When? Did you discover-that you were a Bad movie geek? Or a geek in general? When did it start? When you realized-"Dang-Im not like other people-"
Hmmmm? I think I realized this-back in -oh-1972-I was 10 years old. But even then....EVEN THEN- I Knew--Iwas considered a "weirdo".I read FAMOUS MONSTERS,CASTLE OF FRANKENSTIEN. When my buddies were into comic books-I wanted to know about the artists who drew them. So. When did you turn into a "geek"?
In the early '80s. Between Elvira's Movie Macabre, a bunch of straight-to-video '80s post-apocalyptic movies, USA's Up All Night movies, and then Mystery Science theater 3000, I descended into geekdom.
I remember watching ASTRO ZOMBIES on Shock Theater on chanell 41 uhf...and thinking-"this is just part of Witchie's (the local host-some guy dressed up as a witch-) shtick.. was un warrented. .nope....it was the film. This was about...oh...I dunno...1972? :question: Bout the time FM had DRACULA VS FRANKENSTEIN on the cover of FM...yeah...I knew...I was in the minorty....I liked it anyway.....
I realized...not all of the stuff I liked was accepted by the world at large....
(http://i93.photobucket.com/albums/l79/RCMerchant/B6nhlrQWkKGrHqFjEEyd8QJlnSBMosw_3.jpg)
I also recall being horrified that Dracula-my favorite monster-had an afro!
BUT-before I realized this...I was already into FM...but I thought all kids liked it....like kids nowadays like video games....I was wrong. My first issue of FM was #81-1970....
(http://i93.photobucket.com/albums/l79/RCMerchant/71-9.jpg)
Back then-monsters were popular-like Power Rangers or video games were for future generations...but ive noticed Monster Kids (thats what they call us nowadays) have a loyalty that transends age....I am proud to be a "Monster Kid". :cheers:
Oh, I think I always appreciated bad movies. I think I first intellectualized that it was a "thing" when I was in my pre-teen years. Several things contributed to it:
* Reading alot of MAD Magazine
* Older siblings who were cracking up to movies like Reefer Madness and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
* Spending many hours with my buddy during sleepovers watching b-movies on late night television back in the day
To name a few.
Quote from: Flick James on January 13, 2011, 06:24:28 PM
Oh, I think I always appreciated bad movies. I think I first intellectualized that it was a "thing" when I was in my pre-teen years. Several things contributed to it:
* Reading alot of MAD Magazine
* Older siblings who were cracking up to movies like Reefer Madness and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
* Spending many hours with my buddy during sleepovers watching b-movies on late night television back in the day
To name a few.
I think MAD magazine had an influnce on all of us...intoduced us to parady and questioning of everyting! Comics? MAD ragged em. Movies? Mad ragged em. Politics. Yup. MAD was just as influntial in my life as FM was.
(http://i34.photobucket.com/albums/d137/lomeranger/change.jpg)
Definitely when I saw my first issue of FM:
(http://www.moviemags.com/big/fmof048.jpg)
It was an older issue a friend of my older brother brought over one afternoon.
This was the first issue I actually bought:
(http://www.moviemags.com/big/fmof065.jpg)
I spied it at the Rexall drugstore and begged my mother to let me buy it rather than some comic books.
I was hooked!
There were some huge gaps in my personal collection due to my mother's wariness over my monster obession ("You're going to warp your mind!"), but my buddy Steve had a whole stack and never missed an issue.
This was the last issue of the initial run I had:
(http://www.moviemags.com/big/fmof110.jpg)
My parents decided "enough is enough" and the magazines, models, etc. all went into the garbage. :hatred:
Watching The Creeping Flesh on the local saturday afternoon horror show when i was 7. I started early :smile:
What made me think that this stuff was actually an ART FORM...something to take seriously...was...oddly...about the same time-(age 10!) CASTLE of FRANKENSTEIN magazine...which-unlike FM-dont get me wrong-I loved FM) but it was more of a film and pop culture analaysis (I KNOW I spelt that wrong...) kinda like the later PSYCHOTRONIC magazine. I was a weird kid. Raffine-my Dad didnt care about my weird interests...but he did get drunk once and busted up all my Aurora models...old basterd! I had em all too! Old f**ker!
(http://i93.photobucket.com/albums/l79/RCMerchant/CoF24-1.jpg)
As far back as I can remember. I was begging my mother to let me stay up late to watch horror movies when I was about 5 years old . . . maybe younger. Now I beg my wife to let me stay up late and watch horror movies.
Little bits and pieces of my past kind of contributed to my love of the genre.
Quote
I think MAD magazine had an influnce on all of us...intoduced us to parady and questioning of everyting! Comics? MAD ragged em. Movies? Mad ragged em. Politics. Yup. MAD was just as influntial in my life as FM was.
Mad Magazine indeed fine tuned my wise ass side growing up. Being able to parody things is an acquired personality trait to take on the movies we do. MAD always and continues to teach the message its ok to like things but don't take them too seriously.
At an early age my brother played a huge part in my love of horror and scifi. I'd also intake a lot of slapstick comedies with him. He'd let me watch movies my mother would have flipped out at. However, he never let me watch the gory parts until I was older. My brother was a rabid fan of Elvira who also shared with me the joys of parody. Where certain kids grew up on a primarily on Disney, I was tuning in to a lot of stuff they weren't.
My father also let me watch many movies with him like spaghetti westerns, action films, slapstick etc. He'd often tune in to late Saturday night matinees on TV and I'd watch them with him. Speaking of Saturdays, I used to catch a lot of cheesy Kung Fu flicks after cartoons.
Thats the start of it really. I really got majorly into B-Flicks in college. I had a professor that actually introduced me to Dead Alive. I'm his friend on Facebook and thank him from time to time for hooking me up with that. :bouncegiggle:
Much to the protest of my mother, I watched a lot of horror movies with my dad starting when I was a baby. She'd come home and find me cuddled up on the couch with him watching something gory- werewolves, zombies, vampires, axe murderers – we'd watch them all! He'd be making jokes about it so I wouldn't be scared and I'd be giggling. I also have to give some credit to my uncle. We've lived in the same house with him all my life, and he's big on hobbies and tech stuff. At the same time we got cable, he bought a vhs recorder and recorded EVERY movie on cable for years. There were 3 movies to a tape, he'd label them and stick them up on the book shelf – a custom made book shelf that fit the whole wall and was 3 rows deep. There had to be hundreds of tapes. We still have them! It's kind of fun to put one on and see the old Cinemax and HBO intros before the movie started. I'd usually watch one when I was up late, or when I had a sleepover my friend and I would peruse for the scariest title or one that we thought might have boobs. I also watched the USA up all night movies.. I loved Rhonda! I never really thought of myself as a geek for liking that stuff, I always thought I was way cooler than the other kids because I had such a great dad with good taste in movies and my super cool uncle with all the movies I could ever want!
I didn't really realize no one else thought I was cool until I was in 7th grade and the kids at school started a rumor that I was a witch.. and I didn't deny or confirm it because I didn't want to be friends with them lame-os anyway. Weekly sessions with the school counselor solidified it for me – I was weird, no one liked me, and I was going to be alone the rest of my teenage life! I'm over it now, and I still think I'm cooler than them!
Whe I realized I preferred collecting comic books (I loved The Mighty Thor, The Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, The Avengers, The Justice League of America and the Legion of Super-Heroes) and watching superhero cartoons (Marvel Superheroes Action Hour!, 1960s Spider-Man, He-Man, Astroboy) over sports trading cards, car magazines and playing outdoor sports which all my friends were more into (although I was always a big lover of pro wrestling (it was like watching superheroes and villains battle for real?! :bouncegiggle: ...which also tended to make me seem geeky later in life to many). I also watched The Incredible Hulk TV series as well as The Bionic Woman.
This was the first FM I bought, I'm not sure what the first issue was that I saw (it was my older brother's and had a picture of FRANKENSTEIN standing on MAE CLARKE's wedding train on the inside back cover). Practically PORNOGRAPHIC in our house.
(http://www.moviemags.com/big/fmof094.jpg)
Thanks RAFFINE, I followed your image URLs to find mine (my scanner isn't working, but I do have the issue 'round here somewhere!)
When friends of my family took me to see the awful musical version remake of Lost Horizon when I was six. I came home and my mom asked me what I thought of it: my answer was "It was sh*t." My mom's first reaction was to laugh and then to clout me upside the head for using the word sh*t. :teddyr:
Thankfully, my folks took me to see Murder On The Orient Express the following year. They had to drag me kicking and screaming into the cinema because I didn't want to go in and then when the film was over, they had to drag me kicking and screaming out because I didn't want to leave. :teddyr:
It started back in the mid-to-late seventies, when my sisters and I would watch Monster Matinee on Saturdays.. Ghidra, Mothra, Godzilla, Gamera, etc. But I didn't really pay attention to the laughable production values/appreciate a movie's badness until we rented Rodan on laserdisc in the early eighties. We fell over howling.
As far back as I can remember, it was a treat and delight to watch B-movies with my Dad. So mid-60's? He had those Aurora models too. He got me into Twilight Zone, Night Gallery, Outer Limits and we always seemed to be the only ones I knew who tried to catch the 'new' off-beat TV shows - before they were cancelled (as they always were :bluesad: ) The original Star Trek included. I realized that I was a little...odd...when I had read both Dracula and Frankenstein by age 10 - and most of my classmates had only vague ideas of what they were about! Dad and I almost had a secret language: quoting dialogue from our favourite episodes and making references to them in appropriate situations and cracking each other up.
Thanks, Dad!
When i was 5 or 6 when I watched my first Godzilla film. I think from that point there was no place really else to go but geekdom.
Me? A geek? Who sez I'm a geek? The whole world? Oh, okay.
When I was in elementary school, before I'd really been introduced to monster movies, a friend actually briefly convinced me that Godzilla was real. It didn't last long, but then, of course, I became more curious and fell in love with the big ol' radioactive reptile and all his movies (that'd be Godzilla, not my friend, who was a kid and not reptilian at all :tongueout:). I didn't really view them as "bad"; rather, they were just entertaining. I do remember laughing with my brother at The Giant Claw and The Deadly Mantis, but, again, they were entertaining movies, so they were good, not bad.
In a way, I was like Paquita, except not as cute and without the girly bits :twirl:. I always marched to my own drummer, and figured out early on that if people didn't like me for who I was, I didn't really care if they liked me at all, because I wasn't going to change just to suit them. I like the things I like, and if that makes the world label me a geek, so be it. These days, my wife and daughter don't understand why I like the movies I like, but they tolerate me well enough and give me space to watch them (okay, I had to buy an old travel trailer and fix it up to have that "space," but still...).
Nobody in my family has the same taste in books and movies that I do, but I never saw myself as being fundamentally different because of that. To me, I just had different taste in books and movies. I've always had this penchant for b type stuff though. I remember watching Mysterious Island on tv when I was just a wee lad and loving it. I discovered Godzilla a short time later. After that I'd watch anything with a giant animal in it.
WOW! I am having serious flashbacks from those FMF covers! Thanks RCMerchant, Raffine and Allhallowsday for reviving all those dormant kid memories!
Oh yeah, It started for me when I saw the movie trailer for Earth Vs the Spider on TV when I was four! That was more than 50 years ago.
QuoteOh yeah, It started for me when I saw the movie trailer for Earth Vs the Spider on TV when I was four! That was more than 50 years ago.
Yeah, I'd have to say my roots go back to being that four year old peeking from behind the couch to watch THE KILLER SHREWS, THE SCREAMING SKULL, FROM HELL IT CAME, THE GIANT GILA MONSTER, etc. on the afternoon Dialing For Dollars show. Thank you, Tom York and WBRC!
Seeing my first FM sort of solidified the warpedness already twisting in my brain! :thumbup:
(http://www.birminghamrewound.com/WBRCNewsTeam.GIF)
Tom York twisted my mind. And the lovely Pat Gray put fire in my heart.
Bill Bolen and Joe Langston didn't do a thing for me.
Also I've got to give some credit to Walt Disney for turning me into a B-movie fan...I'm not sure how else I would classify The Black Hole and Tron both of which I adored as a kid (I even had those little book/records of both and they were very cherished in my youth although I'm not sure whatever happened to them today)...
I was always into b-movies since i was a kid. this was aound the early 80s. i remember seeing an ad for the movie "visiting hours" in the local newspaper and wished like hell that i could go see it. i thought that skull design on the hospital was awesome! by the time vcrs came around, i was in heaven renting up anything and everything horror related, from the bigwigs like F13th to more obscure like Pieces, Hospital Massacre and the like. eventually, i was a regular fango reader. but as far as "bad" movies go, they just kinda snuck up on me and went hand in hand with my horror addiction. as much as there is "good" horror (ie: halloween), there is "bad" horror (ie: garden of the dead), but that didn't really need mentioning i guess. i can't really explain my attraction to bad movies, but to put it simply, i just like to be entertained and damned if the majority of movies WE like are entertaining as hell. :smile: btw, when i eventually did see it, "visiting hours" did not dissapoint. has to be one of the classiest slashers i've ever seen.
I was born in 1989, so I missed the golden, silver, AND bronze age for all this kinda stuff. Also, NO ONE in my entire family digs monsters, weirdos, or anything taboo, so it's truely a mystery how I've gotten to where I am now. Infact, when I was naught but a wee sapling, I wasn't even allowed to watch Batman, Power Rangers, and the like. Much less anything weird or remotely frightening. Because of this, I had a phobia of anything riskay growing up. In middle school, I was even too afraid to watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail because of the Black Night scene.
Then, somewhere in my junior year of high school, I did a complete backflip and OVERLOADED on anything and everything weird and socialy unaceptable. Friends would always try to get me to watch Hellraiser or Scream or even Frankenstein, and up until that point, I would never abide.
I don't know what happened to me or why, but I'm sure as sh!t glad it did.
I'm no geek, I just like hanging around you guys! :bouncegiggle: :bouncegiggle:
Quote from: A Man Called Ed on January 17, 2011, 06:01:46 PM
I'm no geek, I just like hanging around you guys! :bouncegiggle: :bouncegiggle:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBXyB7niEc0
:teddyr:
Quote from: Raffine on January 17, 2011, 06:15:19 PM
Quote from: A Man Called Ed on January 17, 2011, 06:01:46 PM
I'm no geek, I just like hanging around you guys! :bouncegiggle: :bouncegiggle:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBXyB7niEc0
:teddyr:
All the best freaks are here...Stop staring at me. (look it up kids)
-Ed
ps. Crap, Prog Rock marks me doesn't it?
Generational difference, I was born in old '82 so I never got a chance to see the FM magazines that are listed here. It does kindof feel like missing out on a golden age though.
When I was a kid my mom tolerated bad movies and my dad loved them. I remember spending long times talking with my dad (typically as we were doing something, working on a car, cutting wood, etc.) and pestering him with questions until he pretty much gave me the entire plot-line of every horror movie he had ever seen (when I was too young to watch, later he showed them all to me). This coupled with the fact that I lived in a "haunted" house as a child definitely cemented my love of all things horror. I say "haunted" because our house was out in a woods nearby town where teenage boys would drive their girlfriends too for the explicit goal of scaring the girl's pants off (easier to get in the pants that way). My house wasn't really haunted, just everyone in nearby towns believed it was so we had a bizzare underworld popularity as the house at the end of "witch's hollow". We would have teen kids coming back to see our place all the time and several times they would get stuck because our lane was narrow with no good place to turn around. So they would be desperately trying to escape as my dad would be calmly walking out to their car to explain the finer points of a three point turn. Of course I would go out to watch (creeping the kids out further) and my sister and I would always be talking about ways to enhance the experience (like having me jump off of a large cross in the front yard or setting up something really spooky, we never actually did these things because that would take planning and foresight). It is strange how much of an impact actually being "the spook" while growing up had on me. My love of bad movies can be blamed on Cassandra Peterson and her hmmm... assets :wink:. That was cemented when my parents made the mistake of letting me watch "Elvira: Mistress of the Dark".
When a friend loaned me a copy of the MST3K of BLACK SCORPION...and I laughed my galaxy spanning a$$ off.
"Look at me, I'm messin' up time tables!"