Confessions of a Monster Kid:10 Guilty Pleasures -- Part 2

(Read Part 1 of this article by hitting the Older Post link at the bottom of this page.)

The Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow
The writing was on the wall, the 50s style monster movie churned out by AIP was going to cease to exist... and it was AIP itself who sent a message to its audience of drive-in attending teenagers for those paying attention.

It's a silly film that starts with a newspaper reporter doing a story about teen hotrodding, initially very straight but gradually letting its eccentric characters take over the movie, including an elder aunt with a smart ass talking parrot, a big brain custom car building Poindexter-type and his gorgeous long legged girlfriend, and even AIP master monster creator Paul Blaisedell playing himself, wearing the last fragments of the She Creature costume. Toss in some late in the story haunted house hi jinks and you've got a movie that feels like a surf film, before Frankie and Annette, before color and before Corman's Edgar Allan Poe films broke new ground for the exploitation studio resulting in big changes in the kinds of horror movies they made.

It's the end of an era, and you know it is.



The Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Monsters
The older I get the more Ray Dennis Steckler's idea of how to make a movie makes more sense. Basically, if there was ever a script, Ray would toss it out and improvise the whole thing. In doing so, he made some truly unique films, maybe not realizing what the end results would be. Though most of the fans of his films enjoy The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies, I find myself drawn more often to The Lemon Grove Kids.

I realize now that if Steckler had been a bit more canny or had realized what he had here, he might have created something loads more people would look back at nostalgically. The film is actually made of three or four different short films, improvised, filled with Steckler friends and family and goofy Bowery Boys inspired wackiness. When I first saw it, I imagined the big potential there and that Steckler could have easily turned it into a syndicated kid program shown on local TV kid programs in 5 minute chunks, like on Chicago's Garfield Goose (which ran a serialized version of Karel Zeman's amazing Journey to the Beginning of Time). It could have been another Funny Company, and actually funny.

Ah, well, missed opportunities. Show it to your kids, and maybe they'll actually watch it.



My Bloody Valentine
There's nothing poetic about this slice and dice Canadian gore film. It is just what it is.



It tells the story of a man who went crazy in a mining town when the mine he was in caved in on Valentine's Day, and were ignored due to the big yearly holiday dance. When he finally got out, Harry (that's his name) went on a killing spree, wearing his mining outfit, gas mask and wielding a pick axe to tear out the hearts of those who didn't care.

Years later, he breaks out of the asylum and the Sheriff thinks he's headed home to stop the first Valentine Dance since Harry went crackers. Of course, much carnage follows, with a nice twist.

There's also some soap opera aspects when the Sheriff's son, who went away to California without letting anyone (including his girlfriend) know where he went. A highlight of their tormented discussion is sabotaged by the young man's thick Canadian accent. "I'm so soorrry. I'm soo dammm soorrrey."

Okay, to be fair, with the exception of this lesser acting, the rest of the film's thespians are actually pretty good. Still, we're not talking about aperformance of Hamlet here.

What stands out for me on this film is that the production level is elevated by the authentic locations used to film in, including a real operating mine. Low budget films usually had to work with Friday the 13th style campsites back then. This movie has thousands of dollars worth of sets.

Also, as this stuff goes, the killings are particularly unique and gruesome. What would a person look like left in an operating laundromat dryer. Hmmm, par boiled? I guess that I wasn't alone in liking this flick, because an unnecessary remake was made in 2009 in 3D. No, thanks, I'll stick with the original.



Next: The Last 3 Guilty Pleasures!