“His pants were the obvious source of his super-powers!”

I love vintage diners. You know those old style diners where you could sit up at the counter and dodge the grease splatterings from the kitchen. Wood grain paneling surround your bright orange plastic booth and you have to avoid the newest stain on the floor smartly camouflaged by the 70’s style floor tiles. Orders were yelled by a middle aged waitress with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth with catchy titles like “Bloodhounds in the Hay (hot dogs and sauerkraut)”, “Adam and Eve on a raft (2 poached eggs on toast)” or the less apitizing “Angels on horseback” which is actually oysters rolled in bacon on toast. Yummy…. serve that in a smoke filled room and you got yourself some fine dining ambience.

Sure the food was greasy and the atmosphere was noisey but it was your grease pit not some impersonnel mega-restaurant chain. Now you get places like Johnny Rockets with their $7 hamburgers and awkward interludes of employees singing and dancing. There’s also Bennigans which is just an Irish dining experience without the drunken brawls. You can also see a lot of TGIF’s (Terrifying Godless Incarnations of Food) and the ever popular Apple Bee’s. They all pop up next to a strip malls like weeds. Well it’s time to stomp them out and stand up for the small businessman. Your heart attack shouldn’t occur at a Apple Bee’s where the last sounds you’ll hear is some poor sap getting a birthday serenade by workers covered in flair. Nope, let me die on that brown tiled floor with a couple partially chewed fries on my shirt. They’ll just step over me on the way out the door. “Hey Charlie, yeah you got another stiff over here from your food ya lousy cook. Come clean up this mess he’s blockin da door.” ahh the sweet sounds of the Jersey accent would be the last thing I hear before sitting down at that great greasy spoon in the sky. 

Speaking of Diners with questionable health standards. Blood Diner stands as a testimate to everything you thought might be in a fast food joint but were afraid to ask. Brothers Mike and George Namtu are the owners of their booming vegetarian diner where their only special ingredient  isn’t tofu but chopped up tramps in tight spandex. To guide them in running their venture business is the disembodied brain and eyes of their Uncle Anwar whom they recently dugged up and put in a canning jar. He’s no Gordon Ramsey but he is a loud foul mouthed organ with a jewish accent so that’s close enough.

Anwar gets a bit Fahklumpted as he orders his nephews to kill whichever big haired 80’s tramp walks into the diner but also demands they use only the best body parts for a resurrection of Shee-tar. Shee-tar is either a poorly named 2 million year old pagan goddess or the modern jungle princess of gold body paint. The dimwitted brothers patchwork together their golden frankenhooker with the spare body parts only needing the obligatory virgin sacrifice to bring her to life and rule the world. But that kind of ceremony can only work if it’s done at a punk rave party with a zombie buffet and motown harmony band. Mike hypnotizes a shy cheerleader with his Jedi mind tricks and dollar store neck charm convincing her that she actually wants to see a Nazi wrestling match that his brother is in. The date takes a sour torn when George bites off the ankle off his Hitler opponent and they have to knock out Connie unconciousness with a mean right hook (Isn’t that how Britney and Kevin Federline first met.) Some cops in 70’s leisure suits and greesy hair suspect that the brothers might be involved with the recent rash of nude areobic massacres and the recent killing of a handless vantriliquist chef.

Lead by a trovoltian saturday night fever parody who oozes grease through every pore,  the cops track down the brothers  at the local rave club. On the main stage is a propped up Shee-tar with some newly grown tummy teeth about to snack on Connie’s noggin while zombies party at the buffet table. The only thing that could save this movie is deep frying a batter dipped hooker and a kung-fu naked chick…and luckily it has both. Can it get any weirder? Probably but I think they ran out of film.

This gross horror-comedy is supposedly a low budget tribute to Herschell Gordon Lewis’ trashy splatter classic Blood Feast and with the crazed splat stick humor you can see the influence but I wouldn’t put it in the same class. Especially bad acting all around on this one but still enjoyable for it’s pure outrageous weirdness. Retroman Steve says check it out, but watch out for flying body parts. 

- Nude areobic workout massacre
- Pickled brains
- Belching overweight vegetarians
- Vantriliquist diner chefs
- Deep fried hookers noggins
- Finger food
- Multiple mamboo hit and runs
- Kung-fu nudists
- Hitler wrestling 
- Zombie mosh pits
- Broomstick decapitation
- Gratuitous use of the line “Georgie, stop fooling around!”

 rated 7.3 out of 10

Blood buffets…take all you want but eat alll you take. Sheetar commands it.

Check out this clip from Blood Diner. This is why I Love to Mamboo!

“His decision to fight crime as Chocolate Chip Cookie Man was not received well within the super hero community.”

I would have to say that hunting is my least favorite sport that I’ve experienced in my lifetime. Give me basketball or football or even the nerve wrenching tension of Canadian curling. Just as long as you don’t put me in camoflauge and drop me in the woods. I’m not quite sure why they even call hunting a sport. There’s no running involved, well unless a bear is chasing you up a tree. There’s no throwing things except maybe empty beer cans in the woods. In fact there’s no real physical activity at all. Mostly it’s just sitting on your hinder shivering in a tree blind with a rifle barrel freezing to your groin hoping for the unlikely chance of a deer crossing your path to your pile of apples. “Oh look a magic pile of food..what a lucky deer I am that someone left this here for….KAAAABLAAAAAAAAM!!!”

Lucky that you picked up that semi automatic at Kmart last week so if at any point a large semi-trailer gets between you in the deer well he’s still a goner. Though Dick Cheney would beg to differ, I don’t feel other hunters are competiting against me nor do I mistake rich lawyers faces as targets, well most of the time. Give the deer a gun too and now we’ve got a real competetive sport. I’ve sat in the tree stands, slept in the deer blinds, and caught headlice in rustic hunting cabins but never caught buck fever at least nothing a couple shots of  Nyquil wouldn’t fix. I know some people say “Well if we don’t kill the deer they’ll just destroy our crops!” If they were locusts and this was biblical times then it’s a maybe but you’ll see at most five deer darting across a big empty field once in a winter. That’s not really an infestation. But I respect the hunter. They’re truly committed to their craft. Anyone that can sit out in a deerblind in a middle of a field all day is a man of patience and perseverance. It builds character, just look at what it did for Ted Nugget.

Speaking of people standing out in the middle of a field with nothing to do. Night of the Scarecrow introduces us to a vengeful scarecrow that unleashes an unholy terror on a group of redneck vigilantes. Larry Drake plays Bubba, a mentally challenged middle aged man who is wrongly accused of killing a young child. They’re lead by one of the the most evil postman ever seen on TV since the dark days of Mr. McFeely. Charles Durning plays Otis P. Hazelrigg (not his maiden name) the town postman who convinces a group of his friends to track down Bubba now disguised as a scarecrow and  shoot him up like a pinata at a gansta party.

After a circus courtroom hearing that had all the lawful proceedings of a skit from He-Haw, the judge throws out the case claiming it was all in self defense. As if these upstanding members of society would ever harm a fly on purpose. I mean who’d ever believe a postman would go on a murderous killing spree? If Judge Judy was there she’d mop up the floor with them and their plaid shirts and bolo ties. Later than night a mighty wind blows through town bringing with it the vengful spirit of Bubba and the strong odor of fertilizer manure. Soon a possessed scarecrow starts showing up in empty fields near their homes to put the creeper jeepers on his murdering foes. It’s mostly an intimidation move but causes the guys to panic and start suspecting each other of breaking their secret.

What you gotta love  is throughout the film Otis never once changes his mailman uniform. I swear he must shower and slept in it. Impressive also is his ability to pack away the food like it’s a 99 cent buffet even after killing an innocent man. Buffet’s cower in his presence. Otis’s friends start showing up dead it what appears to be work related accidents. Falling into wood chippers, drownings in grain silos, typical farming mishaps. But Otis’s paranoia kicks into overdrive as his tiny pea brain theorizes that it’s Bubba’s grieving mother or the prosecuting attorney causing all the ruckus trying to get him to confess.

A stern warning from Otis accidentally gives Bubba’s mom a fatal heart attack and he then proceeds to off one of his buddies with a shovel to the back of the skull from fear he might tattle on him. This brings up the Ottis murder-meter total to 3, already beating out the scarecrow’s in just a few short days. That’s not to shabby for a middle aged government worker.

Later after a drab halloween party where he gets drunk on spiked apple cider, he ends up getting chased down in a corn field by a rusty John Deere and meets his much deserved and pointed ending. Serves him right for all that junk mail delivery. Oh and his stupid hat.

So go put the flag down on your mailbox, turn the lights down low and cuddle up with your favorite bag of hay. Retroman Steve says check it out and bring a pitchfork.

- Dorky postal jungle hats
- Scarecrow target practice
- Farmer mulchers
- Feed grain drowning
- Gratuitous pancake eating
- Fat guys running in fields
- Shovel to the head

Speaking of creepy scarecrows on TV, Scarecrow Spud on Bob the Builder is hands down the most frightening.

Dark Night of the ScareCrow T-shirts available from Fright Rags At Fright Rags you can get this high quality horror shirt you can’t find anywhere else. Fright Rags has the best selection of horror shirts based on your favorite cult classics, creature features, and slasher flicks! Check out the Dark Night of the Scarecrow T-shirts

Check out a scene from Dark Night of the Scarecrow

“Chris discovers Tom Cruise’s Scientology approved hyperbolic chamber. The only side effect is his continual shrinkage.”

I think college frat guys are getting an unfair stereotype in film. In most movies they’re portrayed as the dumb jock whose out to boink every co-ed they stumble across and that’s only if they can take enough time to put their beer can down. They initiate freshmen pledges by forcing  them to carry around stemmed cherries with their butt cheeks or having them steal the rival teams animal mascot and put in the dean’s new convertible. Their frat house are like a demilitarized zones littered with pizza boxes from last years graduating class and empty keg cans make up most of their furniture. The place is so gruesome sometimes you can count the ring of stains on the walls and figure out how old the building is. It’s not their fault and I think I know where the blame firmly lies…it’s the cheap beer. College frat guys are always broke and are forced to buy cheap beer which leads to binge drinking and eventually some guy who thinks he can fly off the roof if he wears a cape and an adult diaper (and I have the metal plate in my head to prove that.) I think the colleges should institute a fine imported beer requirement. They can only drink a few though because, well who can afford to drink any more. No more Pabst Blue Ribbon specials for those incoming pledges either, that’s just cruel. Freshly sobered, the dumb meat headed jock suddenly becomes a wine critic, an upstanding member of society, a consumer of fine cheeses and toothpicked snacks. Just think about it, no more streaking pledges across campus…because that’s really not that funny unless your drunk. No more belching the alphabet or lighting farts, again not funny unless your hammered. Pizza boxes are recycled into green friendly IKEA packaging, no more rowdy football games on the TV just Antique Roadshow re-runs and rush week turns into home and garden tours where….. wait you know what? On second thought I think they should just keep the cheap beers and wear those greek embroidered polo shirts. Their inner caveman will thank them for it later when they get married.
Speaking of frat guys who are no longer in control of their own brains. Night of the creeps has a whole bus load of them as helpless co-eds faceoff against zombified frat brothers whose brains are infested with alien slugs. Makes your last prom date not look so bad don’t it? Chris “don’t call me George” Romero is a red headed nerd in a sweater vest and J.C. is a wise talker in an arm brace walker out cruising around pledge week. Suddenly Chris spots Cindy Cronenberg, a pretty college girl with the voice of a chipmunk hooked on helium. Chris can’t resist a girl who looks like a super model but sounds like Rocky from a Bullwinkle cartoon so he has J.C. try to introduce him to her. Unfortunately his weak human ears can’t handle her vocal octaves so they have to pledge a fraternity to impress her instead. Brad, their fearless leader and king of polo pop-up collars sends them on a pledge mission to steal a corpse and drop it on the front lawn of a rival frat house. Nothing really says a fun greek week like rotting corpse lawn decor so Chris and J.C. break into a medical lab on campus hoping to score some fresh dead. They find a freeze dried corpse instead who had a close oral encounter with some alien slugs 40 years earlier. Why the med students decided to freeze this guy like a TV dinner is beyond me. “We have to preserve his tall hair style for future generations!”

Smart as a brick J.C. hits the child friendly release button and the corpse starts spitting out slugs from it’s head like a broken Pez dispenser. J.C. has such a big mouth it’s an easy target for the alien slugs so he soon gets zombified during a bathroom break and his failed burning toilet paper roll defense. Dead med students start walking, janitors are turned into mopping alien incubators, zombie dogs and cats living together..it’s mass hysteria!

To save the world they get cop Detective Ray Cameron played pitch perfect by Tom Akins. Ray is hankering for some good old slug skeet shooting and blows the head off an infested axe murder earlier just to warm up. Meanwhile Chris and Cindy are torching some slugs-ka-bobs outside the sorority house and mulching their lawn with frat guy’s innards. Detective Cameron  fights off more zombies inside the house dirty Harry style and gets to deliver one of the great lines in b-movie history “The good news is your dates are here…the bad news is they’re dead.” That’s pure movie gold right there. The slugs have all gathered in the basement to munch on some freshly canned brain preserves and Detective Cameron has got a can of gasoline just waiting to start the pyrotechnic grand finale. If you’ve seen the more recent movie called Slither directed by James Gunn then you’ll see the direct influence of this classic 80’s horror slug-fest on that story. Now if the owners of this film would just release the darn movie rights already so we could watch it on DVD. In the meantime you’ll just have to sift through some old VCR tapes bargain bins to find this little horror gem. Retroman Steve says check it out and be sure to bring some matches.

Roadside Attractions

- 3 naked alien midgets
- 1 sorority house explosion
- 1 corpsicle
- 1 fratastic bus crash
- 1 cat of the living dead
- Doggy slug-dispensers
- Canned brain storage
- Peeping tom zombies
- Lawn slug exterminators
- Zombie mowing and landscape services

rated 8.6 out of 10 for the movie

The most popular fraternities on my campus? I Felta Thigh and Kappa Tappa Kegga

Check out the trailer for Night of the Creeps