Music to Make Horror Movies By: Theresa Harris

Published June 15, 2020 by biggayhorrorfan

Theresa Harris Main

Theresa Harris should reside fondly in the hearts of those who adore classic horror. After making bright appearances in two moody terror fests from legendary producer Val Lewton, Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie, she went on to appear on an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and in such noir-flecked extravaganzas as The File on Thelma Jordan.

Unfortunately, prejudice kept her from ascending to the cinematic heights that she deserved. But those in the know recognize her as a true triple threat – a fine actress, dancer and singer!

Until the next time, SWEET love and pink GRUE, Big Gay Horror Fan!

www.facebook.com/biggayhorrorfan

Theresa I Walked With A Zombie

Unsung Heroines of Horror: Theresa Harris

Published June 12, 2020 by biggayhorrorfan

theresa-harris-photo_111603_3465

Creating as much captivating celluloid magic as Barbara Stanwyck in the 1933 Pre-Code classic Baby Face, actress Theresa Harris would surely have had a much bigger career if she had been born in the 21^st century. Unfortunately, the gorgeous and talented Harris, akin to such filmic contemporaries as Nina Mae McKinney and Louise Beavers, often found herself playing maids and other unglorified subservient types for the thirty years that encompassed the entirety of her career.

Theresa Zombie Nicely, two of the over 100 credits that distinguish her creative output include Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie. These Val Lewton masterpieces did cast Harris as a happy-go-lucky waitress and a loyal maid…typical, prejudiced fare. But she fills Zombie’s Alma with a sense of beauty and strength even when the character confides her love of domestic duties to the film’s heroine. Harris’ matter of fact essence gives the role a seriousness and sense of class, thankfully eradicating any comic qualities or unceremoniously stereotypical gestures. Theresa Cat

Minnie, the all-night café goddess of Cat People, meanwhile comes off as a friendly companion to the film’s leads when they visit her place of work. With the help of director Jacques Tourneur, Harris brings a sense of humor and equality to her exchanges with her co-stars. In fact, the pure wattage of her star power almost completely eradicates them from the proceedings, making one long for a redo wherein the roles she was given actually reflected the gloriousness of her too often overlooked personality.

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0365382/bio

Until the next time, SWEET love and pink GRUE, Big Gay Horror Fan!

www.facebook.com/biggayhorrorfan

Music to Make Horror Movies By: Lou Rawls

Published June 7, 2020 by biggayhorrorfan

As protests against this country’s deadly racism rightfully rage on, it almost feels wrong to post about favorite instances of entertainment. But I thought that maybe in acknowledgement of these injustices, I could highlight some of the world’s amazing Black talent this week…those amazing individuals who have given us joy throughout the good and the bad, the fair and the (all too frequently) unfair.

In the summer of 1984, I won a scholarship to study acting for the summer at Chautauqua Institution in Western New York. The students were given free passes to all of the theater and concert events that occurred throughout those two months on campus and, when I wasn’t in classes or rehearsal, I was often at the outdoor amphitheater. One night, Lou Rawls was performing his show. It was a number of years after his songs like Lady Love and You’ll Never Find had ruled the AM airways, but he was still a major star. After the show, my buddy Steve and I went to the stage door and he kindly chatted with us for a moment and signed our copies of the institute’s paper that had announced his presence for the evening. For a kid from a small farm town of 600, it was an exciting night, and Rawls has always had a special place in my memories in the many years since.

Of course, the fact that Rawls made appearances in such ‘90s genre films as Watchers Reborn, Morella and The Code Conspiracy, throws him into a special category, as well. Significantly, he also sang the theme song for Laurence Harvey’s odd 1974 cannibalism shocker Welcome to Arrow Beach. His songs have been featured in Disturbia and an episode of Ash Vs. The Evil Dead as well.

Rawls (1933-2006), an activist with a special interest in the education of minorities and the disadvantaged, performed with dignity and style for over 50 of his 72 years. I hope the songs that I have selected here not only highlight the uncertain hope of these times, but the breadth of his talent, as well.

http://www.lourawls.com/

Rawls and Mark Hamill in Watchers Reborn

Until the next time, SWEET love and pink GRUE, Big Gay Horror Fan!

www.facebook.com/biggayhorrorfan

Hopelessly Devoted to: Louise Beavers

Published June 5, 2020 by biggayhorrorfan

Louise Beaver Bullets Main

Louise Beavers made her presence known in almost 170 celluloid adventures whether she had a dictionary’s worth of dialogue or none at all. For instance, she milks all of the comedy out of her brief bit as a sleeping washroom attendant in the Pre-Code woman’s flick The Strange Love of Molly Louvain. Nobody ever greeted old school leading man Lee Tracy with a wider smile than her cathouse maid in the sepia toned horror classic Doctor X either.

Louise Shriek Beavers, who also appeared in the early Ginger Rogers’ thriller A Shriek in the Night, nicely broke out of the stereotypical roles that Black women were assigned in those years on rare occasions, as well. Of course, the hysteria laced antics she was required to provide as a domestic who stumbles upon a dead body in Shriek were a far cry from progressive despite her animated yet subtle take on the proceedings. (Another saving grace for this particular assignment is that the white maid played by character actress Lillian Harmer here is just as emotionally flighty as Beavers’ fictional concoction.)

But as Nellie LeFleur, the founder of a numbers game, in 1936’s Ballots or Bullets, this fine actress finally played a true contemporary of the leading lady, Joan Blondell, and a very enterprising one at that. Beavers registers with a sincere slyness along the way, providing an appeal that doesn’t diminish even when the writers betray her by making LeFleur, momentarily, long to resign her high stakes position to become Blondell’s hairdresser again. Granted, her most famous role, that of Delilah Johnson in the original version of Imitation of Life, had her back in housekeeping territory, but the film’s look at racism and motherhood gave her a lot to work with, allowing her to create one of early cinema’s most sympathetic characters. Louise Beavers Bullets

In addition to her prodigious acting talent, one has to admire Beavers’ fortitude, as well. The ‘50s found her providing audiences with some of her most prominently billed roles in projects such as My Blue Heaven (with Betty Grable) and Tammy and the Bachelor (with Debbie Reynolds). Granted, one wishes that the parts she was offered afforded her more range and variety. (Harmer, her Shriek counterpart, may have most frequently been cast as landladies, but she also got to play numerous society women, business owners and stage mothers, as well.) Still, despite the racism she experienced in casting, her bright talent and eclectic energy make Beavers a heroine in my book – and truly one of my favorite performers of all time!

Beavers greeting Tracy in Doctor X.

For those interested, TCM has a fairly detailed biography of Beavers on their website, as well – http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/person/12301%7C101475/Louise-Beavers/biography.html.

Until the next time, SWEET love and pink GRUE, Big Gay Horror Fan!

www.facebook.com/biggayhorrorfan

Music to Make Horror Movies By: Premier Quartet

Published May 31, 2020 by biggayhorrorfan

Premier_Quartet

Sometimes classic only goes with classic. If nothing says the Halloween season like the Premier Quartet’s That Syncopated Boogie-Boo than nothing says horror like the Amityville house.

Thus, director Henrique Couto smartly ends Amityville No Escape, his entry in the long line of sequels based around this spooky landmark, with the Quartet’s unexpectedly fun, eternally jumping tune.

Inventively utilizing different styles of film throughout its running time, this indie found footage nightmare is available at Couto’s Store Envy site, https://www.storenvy.com/products/29194798-amityville-no-escape-limited-edition-blu-ray-dvd-combo-with-reversible-artw.

Until the next time, SWEET love and pink GRUE, Big Gay Horror Fan!

www.facebook.com/biggayhorrorfan

Amityville

Review: A Stranger Among the Living

Published May 29, 2020 by biggayhorrorfan

I think the true social importance of horror films is how we often readily identify with the characters at the heart of a story’s bloody crisis. It would have been much more difficult me for to survive my rural, often un-fabulous childhood without Halloween’s Laurie and Friday the 13^th Part 3’s Chris filling me with determination and hope. Similarly, the gateway into openly gay writer-director Chris Moore’s moody chiller A Stranger Among the Living is how much we sympathize and relate to Henry Lyle, the film’s sensitive lead who finds his life thrown off balance after a violent crime occurs at his place of work.

A struggling actor with an emotionally suffocating mother, Lyle finds himself shadowed here by mysterious figures after he switches assignments with a fellow teacher in order to attend an audition. When his coworker expires in a school shooting, he soon realizes, much like Carnival of Souls’ Mary Henry or Final Destination’s Alex Browning, that death isn’t quite through with him yet.

Played with quiet conviction by the talented Jake Milton, Lyle is already burdened by the time we meet him. Unfulfilled with his career path, he is seemingly afraid to commit too fully to any life choice less he be disappointed. He is uninterested in romance, making him perhaps the first asexual protagonist in a genre project. But even the virgin as final girl/guy trope may not save him as his friends and family soon begin to disappear or meet mysterious fates.

That Moore makes those supporting contemporaries an often sympathetic and aggregable bunch is another of this film’s strengths. Even as she tries to strangle the few tremulous ambitions that Henry retains, actress Victoria Posey brings a soft vulnerability to Patsy, Lyle’s needy, traumatized mother. Moore, himself, brings a ray of fun and energy into the film’s world with his take on the flamboyant Jarvis Coker, a zany addict who ingratiates himself into Henry’s life after they meet at a support group.

As with his previous films, including Blessed Are the Children and Triggered, Moore applies a bit of political consciousness here, as well. But, most importantly, with Henry he presents us with a character that reflects the insecurities and indecisions that we all so often face in a world that seems odder and more hostile with every passing moment.

More information on Stranger, including screening events and links, is available at https://www.facebook.com/astrangeramongtheliving/.

Until the next time, SWEET love and pink GRUE, Big Gay Horror Fan!

www.facebook.com/biggayhorrorfan

Music to Make Horror Movies By: Madelyn von Ritz/Lynn Castle

Published May 24, 2020 by biggayhorrorfan

Without a doubt When I Close My Eyes I See Blood is one of the most memorable songs on the soundtrack of William Friedkin’s notorious Cruising. As the music wildly escalates, the ragged vocals seem to barely escape from the singer’s throat. In fact, one could imagine that this desperate sounding performer was picked out of the heroin-soaked chorus of some dimly lit drag revue and then discarded on the street the moment the track was set to tape. But Madelyn von Ritz, who perfectly matched the forbidden horror of the film’s milieu with the number, was actually a talented artist who went on to score a variety of ‘90s film projects, proving that old adage that sometimes talent and beauty are just not enough to make a permanent mark in show business.

Ritz’s story is actually more fascinating than many celluloid journeys, though. Growing up in less than ideal circumstances, she escaped through the magic of fairy tales and music. As Lynn Castle. she gained recognition in the ‘60s as a barber and when she wasn’t writing, she was catering to the longer hair of such notables as Sonny Bono and Lee Hazlewood. After making quick appearances on several television shows and films, her song Lady Barber caught the ears of Hazlewood. They eventually recorded that track and one other. Neither made an impact on the charts. Riding this mild momentum, Castle also put an album’s worth of demos to tape around the same time. Unfortunately, those unique numbers remained a mysterious trade secret for almost 40 years. Thankfully, intrepid music purveyors Light in the Attic released them on a special edition LP in 2017 and the world is finally discovering the rare, psychedelic beauty of this long-neglected songstress.

We have all been to the Castle…and our lives will never be the same!

Until the next time, SWEET love and pink GRUE, Big Gay Horror Fan!

http://www.facebook.com/biggayhorrorfan

Va-Va-Villainess: Mara Corday

Published May 23, 2020 by biggayhorrorfan

Mara Corday (1954)

“A disgusting turn of events, Mr. Gunn. You’ve wasted everybody’s evening. It’s going to cost you!” – Emily (Mara Corday)

Keep Smiling, the 26^th episode of Peter Gunn, the suave jazz flecked detective series created by Blake Edwards, has to be one of the hippest half hours of television ever produced. Directed by the legendary Jack Arnold (Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Incredible Shrinking Man), this episode accentuates its coolness most fully at the story’s midpoint. As acclaimed drummer Shelly Manne manipulates the skins on stage, Gunn (Craig Stevens) puts the hooks into Mara Corday’s sexy serial blackmailer while an eager whistleblower (played by The Addams Family’s Jackie Coogan) looks on.

Mara Tarantula Corday, of course, efficiently and naturally played a series of valiant heroines in such science fiction-horror pictures as The Giant Claw, The Black Scorpion and (the Arnold directed) Tarantula. Here, she obviously relishes being the bad girl, biting into her lines with acidic menace. It’s a tart performance that radiates with a calm evil, proving that Corday was a step above many of the other model-actresses who played similar roles in that same period of time.

The 90-year-old Corday, who parlayed her longtime friendship with Clint Eastwood into roles in several of his films, is still active at http://maracorday.com/. Those wishing to indulge in the full ecstasies of her presence can find Keep Smiling on Amazon Prime, as well.

Until the next time, SWEET love and pink GRUE, Big Gay Horror Fan!

www.facebook.com/biggayhorrorfan

mara

Music to Make Horror Movies By: Ethel Ennis

Published May 17, 2020 by biggayhorrorfan

Her take on The Star-Spangled Banner may have helped heal the nation during the Viet Nam War, but joyful terror tykes across the continents are probably most aware of the smooth tones of the divine Ethel Ennis due to her singing the theme song of the stop motion classic Mad Monster Party.

Credited as being a jazz icon, Ennis did not like to be sonically labeled, preferring to add her lilting personality and unique presence into whatever genre of music that she chose to sing.

But she was proud to be claimed by her native Baltimore as one of their prime attractions, dying at the age of 86 in 2019 after dedicating nearly 70 years of her life to the arts.

Until the next time, SWEET love and pink GRUE, Big Gay Horror Fan!

www.facebook.com/biggayhorrorfan

Hopelessly Devoted To: Marilyn Maxwell

Published May 16, 2020 by biggayhorrorfan

Marilyn Maxwell

Whether mocking the heroics of action cinema in 1956’s Forever Darling or reacting perfectly to the antics of comic Red Skeleton as the two explored a haunted house on his long running variety show, Marilyn Maxwell was always on the mark. One of those eclectically zaftig blondes that never got the attention she deserved despite her multiple talents, Maxwell has probably been best known, and then only to aggressive cinephiles, as the agreeable accomplice to such legends as Bob Hope, Lucille Ball and Skeleton.

Marilyn Maxwell Swing Fever Beginning her career as a beautiful background artist, often cast as supple showgirls, in such MGM epics as Presenting Lily Mars and Du Barry Was a Lady (which featured both Ball and Skeleton), Maxwell eventually graduated to leading roles in such silly efforts as The Show Off (again with Skeleton) and The Lemon Drop Kid (with Hope). Her first major role as entertainer Ginger Gray in 1943’s Swing Fever even had a bit of a genre connotation as it revolved around the ridiculous exploits of a band leader cursed with an evil eye.

Skilled as a singer and dancer, Maxwell was also a hit in USO shows for the troops during WWII and the Korean War. Apparently, she was a hit with Rock Hudson as well and, thusly, has been sporadically entering the news again as Hudson’s public profile blossoms due to Ryan Murphy’s recently released Hollywood series. Apparently, after initially being set up as one of the gay actor’s beards, the two quickly grew close and even contemplated marriage. Some reports even claim that their relationship may have gone past the friendship stage. Marilyn Maxwell and Rock Hudson 2

But more than anything, Maxwell, who died at the very young age of 50 due to heart problems, deserves to be remembered for her magnetic performances and joyful spirit. She was definitely one of kind. In fact, one can even imagine her spirit sprinkling out into the starlight, creating glittery energy and hopeful wanderlust for all those weary small-town kids living only for their future dreams.

Until the next time, SWEET love and pink GRUE, Big Gay Horror Fan!

http://www.facebook.com/biggayhorrorfan

Maxwell haunted house hunting with Red