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AWESOME-tober-fest 2019: Looking back at the history of the Nerd Lunch Halloween Episodes

Posted in AWESOME-tober-fest, Blog Series, Halloween, holiday, movies, podcast, pop culture with tags AWESOME-tober-fest, AWESOME-tober-fest 2019, Fangoria, Halloween, Nerd Lunch Podcast, podcast, pop culture on October 15, 2019 by Paxton

I’m going to break with the Fangoria theme here for just a second.

As you may, or may not, know, the Nerd Lunch Podcast is winding down. We only have a few more months before it ends. Today, is the final installment of the Nerd Lunch Halloween Special. Our Halloween episode has a long and storied tradition, so let’s take a walk down memory lane and see all the previous Nerd Lunch Halloween Specials leading up to today’s final entry.

Click the titles to go listen to the episodes one final time.

Nerd Lunch Episode 59: Halloween Specials (2012)
We didn’t do a Halloween special our very first year, 2011. Our themed Halloween episodes started with episode 59 in October 2012. We had Jay and Shawn on to discuss two Halloween specials, the 1976 Paul Lynde Halloween Special and 1986’s The Worst Witch starring Fairuza Balk, Charlotte Rae, Diana Rigg and Tim Curry.

Dead Lunch
The next year, 2013, we did a whole month of Halloween shows. It was called BRUCE-tober and it celebrated the man, the myth, the legend, Bruce Campbell. This is the only time Jay didn’t join us for a Halloween episode.

Here’s what we did all 4 weeks of BRUCE-tober 2013.
Week 1- 102 – Give that Bruce Campbell Guy Some Work – We all come up with the perfect movie/TV project for Bruce to work on.
Week 2- 103 – Bubba Ho-Tep drill down – We review Bubba Ho-Tep
Week 3- 104 – Nerd Lunch reads Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way – We all read Campbell’s farcical book about Hollywood.
Week 4- 105 – Evil Dead drill down – We watch and review the very first Evil Dead movie.

NL Halloween 2014
Episode 152 – 2014 Halloween Episode
For the 2014 Halloween episode, we were joined by Halloween guest stalwart Jay as well as, for the first time anywhere, Matt from Dinosaur Dracula. This is where their Purple Stuff Podcast got started. For this episode we talked about Halloween-ized retail products and we even made up a few things of our own. Also, that Halloween, we did an Extra Helping where Jay joined us to review the awesomely bonkers 1978 movie KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park.

Episode 202 – 2015 Halloween Episode
For this episode we were again joined by Jay and Matt, this time to talk about two Rankin Bass Halloween specials; 1972’s Jack O’Lantern and 1962’s Mad Monster Party.

NL Halloween 2016
Episode 249 – 2016 Halloween Episode
In 2016 we were joined by Jay and newcomer Will (aka @veggiemacabre on Twitter) to do a spooky version of our franchise topic Movie Menus. We were each assigned a scary movie and a fast food restaurant and had to come up with a themed menu.

Halloween 2017
Episode 289 – Halloween Horror Show 2017
For the Halloween episode in 2017, Matt and Jay came back to talk all about Elvira’s 1986 MTV Halloween Special.

Halloween 2018
Episode 316 – 2018 Halloween Episode
Last year Jay came back and we were also joined by my good friend Mr Michael May. We did a Sweet 16 of Movie Monsters to determine who is the best Movie Monster out there.

Episode 340 – The Final Halloween Episode
And that leads us to this year. 2019. This will ultimately be the final Nerd Lunch Halloween Special. I’m not going to lie, it’s a bittersweet ending. We are again joined by Jay as well as Robert Zerbe and we are doing a spin off of Movie Menus. We are all assigned spooky pop culture characters or movies and we have to build a restaurant from the ground up around our assignment. So we come up with the name, the building, how it’s decorated, how the servers are dressed, any onsite entertainment, and even a few of the menu items. It’s a lot of fun and I want to eat at all of these places.

And that’s it. That should be all for the Nerd Lunch Halloween episode. It’s been a blast doing these every year. I hope you guys have enjoyed listening.

Also, check out the blog Countdown to Halloween for more Halloween-y, bloggy AWESOMEness.

AWESOME-tober-fest 2019: Fangoria Scream Greats: Ghostbusters

Posted in AWESOME-tober-fest, Blog Series, Fangoria, Ghostbusters, Halloween, holiday, magazine, movies with tags AWESOME-tober-fest, AWESOME-tober-fest 2019, Fangoria, Ghostbusters, Halloween, pop culture on October 14, 2019 by Paxton

Okay, here we go with the third week of AWESOME-tober-fest. Now I’m going to switch over from Elvira to a more general Fangoria focus and we’ll look at posters, pin-ups, interviews, articles and ads from all eras of Fangoria.

One of the best things about Fangoria are the Scream Greats posters. I showed you one of Elvira’s last week. This week, here’s a pretty great Ghostbusters poster featuring Slimer that appeared in issue #40 from 1984.

And just a few issues earlier, in Fangoria #36, they did a whole article on the ghosts in Ghostbusters.

Also, check out the blog Countdown to Halloween for more Halloween-y, bloggy AWESOMEness.

AWESOME-tober-fest 2019: Elvira’s Haunted Hills (2001) movie review

Posted in AWESOME-tober-fest, Blog Series, Halloween, holiday, movies, pop culture with tags AWESOME-tober-fest, AWESOME-tober-fest 2019, Elvira, Fangoria Movie Friday, Halloween, movies, review on October 11, 2019 by Paxton

So, I’m finishing out the first two weeks of Elvira with a review of Elvira’s second movie, Elvira’s Haunted Hills from 2001.

Like Mistress of the Dark, I had never watched this one, so with the surprise of actually liking that first movie, I sat down to watch this one hoping to also like it.

And I didn’t. It’s more of the same but not done as well. Elvira is Elvira. Double entendres abound. It feels like it wants to be something like Young Frankenstein, or, to be more accurate, Haunted Honeymoon. But the charisma of the cast (or lack thereof) can’t overcome the poor script and attempts at humor. I know this was made on a shoestring budget, and it’s lampooning old Vincent Price Poe movies like The Pit and the Pendulum (the poster for which even had the giant swinging blade on it) and The Raven, which I honestly haven’t seen. But it still didn’t land, meaning mainly the humor.

The sets for this movie were pretty great though. The giant castle, as a set, worked very well and had lots of cool elements incorporated into the design including a small hidden door in the side of the giant fireplace (sidenote: I love giant stone fireplaces in castles). And the overall story was actually not that bad, but this movie lives or dies on the humor and the humor just doesn’t work as well in this one as it did in the previous movie. It was so MEH that I didn’t really have anything I wanted to talk about more in depth by pulling out screen grabs. It’s just not as fun a movie as I wanted it to be.

I wish it wasn’t so, because I still love the character of Elvira.

Also, check out the blog Countdown to Halloween for more Halloween-y, bloggy AWESOMEness.

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AWESOME-tober-fest 2019: Elvira’s crazy cameos

Posted in AWESOME-tober-fest, Blog Series, Halloween, holiday, movies, pop culture, TV shows with tags AWESOME-tober-fest, AWESOME-tober-fest 2019, Elvira, Halloween, movies, pop culture, TV shows on October 8, 2019 by Paxton

The character of Elvira has become pretty ubiquitous over the years popping up in everything in pop culture including movies, TV shows, beer ads, MTV specials and video games. In the next few articles over the next few days I’ll take a look at some of Elvira’s strangest pop culture appearances. Today, let’s take a look at movies and TV shows.

Like I said, Elvira has popped in all all kinds of TV shows and movies. Sometimes she’s in costume, sometimes it’s Cassandra Peterson as herself. Here are a few cool, random appearances of Elvira in costume in different movies and TV shows.

Elvira showed up as a race car groupie in the 1983 Burt Reynolds NASCAR comedy, Stroker Ace. There are a lot of mixed opinions about this movie, but I love it.

Elvira showed up on an episode of CHiPs in Season 6, episode 21 titled “Things That Go Creep in the Night”. Ponch and Jon are protecting a woman who seems to be stalked by a comic book character. Elvira shows up at a comic book/horror convention.

Elvira starred in an episode of The Fall Guy that was written specifically for her. It was Season 4, episode 7, titled October 31st. Colt Seavers (Lee Majors) is filming a Halloween Special with Elvira in an old mansion that is supposedly haunted.

Elvira also showed up in a couple of live action segments of the Super Mario Bros Super Show from 1989.

Cassandra Peterson had a few fun movie cameos that I always forget about.

Cassandra Peterson had a small part in a sex comedy called Jekyll & Hyde: Together Again from 1982. She played the busty nurse. I love this movie and I hope to do it one day on Cult Film Club.

Cassandra is good friends with Paul Reubens. Consequently, she appeared in the biker scene in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure.

And there are several others I could bring up but I think that’s a good random sampling of appearances for the Mistress of the Dark. Tomorrow I’ll take a look at one of Elvira’s first, and most mainstream, forays into comic books!

Also, check out the blog Countdown to Halloween for more Halloween-y, bloggy AWESOMEness.

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AWESOME-tober-fest 2019: Elvira Mistress of the Dark (1988) movie review

Posted in Fangoria, Halloween, holiday, magazine, movies with tags AWESOME-tober-fest, AWESOME-tober-fest 2019, Elvira, Fangoria Movie Friday, Halloween, movies, review on October 4, 2019 by Paxton

So this week has been all about Elvira. You’ve seen articles and centerfolds. Elvira has permeated pop culture especially during the Halloween season. She has popped up in many random movies as a fun cameo. But there have been two Elvira specific movies released and I have watched neither of them. So I thought now would be a good time to do that.

Today, for my very first time, I’m taking a look at the first Elvira movie; Elvira Mistress of the Dark from 1988.

movie poster

I can’t believe I’ve never watched this movie. It’s fun, it’s campy. It’s the perfect Elvira movie. Mostly comedy, with some spooky genre elements added in. I had a lot of fun with it.

Let’s take a look at a few highlights from the movie.

Title cards.

on the TV show set
The show opens up with Elvira on the set of her late night TV show. It’s a low budget local station so naturally she wants to get out of there and go to Vegas to become a showgirl.

This is an anchorwoman at Elvira’s TV station waiting to go on after Elvira finishes her show. She’s not very nice. She’s played by Tress MacNeille. Tress is sort of a legend in voice over animation work. She does voice work for Simpsons, Futurama, Animaniacs, and SO MANY other shows. Check out her IMDB. It’s insane. But, funnily enough, Tress would voice the character Booberella on The Simpsons which was a parody of Elvira.

A lot of this movie is what actors pop up from other genre pictures.

teens
Here are a few of the teens Elvira befriends in the movie. On the far left, is Ira Heiden, who played Will in Nightmare on Elm Street 3. To the right of Ira is Kris Kamm who’s been in a ton of TV like Quantum Leap, 21 Jump Street, and Coach.

Hey, it’s Kenicky! From Grease!

villain!
Here’s the villain, Vincent. He plays this up pretty well. He’s appropriately evil and English. This guy has also been in a bunch of genre stuff like Star Trek VI: Undiscovered Country, the old Fox TV show Werewolf, the Max Headroom TV series, Needful Things and Michael Bay’s Transformers.

Apple Slice!
Edie McClurg! I love 80s movies for vintage product placement. We get a scene at a town picnic and in it we see a bunch of old soda cans like this Apple Slice as well as a few vintage Diet Pepsi cans.

Elvira finally gets to Vegas at the end and we get to see a whole overblown Vegas number. It’s campy but fun.

This was a fun movie to watch. Yes, it was campy, but that’s Elvira’s whole shtick. The movie was entertaining and I enjoyed it. Glad I finally watched it.

So next week. I had so much fun doing Elvira this week, that I think I’ll do it again. So, expect to see another week of Elvira goodness. I’ll look at more movie and TV appearances as well as a few other surprises. Come back next week to see what I have in store.

Also, check out the blog Countdown to Halloween for more Halloween-y, bloggy AWESOMEness.