Cinema Wasteland Report Part 2: Horror Hosts

Yes, Ohioans (Ohioites? Ummm… people from Ohio) seem to be swimming in horror hosts, and most were in attendance at Cinema Wasteland with videos to sell. Personally, I spoke with Son of Ghoul, Dr. Shock, Butch Cleaver, and all the way from California, Doktor Goulfinger. There were others there as well, including Dr. Mor B.S. and A. Ghastly Ghoul. Most of these guys present movies from the public domain on broadcast television. (An exception is Dr. Shock, who now hosts After Shock direct to video products.) Talking to any of these hosts is a surreal experience, because they all appear in costume. This usually consists of weird glasses, fake moustaches and/or beards, and funky wigs.

Son of Ghoul

I picked up a DVD from Son of Ghoul, who sports a top hat and dark shades, moustache, & goatee. The video turned out to be rather hokey, but charming. It was the Xmas edition of his show, featuring holiday themed PD cartoons with jokey intros and skits. Reminds me of some of the goofing around I’ve seen on public access in Rochester. Anyway, SOG has been doing the host thing in north-eastern Ohio for more than 17 years. Check out an interview with him at UtterTrash.net.

Doktor Goulfinger

Doktor Goulfinger, who made the journey from Berkeley, has a more hippie appeal. He wears the wireframe 3-D glasses and a wild 60s print shirt and fiddles with a cigarette in a long holder. His show is apparently not just horror, but showcases all sorts of weirdness. We talked about hosts like John Stanley, author of the Creature Feature books. Goulfinger’s knowledge of horror hosts is extensive, and he told me about a documentary he’s involved with that, when completed, will cover the whole horror host phenomenon. Check out the progress at AmericanScary.com.

Meet Cleaver Theatre

I enjoyed meeting Butch R. Cleaver, but I couldn’t figure out how to relate to his sidekick, a rat puppet who kept interrupting our conversation. I persevered, however, and walked away with several freebies. “Aren’t you SELLING anything?” I asked after Butch gave me two demos from Ophelia’s Frenzy (a musical group) and a DVD of the Cleaver show. I returned the gesture by passing on a DVD of my own work.

The Meet Cleaver Theatre disc turned out to have better production value than the Son of Ghoul show. It starts out with a great schlocky pop culture intro full of TV/movie/music clips and static. The effect is that you’re receiving some sort of forbidden transmission from the past, or perhaps another dimension. In fact, according to the Meet Cleaver press materials, Butch’s broadcasts came as a result of opening a “rip in the space-time continuum.” So there you go.

Butch is then shown walking through the halls of a strange industrial building, set to sad late nite music. Butch wears a grey wig, large framed 3-D glasses, and sucks on a pipe. He and his rat sidekick introduce a public domain movie (PD product is the bread and butter of these sorts of shows) from behind a counter, a la Mystery Science Theatre 3000. Their material isn’t especially riveting or hysterically funny, but it’s comforting and classy. Much better sound and production value than other shows produced on the cheap.

The dull movie, “The Brain Machine,” plays with occasional interstitials by man and rat. But that’s not all — the folks at MCT have added a sort of “Pop Up Video” element to the experience. Footnotes appear on the screen from time to time to fill us in on movie trivia. A cool approach.

Related to the Meet Cleaver show, if only by proximity, were the Ophelia’s Frenzy discs. The first was a short CD of scary ambient music, the kind I enjoy immensely.

The second promo was a DVD of Carnival of Souls Redux. Now this is a great idea. The musician/band (is it one person or many?) has taken the classic 1962 film and remixed it with their own music. The results feel more like a freaky music video than a coherent movie, but I dug it a lot. I was already a fan of the movie, which feels like a Twilight Zone episode and was undoubtedly an influence on George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. The fact that it’s in the public domain makes it great material to be reworked like this. I’d like to see more musicians try this. (Actually, I’ve been in contact recently with a fellow named Mars, who has done a new soundtrack to the 1922 Nosferatu.)

The one major drawback of Carnival of Souls Redux: worst compression ever. Digital artifacting really detracts from the experience. If I hadn’t seen the movie before, it would have turned me right off.

Dr. Shock

Dr. Shock adopts a wild wig, x-ray glasses, labcoat, and that shiny doctor forehead thing for his schtick. His antics are used as glue to hold together compilations of After Shock shorts (see my run-down of shorts in part one of this report). He’s got an infectious enthusiasm and pretty good banter to back it up. I spoke with his production partner, Lance Otto Smith, about the DVD market and distributors. They’ve got several plans going, with discs released through Brain Damage Films, a U.K. company, and others. I found these guys interesting, as they’re good at what they do, plus I’ve read favorable reviews of their Tales of Terror disc in the past. I went ahead and purchased said disc, and I’ll be reviewing it here in the near future.

For more about these and other purveyors of cheesy TV, visit the Horror Host Underground.