Saturday, January 24, 2009

B-Horror Movie Madness


Every saturday as a child I couldn't wait to sit down in from of the television, turn it to channel 11 WPIX in NYC and watch "Chiller Theater".

There I would see the six fingered claymation arm rise up from the quicksand and then ominously pluck away each letter of the C-H-I-L-L-E-R title and then sink back into the evil depths it came from.

Yes this was some serious B-movie, cheesy, low budget viewing but this was also enough to capture my young imagination along with millions of others.

Invasion Of The Monsters And Other Misunderstood Outcast.

Where else could you view such B-movie classics as "The Ghost Of Frankenstein", "Invasion Of The Body Snatchers", "Attack Of The 50 Foot Woman" and the ever popular "Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Monster" ?

There was no digital special effects, no multi-million dollar budget, A-listed actors. They were made up of unknown wanna-be players. Some special effects were so bad that you could actually see the strings holding up the invading spaceships. The acting was bad, the story lines even worse but when you're a 10 year old boy you couldn't ask for more.

I was a faithful fan of not only "Chiller Theater" but also to it's rival "Creature Feature". Both shows featured the frightening results of radiation on man and beast causing a woman to tower as high as 40 feet high or shrinking a man to the size of a pin. Giant man-eating spiders roamed the streets and a gigantic octopus would down a massive bridge, along with everyone driving over it.
From deep space they would show the horrors of the aliens that seemed to dislike us for no reason. They traveled as far away as Mars just to shoot us with lasers. they fell to Earth in meteors and oozed around like growing jelly fish to feast upon us.

This was some good quality viewing as far as a 10 year old was concerned!

These movies never really scared me. Even at 10 years old I knew they were cheesy but yet they fascinated me. The idea of a giant spider running around chasing people as in "Tarantula" or a gooey, messy pile of sludge that ate everything in it's sight as in "The Blob" was my idea of thrills.

Ghost Of The Past

I look at the horror films of today and I see that even with all the incredible special effects and over paid actors, most are missing something that these little b-movies all had. They lack heart.

On the left hand side of my blog I listed my "Top 10 Favorite B Horror Movies". If you have any favorites you want to share with me please posted them in the comment section under this post.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Rick, you have an award, call over to NR II and collect.

AV
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