tree frogs of the Amazon rain forest.  On the return leg of one trip I had a five hour layover in Mexico City and eventually found myself in a small movie theater with a few hours to kill before my flight.  Sitting down in the cool dark of el cine, armed with a small popcorn and a large Sonoran desert toad, I was exposed that day to the magnificent glory of Viva Knievel! and the awesome healing light of the one and only Evel Knievel, and verily I came to accept Him into my heart and soul as mine own lord and savior.

When the credits finally rolled I felt like every single bone in my body, along with my mind, had been broken, and the only way to mend them again was to get back on my hog, lick the toad and watch the film again, and again, and again...which I did several times every day for the next few weeks, until some new sci-fi flick by the director of THX-1138 finally pushed Viva Knievel! out of the theater.

Eighteen grueling months later as a recently converted and fanatical orthodox Knievelist, rabidly and LOUDLY attempting to spread the gospel that "Evel is the reason!" at airports, church socials and county fairs throughout Mexico, I found myself disenchanted with the Church of the Holy Cape and Helmet and eventually hitchhiked my way back to the States in order to lick both my physical and psychic wounds and hopefully return to my former well paying job as astronomer in residence at Underwriters Laboratories, where I had previously worked on various projects under the auspices of an extremely generous MK-Ultra grant.

I have not seen the damned film since then.

Keeping my own personal experience in mind, I warn my readers to tread carefully when dabbling in the red, white and blue arts.  Evel is a charismatic showman and almost as hard a habit to kick as Mexican Coke.

A few points to consider before deciding to embark down the 106 minute long ramp of insanity that is Viva Knievel!:

• Evel Knievel is like Santa Claus, if Santa Claus only brought Santa Claus brand toys to distribute to orphans.
• Evel is the reason that lame children throw away their crutches and walk again.
• Lauren Hutton:  "I've had a front row seat at this ugly spectacle".  So true on so many levels!
• Evel is like a charismatic cross between Jesus, Elvis Presley and Superman, and like the latter two, he's one of the few Caucasian men that can really wear a cape and look good doing it.
• The Stratocycle is ah-mah-zing!  It has an American flag and a bald eagle on it (Stephen Colbert would love it).  And it sounds exactly like what I imagine Darth Vader's space toilet sounds like when he flushes in his executive bathroom/meditation chamber aboard the Super Star Destroyer Executor.

This:

Sounds like this:

• Leslie Nielsen plays a surprisingly great villain.
• Two words: Marjoe Gortner.  He's the standout in the film as Jessie the junkie; he was also disturbingly great as Jody the psycho from Earthquake (1974).  Really, Google this guy.
• Gene Kelly as an alcoholic ex-motorcycle jumper/deadbeat dad?...yes that Gene Kelly.
• There's a byzantine subplot involving the bad guys plotting to create an exact replica of Knievel's jumping cycle and tractor trailer in an overly complicated plan to smuggle cocaine out of Mexico.
• Mr. Kathy Lee "Frank" Gifford gets quite a bit of airtime as Evel's announcer.
• It could just be me and my ears but Gene Kelly's little bastard kid has a preternaturally deep voice; either the kid was going through puberty during filming or his voice was later re-dubbed by a young Don LaFontaine.
• Helmets had no straps back then, you just stick one on your head and hope it doesn't fall off.
• Instead of Viva Knievel! this film could almost be called Fathers and Sons.
• Again this may just be me, but I could swear Steven Spielberg ripped off several scenes for the truck chase scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark from the final chase scene in this movie.  There are several beats that look almost exactly the same!
• During the end chase scene, Evel Knievel and Leslie Nielsen ride into a small Mexican village, basically terrorizing the entire population of townsfolk, chickens, and goats.
• It's too bad there weren't any sequels; I would love to have seen a whole series of Knievel films that took place in different locales: Konichiwa Knievel!, L'chaim Knievel!, Da Svidaniya Knievel!

Here's the trailer:



And may Knievel have mercy upon your blasted soul if you do choose to look upon His Evel face with your puny mortal eyes.

You have been warned.

Musica Moonday

"On TV" by The Buggles:

We'll be right back after these messages...

Animated Levi's commercial:

The Alien Encounters

File Under WTF? Part 2

Caution: Spoilers ahead!

Allan Reed: Mrs. Arlyn, for the past five years I've been traveling, investigating every phenomenon from alien astronauts to Atlantis to the Bermuda Triangle, even Bigfoot. I'm a scientist... I'm an astronomer.
Mrs. Arlyn: Really?
Allan Reed: Well, an unemployed astronomer.

After recently re-watching the obscure, nigh forgotten sci-fi flick The Alien Encounters (1979) written and directed by James T. Flocker--creator of the previously reviewed and similarly deranged Ghosts That Still Walk (1977)--I was happy to know that I was NOT hallucinating for the past several decades when a fuzzy childhood memory would occasionally bubble up from the depths of my brain of once upon a time watching a film on TV about a silver spherical alien probe named Charlie that hovers around the desert, observing a scientist and teenage boy hiking near the Devil's Tower-like Eagle Rock as they search for the Betatron, a machine to prolong human life invented by the boy's late scientist father.  

With its pre-CGI practical special effects and 1970s trappings, sitting down and watching this possibly made-for-TV movie again was like taking a time machine back to another era, long before high definition televisions, Blu-ray discs, YouTube, Netflix, or home theater in general existed and before infomercials took over the late night airwaves, an era when in order not to miss a favorite movie on one of just a handful of channels, you had to possess luck or a highlighted copy of TV Guide, along with a strong aerial antenna mounted on the roof to coax down those distant, fuzzy UHF station signals.  The Alien Encounters is the quintessential type of late night UHF movie that you could have once stumbled upon at 2:30 in the morning without ever knowing exactly what the hell you were watching, and then possibly never see again.  Like the fictitious sci-fi B-movie Flaming Globes of Sigmund that Jerry groggily half remembers in an episode of Seinfeld, The Alien Encounters is a film I possessed only hazy memories of watching once or twice as a kid growing up in the NY/NJ/PA tri-state area back in the early 1980s--probably casually watched after the CBS Late Movie or on a lazy Saturday or Sunday afternoon--but I could never really remember the title or many pertinent details until I recently purchased an Australian PAL VHS copy on eBay.

Without wanting to get into spoilers too much, I’ll just say that if you're an aficionado of such speculative pseudo-documentary 1970s fare like In Search of…, Overlords of the UFO, Hangar 18 or Sasquatch: The Legend of Bigfoot, you should find The Alien Encounters right up your alley.  I’ll admit the film can be a bit talky and poky compared with the seizure inducing editing of current action films, and in fact it really comes across as less of a fictional narrative sci-fi flick than a leisurely paced true-life nature documentary from some parallel universe; with its talk of intelligent signals beamed to Earth from Barnard’s Star, I’m almost convinced it was The Alien Encounters and not The Man Who Fell to Earth that was the real cinematic inspiration behind Philip K. Dick’s 1981 movie-within-a-novel VALIS.

Overlooking the amateur home movie quality of the overall production and obvious ultra low budget special effects, the only major nitpicks I have with the film are that some sequences could have used some tightening up in the editing room, but that said I still found this flick strangely endearing, even occasionally hypnotic—an early scene depicts astronomer Allan Reed (Augie Tribach) as he tries valiantly to flip a switch on a massive mainframe computer terminal amid smoke and fire after electromagnetic interference from a nearby UFO disastrously causes his radio telescope to explode. This sequence comically goes on for at least a minute too long and practically seems lifted from Airplane! or one of the Naked Gun movies, as Reed keeps…reaching…for that…switch that’s just…slightly…out…of…reach.  I will admit I laughed out loud with--but not at, never at--this particular scene.  And though you can occasionally see the wire that keeps Charlie the little silver spheroid alien probe floating aloft in the desert, scenes with the probe and others when a large flying saucer slowly hovers over the desert landscape with a low subsonic rumble are fairly convincing considering the size of the budget director James T. Flocker had making this film was probably just a mere fraction Steven Spielberg had at his disposal for the big budget Close Encounters of the Third Kind produced a couple years earlier.

All caveats aside, Flocker’s UFO conspiracy flick still manages to evoke occasional moments of sheer otherworldly weirdness.  There’s a genuinely creepy flashback about twenty minutes in as Elaine Stafford (Bonnie Henry), a young woman interviewed by the now unemployed astronomer, recounts her sighting of what she originally thought a ghost, but has come to believe was actually an extraterrestrial after reading the late Dr. Arlyn’s book while researching the paranormal.  As Stafford slowly walks down the stairs towards her encounter with the unknown, an atmosphere of unease builds as the camera focuses on a close-up of a round, suspiciously UFO-shaped chandelier at the bottom of the stairs (a shot similar to one David Lynch would use a decade later in Twin Peaks when focusing on the seemingly mundane ceiling fan at the top of the stairs outside the late Laura Palmer’s bedroom door to evoke a sense that not all was as it seemed in the Palmer house).  The faces of creepy cherubic statues are inter-cut with the girl descending the stairs as the sound of agitated birds in the night increases, recalling the preternatural call of the whippoorwill that presages death and cosmic horror in H.P. Lovecraft’s short story The Dunwich Horror.  And like Bruce the shark in the first half of Jaws or the xenomorph in most of Alien, the creature in this sequence is never clearly seen by the viewer, but is only hinted at in brief snippets as it slowly turns to face the hapless human as she reaches the bottom of the stairs; one can almost make out a type of bestial face that looks as though it stepped out of a medieval wood carving of the devil, the only details discernible are that the thing's puffy head appears crowned with a pair of antennae and it possesses three or more eyes.  The soundtrack builds to a hypnotic drone as the girl comes face to face with the alien, and the final shot of the thing is so dark and obscured (certainly not helped by the low quality VHS transfer I viewed) that one can only perceive what looks like some kind of strange insectoid shape, glistening like wet, black leather as Elaine screams in terror and then collapses.  I thought it was a truly effective scene and one that I immediately recalled watching and being frightened of so many years ago as a kid, and in my opinion is one of the real highlights of this film.

A couple other minor observations:  a good decade before The X-Files and the later Men in Black, The Alien Encounters might be one of the earliest--if not the first--motion picture to feature both the concept of animal mutilations and the mysterious Men in Black from UFO lore, though instead of driving around in a black Cadillac, the “Mibs” as they’re called in this film cruise around in a gray cargo van and rock dark aviator glasses and porn ‘staches; there's even a car chase thrown in during the climax of the film involving Dr. Allan Reed's beat up station wagon and the Men in Black's sinister gray van, accompanied musically by a requisite 1970s electro-funk groove to emphasize the action.  I also noticed one of the scenes in the desert was scored with what I think are several minutes of music from the Capitol Records Hi-Q stock music library that anyone familiar with the episode "Inside the Closet" from Tales from the Darkside will recognize; I’m not familiar with the title or composer but it’s great--spacey, atmospheric and just overall creepy sounding.*

*UPDATED 1/29/15: That fantastic library track is apparently entitled "Underwater Shadows" by the prolific stock music composer William George "Bill" Loose.  Thanks YouTube copyright infringement lawyer-bots!

Here's a short clip:

It seems surly teenager Steve Arlyn (Matt Boston) presumably shops at the same “Ye Olde Orange Life Preserver Vest Shoppe” at Twin Pines Mall since he dresses eerily similar to Marty McFly in Back to the Future just a few years later.

James T. Flocker’s The Alien Encounters was obviously an ultra low budget labor of love by its director, cast, and crew and yet it still manages to effectively capture an atmosphere of otherworldly alien-ness, due in part to the natural desert landscape used for a majority of the setting, but also because this is a film that is chock-a-block full of ideas, even if those ideas presented through the dialogue and documentary-like narration are frequently wackadoodle and occasionally just bugnuts crazy.  However, I loved this movie and think this film is way past due for a re-release and re-evaluation of its shaggy, 1970s charm on DVD or Blu-ray, even if it’s just in one of those 50-public-domain-movies-for-$20 collections.  I’m not sure why The Alien Encounters has practically fallen off the face of the Earth and is nearly unknown in this day and age when pretty much everything else imaginable--good, bad or otherwise--is available in one form or another, either as an official release or uploaded to YouTube…

...unless that’s just the way the “Mibs” want it to stay.

Allan Reed: What's a "Mib"?
Steve Arlyn: Men in black... my dad called them "Mibs". It's a... code name. They're guys who showed up after UFO sightings asking a lot of questions, with really no reason.
Allan Reed: Steve, your father was being watched by somebody, wasn't he?
[Pause] Who?
Steve Arlyn: For years before he died... my dad was being followed by the men in black.
Allan Reed: What project was he working on?
Steve Arlyn: Betatron.

Note: Earlier versions of this review appeared previously on imdb.com and classichorrorfilmboard.com.

We'll be right back after these messages...

Brigantine Castle (Brigantine, NJ):

We'll be right back after these messages...

Aspen soda commercial--featuring movie star ('s son) Patrick Wayne! (The People That Time Forgot & Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger):

Race with the Devil

Winnebago Warriors Part 2

Race with the Devil (1975) is arguably the greatest genre film ever made involving an RV (recreational vehicle).  OK, so there may not be all that many RV themed films to begin with; the only other one that your humble reviewer is even familiar with is the recently reviewed Ghosts That Still Walk, but Race with the Devil must surely be the most well known.

Released smack dab in the middle of the devil obsessed 1970s,  this film really does have it all: a big ass RV, motorcycle racing, Peter Fonda, car chases, robed cultists, a scary tree, Loretta ("Hot Lips" Houlihan from TV's M*A*S*H) Swit in a tight sweater, animal sacrifice, dirt biking, Satanism, female nudity only partially obscured by flame, that thing when you go to make dinner in your RV and then a rattlesnake jumps out of the cupboard at you, vehicular destruction, poolside leering, human sacrifice, a ring of fire, and last but certainly not least: public library non-circulating reference book theft.

Best line: After Warren Oates takes a spill on his dirt bike into a big puddle of water: "I'm getting too old for this shit!".  This has surely got to be one of the earliest sincere instances of this hoary saying before its eventual descent into action film cliche.

In spite of all joking at the preposterous absurdity of the whole thing, this film is actually really pretty scary and can be downright creepy, especially in the early scenes involving the cult at the sacrificial tree (which looks like a close cousin to the Louisiana devil tree from the recent True Detective).  One memorably terrifying action sequence has the RV vacationeers trying to flee the scene of human sacrifice they've inadvertently witnessed while several murderous cultists cling to the back of their RV, their hooded faces illumined by the hellish red glare of tail lights as they smash in the rear window in an attempt to gain ingress and thwart the protagonists' escape.  It's a truly violent and viscerally effective scene of motor vehicle violation.

But as the tag line says:  "When you race with the Devil, you'd better be faster than hell!"

Trailer:



One thing is for sure, a PG rated movie from the '70s like Race with the Devil could be way more explicit in terms of nudity and violence than a modern PG movie; it's hard to believe this film shares the same exact rating as something innocuous like Disney's Frozen; that would certainly make for an interesting double feature if you'd like to traumatize the kiddies for life!

P.S.: If you have the chance I highly recommend checking this film out on the recent Blu-ray from Shout! Factory (a double feature with Dirty Mary Crazy Larry).  It really looks amazing, almost like it was filmed yesterday instead of forty years ago.

Here's Dead Kennedys' "Winnebago Warrior" performed by The Fractal Cauliflowers to play us out:

We'll be right back after these messages....

The Enchanted World from Time-Life Books hawked by Vincent Price:

The Amazing Mr. X

Next up is 1948's The Amazing Mr. X in Mill Creek Entertainment's Horror Classics 50 movie set.  The blurb in the insert reads (spoiler alert!):

The Amazing Mr. X
Starring Turhan Bey, Lynn Bari, Donald Curtis
(1948) B&W Unrated 

A phony mystic makes a comfortable living by putting on séances for gullible women to scam them of their money. His most recent victim is a young widow who had lost her husband just two years prior to him meeting her. Things start out normal for our fake swami on his latest scam until the "deceased" husband shows up and threatens to expose the mystic unless a large sum of money is paid.

Other than the name of actor Turhan Bey who I recognized from the Universal classic The Mummy's Tomb (1942), I had no idea whatsoever what this movie was about going in.  That said, overall I thought this was an enjoyably atmospheric melodrama--call it a metaphysical noir--that reminded me more than anything of some forgotten Val Lewton film.

We'll be right back after these messages...

Carvel Cookie Puss commercial (thank you):

Rest in Peace Robin Williams

Robin Williams
1951-2014

"Blow Me Down" from Popeye (1980):

Ghosts That Still Walk

File Under: Winnebago Warriors/WTF?

For many years I regarded The Alien Encounters (1979) as some fuzzy childhood hallucination until I finally found a PAL VHS tape from Australia on eBay in 2013 and could finally confirm that this strange film actually did exist--but that's a subject for another post.  An earlier film written and directed by the same nigh forgotten low-budget auteur James T. Flocker was not as hard to find: some poor, demented soul has recently uploaded a copy of the 1977 film Ghosts That Still Walk on YouTube.

If you're unfamiliar with this flick, here's a fan made trailer to give you a taste of just what to expect:



The capsule review in John Stanley's Creature Features Movie Guide Strikes Again (Fourth revised version) reads:

GHOSTS THAT STILL WALK (1977).  Young boy is possessed by an Indian medicine man spirit in this low-budget pseudodocumentary about ghosts and spirits.  It's terribly disjointed and hard to follow but does have one exciting sequence in which an elderly couple traveling in a rec vehicle is attacked by boulders rolling across the desert.  Otherwise, tedious going.  And boring.  Written-directed by James T. Flocker. (VCI: United)

Most people that recall seeing Ghosts That Still Walk on a late night or Saturday afternoon UHF airing in the late '70s or early '80s usually only remember that "one exciting sequence" of rolling boulders in the desert inexplicably attacking a couple of senior citizens in an RV.  This unnervingly bizarre action sequence is probably the second greatest chase scene involving a motor home in cinematic history, topped only by well, really the entirety of Race with the Devil (1975); it gradually builds to a point of High Strangeness to create an overwhelmingly oppressive mood of true otherworldly alien-ness impinging on the normal waking world, as giant square shaped boulders--seemingly alive and with malicious intent--bear down on the RV like a galloping herd of mammoth antediluvian beasts, a tableau certainly never witnessed by a sane mind before or since, unless in the fevered phantasies of some deranged eater of hashish.

Another portion of the film involves a teenage boy's astral projection and his mommy's mummy (don't ask) and a few scenes of transcendent weirdness could be compared to a primitivist version of cult film maker David Lynch in the use of light and sound, sharing Lynch's predilection for sharp crackling sound bursts of electrical current and bright stroboscopic flashes of light as signifiers for a rent in the fabric of everyday reality.  These fleeting peeks of otherworldliness are contrasted with stultifyingly mundane scenes of middle class suburban normality, presaging the settings typical of late '70s to mid '80s Steven Spielberg classics like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., Poltergeist, Gremlins, Back to the Future, or The Goonies that take place in one version or another of Spielburbia, USA.

That's not to say that Ghosts That Still Walk is by ANY stretch of the imagination as inherently "good" or well made as any one of those films, but it is as fascinatingly bizarre and eminently watchable as anything created by the man-god Ed Wood and does deserve to be seen again on DVD or Blu-ray disc by any fan of good old fashioned low budget schlock.  Just file it under: What the Flocker?

And now a word from our sponsors...

Sunday!  Sunday!!  SUNDAY!!!

There's something fishy in Jacksonville!
Meet Ricou Browning--the Creature from the Black Lagoon!

Retr-O-Rama Pop Culture Collectibles Show
Sunday, August 10, 2014

Featuring quality vintage toys, dolls, models, comics, G.I. Joe, music, Star Wars, TV & movie memorabilia, Barbie, games, posters, Disneyana and much, much more!

Ramada Conference Center
3130 Hartley Road
Jacksonville, Florida 32257
From 10:00 am to 4:00 pm
Early bird preview 9:00 am

For more information:
www.jaxretrorama.com
retrorama66@aol.com

The Sci-Fi Boys

Just watched The Sci-Fi Boys (2006) on Netflix.  A veritable love letter to sci-fi geekdom, in particular Ray Harryhausen and Forrest J. Ackerman, I thought it was a great little documentary by Paul Davids (who was also the writer of the excellent 1994 TV movie Roswell with Kyle MacLachlan).  A paean to the true magick of the movies and the sensawunda they inspire in us.

First Post/The Alpha Incident

First post!

Why?  I've got several cheap 50 movie DVD sets filled with public domain film titles so needed a place to keep track of what I watch since I probably won't want to revisit too many of them more than once, hence this blog--which I had originally thought should be named Death By Television but ultimately decided on the more life affirming Obscurantist Drivel; the check is in the mail Mr. Ellison.  I love these 50 movie collections because you really get a lot of bang for your buck.  Of course they are mostly filled with forgettably crappy films but there are usually at least a few really interesting gems in each set.

These were the types of odd, low budget films that would pop up on Saturday afternoons or at half past two in the morning on local/independent UHF TV stations in the 1970s and early '80s back when I was a kid living in rural New Jersey--before the rise of the nefarious and soul blasting infomercial and 24 hour a day narrow interest pay cable channels that killed this type of more free form programming.

Obscurantist Drivel and the accompanying YouTube channel for WODS-TV will attempt to recreate a similarly eclectic UHF channel format, with a specific emphasis on the fantastique and outré films of the 1970s to mid '80s, but we will undoubtedly explore content from other eras and genres as well; please feel free to view and comment on the movies (and commercials) "aired".

Disclaimer: Obscurantist Drivel is a 100% fan made, not-for-profit blog so the titles that will be discussed are not offered for sale by your humble host; you will have to locate and purchase these titles on your own dime and your own time, so don't bother asking!

The Alpha Incident (1979)

First up on WODS-TV late night (You'll love the way we smell...W...O...D...S!): Mill Creek Entertainment's Sci-Fi Classics collection and the made-in-Wisconsin The Alpha Incident directed by Bill Rebane, produced by "Studio Film Corporation" (!) and released in 1978 according to IMDB and John Stanley's Creature Features Movie Guide Strikes Again (fourth revised version), though the Mill Creek set lists it as 1977.  The blurb from the booklet reads:

THE ALPHA INCIDENT
Starring Ralph Meeker, Stafford Morgan, George "Buck" Flower
(1977) Color Rated PG 

A Mars space probe returns to Earth and brings with it a microorganism from the red planet.  While transporting the microscopic alien life form by train, there is an accident and the microorganism is unleashed.  Exposure to the alien virus forces four strangers into quarantine while government scientists rush to find a cure.

Here's a clip:



Around 20 minutes in and as I always suspected, it looks like the end of the world will inevitably be brought about by a dumb redneck in overalls and a trucker hat.

Best quote: After the four strangers are quarantined for exposure to the deadly Martian microorganism and informed they'll all die if they fall asleep, Jack Tiller (John Goff)-a good ol' boy train depot worker-turns away from the camera and mumbles under his breath: "It's a bunch o' shit."

Here's an exchange I especially enjoyed:

Jack: "What I need right now is a drink!  Every good party needs some booze...Hey, I bet Hank had some stashed out in that caboose o' his."
Dr. Sorensen (Stafford Morgan): "That's not a good idea...stick to the amphetamines!"

Sound advice Doctor Sorensen...don't mind if I do!

This one ended up being more grim than I expected, and there was some minor profanity (and brief nudity which I wasn't really expecting in a PG rated film) along with a decent sense of '70s flavor with a healthy dollop of paranoia and post-Nixon government mistrust.  Also kind of amazing to think this low budget throwback to Night of the Living Dead was released the year after Star Wars; though if the good Mr. Ellison thought Star Wars and Close Encounters were dreck, what would he have thought of something like The Alpha Incident?  

Together dear reader, we shall strive to explore more of such odious drivel and nonsense on our fictitious late night UHF channel, so don't change that dial!

In the beginning...