A VAULT RERUN-A JAW-DROPPING TIME WARP BACK TO THE SEVENTIES: THE 1976 ABC PAUL LYNDE HALLOWEEN SPECIAL

I can't believe I wrote this six years ago. How time flies...

Yesterday I got my hands on what amounts to a wrenching time warp gene-spliced with a memory-jogging roundhouse kick in the skull, and that item is a DVD of the 1976 Paul Lynde Halloween Special.

Holy fuckin’ Jesus…

If you are of an age that recalls the truly out-of-control excesses of the 1970’s occurring right around the time that you were either waging battles with rudely autonomous public hardons or your crotch hemorrhaging on a monthly basis while your nascent jubblies were first making themselves known, then you no doubt remember the loopy television of that era, television that reflected the “who gives a fuck?” vitality of that cocaine-fueled decade; TV fluff that literally was an opiate for the masses, granting us adolescents refuge from the steadily escalating rigmarole of leaving childhood behind. It seemed that after the cookie cutter, antiseptic fare of the 1950’s and the increasingly bizarre offerings of the 1960’s — to say nothing of the social upheavals that shook the US in both of those decades — network execs had an anything-goes attitude and approach to programming, no doubt spawned by massive consumption of booze and illicit recreational pharmaceuticals, and a veritable avalanche of cheese cornucopiaed its way out of our cathode ray altars.

The networks latched on to whatever was the current fad — disco (original flavor and the roller variety), CB radios and truckers, the kung fu boom, nostalgia for “the good old days,” sci-fi that was more action-oriented than cerebral, hot chicks with feathered hair and nipples as hard as your thumb — and quickly spewed it forth in a diluted fashion onto the airwaves. And then there were the “celebrities” who appeared on virtually every show under the sun, stars like Charo, Dick Gautier (remember him?), Charles Nelson Reilly, Ruth Buzzi, Joey Heatherton, Rich Little, John Byner, and the cultural criminals responsible for subjecting us to mime in primetime, Shields and Yarnell. The list is just as endless as it is riddled with mediocrity.

And the grand poobah of showing up on TV specials and guest starring all over the whole of creation was everyone’s favorite vicious alcoholic queen, the incomparable Paul Lynde.

Legendary throughout Hollywood for his downright sadistic wit and rampaging homosexuality (that was not, technically speaking, public knowledge but was as obvious as the dick on a bull elephant), Lynde gained a name for himself first as a stage actor and standup comedian, achieved TV immortality as the irrepressible and flaming Uncle Arthur on “Bewitched,” and reigned supreme as the resident snarkmeister on “The Hollywood Squares,” a show that he would tape after sucking down copious amounts of booze. It was widely agreed upon that Lynde was already a sharp-tongued S.O.B., but when he had a few drinks in him he became Josef Mengele (according to latter day raging Hollywood queen and bear, Bruce Villanch, who incidentally co-wrote the Halloween special), and nowhere was that more apparent than on “Squares,” a long-running gig that made Lynde rich and introduced us impressionable youngsters to rude, raunchy and hilarious gay humor that went as far as Lynde could get away with for the time; even today some of his quips would never have gotten past the watchdogs at Network Standards and Practices, especially after Janet Jackson so kindly treated us to an unwanted glimpse of her right dairy during an annual festival of man-on-man brutality and ads for Viagra and beer and the networks went into an Islamic-jihad-like frenzy of shielding the public from “indecent” material.

Needless to say, Lynde was extremely popular and, never too slow on the uptake when it came to potential ratings, the networks milked his catty groove for all it was worth and shoehorned him into any available showcase, no matter how ill-suited to his unique brand of bitchery. He appeared in an avalanche of absolute garbage that would have amounted to career seppuku for anyone else, but since he was savvy — and drunk — enough to be aware of just how lousy much of the TV gigs he got were, he rose (or sank) to the level of what he had to work with and became the shining yellow nugget of corn at the precipice of a mountain of shit. No line was too corny and no bit was too shameless for Paul Lynde, and he camped it up to such a degree that one had no conscious choice but to sit in front of the tube and stare like a drooling mongoloid.

Lynde’s 1976 Halloween special is nothing less than a spectacle of cosmic awfulness, something so mind-warping that you could no sooner turn away from it than you would turn away from witnessing the president holding a press conference and suddenly seeing him whip out his turkey neck of a pecker and actually piss out a surf board-riding Jesus Christ who was not only on fire but wearing assless leather chaps while screaming “Hey, kids! It’s the Second Coming!,” at which point Condaleeza Rice begins savagely masturbating on camera with a gravy-smothered leg of Kentucky Fried Chicken and singing “Old Man River.” It’s on a level with the infamous “Star Wars Holiday Special” but unlike that dead-in-the-water Hiroshima of the small screen, Lynde’s show at least has the decency of being mesmerizingly, entertainingly bad.

So just what is contained in the special that makes it so Christfuckingly bad? Here’s a play-by-play breakdown:

SCENE ONE- Paul Lynde is gaily mincing around his home in full Santa Claus drag and singing “We Wish You A Merry Christmas” and decorating a Christmas tree when his housekeeper (Margaret Hamilton, best known as the Wicked Witch of the West in THE WIZARD OF OZ, and later Cora the Coffee Lady in Maxwell House adverts) shows up and lets him know that it ain’t Christmas. Lynde snippily dismisses her with a disdainfully sneered “Why don’t you go dust?” and the camera zooms in on his face as we see that he has just had a clever idea. Cut to Lynde starting the scene over again in an horrendous Easter Bunny outfit, singing “Here Comes Peter Cottontail” (by this point during the original broadcast I would imagine that thousands of closets across the nation flung open with a sonic boom as many “sensitive and artistic” young men burst forth and said “fuck you” to a country that hates fags yet gobbles up entertainment created by gays like it was a really good batch of General Tso’s chicken, this particular special being a case in point), only to be clued in on the fact that it ain’t Easter. Lynde again gets an idea and suddenly we are treated to him in a Hugh Hefner-style red smoking jacket holding a huge heart-shaped box of chocolates while mangling “My Funny Valentine” and sitting on one of the ugliest couches in the entire history of furniture, even by the questionable standards of the mid-1970’s. Again, Hamilton shows up and finally clues him in to the fact that it’s Halloween amidst much allegedly witty dialogue. Then we get the announcer stating:

“It’s the Paul Lynde Halloween Special! Starring Paul Lynde! With Paul’s special guests Tim Conway! Roz “Pinky Tuscadero” Kelly! Margaret Hamilton! Billie Hayes! (NOTE: she is best known as Witchie-Poo from “H.R. Pufnstuff”) Billy Barty! (the legendary dwarf actor) And special guest star Florence Henderson! A special appearance by Betty White (before she was two-hundred)! And a rock ‘n’ roll explosion, Kiss! And now, The Paul Lynde Halloween Special!”

SCENE TWO- Lynde launches into a staggeringly stale introductory monologue, followed by a re-written for Halloween version of “Kids,” his signature number from his role in the Broadway show “Bye Bye, Birdie.” As if that wasn’t bad enough, the stage is suddenly infested with poorly choreographed dancers in cheesy devil outfits — accessorized with dime store plastic pitchforks — who antagonize Lynde, but don’t have the decency to kill him, thereby preventing this atrocity from continuing. After being tied up and forced to dance in a satanic chorus line while lyrically bitching about how “there’s too much Alice Cooper, not enough Alice Faye,” Lynde is unceremoniously dumped into a garbage can by celebrated Mormon icons of ‘70’s TV schlock Donny and Marie Osmond (who happen to be dressed in devil suits). The garbage can then explodes for no adequately explained reason.

SCENE THREE- Lynde’s housekeeper drives him to her sister’s house in order to keep him away from the horrible kids of the previous scene, and we immediately discover that the housekeeper and her sister are actually card-carrying witches, specifically the Wicked Witch of the West and Witchie-Poo, both in their famous costumes and totally in character. They let him know that they want him to help them soften the worldwide image of witches despite centuries of evidence which they both deny, with the exception of the torments that Dorothy went through, which were justified because “she had it coming.” Then, Miss Halloween 1976 shows up, courtesy of a terrible video special defect, and it’s Betty White. She totally disses Paul Lynde, disappointed that he’s not Paul Newman (who was supposed to be her prize for winning the coveted title), and she bitches out the two witches as to why they couldn’t have gotten another famous Paul, such as Paul Williams, Paul McCartney, Les Paul, Saint Paul or even Pall Mall. She then disappears after pronouncing Lynde “a nobody.” Anyway, the witches promise him three wishes if he helps them in their cause, and his first wish is to be — now get this — a trucker. He is immediately transformed into what appears to be a Village People reject in a silver, rhinestone-studded jumpsuit with “Big Red” inexplicably emblazoned across the back, and a Tom of Finland-style matching cap.

Paul Lynde as The Rhinestone Trucker. No, you have not gone completely barking insane. This actually happened!

He also sings the indescribably trite “Rhinestone Trucker” jingle and hops into the cab of an eighteen-wheeler. We are then “treated” to the romantic rivalry between the Rhinestone Trucker and another rig jockey (Tim Conway, proving just how unfunny he was when not on “The Carol Burnett Show,” a trend that would continue in his later efforts as the vertically-challenged Dorf) over the attentions of Kinky Pinky (Roz Kelly). This sketch goes on for a short eternity and is replete with gags that were old when dirt was invented. The whole car wreck culminates in an overwrought square dance/disco number that will make you want to eat your own buttocks while jamming a rusty screwdriver into your eardrums. The unhappy ending features the Rhinestone Trucker marrying a woman.

SCENE FOUR- After the previous idiotic scenario plays itself out, Lynde returns to the witches’ place and is offered some soothing chamber music by Kiss. They lip synch through “Detroit Rock City” with all the convincingness of Ashlee Simpson on “Saturday Night Live” while a smoke machine is truly put to the test (or maybe it was the runoff from all of the joints that surely blazed on set during this fiasco). And not that we didn’t already know they looked like idiots, but Kiss’ makeup gimmick has seldom looked more stupid than it did here.

SCENE FIVE- Lynde then goes for wish number two, namely being turned into a Valentino-esque desert sheik, complete with enormous hoop earring, who is vastly wealthy and a master seducer who goes by the name “Florence of Arabia.” He then attempts to force his lusty will upon captive Englishwoman Florence Henderson… Their lip lock will make you cringe, I swear to God. Tim Conway shows up again as a member of the French Foreign Legion who attempts to save Florence Henderson from the swishy sheik. Sheer torture, folks.

SCENE SIX- The Wicked Witch of the West engages in painfully unfunny banter with her diminutive butler (Billy Barty) until Lynde pops back to the scary house. Paul selflessly sacrifices his last wish to the witches, who want nothing more than to go to a Hollywood disco; at this point, the show becomes truly impossible to turn away from since it is a cavalcade of bad TV-friendly discotheque antics such as Lynde spewing forth wretched one-liners (one of which involves bestiality between Tim Conway and an unwilling monkey), Florence Henderson performing a “disco” version of “That Old Black Magic,” and Peter Chris subjecting us to that wimpiest of Kiss tunes, “Beth” (in which the endless close-ups prove that Chris was bloated even then and that though his makeup is allegedly supposed to represent a cat, he looks like a “kitty”), as the band nods in approval as if to say “Yo, man. That shit is deep.” Then Lynde trades ultra-pitiful quips with Kiss until they take pity on the audience and lip synch “King of the Nighttime World.” Then, in a sequence that nearly caused me to have a seizure, Paul asks Roz Kelly to teach him some happenin’ disco moves and she launches into a version of “Disco lady” that somehow manages to be more noxious than the actual hit version. Then, incredibly, Lynde trumps that by singing the song himself; you have not lived until you witness all of the guest stars awkwardly shaking their groove thangs as the queerest man in the universe utters the lines “Move it in, move it out, move it in, and about, disco baby! I like that funky stuff!” Yes, you read that right.

EPILOGUE- Paul Lynde takes time to thank all of his guests and then commits the ultimate Halloween prank by ending the show on a freeze-frame of himself kissing the Wicked Witch of the West full on the mouth as his voice-over exclaims “Happy Halloween, everybody!”

I now have a perennial to run each Halloween, a confection more horrifying than THE EXORCIST, THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and FACES OF DEATH combined. Fuck, I miss Paul Lynde…

A VAULT RERUN-THE HOT BABES OF HORROR: LOTA THE PANTHER WOMAN

Poor, abused Lota (Kathleen Burke).

The creepily twisted horrors found in 1932's delirious ISLAND OF LOST SOULS have been discussed here on the Vault at length, but I had to give props to Lota (Kathleen Burke), an innocent panther that was altered into a human form and intended for her creator's most vile and questionable experiments. In short: the sicko wanted to see if she could successfully mate with a human castaway and produce offspring.

(Long pause)

Okay, kids, all together now: Eeeeeeeeeeeew!!!

When introduced to the bland castaway, the sad-eyed Lota’s curiosity is piqued and it’s quite obvious that she’s attracted to the guy, but even though the script manages to get away with planting the concept of inter-species humping within our heads, it was still 1932 so there was simply fucking way that the movie would go all the way (so to speak) with that element (one of several plot points that got the film banned in the UK for nearly twenty-five years). That hitch was solved by having Lota and the castaway getting very close, the sexual tension building to an uncomfortable level (he’s engaged to be married, but when on an uncharted tropical island and some hotness in a sarong throws herself at you…), only to be defused and carried into another area of horror altogether as the guy notices the sultry beauty’s hands and has a bit of a freakout.

Lota's animal genetics revealed.

Despite Dr. Moreau’s considerable (if admittedly fucked-up) surgical skills, Lota’s once-dainty mitts have begun to revert to sharp, ghastly claws, jarringly blowing her fully human aspect to smithereens, so upon seeing them Moreau declares that he’s taking her to his lab, charmingly known to all of his altered-from-bestial children as the “House of Pain,” in order to “burn out” what remains of her original traits. It’s at this moment when we realize Lota’s tentative (though nonetheless sexy) demeanor stems less from her once having been a full-blown panther, but rather from a wholly understandable and deep-seated fear of the unimaginable, probably anesthesia-free tortures she endured at her “father’s” hands on the long, hard road to Homo Sapiens. And once the rest of the animal-men on the island finally get fed up with not only the medical torture but also their status as unnatural “things,” the whole place goes to hell in a handbasket, with things ending quite badly for the island’s inhabitants, including poor, innocent Lota.

Based on H.G. Wells’ 1896 novel THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU, ISLAND OF LOST SOULS tarts up the book’s disturbing anti-vivisection material considerably, most notably with the invention of the human/animal-chick crossbreeding experiment, and the movie only benefits from the addition of prurient elements. I mean, what’s not to like about a hot half-big-cat chick (other than the bestiality element, that is)? I think it’s rather telling that some variation on the Lota template has been found in each version of the story released since the 1932 landmark original, including boner-igniting Barbara Carrera in 1977,

Fairuza Baulk in 1996 (since she possesses the most distinctive eyes this side of Meg Foster, did they even need to provide her with contacts?),

and even Marge Simpson in 2002’s “The Island of Dr. Hibbert” segment from the annual “Treehouse of Horror” special on THE SIMPSONS.

Guess you just can’t keep a good chimera down.

Kathleen Burke.

And, just for the fuck of it, one more of the awesome Fairuza Baulk.

A VAULT RERUN-THE HOT BABES OF HORROR: THE DEER WOMAN

A deer — and then some — caught in the headlights.

A detective investigates a series of bizarre slayings that at first bear all the earmarks of animal attacks, the male victims’ bodies trampled to unrecognizable hamburger by what is apparently an incredibly powerful deer, and as he delves deeper he discovers each of the deceased were last seen with a beautiful Native American woman of inhuman allure.

Cinthia Mauro as the enchanting and completely fucking deadly Deer Woman.

As the strange clues begin to pile up, the detective awakens to the possibility that the murders may be supernatural in nature, perpetrated by what a worker at a local Indian casino informs him sounds like “Deer Woman,” an irresistibly sexy spirit who lures men away with her seductive charms, has sex with them — in one case snapping off a victim’s penis — and fatally stomps her bedazzled lovers until they resemble steak tartare. The casino worker fills the detective in on all the pertinent info regarding his impossible suspect, such as the fact that she’s physically a deer from the waist down and wears outfits that hide her half-doe aspect, she’s a spirit so there’s no motive behind her murderous behavior, and that the fact that she’s a spirit means that you can’t stop or kill her. The last outbreak of identical stomping deaths occurred one hundred years previous and claimed the lives of several loggers, so any way you cut it, in an encounter with Deer Woman you’re shit outta luck.

The 2005 DEER WOMAN installment in the MASTERS OF HORROR series is only fifty-seven minutes long and as such it’s a model of tight storytelling economy. Directed by John Landis — he of AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON and INNOCENT BLOOD renown (I’ll leave out A VAMPIRE IN BROOKLYN) — , DEER WOMAN features his patented blend of scares and humor and is a lot of fun while it lasts, but the real draw here is Brazilian actress Cinthia Moura in the title role. She’s mouthwateringly stunning, and the Deer Woman’s totally silent presence, remaining utterly wordless even as her horny prey chat her up, only adds to her unknowable otherworldliness. Looking every bit like the forest goddess/siren she’s supposed to be, Moura is so easy on the eyes that one can see how any guy would find himself bewitched, probably grinning from ear-to-ear as she removed her top, revealing a pair of the most perfect breasts in all of Creation…until the hooved blunt force trauma began.

All I have to say to this is: What a way to go!

Other than the unmitigated pleasure of taking in her spectacular beauty, the thing I enjoyed most about the Deer Woman as a character was that we’re told in no uncertain terms that she’s an unkillable, unfathomable spirit, so she rightly remains unexplained and simply vanishes into thin air at the story’s climax, just after the detective has shot her several times and totaled his car against a tree while running it into her at full speed, demonstrating the impotence of science and technology in the face of ancient Earth-magicks. In other words, you can do your damnedest to control or even destroy nature, but it’s kind of like attempting to face down a ravenous zombie horde with nothing but your limp dick in your hand. Native American lore has been little explored to viable effect in the horror genre and its myth base is very rich indeed, so I hope to see filmmakers return to that territory and mine its vast resources. With hockey-masked machete-wielding slashers and other serial-killing madmen defining the face of the American horror ethos for the better part of nearly the past five decades, it would be awesome to see the nature-inspired myths and legends of this land’s original inhabitants brought to wondrous and fearsome life on the big screen, and I hope that DEER WOMAN won’t be the last of its ilk.

And I swear that when Moura’s top came off — twice!!! — I exclaimed “Holy fucking shit!” out loud, and I bet you will too.

A VAULT RERUN-THE HOT BABES OF HORROR: BARBARA CRAMPTON

Barabara Crampton vamps for the camera on the set of FROM BEYOND. I dunno what you think, but there's just something about a hot chick in glasses and a lab coat...

When I started this whole "Hot Babes of Horror" thing I initially intended it to be devoted to monsters who happened to be genuinely beautiful as well as scary, but for this post I feel I have to make an exception and pay tribute to an actress who while not ever portraying a monster certainly — and very memorably — ended up on the wrong end of the attentions of malevolent entities. That actress is the lovely and talented Barbara Crampton, venerated by genre fans for her role in Stuart Gordon's FROM BEYOND (1986), but most especially for her incredibly shocking contribution to RE-ANIMATOR (1985) also helmed by Stuart Gordon, and there was just no way that I could leave her out.

Both FROM BEYOND and RE-ANIMATOR kicked off the H.P. Lovecraft adaptation revival, both taking considerable liberties with the material but managing to please hard-to-satisfy horror addicts with their clever scripts, lashings of extreme gore and violence, twisted sex stuff and very game casts. Crampton stands out as the the requisite horror heroine in roles that have been more or less stock characters since the fright stuff hit the 1950's, specifically the "good girl" love interest who ends up menaced by something nasty and the brainy scientist/psychiatrist/doctor-type who finds herself wrenched from the world of the clinical and rational and thrown into the deep end of outright awfulness, but as her two classic turns occurred in the mid-1980's, filmmakers could get away with far more than their predecessors could ever have imagined possible. Far, far more, believe you me.

FROM BEYOND finds Crampton in the role of a bespectacled brain specialist who finds her inner slut unleashed after having her perceptions widened following peering into a monster-laden dimension just out of sync with our own. The emanations of the device that allows this window to open affects the human Pineal gland in bizarre ways, causing the once icy and prim doctor to let her hair down, ditch the Clark Kents and borrow a fetching S/M ensemble from the local mad scientist's well-equipped playroom.

She then attempts to get her hump on with the even more fucked-up lab assistant (my man Jeffrey Combs) who'd experienced longer exposure to the "resonator" device


and later gets molested by the machine's pervy inventor, whose consciousness has now fused with some hideous, slime-covered Lovecraftian wiggly from the other dimension.

As his K-Y-covered spidery digits dance across her bared breasts, I defy you not to feel a sense of deep, primal revulsion.

But the sequence that gained Barbara Crampton screen immortality is definitely the bit in RE-ANIMATOR where her character, the Twinkie-wholesome daughter of a medical school's dean, is rendered unconscious and kidnapped by her own dead-but revived and mind-controlled father at the behest of the re-animated headless corpse of an evil brain surgeon (David Gale). The sleazy bastard had lusted after her throughout the film, and since we all understand the power of horniness it comes as no surprise that when brought back from the dead he'd still want a taste of the innocent girl, and since he's now able to carry his own noggin about in a bowling bag why not live out his most amoral of illicit desires? So when Crampton's character finally comes to, she's stark naked atop an operating table with her wrists and ankles securely restrained, leaving her in an uncomfortably vulnerable state. As she begins to comprehend her predicament, her horror escalates as she beholds the very active headless corpse approaching her helpless, splayed-out form. It's at that moment that things move into an area that was jaw-droppingly unbelievable to those of us who saw it onscreen in 1985: the corpse firmly grasps its own severed head and maneuvers it between the captive co-ed's legs and, well, let's just say that the poor girl would most likely be turned against receiving "oral kindness" for the rest of her life (which turns out not to be for all that much longer).

I shit you not, I witnessed this in a theater where a couple had brought their gaggle of under-tens, about six of them, to see the film with them rather than shell out the scratch for a babysitter, an aspect that only made the incredible bad taste and sick-as-shit humor of the sequence that much more potent. I'm pretty lenient when it comes to what I'd let kids watch, but there's no fucking way I would have let a group ranging from two to eight experience the image of a crudely-severed head eating some screaming woman's pussy. Call me a prude if you like, but that's just beyond the pale.

Nonetheless, the scene was a landmark in horror that pushed the envelope into a whole other level and blew the minds of genre fans everywhere, so for her fearless venturing where no other actress had gone before I salute Barbara Crampton and give her immeasurable kudos. Plus you know she has to be one hell of a pro for not laughing herself silly at the crass absurdity of the whole thing like the rest of us did!

A VAULT RERUN-THE HOT BABES OF HORROR: UXIA CAMBARRO, HIGH PRIESTESS OF DAGON

Picture, if you will, a vast undersea expanse, all sound muted by the water that envelops you as shafts of light from the distant surface provide scant illumination. You swim through this seemingly endless dreamlike environment, your movements slow and clumsy, body leaden with the weight of your scuba gear and aided by the beam of a flashlight. Suddenly, through the murky darkness you encounter an opening in the ocean’s floor that is clearly the skillfully crafted work of hands unknown, a wide portal that is at once ocular, oral and vaginal in its aspect. You swim into its yawning maw and curiously explore this tunnel leading to…where or what you cannot begin to fathom. Your hands explore the eerily striated walls of the portal, and as your fascinated gaze scans what lays before you, the pallid face of a beautiful, raven-tressed mermaid smiles up at you. She swims into clear view and you marvel at her strange beauty as her thick hair swirls about her, borne by invisible currents and exposing her lovely, buoyant breasts. This nubile vision swims over, unafraid, and removes your facemask and rebreather’s mouthpiece. Your senses reel as she kisses you, deeply and passionately, and you don’t even notice you no longer require your heavy equipment to breathe, so caught up are you in the deep-sea maiden’s unexpected ardor.

Then, with a ravenous shriek, she bares a dental array that would give a piranha pause and you awaken with a start.

It was only a dream, but you have just awakened from a harbinger of an infinitely worse, living nightmare from which there is no hope of escape for you or the companions who accompanied you on what was meant to be a relaxing getaway on a chartered yacht off the coast of Spain. You have just entered the world of the fish-god Dagon, and you’re about to learn some dark and ancient truths that will affect you in ways you would never have expected.

That’s the basic setup for Stuart (RE-ANIMATOR) Gordon’s masterful H.P. Lovecraft adaptation, DAGON (2001), and among its many malignant wonders is Macarena Gomez as Uxia Cambarro, the beautiful large-eyed mermaid from the opening dream sequence.

In the dream she was the mermaid fantasy brought to alluring life, but in the incredibly creepy reality of the remote fishing village of Imboca she’s the wheelchair-bound high priestess of the evil oceanic god who has mated with mortal women, thus spawning a race of human/sea monster hybrids.

Uxia’s clearly one of those creatures, but even though she boasts a pair of floppy, sucker-laden tentacles in place of a scaly fish tail, to say nothing of the enormous, gasping gills on her ribcage, she’s got that wild-eyed-and-crazy look that I find irresistible.

Crazed, incestuous, sacrificial dagger-wielding evil half-breed or not, I’d love a taste of her saltwater charms. Plus, unlike a traditional mermaid, with Uxia you’ve got a pretty good idea of where the pussy is. Always a plus.

No bullshit, if you haven't seen DAGON, run out and rent it immediately. It's fairly low on gore and violence but it's got an appropriately high creep factor that translates the crawly feel of Lovecraft's tales of cross-species interbreeding to the screen, and getting across the flavor of his works had never been successful in the movies until this one. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

A VAULT RERUN-THE HOT BABES OF HORROR: SANTANICO PANDEMONIUM

Santanico Pandemonium shows up and the audience forgets to breathe.

1996's crime/vampire mash-up FROM DUSK 'TIL DAWN polarized audiences into camps of those who loved its from-out-of-nowhere shift in tone from a straight criminals on the run yarn to a gory horror piece and those who despised it for the exact same reason, but the one thing both warring tribes couldn't help but agree upon was Salma Hayek's unforgettable showstopping entrance into the proceedings as "Santanico Pandemonium." An exotic dancer who headlines at the Titty Twister, an out-of-the-way Mexican topless joint catering to truckers and assorted biker types, the mouth-wateringly curvy, raven-tressed goddess in a bikini sensuously strolls out onto the stage, her head crowned with feathers and a huge albino boa constrictor draped about her luscious self, her mesmerizing body swaying to Tito & Tarantula's "After Dark." Hayek's Lebanese/Mexican beauty is simply hypnotic and she looks like a Frank Frazetta painting come to life, much moreso than the rotoscoped characters culled from his work for the "animated" feature FIRE AND ICE (1983).

The audience in the movie theater was held as transfixed as the bar crowd on the screen, and I swear no one breathed for a few seconds when she showed up and began to move. When her number ends, this earthy vision reveals herself as a monstrously bat-faced Aztec vampire queen, the bar's staff and strippers her legion of blood-sucking minions, and the patrons immediately realize they're locked into the place with no chance of escape. Copious amounts of gore and violence ensue and the situation escalates to truly crazy levels, with stakings, disembowelings, throat-munching, you name it, all perpetrated by an assortment of vampires, some of whom are kind enough to engage in mayhem while their bare tits flop about (sadly, not Salma's). What's not to love?

Legendary fantasy illustrator Frank Frazetta captures Hayek on the canvas. How weird must it have been for him to paint a woman who looks just like one of his buxom fantasy goddesses made flesh, and did he do the painting one-handed?

A VAULT RERUN-THE HOT BABES OF HORROR: "THE BRIDE"

Dear Vaulties-

As stated the other day, there will be seasonal horror-related content coming soon, but until I can get it together and write new stuff, here's the first of six "Hot Babes of Horror" entries to whet your appetite. Posting these (which first ran two years ago) will give me time to come up with some new entries for the series, so stay tuned!

-Yer Bunche (dosed on painkillers for a bad back)

When beauty and horror collide: Elsa Lanchester as the Bride.

With all the mishegoss that's been swirling about me for the past few weeks I'd almost forgotten that it's the month of my favorite day of the year, Halloween, and as of now Yer Bunche is gonna rectify that inexcusable oversight. This year, rather than focus on simply the gory, more often than not testosterone-driven fury of assorted monsters, mad slashers, space aliens and zombies that so deliciously spice up this season, I'm gonna do my best to present a gallery paying well-deserved tribute to representatives of horror's fairer (though not necessarily more gentle) sex, and where better to start than with the creation most synonymous with the creepy aspect of that which is female, namely the iconic Bride of Frankenstein from the 1935 classic of the same name?

I'm a single, sometimes lonely guy, so I could totally relate when the Monster (Boris Karloff), at the urging of the balls-out insane Dr. Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger), demanded that his creator, Dr. Frankenstein (Colin Clive, Mister "It's alive!!!" himself), construct him a mate from the sundry bits of female corpses. It's a proposition somehow even more shocking than Frankenstein's act of re-animating a composite superhuman dead dude because now said dead dude could possibly reproduce with the participation of his distaff counterpart, and that's just plain howlingly wrong on many levels, both scientific and theological. (Think about it: live birth from what's essentially a corpse? Yeeesh!) But, luckily for the Monster and horror movie history, Frankenstein is a bit of an artist (especially when considering the science available during his day), and, assisted by Pretorius, who had grown impressive homunculi in jars, he crafts a miraculous woman from cadaverous leftovers.

It should come as no shock that so twistedly lovely a vision of femininity and the utterly morbid would emerge from an archaic film so subtly yet simultaneously in-your-face fuh-lamingly gay, thanks to the world’s awesome queer contingent working nigh-magical makeup and wardrobe alchemy in the most dire of circumstances since day one. That the Bride would result from the efforts of characters portrayed by two raging queens like Clive and Thesiger — whose separate characterizations not only nearly burned down movie theaters worldwide, but also laid down templates that would later be fused and perfected by Jonathan Harris as Dr. Zachary Smith — is simply appropriate for the film’s aesthetic (to say nothing of her incredible look being conceived and executed for the film by makeup artistry pioneer Jack Pierce). The intentionally campy, over-the-top tone and expressionistic design sense is frequently muted by moments of great emotion and sensitivity (if you don’t cry during the sequence where the Monster is befriended by a blind hermit, you simply have no soul), and the Bride’s arrival at the end, though brief, is no gimmicky afterthought.

Here comes the Bride...for all of maybe three minutes.

When the nameless Bride is finally unveiled after the usual spectacular Kenneth Strickfaden pyrotechnics, we almost expect to behold another unrefined and terrifying patchwork revenant along the lines of the Karloff Monster — an incredibly masculine bogeyman if ever there was one — but our expectations are immediately turned upside down. Instead of a moldering, disfigured nightmare Eve, we discover a clumsily twitchy, stiff-limbed ingenue sporting a white-streaked proto-new wave Nefertiti-esque ‘do presumably blasted skyward by the untold number of volts used to ignite the spark of life within her, draped in an inpatient’s post-surgery gown. This is an undead thing, yet so beautiful and delicate in her own way, her raiment an eerie parody of nuptial lace, that we forget she’s a walking jigsaw puzzle of a corpse, and, scars clearly pointing out where her head attaches to her neck be damned, we share in the Monster’s undisguised elation at finally having someone like himself that he can have as a companion and a mate.

As the hopeful Monster awkwardly moves to greet his mate, pitifully gesturing with welcoming hands while hopefully asking “Friend? Friend?,” the Bride lets out a strangled yelp of repulsion upon seeing his considerably-less-than-Denzel-like looks and instinctively gravitates to the slick Dr. Frankenstein for succor. Still hopeful, the Monster once more earnestly tries to appeal to his manufactured mate, but she just ain’t havin’ it and unequivocally hisses her final rejection of him, prompting the Monster to let Dr. Frankenstein haul ass out of there with his own bride before throwing a lever that blows the tower lab and the batshit-loony Pretorius to kingdom come.

Again, I can relate.

I’m glad that the Bride served her purpose and was wisely not dredged up again for umpteen sequels, allowing her to retain her iconic specialness, but one can’t help but wonder what would have become of her if she’d either accepted the Monster or gone down her own path. Would she too have been a physical powerhouse? Would the memories and personality of the woman whose brain she was supplied with have come to fore and allowed her to be articulate and charming in ways that her male counterpart could never have hoped for thanks to his dropped and glass shard-penetrated criminal gray matter? We’ll never know. Yet another thing to add to the ages-long list of female mysteries, I guess…