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Being Welcomed to a Movie
For some, movie watching is an isolated event, especially watching a movie on television. But there is a long tradition of hosts who keep home viewers company along with Bogart and Bacall and Don Knotts.
The first TV host I remember watching as a kid in the San Francisco Bay Area was Pat McCormick hosting KTVU’s Dialing for Dollars. When I was home sick (or faking sick), Pat was a much better option than the afternoon soap operas. Old films were interrupted by commercials and McCormick phoning random people from the phone book asking if they knew the amount of money being given away (starting with $100 and going up into the thousands if no one answering their phones gave the correct amount).
I don’t really remember the movies I watched, but I remember McCormick because he also hosted kids’ shows in the afternoon: Captain Cosmic and the puppet show Charlie and Humprey.
But then KTVU added another movie host with movies I do remember. Saturday night became the night for Creature Features with host Bob Wilkins. Many horror hosts of that time had their hosts take on phony names and creepy personas (such as Sammy Terry in Indianapolis, whose real name was Bob Carter. He attended the same church as my wife Mindy did). Wilkins was just a guy with his own goofy persona, wearing thick glasses and smoking thick cigars.
He would interview horror celebrities (Anne Rice plugged her new book, Interview With a Vampire) and talk about upcoming films (I remember him talking about an upcoming Sci-Fi film, Star Wars, which I had doubts about because the big ape’s costume wasn’t as cool as the apes in Planet of the Apes.)
Usually, my parents wouldn’t let me stay up for Creature Features, but I could watch it when I stayed overnight at Pat Haskins’ house.
I can’t forget the movies Wilkins showed. He had some classics that he praised, such as the Universal Monster films like Frankenstein and The Wolfman, but he also mocked the bad films he showed like The Vulture and Horror at Party Beach. I loved watching the bad as much as the good.
It was some time later that I met my favorite movie host in the newspaper. A syndicated columnist named Joe Bob Briggs claimed to be the nation’s foremost drive-in film critic. He wrote about films that tended to be ignored, such as Street Trash or Basket Case or Humanoids from the Deep. He would rate these films by the number of dead bodies, car crashes, and breasts, but most of the paragraphs of the articles were tales of his red-neck adventures at drive-ins, bars, and football games.
When our Minneapolis apartment cable inexplicably gave us The Move Channel, I was delighted to find that Joe Bob was hosting a weekend late-night movie show, Joe Bob’s Drive-In Theater. It showed action and horror films (which I watched) and sex comedies and soft-core porn (which I skipped) — pretty much the films rural drive-ins showed in the seventies (minus the family films).
We were only in that apartment for a year, so I didn’t regularly see Joe Bob. We tended not to have cable through the years, so I missed Monstervision, the show he hosted on TNT.
But I’ve been watching Joe Bob again on Shudder (the streaming horror channel that’s a subsidiary of AMC) The show’s called The Last Drive-In, and as in the days of ye old Creature Features, there are many bad films (looking at you, Sledge Hammer and Spookies) and some genuinely good films such as Train to Bushan, Heathers, and One Cut of the Dead.
This coming weekend, Mindy and I are going to see Joe Bob Briggs as he hosts movies in person at the Mahoning Drive-In in Lehighton, PA. The first night he’ll be giving a lecture on “How Rednecks Saved Hollywood” followed by what Joe Bob calls the greatest film ever made: Smokey and the Bandit. Over the weekend there will be plenty of films, good and bad, concluding Sunday night with two films that could have played on Creature Features: the Vincent Price classic, House of Wax; and the greatest giant ant film ever made, Them.
Of course, instead of the viewers being home alone, Joe Bob will be hosting hundreds of fans together, proving the truth of Joe Bob’s mantra, “The Drive-In will never die!” And neither will movie hosts, I hope.
Published in Entertainment
I love Joe Bob Briggs! Thanks for the memories.
But you can’t talk about this subject without mentioning Mystery Science Theater 3000.
A nice post. New York had Zacherly as a late night movie host, sort of a politely stoned vampire, and Los Angeles had Vampira, the template for a much better known character, Elvira, 25 years later.
When FX first went on the air, for a while it had an unusual format, basically live hosts all day and evening. They’d (supposedly) watch the show with you and fill in interesting trivia references during the breaks.
Back when the airwaves had the big three networks and maybe a couple UHF stations in a local area (remember them? I remember when the local UHF station Ch.13 offered viewers free special roof antennas to improve their signal), director Stanley Kramer became an afternoon movie host on one of them. He’d retired from Hollywood to the area, and so I guess this was his version of a retirement gig. He’d briefly pop up in breaks during the film as well, to toss viewers a couple more tidbits. He’d start out wth a few comments about the movie, then tell a Hollywood anecdote, or get off on some tangent, and then bring himself back with, “At any rate, . . . “
Fun times.
Epix cable/satellite network has a channel called Epix Drive-In that used to have a lot of those movies, although without a host to talk about them. Sometime over the last few years, it stopped doing that and basically shows pretty much the same movies as the other Epix channels. What a waste.
Much earlier, when I lived in Oregon, a station from Portland had “Sinister Cinema” on Saturday nights, hosted by Victor Ives who apparently used his real name. (His real name being Victor made that easier…) According to wiki it only lasted 3 1/2 years, but when we’re that age, 3 1/2 years can seem like much longer.
One of the regular sponsors was the Ron Tonkin “family” of car dealerships. Including Ron Tonkin Gran Turismo, which sold various imports such as Alfa Romeo and “exotics” including Lamborghini and I think Ferrari. Years after Sinister Cinema was gone, I was in the market for a “sports car” and while I eventually settled on a Triumph TR8 from European-circle-track race driver Monte Shelton’s dealership in Portland, along the way I test-drove an Alfa Romeo GTV6. And none other than Ron Tonkin himself went along for the test drive! So I actually had a chance to thank him in person for sponsoring Sinister Cinema.
Oklahoma City had Count Gregore to introduce the scary stuff:
But nobody can beat Count Floyd!
I think every market in the country had that Dialing for Dollars format. In Cleveland it was on one of the stations I freelanced at and was called The Prize Movie and was hosted by a popular DJ named John Lanigan. If you were truly a movie fan you hated it because they chopped the hell out of every picture they used.
Like so much of TV the format originated on radio in 1939 in Baltimore on WCMB.
Second that; Joe Bob’s great. As for MST3K, I can’t praise it enough. Not just because it’s a Minnesota product, thank you very much, or because it perfectly managed the equation of irony and affection, or because Mike Nelson is a capital fellow, but because it’s one of the most consistently intelligent, goofy, smart, and amusing shows of its time.
I think I watched ten minutes of the reboot and gave up.
Ok…
growing up for me had Sir Graves Ghastley, and the Count Gore De Vol/Captain 20. Great hosts. Educators regarding horror movies that were worth watching. I suppose that the inaccessibility of movies back in the day (no VCR, DVD, cable) made these hosts/presenters interesting. They also contributed to drawing-out a 90- minute movie to more than two hours, but somehow I remember less ads.
MST3K – am I the only contrarian? – is the equivalent of people talking during movies. I can’t stand it.
In Pittsburgh, we had “Chilly Billy” Cardille. He was also the emcee to the local “Studio Wrestling”
In Chicago we had Creature Features. I don’t think there was a regular host.
You are not alone.
I Lived in Palatine from ‘71 to ‘73. I don’t remember a host. I will not forget watching Night of the Living Dead.
Green Bay had “Ned the Dead”. OH NEDDY!
I was fortunate to live one year in Minnesota the year the show started. Caught it just a time or two. But watched MST3K later when it became a bigger deal. Another wonderful thing about the show is it knew midwest culture and church culture and joked about those things with great affection. It never lost Minnesota Nice.
Joe Bob’s Drive-In was a unique, refreshing voice in the otherwise elitist premium cable space back in the 1980’s. Glad he’s still around. Maybe Newsmax or OAN should do a Sunday news program and put Joe Bob up against Chris Wallace.
Recently my favorite TV film host has been Eddie Muller, host of Noir Alley on Turner Classic. His talks are more spirited and invigorating than the beautiful but necessarily downbeat films which follow. With TCM adding younger and younger hosts to their rotation these days, I’m glad they hired this brilliant film scholar now in his early 60’s.
The theme music for “Creature Features” was the theme of Experiment in Terror by Henry Mancini. 1962. Glenn Ford, Lee Remick, Stefani Powers and Ross Martin. Directed by Blake Edwards.
Believe me, those films are so bad that two people having a heated debate about monetary policy in the row behind you would be an improvement.
Reminds me of this behind the scenes interview with Rob Long.
Same. I stuck with MST3K through all the changes over the years, and enjoyed every iteration. But this new one . . . I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was missing, but . . . I felt it in my marrow!
It was always surprising to hear regional references on the show. Jokes about River Falls, or cheese factories in Osceola?
I suppose you don’t watch a movie on MST3K if you haven’t already seen it and really want to study the cinematography or something. But that wasn’t its intent anyway.
I believe at least one of the movies shown on MST3K could actually be described as an “Oscar Winner.”
Was in Arlington Heights next to the racetrack until ’72.
I was watching it while living in DC and they mentioned Perkins’, and I almost wept.
I remember Perkins’ in Arizona too, but no weeping.
When Mike once make a crack about being “on gool,” I knew I had found my people.
Maybe that’s another part of why I liked Joel better. Sub-regional references in a show that was getting nationwide and even worldwide acclaim, doesn’t seem wise.
Bah. We’re tired of hearing about California anyway.