Boom-Bastic: Elizabeth Taylor

Published December 14, 2024 by biggayhorrorfan

Radically individualistic, Hollywood goddess Elizabeth Taylor consistently chose latter day celluloid projects that probably boggled the minds of those who had grown accustomed to her charms via such mainstream heart warmers as National Velvet and Father of the Bride.

Portraying characters drawn to acting out twisted facsimiles of familial relations or those haunted by specters of overwhelming death, Taylor’s roles in her thirties and forties often contained hysterical and delusional elements – traits commonly found in many of our most popular horror heroines.

Disney villainesses, the hysterically hobbled, unseen diva in Argento’s Opera and the matriarchal forces in such modern fright offerings as You’re Next & Ready or Not, for instance, definitely find themselves embedded in the emotional lifelines of Flora Goforth, her character in 1968’s incredibly wacked out Boom! A mean-spirited mansion dweller, Goforth is one of Tennessee Williams’ most indulgent characters. Cruel to all around her, she seems to both long for the escape of the grave while desperately and cravenly clinging to her seemingly very miserable mortality.

Enter Richard Burton as the enigmatic Christopher Flanders. Viewers soon realize, after some lustful thespian volleying, back and forth, of very cryptic dialogue that Flanders, who has descended upon Goforth’s remote paradise, is the Angel of Death and that Goforth’s time on earth is going to be very limited. After Noel Coward’s arch appearance as (of all things) The Witch of Capri, the dialogue between Taylor and Burton gets even more inscrutable.

This delirious denseness, even though Williams, perhaps in as doth protest too much moment, listed this as his favorite filmed adaptation of his work, resulted in a critical and financial failure upon release. Still peach ripe and filmed through a lusty lens, Taylor’s glitter edged work here does lend itself to camp, though. This has allowed uber-fans like John Waters to sing the project’s many awkward praises as the decades have passed.

Interestingly, the piece is also very reminiscent, in an orgiastic, oversaturated manner, of Nothing in the Dark, the 1962 The Twilight Zone episode in which a very young, almost achingly lovely Robert Redford plays the male equivalent of the grim reaper.

That Redford, in this author’s opinion, surely bests Burton as a figurehead of muddy mortality, does nothing to take away from Taylor’s power in Boom! The prototypical movie star, she also provides enough essence to feed the minds of genre critics for decades to come.

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

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Music to Make Horror Movies By: Thelma Houston

Published December 8, 2024 by biggayhorrorfan

After it illuminated countless dance floors in the mid-70s, the magnificent Thelma Houston may have felt that there was no way to go but down for her iconic disco anthem Don’t Leave Me This Way. Flash forward forty some years, though, and this jumpy lover’s plea found its way into horror nirvana.

Featured at a key moment in Netflix’s very popular Fear Street: Part Two – 1978, this song gained a new life while exposing Houston to many eager young viewers.

17 albums into her career, this was obviously not her first terror film connection. Her song Keep it Light was featured on the soundtrack to Into the Night, one of the films that John Landis directed, post An American Werewolf in London and Twilight Zone: The Movie.

Even more importantly, Houston seems to be a horror fan, herself. She and Bunny Hall, a friend, pulled off a perfect Baby Jane and Blanche Hudson a few Halloween seasons ago.

Frightening up a new sonic spectacle ever year or so, you can also follow her future exploits (while exploring facets of her long ranging career) at https://www.thelmahouston.com/.

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

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Miss Hannigan: Stefanie Londino’s Villainous Triumph

Published November 30, 2024 by biggayhorrorfan

As a theater loving grade schooler, I spent many a weekend afternoon spinning my Annie Original Broadway Cast album. Unbeknownst to me, those tunes must have found a way into the fabric of my soul.

Decades later, when a river of nostalgia carried me to a downtown Chicago theater to witness the 2023 touring production of the show, the lyrics of those songs came, instantly, back to me in waves of sonic glory. I was also surprised to rediscover how sharply humorous and grimy some of the show’s most celebrated numbers are. It’s A Hard Knock Life and We’d Like To Thank You Herbert Hoover, for instance, contain some truly black imagery.

Even more surprisingly, I had forgotten that Miss Hannigan and her criminal cohorts planned to kill Annie as part of their plan to abscond with Daddy Warbucks’ reward money. Thus, Hannigan’s comic villainy is shadowed throughout with a truly dark core. This revelation led me to further reevaluate the show and led me back to the theater when it returned to Chicago this winter.

Nicely, actress Stefanie Londino, who has played the role in the last two tour settings, also adds a bit of rock ‘n roll heart to the character, playing her with a combination of Patti Smith grit and Dorothy Loudon grease paint pizzaz. Her take is definitely a little leaner and meaner…and sexier than such former portrayers as Marcia Lewis and Alice Ghostley. One can even believe that Bundles, the laundry man who is part of a pivotal orphanage-based plot point in this show, would have gladly taken Londino’s Hannigan for a clean sweep across his sheets – a rather new factor for audiences, experience-wise.

Indeed, by adding a bit of saucy modernity here, Londino helps leaven the show’s occasional sentimentality. That bite is sure to appeal to people unfamiliar with it and its seemingly too sweet legacy as this production winds its way across the US until the spring of 2025.

More information on Londino and the tour, itself, is available at https://annietour.com/tour/.

More on this eclectic performer, who also fronts a band called West Side Waltz, can be found at http://www.stefanielondino.com/, as well.

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

The Witching Hour: Joan Fontaine

Published November 23, 2024 by biggayhorrorfan

One of my favorite anecdotes about Joan Fontaine, one of my cherished golden age of celluloid greats, involves an opinion given by her only sister and bitter rival, Olivia de Havilland. After Fontaine published a memoir called No Bed of Roses in 1978, de Havilland supposedly sniffed, “No Bed of Roses? More like No Shred of Truth!”

That assessment is perhaps not surprising, though. Years before, in her only Hammer Horror film, Fontaine certainly proved that being an unreliable narrator was one of her cinematic strengths. As the vulnerable Gwen Mayfield in 1966’s The Witches, this Academy Award winning performer is filled with a whispered hesitancy. Naturally, the slight skittering in her tone indicates the fear that Mayfield has of losing hold of her sanity, post-nervous breakdown.

Cunningly, this underlying dread is taken advantage of by a powerful familial branch in a small English town. Hired as the head mistress of the local school, Mayfield is actually being manipulated for their nefarious means. Of course, as is the game plan, no one believes her once she tries to reveal the truth and it is back to the rubber room for her.

Thankfully, as ever resilient heroines before her, Mayfield grows sharper as the runtime expands. As waves of black magic mist around her, she eventually stops all rituals and pert sacrifices – just in the nick of time.

Nicely, as a bookend to Fontaine’s compelling presence here, there is famed British actress Kay Walsh as bestselling author and possible nemesis Stephanie Bax. Understanding this type of potential antagonism well, Fontaine is at her best when these two distinguished femme thespians go throat-to-throat.

One hopes that even Olivia might have recognized the beautiful symmetry in that.

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

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Va-Va-Villainess: Carrick Glenn

Published November 9, 2024 by biggayhorrorfan

Before she played quirkily luscious victims in a duo of slasher flicks of varying pedigrees, actress Carrick Glenn paid an interesting visit to psycho street.

In an effort to boost ratings, The Doctors, a once popular, long running soap opera, began to embrace natural disasters, mad science and unhinged divas in the late ’70s and early ’80s. To that effect, Glenn joined the show as a short-lived character with diminishing mental returns. As Laura Young, a disgraced nursing student, she spent the winter of 1980 terrorizing the program’s longstanding heroine Dr. Maggie Powers (Lydia Bruce). Kidnapping Powers after a tornado wreaked havoc onscreen, Young was determined to prove to the powerful medical administrator that her chops as a caregiver were as keen as her clear-cut fashion sense.

Thus, labored scenes of a perspiring Powers, growing ever nearer to death, pleading with a resolute and ever more delusional Young were a staple that long January. Once discovered by Powers’ concerned friends and family, Laura went the way of most sympathetic nut jobs – the psycho ward.

Glenn, herself, went onto to delight many a horror fan as Sally in The Burning and Kathy in Girls Nite Out. Girls Nite Out, of course, is an enjoyable romp, where Glenn energetically enacts a typical coed college casualty. The Burning, on the other hand, due to Tom Savini’s special effects and several interesting cinematic angles (including Brian Matthews’ Final Guy), has become something of a modern classic in the genre. Glenn also gives her character discrete depth. Torn between wanting to maintain her virtue while also finding herself intrigued by the thuggish Glazer (Larry Joshua) and his efforts to bed her, Glenn practically vibrates with lusty indecisiveness. Her interactions are always charmingly honest, adding real life layers to an exploitive extravaganza.

Girls, though, turned out to be Glenn’s last major credit. (A short film, according to IMDB, marked her last onscreen appearance) While I managed to track down a pre-The Doctors wedding announcement, surprisingly little other information is available about her online. That several of her major roles are readily available for consumption may be the one saving grace of that tiny mystery. *

*Glenn’s The Doctors episodes are available for viewing at It’s Real Good TV.

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

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Halloween Heroine: Mary Carlisle

Published October 31, 2024 by biggayhorrorfan

Fresh as golden brass, actress Mary Carlisle was a ’30s Ginger Rogers type, enlivening many a movie musical with a zestful attitude and an ebullient sense of pep. Nicely, Carlisle also utilized this charisma in a few creaky gothic extravaganzas, as well.

1935’s One Frightened Night found her playing (The Second) Doris Waverly, a sassy vaudeville-style actress who pays a visit to her long-lost millionaire grandfather. Her arrival signals the murder of another femme claiming to be Doris and soon everyone is not only in danger…. but a potential suspect, as well.

This fun throwback is further notable for the casting inclusions of Hedda Hopper as hopeful heir Laura Proctor and Charley Grapewin as the curmudgeonly Jasper Whyte. Hopper went on to become one of Hollywood’s most celebrated/dreaded gossip columnists while Grapewin would find celluloid immortality as Uncle Henry in MGM’s classic The Wizard of Oz.

In celluloid coincidence, 1934’s Murder in the Private Car, a more comic take on the formula, also featured Carlisle as an abrupt blonde who discovers that she is an heiress…with equally dangerous results, as well.

Surprisingly, after marrying James Edward Blakely in 1942, Carlisle made only one more film. Thankfully, for celluloid junkies, this feature was the oft-circulated Dead Man Walk. Featured on multiple, cheaply made horror DVD compilations, this spooky yarn features Mary as the potential victim of horror king George Zucco. Interestingly, not only was this programmer filmed in only 6 days, but it also has the unique distinction of being released on Valentine’s Day in 1943, as well.

Happily married for decades, Carlisle became a favorite of autograph collectors in her final years. This was a role that she, seemingly, embraced, leaving behind many heartbroken admirers upon her passing at the truly impressive age of 104 in 2018.

Hopelessly Devoted To: Lisa Zane

Published October 29, 2024 by biggayhorrorfan

Many believe that a skilled singer can create visual tableaus via pure sonics alone. If that is so, then the atmosphere conjured by Lisa Zane definitely involves candle strewn nightclubs and back of house stages swathed in red velvet curtains. Due to her lilting continental flair, a Mediterranean breeze may also be an unsurprising guest once her voice begins winding it’s way out of your stereo speakers.

Indeed, Zane, best known to celluloid scare junkies for her measured and defiant performance in Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, has often proven she is, creatively, much more than just Krueger kin. Her 3 recorded releases, containing many of her own original songs, are all unique and exotic affairs.

Val D’amour, my favorite, is not only filled with classic cabaret vibes, but gritty, street smart rock n roll, as well.

Track-wise, her take on the classic If You Go Away (Ne Me Quitte Pas) provides an almost rapturous start to the proceedings while the quietly slinky You Are A Mystery to Me eventually morphs into a propulsive banger. These opening tracks brilliantly clarify the rest of the proceedings.

To single just a few others out, Sweet and Rotten is lusciously sexy while Hello Lover is an honest look at sexual dynamics between two beautifully flawed human beings. La Paloma, meanwhile, plays best to Zane’s multicultural strengths while Good Night ends the affair with the perfect shade of content solitude.

Overall, a magical aural journey, Val D’amour is highly recommended.

This and Zane’s other recordings are available on multiple streaming services or can be ordered from her website – http://www.lisazane.com

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

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The Last of Connie

Published October 19, 2024 by biggayhorrorfan

Leave it to Jada (Elia Cantu). She finally got a couple of clues and realized it might be uber-perky Connie (Julie Dove) that was behind all the disappearances and deaths that had been happening in Salem all summer long. Of course, for drama’s sake, Days of our Lives‘ finest detective was always a step or two behind everyone’s favorite, truly demented personal assistant.

As a capper to her previous crimes, which included murdering Bobby (Blake Berris) and stabbing Rafe (Galen Gering), Connie deposited Melinda (Tina Huang), her long held hostage, in the lower-level vaults of the DiMera Mansion. After confronting Gabi (Cherie Jimenez), her mortal enemy, in that estate’s ostentatious living room, she added her to the cobweb strewn larder. Ever the amateur explosives enthusiast, she then tried to blow both of her captives up with a homemade bomb.

It was then onto the Brady Pub to eliminate Ava (Tamara Braun). With that bloodthirsty deed ultimately interrupted by the heroic Stefan (Brandon Barash), the demented damsel was finally intercepted by (the now exhausted) Jada and soon sent packing to the luxuriously padded walls of Bay View.

Overall, a fun, months-long jaunt, accentuated by Dove’s compelling eccentricity, this story’s long-lasting effects seem like they will be centered on the romantic contingent. Gabi now appears to be drawn to EJ (Dan Feuerriegel), the former business rival who saved her from the blast’s deadly effects. This puts Stefan, Gabi’s formerly ardent husband, into the orbit of Ava, the woman he protected and, much to Gabi’s chagrin, previously bedded.

It seems that Connie, whose truest aim was to permanently upend the lives of Gabi and Stefan, achieved her heart torn victory, after all.

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

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Hellraiser at Leather Archives

Published October 18, 2024 by biggayhorrorfan

There Are No Limits!!! —- But ONLY for every sharp-faced Chicagoan who JOINS US this SATURDAY at the Leather Archives & Museum for the Hellraiser Double Feature!!!

Attendees not only get to see 2 Clive Barker classics in the kinkiest body positive venue in town, but more surprises await them, as well – including a special Barker memorabilia exhibit & a between films visit from the doppelgänger of Kirsty Cotton herself!

Intrigued? Then check out the link to the event, below!

Fetish Film Forum – Hellraiser (1987) and Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988) Double Feature

Hope to see you there – and until the next time, SWEET love and pink GRUE,

Big Gay Horror Fan!

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Halloween Highlight: Slumber Party Massacre II

Published October 14, 2024 by biggayhorrorfan

My favorite fall feature in (the late, lamented) Soap Opera Digest was their round-up featuring the performers talking about the horror movies that they had starred in. All these years later, I’m still thrilled whenever I discover someone known for their work on daytime in a terror project.

I grew up watching the CBS soaps, the channel my mother loosely watched as she went about her daily tasks. One of the plotlines that I most remember involved The Young and the Restless‘ then bad boy Paul (Doug Davidson). As many serial cads before him, he had gotten a mousy lass named April (Cynthia Eilbacher) pregnant. After she refused to bow into his pressure to abort the child, the two entered into a brief, unsuccessful marriage. Permanently rejected, soon thereafter, the quiet, downtrodden girl left town.

Flash forward: My senior year in college, I moved into an apartment with access to multiple cable stations and I was soon taping late night horror movies, left and right. One of my favorite discoveries was Slumber Party Massacre II. A zany, rock n’ roll infused cartoon, it also gave a nod to the complicated factors involved with burgeoning female desire and almost worked as a parody of the (even then) often by-rote practices of the traditional slasher film.

To my extra hyphenated delight, Eilbacher even popped up, in a series of frenzied flashback sequences, as Valerie, the first film’s now very traumatized heroine.

Earnestly, this past weekend, while prepping to interview Deborah Brock, the film’s writer and director, onstage at a film event, I mentioned how much the presence of one of my favorite former soap actresses in the film meant to me. Gregariously, Brock let me know that Eilbacher was a true professional and a great actress to work with. In fact, as a practitioner of The Method style of acting, she got so worked up in her audition that she ran from the room, crying. Brock followed her into the hall and assured her that everyone in the room had been very impressed.

On set, Eilbacher’s intense commitment continued. She would often rock, rhythmically, by herself in the corner or crawl under the set’s bed to prep for the emotional scenes that were soon to follow. A number of crew members, concerned about her mental state, were soon placated by Brock, who informed them that the actress was just getting into character and was totally fine.

Thus, the next time you view the film – hopefully sometime this Halloween season – keep in mind that Eilbacher truly dug deep, allowing you to experience the true depth of Valerie’s longstanding torment, adding a vital component to the cult film’s long lasting, overall enjoyment.

Or, thanks to Brock (pictured, above, at Laurie’s Planet of Sound in Chicago), you can forgo that serious look at thespianism and just focus on the film’s manic, guitar infused fun!

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

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