Year: 2008

Kids in this high-tech age don't know how coddled they are when severe weather is forecast!  Today, you've got all these electronic graphics with little maps in the corner, crawls across the screen, and now and then a weatherbabe (or weatherguy) may come on to give logical, reasoned updates.

Not so when I was a kid in the '70s.

Even for a Severe Thunderstorm Watch, the programming would stop, the TV screen would fill with some ominous-looking graphic (still, of course, no movement back in those days) screaming whatever watch/warning it was in all caps, vivid colors…and worst of all, that infernal, screaming, shrill Emergency Broadcasting Service tone!  Then usually an announcer with The Voice Of Doom would come on and provide the "public service" of warning us all of impending tornadoes, damaging winds and large hail that were SURELY going to target the house you lived in and make Dorothy's tornado in THE WIZARD OF OZ about as scary as a silent fart.

Almost as bad were the "ALL CLEAR" statements that would come on-screen when the danger was supposedly past…except that the graphics were usually in more soothing shades of green and white.

The fake warnings created on YouTube are laughable compared to the horrifying simplicity of the bulletins back in the 1970s that made me want to scream running for the cellar – and, worse, my parents made me watch them because it was "educational"!

I fearlessly watched every Creature Feature run on Detroit's WKBD Channel 50 from the late sixties through the seventies, but one managed to sear its way directly onto my retinas. The 1966 ROGER CORMAN/SAMUEL Z. ARKOFF film QUEEN OF BLOOD was patched together from a bunch of eerie footage from a 1960 Russian sci-fi film called NEBO ZOVYOT. In QUEEN OF BLOOD an American spaceship crew (which includes JOHN SAXON and a young DENNIS HOPPER) intercepts a space capsule containing an inhabitant of Mars–a green-skinned, green-haired and incredibly creepy mute alien female. She turns out to be a blood-sucking space vampire who starts knocking off the crew one by one. Given that she's just an over-the-hill glamour model in green makeup and a beehive wig that might not have been so scary except for the way she does it–by hypnotizing her victims with her TERRIFYING GLOWING EYES.

The sequence that drove me over the edge was when a sleepy crewman observes her walking from the lava-lamp-equipped engine room on the other side of the ship and slowly stalking toward her victim (me in this case), then unveiling her blazing eyes (accompanied by a maddening buzzing sound) in child-scarring close-up. Later she takes out DENNIS HOPPER in the engine room in a scene that anticipates HARRY DEAN STANTON's death scene in ALIEN. We later see her licking blood off one of the crewman's wrists but in a wicked death by irony she turns out to be a hemophiliac who bleeds to death when she's scratched by the spaceship's lone female crew member.

I went to bed that night with the image of that creepy face and those electrifying glowing eyes (director CURTIS HARRINGTON achieved the effect by beaming pencil-thin points of light directly onto her eyeballs) jolting me awake every time I tried to drift off to sleep. The movie showed up on T.V. on MGM Hi-Def so I can now preserve it forever–it's ridiculously cheap and cheesy, yet when I showed my wife the corridor-stalking scene even she admitted it was creepy as hell.

UNK LANCIFER SEZ: Thanks Jeffrey for the great traumafession and thanks for turning me on to QUEEN OF BLOOD. I had no idea it was such an extraordinary looking film. (Those who'd like to get a peek of QUEEN OF BLOOD's exceptional visuals can get a gander HERE and HERE. ) While we're at it, I should also thank you for naming a magazine after folks like me and Aunt John; here's to GEEK MONTHLY inheriting the earth!

If there are any advantages to having alcoholic father, one is the utter lack of parental guidance on what movies a kid is allowed to watch. My father took my older sister and I to see a double feature of FRIDAY THE 13TH and SCREAMERS. It was 1980, so that would have made me seven years old and my sister nine. I remember wanting to see SCREAMERS because people were supposed to be turned inside out! My father took us to the theater and gave me a handful of quarters so I could go to the lobby and play video games if the movie got too scary for me. Needless to say, I spent most of FRIDAY THE 13TH in the lobby.  I could tell that the movie was coming to an end by the peaceful music that was coming from the theater, so I decided to take a seat next to my sister and Dad. The image of a woman in a small boat floating along a still lake was being projected on the screen. It seemed like the worst was over. The next thing I know is that my eyes were being assaulted by the disfigured Jason popping up out of the water and pulling the hapless woman down into the lake. My sister began screaming uncontrollably and I was practically crawling under the seat out of fear and embarrassment of my sister. My Dad picked us both up, one in each arm, and carried two screaming kids out of the theater. We laugh about it now, but we were scared half to death! I never did get to see SCREAMERS!

UNK L SEZ: Erczilla, as traumatic as that final scene may have been you should be thankful that good old Jason spared you the misery of sitting through SCREAMERS! That movie's "Man Turned Inside-Out" ad campaign was all a disguise to hide an Italian film about an island of fishmen! For a better view of that film's super fishy history, check out this great blog, JOHNNY LARUE'S CRANE SHOT and for a very thorough review of the film (which actually has developed a bit of a cult following), I suggest BADMOVIES.ORG!

I suffered mightily at the hands of PUNKY BREWSTER when I was still biting ankles. You see, my sister was a DEAD RINGER for SOLEIL MOON FRYE, and I am not exaggerating when I say that we couldn't leave the house from '87-88 without being mobbed by unruly children looking to get close to their idol, "Punky."  I can even recall my Mom arguing with other mothers at the grocery store: "If she's Punky, what the hell are we doing in this dump?"

AUNT JOHN SEZ: Kitty, I feel your pain. My second cousin bore an uncanny resemblance to CAPTAIN LOU ALBANO, sans the facial hair, and it made shopping at the local K-Mart a nightmare. Cousin Pam was what my mother called a "handsome girl," but I digress. Everyone needs to check out Kitty's blog KILLER KITTENS FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE. Be warned though, this kitten definitely has claws!

As a child, I didn't have too many experiences with horror or violence on T.V. and movies.  I watched a lot of fluffy stuff.  But you never can tell just what can traumatize a little kid, and thus begins the story of how I could not stand the thought of watching AIRPLANE! well through adulthood.  Since it wasn't a movie that would raise the suspicions of my parents, I found myself watching it in my Dad's living room with the family on T.V. in 1984. The eminent plane crash idea wasn't bothering me too much and everything was going just peachy until that ridiculous inflatable autopilot showed up.

The horror that seeped into me at that moment was insidious and tricked me into thinking everything was fine, until I went to sleep. You see, I was only five and I had just started being ferried between Texas and Florida as a "child traveling alone" the year before; and obviously, I hadn't gotten over the whole plane ride thing. The fact that I had nightmares about the inflating autopilot gag is kind of embarrassing and yet I couldn't shake my acquired revulsion to the thought of ever giving the movie another chance.

I did finally see AIRPLANE! all the way through for the second time in college.  I am proud to say that I experienced no fear when watching the autopilot inflate, but I have to confess I still hold a bit of a grudge against them.

AUNT JOHN SEZ: Thanks LeEtta for the great TRAUMAFESSION! Surely, y'all must check out LeEtta's super crafty site The LeEMSmachine. Just don't call her Shirley.

UNKLE LANCIFER SEZ: AIRPLANE!'s inflatable Otto Pilot as an icon of fright? I can see it…

When I was very young my dad called us all to the TV to watch an old rerun of THE ERNIE KOVACS SHOW, which featured the Nairobi Trio – three men with ape masks and long-haired wigs, dressed in winter coats and derbies. They sat very stiffly and did a strange little musical routine. Dad laughed. They terrified me to my very core.