Elvira’s Movie Macabre: Blue Sunshine/Monstroid

Episodes 80/94

USA, 1983/84

Director: Larry Thomas

Writers: Cassandra Peterson, Larry Thomas

Starring: Cassandra Peterson

Genre: Horror, Comedy, Television

Running Time: 200 minutes

Distributor: Shout! Factory

Website: Buy it here

Watching a bad movie by yourself is not an ideal situation. There’s no one to appreciate your snide comments or keep you awake, so it’s a little weird when your girlfriend comes home to find you muttering to yourself in a semi-conscious state halfway through The Phantom Creeps. Thankfully, Shout! Factory has made select episodes of horror hostess Elvira’s old Movie Macabre TV show available, in case the hankering to waste your life watching for boom mikes in crap B-movies strikes you while your one friend is at work. So while your girlfriend might be no more pleased to find you muttering to a vamped-up Type O Negative groupie during the commercial breaks of a early-eighties broadcast of horror film Monstroid, you can at least pretend that you’re being social. This two-DVD set features episodes 80 and 94, Blue Sunshine and Monstroid, films so good and bad, respectively, that they even out to an exactly average set, balancing perfectly on a fulcrum point of quality. Cassandra Peterson’s Elvira character is a deliberately bubble-headed goth, a black magic Barbie, and while that limits the jokes she makes to the sort of thing you’d hear in a Malibu mall, it’s a consistent theme that makes the films all the more enjoyable. Both films are presented in their entirety, and with Elvira's interruptions.

Blue Sunshine

USA, 1976

Director: Jeff Lieberman

Writer: Jeff Lieberman

Cast: Zalman King, Deborah Winters, Mark Goddard, Robert Walden

Producers: George Manasee

Genre: Thriller

Running Time: 89 minutes

For some bizarre reason, Elvira seems to have accidentally picked a good movie to feature. She doesn’t let that particular curve ball throw her out of character, however, and treats Jeff Lieberman’s bizarre cult-thriller with the same disdain Paris Hilton would feel for an issue of Green Lantern, using only slightly more advanced vocabulary. Blue Sunshine stars future soft-core porn pioneer Zalman King as a young man falsely accused of murder after a friend loses giant clumps of hair and then sets three women on fire. While trying to prove his innocence, he discovers that a form of LSD sold at Stanford University 10 years ago is causing distressingly clumpy hair loss. It’s unclear whether the acid is also causing the insanity, or if merely imagining one’s life looking like a cross between Jason Voorhees and a vulture brings on a psychotic break. I hope it’s the acid that’s killing people, because that will eventually weed out those segments of the population who support jam bands, and hopefully eliminate those candy-flipping ravers who throw up on the subway coming back from outdoor electronic concerts in the summer.

Blue Sunshine was made in New York, so the performances are universally excellent, which is a hallmark of independent films made in that city. Zalman King, who went on to direct a thousand The Red Shoe Diaries films, was apparently a fine actor before becoming convinced that Last Tango In Paris is the only film that matters, though he looks a lot like a scarecrow wearing Sean Penn’s skin and comes from the Al Pacino school of yell-acting. Elvira seems to be less irritated with this film that with others she’s hosted, though she’s still keen to point out continuity errors, and engages in an amusing skit in which she performs for a hippie audience.

Monstroid

USA, 1979

Director: Kenneth Halford, Herbert L. Strock (uncredited)

Writer: Kenneth Halford, Walter Roeber Schmidt, Garland Scott, Herbert L. Strock

Producers: Kenneth Hartford, Garland Scott

Cast: James Mitchum, John Carradine, Anthony Eisley, Stella Calle

Genre: Horror

Running Time: 98 minutes

The other film in this set also has a surprising number of competent performances, but the film itself is so ridiculous even that can’t help to save it. And not only is it stupid, it’s also colossally boring, like having a conversation about tires with a guy who flunked high school. Monstroid, which for some reason is titled Monster in the credits and most posters, is about a lake monster terrorizing a local village and slowing down production in an American-owned cement plant. Well, perhaps “terrorizing” is too strong of a word. Granted, these people live near a cement plant, which couldn’t be more soul-crushingly boring if it were manufacturing the parts of slide-rules that don’t have numbers, so they might be easily startled. But the monster doesn’t really do much until about halfway through the movie, when it eats a couple of fishermen so drunk they forget to speak Spanish, and when it finally shows itself towards the end, it looks like Fin Fang Foom with a moustache. The film stars legendary B-movie actor John Carradine, who somehow looks even more tired than usual, going through the paces as only a man trying to earn enough to pay his phone bill can. What's perhaps most notable about this film is that the burst of profanity from the factory owner proves that these releases are uncensored, despite Elvira's tame humor. Speaking of her asides, they're inspired as always, and her skits feature recurring character the Breather, an unpleasantly oily fellow who makes PG versions of obscene phone calls, and a fake interview segment featuring clips from the film.

Rating: 8 on 10

alkratina@comicbookbin.com