Artwork by George "I-Gor" Chastain. - http://myweb.wvnet.edu/e-gor/tvhorrorhosts/

Well, that was a blast and then some. For those who don’t know what Virginia Creepers is, (and shame on you for not knowing) it happens to be an excellent documentary done not long ago that showcases the Horror Host traditions of The Old Dominion. The film goes back to the now, unfortunately, lost (as in there is little to no footage of them in existence anywhere) horror hosts of the 50’s such as Ghoulda, Ronald and Hazel Witch and runs up through the modern era of with the new ghouls on the block like Dr. Sarcofiguy and Karlos Borloff and the Monster Madhouse crew. Along the way we get to see such horror host institutions like Bowman Body who was even honored with an official resolution from the Virginia General Assembly recognizing and thanking him for his public service and, no joke here, had a sandwich named after him that exists to this day and Count Gore de Vol who has pioneered internet horror hosting. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg as far as how many guys are covered in this film. But, far more importantly, the thing is just fun as hell.

See. to be good at horror hosting for longer than a cup of coffee it has to be something that you enjoy doing. It has to be something you love. Each and every guy and gal ghoul who has made a mark in the field is someone who enjoys it and that vibe comes through in the documentary. Every interview looking back on a career and every fan interview looking back on the host(s) they grew up with is filled with this vibe and it’s captured perfectly by the director. And when the film isn’t focusing on an interview it’s giving you clips from the shows where anything and sometimes everything could and did happen. In the simplest terms; the film is really, really fun.

If you grew up with any of the guys featured in the film then the film is a fantastic walk down memory lane. If any of the guys are new to you then the film is an amazingly informative and incredibly joyous introduction to them.

So, where does Charlottesville come in to play? Well, last weekend I received a nice little Halloween gift in the mail in the form of the limited reproduction of the DVD cover (see above) and the DVD that I had pre-ordered some time ago. Jenn and I watched it and we both enjoyed it. Then, thanks to the wonders of Facebook, we found out that they were having a theatrical screening in Charlottesville as a part of a film festival. Oh, and a nice carrot added to the thing were appearances by long time favorite of mine Count Gore de Vol as well as Dr. Sarcofiguy and Karlos Borloff who are both doing a lot to bring horror hosting to new audiences. I couldn’t resist that. And the drive up was made a much easier thing to do as a family thing since Jenn, her mom and I were already looking at taking Ian up to the apple orchards to pick apples and look at the fall beauty of the foothills that lead into the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Higher, Daddy!

What a view

So, easy fit into the day’s planning. And, man, was it worth it.

After a fantastic morning with my wife, my mother-in-law, my father and I watching Ian run around like a little maniac on a hillside and pick apples like there was no tomorrow we headed into town and made our way to the theater. Shortly after we got there the guys behind the film (Sean Kotz and Chris Valluzzo) showed up. Both guys were great and neither of them threatened me with physical violence for sullying their fine production with my short interview. Shortly after their arrival Gore, Borloff and Sarcofiguy arrived. Of course, I immediately mugged them for autographs.

Dr. Sarcofiguy and I

Karlos Borloff signs his card from the Horror Host series as well as the poster prints for Virginia Creepers and Every Other Day is Halloween.

Count Gore de Vol getting mugged (by me) for autographs

After they recovered from the deranged fan incident we all went in to see the film. If anyone out there reading this has the chance to see this film in a theater and with an audience… Jump at the chance and do it in a heartbeat. The experience of the film, the fun factor at least, is just jacked up tenfold. It’s a real blast to watch this with a group of fellow horror host fans. And, honestly, you don’t need to be a horror host fan going in. Neither my mother-in-law nor my father were real big horror host fans, but the film really had them liking several of the hosts and the art form of horror hosting with a new appreciation of the craft and the performers.

And, on a personal level, the guys were all great. John Dimes (Dr, Sarcofiguy) is really a great guy to chat with, Dick Dyszel (Count Gore de Vol) was as gracious as ever when it came to fans (and nuts like me) and Jerry Moore (Karlos Borloff) was… Wow… That man has more energy and is more animated than just about anyone I know. He also seems to be a really, genuinely great guy.

Beyond just the general banter with a fan; Moore was as outgoing as he could be with everyone, handed out free cards and DVDs and did whatever he could to make everyone there know that he appreciated the fans and the support for Monster Madhouse. He also went out of his way to help my poor, suffering wife.

See, we had a plan at the start of the day. Yeah, planning something and expecting a two year old to go along with it… What fools we parents be. But, still, we had a plan. We figured that running through the orchards, up the mountain, down the mountain and around the trails would wear little Ian out. We thought that Ian, who normally goes down for a nap at around 2 PM, would be zonked and gone by the 2:30 start of the film. Nope. Didn’t happen.

It seems that seeing Gore (who, thanks to Halloween viewing of his Legacy DVD series this year Ian could identify by name and did so loudly several times) kinda hyped him up. That was then followed up by having Borloff play with him for a few minutes. By the time the movie started he was not going down. So Jenn, deciding that I was the big fan of the film and her mom and my dad had never seen it, took Ian outside the theater so as to not have him bother the other paying customers. And then she got a little help. It seems that Moore’s fine singing voice (yes, he does sing, plays rock & roll and has a CD of monster themed music) is aided by his love of a good smoke. So, whenever he went out for a smoke break during the film he made silly faces for Ian and played Ian’s version of hide and seek/peek-a-boo with him. By the end of the movie Ian had decided that Karlos Borloff was the greatest thing since Max and Ruby and Borloff may well be Ian’s new favorite person for the foreseeable future. He really, genuinely seems to be a good guy.

So, yeah, jump at the chance to see the film in a theater if you can. And buy the DVD. And, while you’re at it, swing by all the guys’ sites and support ‘em. You’ll be helping to keep a uniquely American art form alive and, more importantly, you’ll end up enjoying yourself.

Glenn Beck…

Glenn Beck... Idiot

The newest idiot supreme in Conservative talk. I’ve watched the man and you would have to be drunk, high or simply mentally challenged to believe that he makes the least bit of sense.

But, by the power of playing to the lowest common denominator, he has some of the best ratings on Fox News. Seriously, they need to take the word “News” off of their name and go ahead and replace it with “Cult” or “Imbecile Nation” if they want to have truth in advertising.

••

Byrne: However, at the bottom of the page there is a block of copy that indicates I am actively involved with maintaining and editing it — which I am not. I didn’t even know it existed until yesterday.”

Now, the page itself does have a small disclaimer on it, but it’s simply named “John Byrne” and John himself apparently isn’t that thrilled with it. Several of his regular forum members have even stated that they’re “apparently” members of the Facebook page and have now flagged it to Facebook administrators with a notice that the real John Byrne is not happy with this page’s existence.

me, being big enough of a dumbass to think I should be nice to a total stranger, logged into my Facebook account and sent the guy a message. I gave him a link to the John Byrne Forum page where the page was being discussed and mentioned that, given John’s long history with being a major prick over issues like this, he might want to change the name of the page to something like The John Byrne Fan Page” or something along those lines so that John wouldn’t have quite the case of getting his fan page killed that he might with a page just called “John Byrne” and sporting a picture of John where the owner’s photo usually is.

Hey, I figured I would be grateful for the heads up in a situation like that. I figured wrong.

About an hour ago I received this delightfully ignorant and laughably “outraged” response back from one Mr. Erik Black.

Despite you running to teacher rest assured that the JOHN BYRNE FAN PAGE will remain as is.

John Byrne does not control the internet and we as TRUE FANS have the RIGHT to post on facebook and wikipedia ok?

Even if the page is taken down i vow to start a new one as is my right.

This is the USA not communist Russia ok?

Erik
——————–

You’re welcome Erik. I hope John shuts your ass down this and every time you create a page like this on a forum like Facebook and name it with simply the name ”John Byrne” rather than giving it a fan page title.

Ian has gotten into a show about two little pigs. The show is called Toot & Puddle. The only thing that I can ever think when that thing is on is…

Did they name the characters after the two thing their target audience likes to do on purpose or was it just a weird coincidence?

Okay, full disclosure up front. I know someone involved in this. Does that make me biased? Well, only insofar as wanting to see them succeed. But seeing them succeed will not be helped by telling people something is great if it isn’t so, no, I’m not going to say something is good if it isn’t.

Fortunately I don’t have to worry about that here. First though; lets get everyone up to speed on the who, what and where behind the film.

Fistful of Brains is the cinematic child of The Adrenalin Group. They’re a small. independent film group working out of Sanford, NC who, at this point, specialize in the zombie flavor of the horror genre and have already created a small library of DVDs to their credit. Fistful of Brains is their third zombie film and a sort of prequel to their first full length feature The Forever Dead (being an extension of their short film The Second Death.) Their pedigree has some technical credits up to and including director and co-founder Christine Parker’s background as a videographer and schooling in the field of film-making, but the largest of these credits seems to be simply being fans of the genre itself.

But don’t confuse that with the idea of their work simply being that of fans making films. While they’re certainly fans of the genre, their first and foremost roles when working on their films are those of filmmakers. They know what needs to be done to make a film tick. They also understand that the big moments have to be built up to and separated with quieter moments in order to give them impact. Their work is not simply fans stringing together a film with a series of “cool” moments devoid of substance but rather a complete and effective film. Speaking of which… On to the film.

As stated above the film is their second full length zombie film, but on a technical level it shows an incredible amount of growth that makes it appear to be three or four films removed from The Forever Dead. Christine Parker’s directing shows a great deal more focus and polish here. There were moments in their prior two films where some scenes looked as though they were being shot at odd angles or in odd ways for no other reason than to be done in a “different” way. Here, you can actually see where she’s going when she uses an angle or a shot that’s not a “normal” POV shot or a typical setup for a scene. They work and they convey the needed feel of the scene and the story being told. And even when they don’t work it’s not a 100% “huh” moment. You can at least see where she was going with it and still understand the ‘why’ behind it. And, honestly, the few scenes that didn’t work 100% for me may simply be a matter of taste on my part as they’re technically very solid.

The FX in general are much better than you would expect from a film that had a production budget that wouldn’t buy you a brand new car. There’s even a few good uses of split screen that don’t suffer the fun glitches that everyone likes to make fun of. The only real general FX nit that I might have picked is an incredibly small one involving the use of fire in one scene. But then fire in the way they used it is a tricky bit of FX even when you’re working on a Peter Jackson level film so, as I said, it was really only a very small nit. I have been told though that they have some new software to play with in their next film.

Then there’s the zombie makeup itself. Well, there’s no other way to say it. Utter crap. No, I’m kidding. (Guess you figured out who on the film I know now.) The makeup is actually quite good. It’s actually amazingly good considering how much of it was needed to be created VS the time they had, the shooting schedule they had to deal with and, of course, the budget that they were working with. The zombies of the piece show various levels of damage and decay and the gore is perfectly in that zone of horrific yet humorous when needed. You can definitely see where there’s some heavy cribbing from the Tom Savini school of “oh, gross” going on. As far as low budget independent zombies go; it would have been a home run for me if only that one zombie’s jaw didn’t look so odd…

The only other “FX” matter in the film that really sticks out is a constant one and one of personal taste. The final product was treated in a way to give it an odd grain and slight color shift to convey (I’m assuming) that old west feel. It has an ever so slight worn look that stylistically is similar to what Terantino and Rodriguez did with Grindhouse. It sort of worked for me, but I’m not sure if I might not like the film a little better without it. But you have to give them credit for trying it. It could be seen as a risky move by some, but they went with their vision for the film and decided to let the chips fall where they may. That in and of itself is a good sign for their future endeavours in my book.

So, for overall look I’d say the film rates a solid 7 out of 10. No, it’s not Universal’s FX shop, but any fan of Romero, Fulci or early Raimi is going to feel comfortably at home here. Now, enough of being someone who can’t just mercilessly picking on those who do. Lets get to what’s the heart of the film for most people. Lets talk general story. I’m not going to get too detailed since there are things that the viewers get to discover along the way and, frankly, there’s no way to tell the whole story without giving away spoiler points. So…

Again, the leaps and bounds in story quality here VS their prior film makes this feel like a film two or three films removed from The Forever Dead. The basic breakdown of the story is that you have a typical old west huckster, Dead Eye, comes into a tiny, drying up western town to sell his wares. It’s just that his special wares really are a bit more… special… than average. The town itself is filled with characters that play out their own various sub-stories throughout the film that show off the various failings in human nature along with a few of the better points of our nature. Not sure about that preacher though…

The central figure of the town’s cast of colorful characters (and one of the primary characters in the film) is Lily. She’s the daughter of the local sheriff and suffers more than just a little from the fact that daddy has quite a few screws loose. Unfortunately for her the loose screws are the kind that make him violent, paranoid and controlling. It also makes her relationship/not relationship with Jack a wee bit complicated. The dysfunctional nature of their interactions is consistently damaging to their lives throughout the film (and into the next one it appears) and actually works to make the protagonists of the film more interesting than the cookie cutter heroes of some genre films, but also not as defective as the stereotypical “damaged” heroes in most films.

And into this mix we add a mysterious group of people out in the woods who may or may not be behind some unsettling matters that started happening just prior to the film’s starting point and the (obviously) all hell breaking loose moment when the dead decide that maybe laying around in the dirt isn’t as much fun as getting up and looking for a good meal. The nice, and rather ambitious, twist in the story is that they attempted to do something a little bit beyond the usual zombie story setup. Our zombie hoards are the result of something older than the old west itself and the story touches myth territory as the relationship of two of the characters and their conflict with one another goes beyond simple human issues.

The story itself actually unfolds at a nice pace. The first half of the story might feel slow to some, but it’s necessary as the groundwork for everything that comes in the second half is laid out and explained. But, rest assured, once the story starts moving it really does start moving. A lot happens in the second half of the film and it almost feels like too much for the time they gave it. Still, better to have just a little too much than to have too little.

The dialog is well done and has a very natural feel to most of it. There was, for me, only a few weak dialog moments and those were created mostly by the actors having to use an old west style accent. And, again, that may simply be a matter of personal taste as I’ve never been a big western fan. Some of the transition scenes and pillow scenes also work quite effectively. Again, they show that the people behind this film know how to space their action and their scares, and what to space them with, so that when something does happen it has a real impact on the viewer. The big scenes have meaning because they use the small scenes as effectively as they do.

There are a couple of scenes where Parker and crew should have had someone on standby with a wiffle bat to whack a few of the extras upside the head though. There were a couple of times when the action in the foreground wasn’t quite being reflected properly by the extras in the background. They were obviously having fun playing around on the set of a zombie western, but they probably shouldn’t have looked like they were having fun when the zombies were breaking into their refuge. (Hey, if they need an extras wrangler on the next film I work cheap and can supply my own taser.) But, again, it’s a small nit to pick and doesn’t truly detract from the action in the foreground.

Between the scripting, directing and use of effects there are some genuinely creepy moments in the film. There are also some fun moments as well. Lily and Dead Eye (and Lazarus) are played well and that goes a long way since they’re central characters and get a lot of screen time. The rest of the cast does a good job as well and there really wasn’t a bad performance in the group. Quite the contrary actually. Even smaller characters have their moments. I quite liked the barkeep who had a “same shit, different day” attitude, but seemed to look as though he still found it to be depressingly amusing “same shit.”

The music used in the film was actually very good as well. The composer deserves some serious kudos. I actually liked it and I’m not a fan of western music or western flavored music.

On the whole the story (and the execution thereof) is also a solid 7 out of 10. Quite a bit better than your average “independent” horror and actually better than quite a few studio zombie films I’ve seen. Oh, and it doesn’t quite end where you would think it would either. Is that a spoiler? No. Why? Cause you’ll never guess it in a million years. Yes, this is a film worth tracking down and, especially for zombie geeks, owning.

The extras on the DVD are fun as well. Maybe not as fun as (inside joke alert for fans of their work) a dead rabbit playing with cats, but still fun. They also include the grossest scene on the DVD. Blood and puss spurting on film actually didn’t bother me. Blood and puss combined with the sound of whatever hand pump they were using (and failing with for a bit) to push the stuff through the tubes? That actually got me squeamish in a way that the scene itself didn’t come close to doing.

Other extras are the standard expectations for films on DVD these days. There are cast and crew interviews, little making of featurettes and a music video. All in all, a very nice package and very much worth the price of the DVD.

A website with info on the film can be found here:

http://www.fistfulofbrains.com/index.html

Purchase information here:

http://www.fistfulofbrains.com/store.html

And updates on happenings with the film and the sequal film can be found on MySpace here:

http://www.myspace.com/adrenalin_productions

http://www.myspace.com/afewbrainsmore

Again, very much worth the price to pick up and far better than my review likely makes it sound.

25 years… Yeah, that’s about right. It’s been a little over 25 years now that I’ve been maybe geekier than even some of my geek friends. But I say that, I should note, in a proud way.

I turned 13 in 1983 and my parents had recently moved into a small little (and for me, mostly useless) town that was just South of Richmond, VA. Unlike a huge chunk of the surrounding counties and towns, this place was serviced by a relatively small cable provider who, unlike the then giant (Comcast) in the Central Virginia area, carried programming out of Washington, DC. Seemed a bit odd even at the time. Neither channel 5 nor channel 20 were major players on the growing national cable scene. I just assumed that the cable company couldn’t afford bigger channels and kind of mentally wrote them off.

Then one night in late 1983 or early 1984 that changed…

I was always a night person. I always stayed up kinda late. On one of those late nights I was channel surfing for some odd reason. Maybe it was that whatever I normally watched was having an off night or was in rerun. I don’t know, just can’t remember. All I do know is that I surfed across WDCA Channel 20 and into an old b&w horror film that I’d seen before and remembered liking a bit. I put the control box down (calling it a remote control by today’s standards is just a joke) and settled in.

The movie went to commercial and I went after either a snack or a drink. I walked back into my room a couple of minutes later and found… something… on my television that wasn’t the something I had been watching a few minutes earlier. Rather than my bugged eyed monster flick picking back up where the action left off a few minutes earlier I was confronted by some strange looking vampire on a wobbly dungeon set going on about something while a bad church organ’s notes were fading out in the background.

I had no idea what this silliness was. Why were they screwing up my movie? Why were they wasting my time with this?

I was not a happy camper.

And then something… happened. I honestly don’t remember if it was something that made me laugh or some really interesting bit of trivia that he said about the film I was watching that I was previously unaware of, but I suddenly found the guy much less annoying. By the end of the show I even found myself liking the guy.

Next week I didn’t channel surf into the program that I now knew was Creature Feature with Count Gore de Vol. I went straight to channel 20 at the start time listed in the paper’s TV guide and was ready to enjoy another film hosted by the Count. This went on for several weeks before the TV listing was for some odd little film that I had never heard of before. I mean I had flat never heard of it before.

That gave me pause. I didn’t know what it was, most of my friends at school had certainly never mentioned it and it had never played on the good cable channels that aired all the classic horror films. Would I give up SNL for some nothing horror film that nobody had ever heard of and I had no idea if I would like the thing? Yeah, I would. Why? Because the guy hosting the film was easily as much fun as the film (if not more so) and, not that I had realized it yet, I was a fan of Gore de Vol more than I was of Creature Feature’s features.

To be honest, I don’t even remember what it was (more on that concept later) and all I remember about it is not liking it very much at the time. But Gore had me laughing like a fool at each and every break in that forgettable film.

That happened a lot actually. Creature Feature played some great old films in its time, but it also fleshed out its bones with what most sane people would consider some real stinkers. Early on I viewed Gore as the icing on the cake when they were showing some of the great old films from the classic age of horror, but my still developing (but occasionally slow) brain started to realize that this guy was the cake as much as the good films. He was just a pineapple upside down cake to go along with the good films’ rich chocolaty goodness. Even the shows featuring the bad films were cake, they just didn’t have that second serving of chocolate cake.

So, yeah, I was hooked and a loyal fan. And, and this may sound odd at first, I think I had become a bit of a student as well. Gore did something that was pretty damned unique in my (then, admittedly limited) experience with all of the grade g and lower horror films out there that were more often than not made with no budget, no time, no studio support, no quality equipment and, sometimes, no discernible talent behind or in front of the camera. He made them fun. No, he didn’t just make his skits fun and thus his part of the show fun, but he made the bad stuff in the film fun. Whether it was by interviews with people who knew what went on during a film’s creation, trivia that let the viewer at home know what was going on and how that sorta kneecapped what was the final product or whether it was making fun of aspects of the film in a lighthearted and very often loving way he made you understand that some of the bad old films had a charm to them that you weren’t going to see in them if you weren’t willing to look.

This is a guy who loved his job, seemed to love just about all the films that he showed (but not, I’ve now learned, The Beast of Yucca Flats) and could, by it seemed sheer force of will and the amount of joy and fun he was able to convey through that little TV screen to infect the viewer with, make you at least a little bit of a fan to some degree or another of the films he was a fan of. And, in the way he presented and hosted some of the films Creature Feature aired, you really did see the charm in some of the films that you would have otherwise have turned off.

I’d like to think that I would, as a proud horror geek, have gotten there myself. There’s a small DVD store worth of films that I know, love and enjoy now that most sane people would pass up and that’s actually been a good thing in my life. I’ve corresponded with, met and, in many cases, become friends with a lot of people because of conversations started about films like Oasis of the Zombies, The Vampire Happening, Manfish, The Devil Bat, Son of Ingagi, The Brain that Wouldn’t Die and other films that have titles that simply cause confused looks on most people when mentioned. And, interestingly, the people who I’ve met and become friends with don’t fit the negative stereotype of the type of “geek” that most people hold in their minds. They’ve come from all walks of life, they’ve all had their own interesting and different life paths and they’ve all been people that have enriched my life in some way or another.

So, as I said, I’d like to think that I would have gotten there myself. But I didn’t have to. I had Gore de Vol leading the way and showing me what fun these “bad” films often really were. And along the way he kept me constantly entertained. His show was filled with a parade of colorful characters, interesting trivia, enlightening interviews and the occasional Penthouse Pet. It was, in many cases then unknown to my 13, 14 and 15 year old mind, also crammed with more innuendo than you could believe could be packed into such small segments. All I knew at the time was I was always enjoying myself when Creature Feature was on. I was a full blown addict and anyone wanting to suggest a 12 Step program could go to hell.

And it seemed that I wasn’t the only one. Gore ran contests and promotions on his show that seemed to get huge responses from the DC area people and his Halloween bashes, giant parties held at huge locations around DC, seemed to draw huge crowds every time out of the gate. Man I wanted to go to those so badly that I was almost a brat about it. Never did though. Funny story about that later. But it’s safe to say that I was ready to go well into my late teens as a rabid fan and would be getting to those bashes on my own as soon as I could drive a car. Likely with or without a legal driver’s license…

And then they did it. My parents moved just after the start of school in 1986 and I was now without a cable provider that carried WDCA Channel 20. I went insane. I was a one teen letter writing campaign and bombed the local Comcast office with letters and calls. They had to pick up WDCA Channel 20. They just had to. There was no discussion in the matter. Somehow, unfathomably, they were unmoved by someone insisting that they had to get a TV channel on their lineup so that some really annoying kid could watch Creature Feature with Count Gore de Vol every Saturday night. Yeah, I can’t understand it either.

So, sadly for me, my association with the good Count had been finally and fatally severed by the financial needs of my parents and the unreasonable bean counting of the Comcast suits. Time to move on.

Didn’t quite work that way though. Elvira was well on her way to national fame and lots of people I met who liked cheesy sci-fi and horror were well acquainted with Commander USA from the USA Channel or Joe Bob Briggs and his Drive-In Theater on The Movie Channel. People were talking about these hosts around the lunch table at school and I, of course, was there to say, “Yeah, but there’s this guy in DC who just blows them all away.”

And not only did I talk about him, but I swiped from him as well. That comment way up above about “more on that concept later” is about to get latered. As time went by, in between talking about my favorite horror host and outright stealing his gags when talking about films, I hit a point where I actually remembered more about Gore from the shows than I did some of the films. Hell, there were actually things that I remembered for years while being completely unable to tell you what film was on when Gore was doing his bit.

If there was any doubt about it before it was now dispelled. I was a fan of Count Gore de Vol over and above many of the movies he hosted. If you gave me the option of seeing a film uncut and uninterrupted VS seeing the same film cut, edited and hosted by Gore… “Good evening and welcome to creature Feature…”

Fast forward well over ten years. Hell, fast forward somewhere around fifteen years really. I’m having my at least twice a year discussion with someone about how much fun this guy in DC was while the general topic is cheesy horror films and, as a shortcut to explaining, hit the Google. As the net grew and more and more people got on the information superhighway you could be rest assured that someone someplace was putting just about everything somewhere on the web. I’d actually been lucky before and hit on some good pictures and even some video. Well, this one time something interesting popped up in the Google search. There was actually a site out there getting enough hits to be on the first page of the search called countgore.com. I clicked on the link and expected to find a really nice but kinda small fan site. What I found was Count Gore himself.

It seems that through countless new owners and the changing times where bean counters where becoming program directors rather than people who knew how to program a local station the good Count had gotten a fairly large stake through the heart only a year or so after I lost Channel 20. The new owners of the station decided that local programming was just so much nonsense and a waste of money. Hey, why be local, unique and supported in the community when you can be the same as 50,000 other stations across the country?

But, in classic b-movie vampire tradition, Gore went to ground, regained enough strength to crank that big ol’ toothpick out of his chest and returned with a vengeance. In 1998, he became the web’s first weekly horror host and he’s coming up on his 11th anniversary of the program as you read this now. (Well, unless you’re reading this some time far removed from June 29, 2009.)

And he has been a very busy little undead body it seems. Getting into everything he’s done for the horror host community and its fans would at least triple the length of this post. You can get the 411 by looking up his site or checking out the great doc (now on DVD) called American Scary. But it’s safe to say that Gore is as entertaining as ever and has been doing things that have allowed newer hosts like Karlos Borloff and Dr. Sarcofiguy to be introduced to new and old fans alike.

And the man gives his old fans the opportunity to get a great nostalgia kick. He owns all of the Gore de Vol material so any film that is in public domain that he still has the bits he did for the aired shows he can put together into a DVD that is, in pretty much most respects, the original show as it aired minus those things that break up the fun by trying to get you to buy something else that you really don’t need. And thanks to those DVDs and others I, or rather my parents, scared the snot outa my wife.

About two years ago now my wife and I had our first child. To say I was stressed and freaked would be understating it in a major way. At one point I think I actually stressed myself into a worse condition than what my wife was in right after the birth. So she looked at me, told me that we had some extra money that she wouldn’t hold against me spending on something that I might enjoy or might want to do and that I should go ahead and just do something for myself. Low and behold, Gore was having a sale on his website. For what was really a steal by any standards he was selling off 8 DVDs (16 shows) of the web program, 4 shows from the classic WDCA days, 4 DVDs known as the Legacy Series that are basically Gore’s best bits, an autographed glossy, a t-shirt (the one I’m wearing above) with the show’s old logo on it and a replica of the old Channel 20 Gore fan club card for what was really a nice price.

With everything else that had been going on I passed up on his DVDs before, but with my wife’s blessing I grabbed this fan pack in a heartbeat. Glad I did too. The web program discs are no longer being sold. There is a 5th classic program though and I did make sure that it was on my Christmas list last year.

Long story short (too late) they arrived and my wife and mother-in-law discovered that my wife was actually stuck being wed to a giddy 13 year old boy. I did a Creature Feature bender that would have driven most sane people stuck around me at that time to thoughts of my murder at their hands. But I was happy.

(Funny story alert from above coming in now.) I started with the Legacy series. Again, the movies may be good, but I figured out a long time ago that I was a fan of Count Gore’s more than some of the creatures he featured. Little did I know the effect that would have on my wife.

My parents, now with their first and only grandchild to coo over, were just about daily visitors at that time. They were over while I was playing the Legacy DVDs one day and the topic on the disc at that moment was the big Halloween bashes that Gore threw. I jokingly jerked my thumb in the direction of the TV and reminded my mom and dad that it was still the great tragedy in my life that they wouldn’t drive all those hours from just South of the Richmond area to DC just so that I could be there in person.

My father rolled his eyes and went on to tell my wife that they’d been hearing about this thing, this complaint about how they let me down so horribly by not taking me to some DC party to see some guy who dressed up funny and showed bad movies, for 25 years. 25 years he emphasized. Several times. And with great aggravation (jokingly) coating his voice. Yeah, my wife knew she had wed a nut for sure by that point.

Fast forward just shy of two years. I get an update email from Gore’s site about some little doc being screened at the AFI Theater in Silver Springs, Maryland on the 27th of June. The subject of the doc was one Dick Dyszel and his long career as Washington, DC’s Bozo the Clown, Captain 20 and, most important of all to me, Count Gore de Vol. The tickets were $10.00 a pop and, on top of the movie, there would be a chance to chat with the man of the hour and see some memorabilia from good old days of DC’s then locally programmed Channel 20.

My wife took one look at it and said “NO” in a very firm voice that made it clear that no argument would be allowed on the matter.

“No,” she said’ “I am not putting up with 25 plus years of you complaining about that like you did with your parents. Buy the tickets right now and we’ll stay the weekend with my sister up there. But I plan to be married to you for at least 25 years and I am not putting up with 25 years of complaining about not getting to go and see Gore de Vol in person and how it was all my fault like you’ve done to your parents since you were a teenager.”

So, despite a bout with poison ivy (that actually worked in my favor) early in the week and more road construction than I thought you could drive through in one trip that short, I found myself here on the evening of the 27th.

Artwork by George "I-Gor" Chastain. - http://myweb.wvnet.edu/e-gor/tvhorrorhosts/

Great film. Great, great film. As much as I loved American Scary I found this one to be better by far in every way. I don’t know if that’s just because it was so much better or because I have been a fan of the subject of the film for so long, but it was just a great way to spend the evening in a theater and, from what was said, will be an even better filled out DVD later this year. Even the “poor” wives and friends that we of the Gore fandom dragged to the show were laughing out loud and loving it. Plus the Q&A was great (did learn something a bit odd and very funny about my favorite Forrest J. Ackerman interview) and I finally got to thank the man for how much entertainment and joy he’s given me for all these years. So, yeah, 25 years is way to long too wait for some things, but it was worth it.

However, thanks to dinner after the show I’m now committed to taking my wife to several dinners each year at the Tastee Diner in Silver Springs. It seems it’s the first really good “diner” food she’s found since leaving the Jersey zone.

http://www.tasteediner.com

The things my wife makes me suffer through…

“EVERY OTHER DAY IS HALLOWEEN”
Has World Premiere at AFI Silver Theatre

Saturday, June 27, 2009 at 8:20 p.m.

Silver Spring, Maryland, May 19, 2009—The Spooky Movie Film Festival is proud to announce the world premiere screening of C.W. Prather’s new documentary, EVERY OTHER DAY IS HALLOWEEN, Saturday, June 27, at 8:20 p.m. at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center in Silver Spring, MD. 

This comedic documentary chronicles the career and legacy of Dick Dyszel, whose television alter-egos, “Count Gore De Vol,” “Captain 20” and “Bozo the Clown” helped raise generations of Washingtonians in the 1970s and 1980s (almost a half-million “Channel 20 Club Cards” were distributed during this time). But it was in the 1990s that Dick helped revolutionized the concept of entertainment-on-demand when he launched the first-ever streaming horror host show, “Creature Feature: The Weekly Web Program,”—predating Hulu, YouTube, and the iPod by years—which opened him up to the world.

“A nostalgic ode that makes you wish you had
your own Gore De Vol on your own TV!” 
-  BadLit.com

 More Here: 

http://everyotherdayishalloween.wordpress.com/2009/05/19/official-press-release-on-world-premiere-screening/#comments

 The fine people in in charge of making signs for the state of Massachusetts really need to learn how to spell. It seems that the signs in Webster, MA directing people to one of their more famous lakes have been guilty of a glaringly obvious spelling error for the last few decades and only just discovered by the Worcester Telegram & Gazette a few years ago. 

http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_3291913.html

The following message appeared on the Monsters HD website this weekend:

MONSTERS HD – BORN: OCTOBER 2003 – DIED: JANUARY 2009
“TV’s first and longest-running hi-def horror and creature feature channel will cease operations and mad experiments this month. Thanks for all the screams and support over the years. Fear not – monsters never die…they always come back! Pleasant dreams fiends.”

Kung-Fu HD and a number of other Voom Network channels also passed away into the digital night with it.

Sucks to be a geek right now.

See more(ish) here.

http://www.monstershd.com/

http://fangoria.com/home/news/17-television/1075-monsters-hd-has-passed-away.html