I have the worst luck. Tonight is the big debut of Elvira’s updated Movie Macabre. I checked her website and saw where it would be on in my area and I have spent considerable time searching my cable guide and have come to the conclusion that Time Warner is not carrying that station on my package. Denied! Oh the pain! Oh the agony! Oh the humanity! This is going to be the worst Halloween ever!
As usual I am behind the times when it comes to news. I just recently learned that Elvira, Mistress of the Dark is bringing back Movie Macabre later this month. It is tentatively scheduled to air on the THIS Network cable channel and in regular syndication on September 25th with the first film being Night of the Living Dead, so check your local listings. I remember watching her in first run syndication back when I was in college where she showed some of the strangest horror films ever made, the incomprehensible Devil’s Wedding Night stands out in my memory (I watched the epsode on DVD a few years ago and the film still makes little sense but Elvira’s one liners more than made up for that, her similarly dressed Grammy was a hoot). Having seen a recent picture of her I am amazed, though in her late fifties, she’s like Lynda Carter or Elizabeth Sladen, she appears ageless. Living in Ohio, the Horror Host capital of the country (Ghoulardi, The Ghoul, The Son of Ghoul, Hoolihan and Big Chuck, Big Chuck and Lil’ John, Superhost, Fritz the Nite Owl, Frank and Drac, Dr. Shock, A. Ghastly Ghoul, Dr. Creep, and Dr. Mor B.S. just to name a few from the past and present) horror movie hosting is part of our state’s TV viewing history, it’s just in the blood to stay up late and watch a campy host show scary movies (heck even my parents watched Hoolihan and Big Chuck when I was a kid, and they don’t even like scary movies) so I’m looking extremely forward to the new Movie Macabre, it’ll be like seeing an old friend come home for a visit.
Saw the funniest movie on NetFlix this past weekend, Black Dynamite. When I first saw the trailer on The Defendor DVD I thought it was a fake trailer like Machete was in Grind House. But just like Machete eventually became, Black Dynamite is a real film. A perfect spoof of a 70’s Blaxploitation, and much funnier than most of the spoofs that have come out in the past few years like Epic Movie and Here Come the Spartans, mostly because instead of making fun of one specific movie while tossing in references to other films out at the moment, Black Dynamite spoofs the cliches of the genre while everyone in the film plays it perfectly straight.
Set in the ’70’s the plot involves Black Dynamite, a Viet Nam vet, ex- CIA operative, who is now his own man, taking to the streets when his younger brother is killed by The Man. Teaming up with his old pals Bullhorn and Cream Corn as well as a foxy militant leader/ orphanage manager, he sets out to clean up the streets of heroin that is being targeted at orphans. But that turns out to be a smoke screen for the real conspiracy of a chemical inserted into malt liquor that causes a very important part of the male anatomy to shrink. The trail leads from the CIA, to Dynamite’s old ach enemy The Fiendish Dr. Wu on Kung Fu Island, and then eventually to a kung fu battle royal with the real villain of the piece, President Richard M. Nixon(!)
Along the way the jokes fly fast and furious, from Tommy Davidson as Cream Corn explaining his name (”cause I’m so smooth”), reusing the same car crash footage for two different chase scenes, a walk through the cleaned up streets that have somehow morphed from an inner city ghetto to a tree lined, ranch house filled suburban neighborhood, to a detailed explanation of the conspiracy through a convoluted name association that starts with waffles then goes through most of the gods in Greek mythology an ends with Little Richard, the film just gets funnier as it goes along mostly due to the cast playing it so seriously. Taking cues from Adam West, the sillier dialog, the more gravity the actors give the lines. Though nothing tops Richard Nixon jumping up with a pair of nun chuks and screaming “Eat this Mother F*****!” Makes me giggle just thinking of the image.
And now they are coming out with an animated series on Cartoon Network. I can dig it.
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