Last week I
reviewed Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. It stirred up memories from my
childhood when I, like the characters in the book, was hooked on horror movies.
I may have mentioned this before, but I was a bit of a nerd as a kid. One of
the ways this nerdom expressed itself was in the watching of old sci-fi or
horror films. Not the newer ones with blood and gore splashed all over the
screen, but we are talking about the films of the 30’s, 40’s, 50’s, and even
some of the 60’s. Frankenstein, the Wolfman, The Mummy, Godzilla,
the Hammer films, etal.
Every Saturday
night at 11:30, I would watch a broadcast from Portland called Sinister
Cinema. There you would find such classic old movies, along with not-so-classic
movies, some of which were so bad that they were good. The show was hosted by
Victor Ives, with an assist from a character named Ravenscroft who never spoke
but looked like some sort of Igor inspired thing. Also, there was a character
called Head, who was literally a disembodied head that floated around the set
with the kind of special effects that a 1970’s local TV production could
afford. Head did not speak, but he mouthed words, and once or twice I could
almost swear that he mouthed a word that would not be allowed on broadcast TV.
The format of
the show was that they showed two movies and sandwiched in-between the two would be a serial (Sinister Serial). The serial would be one of those
old 15-minute-long episodes of a larger story. They were from the 30’s or 40’s, or 50’s: Flash Gordon, Radar men
from the Moon, Zombies from the Stratosphere (yes, these are real
titles. In fact, Zombies from the Stratosphere featured a very young
Leonard Nimoy. I think he was a pointed-eared alien in that one too).
I watched it
every Saturday night. I usually made it to the serial. To watch the second
feature would mean staying up until about 3:00 AM, and I usually wasn’t up for
that. Victor Ives was fun. He told us trivia about the movies and would make
sarcastic jibes and funny comments about the lower quality offerings. I
remember watching a Japanese Godzilla type film called Invasion of Astro-Monster,
and Vic, reading the cast list rolled his eyes and shook his head as he read “.
. . Nick Adams?”
My viewership of Sinister Cinema lasted
until I discovered a new obsession. In 1975 Saturday Night Live began. Once
I discovered it, that was it for Sinister Cinema, because Saturday
Night Live also started at 11:30 and I was hooked. It seems like Sinister
Cinema went off the air not long after, so I was not the only one. There
were only so many TV viewers watching anything at that hour. My guess is, that
was the nail in the coffin for Sinister Cinema. Also, I was growing up. I
was less enamored with the old horror films (I had seen them all anyway). But
looking back, I still remember fondly those old films, even the bad ones.
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