Here at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog, it's Halloween - and time for big screen fun.
And that means Gothic horror flicks made at Universal by James Whale!
And loving homages to James Whale's movies courtesy of Mel Brooks!
And, of course, Halloween cartoons. . .
It's also time to watch spooky comedies yet again, starting with Laurel & Hardy.
And raise that spooky comedies quotient with The Bowery Boys yet again.
As well as The Three Stooges in If A Body Meets A Body.
Another opus de Stooges, Idle Roomers, is excellent Halloween fare because of the guy resembling the little bro of The Wolfman who enters at 7:01.
Universal Pictures stars Bud Abbott & Lou Costello specialized in scare comedies, starting with Who Done It.
These were such big box-office hits that feature films in which Bud & Lou did The Monster Mash in haunted houses would extend through the end of the 1940's and into the 1950's.
The comedy team frequently co-starred with Bela Lugosi as Dracula, Boris Karloff or Glenn Strange as Frankenstein and Lon Chaney, Jr. as The Wolfman.
Abbott & Costello Meet The Mummy co-stars noir queen Marie Windsor!
A&C even made an appearance on The Colgate Comedy Hour with the monster du jour of 1954, the hideous "Gillman" from The Creature From The Black Lagoon!
The creepiest of all 20th century horror-comedies was made four decades later. That would be the Razzie Award winner Nothing But Trouble, a delirious Beetlejuice-influenced Halloween offering written and directed by Dan Aykroyd that got some of the worst reviews this blogger has ever seen, both on the TV show Siskel & Ebert At The Movies and by print film reviewers in many publications. It cost 45 million bucks to produce and made 8.5 million.
Is it understandable why many disliked this nightmarishly disturbing piece that frequently ventured into gross-out territory and found it a terrible movie? Yes. Do we at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog regard Nothing But Trouble (which, very oddly, was given the exact same title as Laurel & Hardy's worst feature film) as a weirdly inspired one-of-a-kind fever dream? Yes. Would it have been a lot better with Harold Ramis substituted for Chevy Chase and also assisting with writing and/or directing? Yes - and John Landis, after reading the script, turned it down.
Do we believe that the objective in making this unsettling (and at times disgusting) opus was to serve up a humorous parody of horror movies a la Mel Brooks? No, definitely not. Unlike the Bowery Boys and Three Stooges monster comedies, it is more than a tad too grotesque to get laughs - but, bear in mind, this is not unprecedented, as none other than Stan Laurel wrote macabre shock endings for such L&H vehicles as Going Bye Bye and The Bullfighters.
That said, Nothing But Trouble, described by Vincent Canby in The New York Times as "a charmless feature-length joke about the world's most elaborate speed trap" is entirely a shock ending from start to finish. In the central role as the hideous 106 year old "hanging judge" of Volkenvania, Aykroyd presides as the ringmaster.
While the film fails in many ways, as an American Gothic piece, it succeeds with flying over-saturated colors, reverb-filled echoes of theremins and imagery a la horror-meister Tod Browning's gruesome films The Devil Doll, Freaks and West Of Zanzibar viewed through a broken funhouse mirror. . . with a musical number by Digital Underground thrown in for good measure.
The not-crazy-about-gory-movies correspondent here is glad the movie was cut from an R to a PG-13, so the violence is not graphic; then it would be not just ultra-creepy but unwatchable. Why the studio released Nothing But Trouble in February 1991, instead of holding it back until October and marketing it as a Halloween movie, nobody knows.
At Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog, we like a rocked-out Halloween as much as anyone.
Like Bo Diddley, Dracula preferred the Gibson Flying V.
We're well aware that only Alice Cooper could confirm that Frankenstein played a Les Paul, Dracula rocked a Flying V - and that the Groucho Marx response to Alice Cooper's show was "this is like vaudeville."
And, yes, the gang at the Psychotronix Film Festival and Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog remain well aware that songwriter/guitarist Roky Erickson of The 13th Floor Elevators and The Explosives may actually have walked with a zombie sometime.
After all, Bobby Boris Pickett didn't just do The Monster Mash, he did the Monster Swim, too.
Of course, the official Screamin' Jay Hawkins response would be that Alice Cooper and Bobby Boris Pickett stole their acts from him!
We finish today's Halloween post with none other than Count Floyd's scary Monster Chiller Horror Theater.
All the Chaney (Sr. and Jr.), Carradine, Tor and Bela-crazed reprobates at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog send our scariest wishes for a Happy Halloween!
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