Blogorium "Classic": Mmm, Delicious Thursdays -er, Fridays...

Sorry, gang, but the Cap'n was hit with some sudden extra school related work. Back tomorrow, if you're lucky. In the meantime, here's one from the vaults that ended up being a longer paper I may share some time.

Thursdays Fridays are for eating Hu-mans. It is also a time to celebrate films where monsters are created through a basic misunderstanding of radiation.

If we are to believe Hollywood (and why shouldn't we?), any time an atomic bomb is tested, the resulting irradiated area will be teeming with Giant Monsters that were once harmless insects, animals, even hu-mans. Look no further than movies like Them! (giant ants), Tarantula (tarantula), Attack of the 50 ft Woman (woman), and The Amazing Colossal Man (Glenn Lagan). Radiation can be blamed for elephantitis of the everything. It also makes people, ants, and tarantulas suddenly very interested in killing and wreaking havoc for no apparent reason. Then again, if you had been turned into a giant whatever-it-is-you-are, maybe you too would grow angry and destroy Las Vegas.

When it isn't creating Giant Monsters, radiation can also turn you into a race of super-powered mutants, like in Alexander Aja's remake of The Hills Have Eyes. Instead of being semi-retarded inbred mutants like in Wes Craven's version, Aja makes the "family" descendants of semi-retarded miners who decided not to leave "the hills" during A-bomb testing. While some of them show no mutation whatsoever and at least one of them turns into a big headed, wheelchair bound superfreak, the rest of the mutants gain Super-Hu-man Strength and stealth. They then use these radioactive super powers to capture and eat people. Even the dude with the permanently broken neck is pretty diesel. The kid in the wheelchair kind of makes sense, but radiation only turns you into a super hero if you're some nerdy teenager.

Also, we all know that radiation wakes up Godzilla. Godzilla is allergic to radiation, so every time you drop a bomb in the ocean of near Monster Island, it's like blowing a big kitten and ragweed dust bunny in the face of all Monsters. Can you blame them for destroying your stupid city, Tokyo?

Finally, we have radiation to blame for Gort. Gort would not be menacing the Earth's peoples but for our desire for Mutually Assured Destruction. Well, and the fact that we shot Klaatu. That was a dick move. I think Gort helped create Skynet while Klaatu was cavorting around with little Billy and the Professor. In a stroke of ironic irony, the Terminator (Arnold Class) is given an H-Bomb Fuel Cell, and Skynet uses all of our Nuclear Weaponry against us. Very clever, Gort. And we thought all you had was super strength and a laser eye.

As you can see, radiation is rarely used to vaporize millions of people instantly or power England, and it is only occasionally used to rebuild a Silicon-Based Alien Overlord from 150 Million Years Ago (see: Doctor Who: The Hand of Fear). Radiation is instead given ridiculous properties which have no doubt spurred many copycat deaths from irradiated spider-bites, Gamma Ray overexposure, and Giant Ant Attacks. When will Hollywood learn that in order to truly cripple the nuclear energy industry, all they have to do is make movies like The China Syndrome and release them right before a power plant goes critical?

I mean, seriously.

We now return to the previously scheduled Hu-man eating, already in progress.

More USA Up All Night (the great conundrum)

I'm going to take a shot in the dark and guess the reason USA's Up All Night is the numero uno way that people find this blogorium has something to do with the hopes it will someday be on dvd. Alas, unlike The State, there doesn't appear to be any plans of bringing this basic cable cult classic to the digital versatility disc world.

This is a shame, because it's not as though having something like an "Up All Night" collection would detract from the film experience. Similar dvds exist for Elvira: usually a double feature that with "breaks" that you can toggle on and off. There isn't exactly a "Monstervision" series but Joe Bob Briggs did put out a few discs (like Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter) where he filmed and introduction and an optional commentary.

What we really want - and I admit, I'm guessing on your behalf, one time visitors - is something with the host segments. The one thing that keeps me from having a USA Up All Night marathon isn't the creeping terror of watching Silk Stalkings again, but not being able to have the appropriate Rhonda Shear / Gilbert Gottfreid clips to punctuate the movies. For me, the ingredients are pretty basic:

- one awful comedy from the 1980s or early 90s
- one reasonably bad horror / sci-fi film from the 1980s
- the host segments
- one episode of Silk Stalkings
- one episode of Tales from the Darkside
- one episode of Monsters

This replicates the experience of sleeping downstairs in front of the tv and watching USA's late night programming. I have (sadly) many of the movies shown on UP All Night, including ones I wouldn't know existed otherwise (I'm looking at you, Killer Klowns from Outer Space), and Tales from the Darkside is making its way to dvd. Silk Stalkings is, um, available now but I can't say I'm in any hurry. It's more of a formality to bridge the movies with the anthology shows.

As you've already noticed if you read my other Up All Night piece, clips are available on Youtube, but in a catch-as-catch-can way that doesn't allow for placing them strategically throughout a film. Like many of you, I've also looked around the internet and not found much regarding Up All Night, something I consider to be a link in the chain between "Horror Hosts" and that show on FX that plays dvd extras during commercial breaks*.

What would be fun, since dvd versions of Up All Night seem very unlikely, is if USA put together an On Demand service for their older shows**, as they do right now for more recent programming. I sincerely doubt that movies like Neon Maniacs and Rock n Roll High School Forever are getting more expensive to upload in their Up All Night format, so maybe we should give USA a gentle nudge in that direction.

Unless you folks dropping in know something that I don't, like a "keep circulating the tapes" version of Up All Night... is there one? Is there???

Alas, until that day my only hope of an Up All Night Marathon in the meantime is to cobble on together with what's availble and edit it onto a VHS. Or travel back in time and tape them all! Yeah, that's the ticket! Let me nuke up the Delorean and get right on that! I'll see you all in the past with hours and hours of Up All Night.



* Which is nowhere near as entertaining.
** They might actually do this, I don't have digital cable or satellite.