The Creature Feature! Let's say your parents were smoking cigarettes and drinking vodka with their friends in the living room on a Saturday night, maybe listening to a Herb Alpert record, and you were in the back room watching television with a big bowl of barbecue potato chips and some clam dip from Reser's Fine Foods. You're eight years old, and it's just midnight.
There were only four channels back then, so luck played a major part. You changed the channel, and it's the creature feature! All right! Some guy at the local network affiliate would dress as a monster and introduce old scary movies. Where we lived, in the Portland area, it was called "Sinister Cinema." This guy is out of Raleigh, and he's pretty good. He introduces a movie called "Day of the Triffids," which is about these walking plants that looked like asparagus and killed people until they were hosed down with Hollandaise sauce at the end of the movie. Dumb, yes, but full of good scares for a kid alone on a Saturday night, especially one not crazy about vegetables.
3 comments:
Mmmmm, asparagus.
Our horror host was the guy on the Sacramento channel (in Reno, we got him on cable), Bob Wilkins. He would fire up a cigar and rate the film you were about to watch -- most of them were pretty bad.
We had a fake Dracula guy hosting "Sinister Cinema" in Portland. Victor Ives was his name. He wasn't bad, but showed plenty of Grade Z movies.
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