SILLY movies that TERRIFIED us as kids...

[mr. henry]

hey john...

what was kolchak? you don't mean kojak do you?

as a tyke i watched a bit of a "quincy" episode that freaked me out...something about a buried body...and a storm i think...

bigfoot recreations can be pretty creepy. although picturing a guy on the throne being groped by bigfoot is pretty hilarious. that famous footage where BF turns and looks at the camera is kind of creepy even though it's a proven fake.

to this day anything with the typical grey-alien face creeps me out...the only movies i don't like watching alone are realistic demonic possession flicks and ANYTHING with grey-type aliens. needless to say i can't watch "communion" alone...christopher walken AND grey-aliens...that's too much.

-mr. henry

[Goon]

               Hmmmmmmmm......(cracks knuckles) let me think...   I remember when I was little I could never stand the bit in the Wizard of Oz where the witch melts.  Something about the sounds and the steam.  I also remember watching "It Came from Hollywood" back when I was a reeeeel short guy.  The clip from "The Giant Claw" scared me and stuck with me for a while, back then it didn't look 'ridiculous' so much as hideous.  Also, the clip from "The Creeping Terror" scared me some.  For years I wondered how the carpet thing caught people and when I finaly saw the movie again I thought "Oh.  They climbed in.  That's it?  I was expecting something a bit more..."  Oh well.
-----------------------ooo-'U'-ooo-------Kilroy was here.

[Steven Millan]

                Okay,okay:I thought that "Land Of The Minotaur"(a.k.a.:"The Devil's Men")was hella extremely scary.
                Peter Cushing really looked creepy as hell,and having small kids conducting the sacrifices(to the nude golden Minotaur statue)was a pretty unnerving sight to see on a theater screen.
                 This movie also had Donald Pleasence as the hero,fighting the satanic evil that is all around him,as he did with the "Halloween" films.
                 Word has it that Peter Cushing was originally offered the Doc Loomis role for the first "Halloween",but turned it down. As much as I would have loved to have seen him in that movie(and Part 2),I think that Peter playing the overly-bonkers Loomis in "Halloween 5" would have been too much of a loony sight for my eyes,and everyone elses'.

[J.R.]

Jurassic Park. I was in my teens when it came out, but it got to me. Not in the theater, but later on as I went to sleep. When I was a kid I was absolutely obsessed with dinosaurs. I had entire dino books memorized and a huge assortment of toys. I wouldn't bathe without my favorite aquatic beasts and would argue endlessly with my brother about the pronunciation of dyplodocus. seeing things I had only imagined look so real was unnerving.

[Cullen]

mr. henry asks:

"what was kolchak? you don't mean kojak do you?"

Kolchak: the Night Stalker is the greatest Horror TV show of all time.  How could you not know about it?

I'm kidding, of course.  

K:tNS was a short lived series that appeared in the seventies.  It was about a Chicago reporter named Carl Kolchak who had a nasty habit of stumbling over supernatural menaces which no one would believe and, in the end, only he could stop.  If that sounds a wee bit like The X-files , it's because K:tNS was the inspiration for The X-files .

The series was itself inspired (and, in one episode, sequels) by a successful TV movie called The Night Stalker which has Carl tangling with the supernatural for the first time in Las Vegas.  Written by Richard Matheson, it is the best vampire movie...at least, the best one made for television.  Well worth your time.

As for the series, well, some episodes were good, most weren't.  Like most series.  It only lasted one season and has it's fans (me being one of them.)

Now, who the hell's Kojack?
_____________________________________________________________________
Telly Savalas, who appeared in some popular cop show or another in the seventies, had a very interesting career in bad movies.  Not only did he appear in Mario Bava's Lisa and the Devil , released in the states as House of Exorcism and the Christopher Lee vehicle Horror Express , but also in the Twilight Zone episode, "The Living Doll," which scared me in my more formidable days.

In none of these did he utter the line "Who loves ya, baby?"  But he did have a lollypop in Lisa and the Devil

[The Honn]

I know its not a movie, but it is stupid, I remember an episode of Little House on The Prarie where someone had supposedly cut off his own wife's head and two of the kids saw it. I dont remember much more except a scene when a ghost (a white sheet) rose up in the attic in front of the two kids. That and the big-ass monster in Krull scared the crap out of me as a kid.

[John]

>bigfoot recreations can be pretty creepy. although picturing a guy on the throne
>being groped by bigfoot is pretty hilarious

 I suppose, unless you happen to be a little kid and have to take a crap soon after on a toilet right next to a window. :)

>to this day anything with the typical grey-alien face creeps me out

 They're not typical greys, but check out Fire in the Sky with Robert Patrick. Pretty creepy and it's supposedly based on true events.

>The series was itself inspired (and, in one episode, sequels) by a successful TV
>movie called The Night Stalker

 Actually, there were two movies, The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler, the latter being about Jack the RIpper using a liquid extracted from his victims to stay young. They also redid this story in the series, but rather than have you find out who he is and have him explain everything to Carl, thereby making him more human, they kept him mysterious and then killed him off without ever letting the audience get to know him. Also, I believe both movies were made by Dan Curtis, the guy behind Dark Shadows.

 Coincidentally, Kolchak fought several bigfoot type creatures, all of which gave me the willies for some time afterward.

>I know its not a movie, but it is stupid, I remember an episode of Little House on
>The Prarie where someone had supposedly cut off his own wife's head and two
>of the kids saw it. I dont remember much more except a scene when a ghost (a
>white sheet) rose up in the attic in front of the two kids.

 I remember that episode, but I don't remember a scene in an attic, let alone one with a sheet. It was a Halloween episode and the kids are sneaking around the Olsen house when they hear the olsend arguing and then see a shadow on the wall of Mr. Olsen chopping someone's head off. Mrs. Olsen seems to have disappeared and the husband is hiding something in a bag and the kids think that it's her body. Turns out that she was just out of town and he had just gotten mad and hacked the head off a dressmaker's dummy. There is a nice scene near the end though, Laura (Melissa Gilbert) is walking through the woods and encounters the/a headless horseman. Or maybe I'm thinking of Dr. Quinn, I seem to recall they had an almost identical episode.

 The ghost in the attic sounds like a Brady Bunch episode where the kids were trying to scare each other out of the attic and one of them rigged up a ghost made out of plastic and hid it in a trunk.

[jmc]

Previews of movies scared me when I was a kid.  The worst was CARRIE.  My dad took me to see THE SHAGGY D.A. when I was 3, and they showed a preview for CARRIE.  Scared the hell out of me!  

The preview for CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND also scared me as a kid.   I was also scared by previews for THE GATES OF HELL, THE EVIL DEAD, and THE SHINING.

I also used to be scared of the scene in PSYCHO when they show Norman Bates' mother.  

THE EXORCIST still scares me!   I first saw it when I was 15.  My mom found out that I saw it and she got really mad.

[raj]

Previewing Carrie at the Shaggy D.A. movie?  What were they thinking?  Why not preview the Amityville Horror at one of the Herbie the Love Bug movies.  Yikes, what a way to freak out a bunch of young kids.

I was always creeped out by Wizard of Oz as a kid, the flying monkeys & melting the witch scenes did it for me.  Even after I had watched it a couple of times and knew what was coming.

Willy Wonka is disturbing.  "I've got a great idea, I'll create a Darwinian process to find the next owner of my candy company.  You'll either succeed, or die."

[Batgirl]

This is gonna sound stupid, cuz this movie is so  hilarious now, but when I was like 6, I saw Ghostbusters 2 and it scared the crap outta me!  The whole river of slime thing, and the pink blob over the city...I had nightmares for weeks.  Has anybody else had this experience?

[mr. henry]

i knew you couldn't have been thinking of kojak...that'd be one hell of a typo...

thanks for the night stalker schooling...a handful of twilight zone, some hitchcock theater, tales from the darkside, monsters, and amazing stories is the extent of my tv knowledge. and i'm pretty sketch on all of them.

-mr. h

[mr. henry]

the Honn wrote:

"I know its not a movie, but it is stupid, I remember an episode of Little House on The Prarie where someone had supposedly cut off his own wife's head and two of the kids saw it. I dont remember much more except a scene when a ghost (a white sheet) rose up in the attic in front of the two kids. That and the big-ass monster in Krull scared the crap out of me as a kid."

John wrote:

"I remember that episode, but I don't remember a scene in an attic, let alone one with a sheet. It was a Halloween episode and the kids are sneaking around the Olsen house when they hear the olsend arguing and then see a shadow on the wall of Mr. Olsen chopping someone's head off. Mrs. Olsen seems to have disappeared and the husband is hiding something in a bag and the kids think that it's her body. Turns out that she was just out of town and he had just gotten mad and hacked the head off a dressmaker's dummy. There is a nice scene near the end though, Laura (Melissa Gilbert) is walking through the woods and encounters the/a headless horseman. Or maybe I'm thinking of Dr. Quinn, I seem to recall they had an almost identical episode.

The ghost in the attic sounds like a Brady Bunch episode where the kids were trying to scare each other out of the attic and one of them rigged up a ghost made out of plastic and hid it in a trunk."

I say: the sheet in the attic sounds like the brady bunch to me too. that scared me as well...that's what i was getting off my chest with the first post on this thread. i'm glad i wasn't the only one. i can't figure out why that was scary to me then...and why in the world i can still remember seeing it. must have really made an impression.

-mr. h.

[Lee]

The Adventures Of Winnie The Pooh. Hey I was a kid! The scene that creeped me out was the dream sequence:the one where the Ephalants and Woozels were trying to steal his honey. Very distrubing. Just about as disturbing as the pink elephants in Dumbo!

[John]

>thanks for the night stalker schooling...a handful of twilight zone, some hitchcock
>theater, tales from the darkside, monsters, and amazing stories is the extent of
>my tv knowledge. and i'm pretty sketch on all of them.

 I'm pretty sure you can get episodes of The Night Stalker on video. They also released several 'movies' from the series. These were just two episodes editted together to make it look like he was working on both stories at the same time.

 As for other shows, there was The Dark Room hosted by James Coburn, One Step Beyond where the stories were supposedly based on true events, the old and new Outer Limits, the New Twilight Zone (they're making another one for UPN), Boris Karloff's Thriller, Rod Serling's Night Gallery, Ghost Story/Circle of Fear and others.

>the sheet in the attic sounds like the brady bunch to me too

 I think TV Land has been running The Brady Bunch early in the mornings. You could watch for that episode to see if that's the one you remember.

>i can't figure out why that was scary to me then...and why in the world i can still
>remember seeing it.

 Lots of older stuff is more scary than anything that's done today. Several years ago, a local channel was showing Ghost Story/Circle of Fear latenight on the weekends, and many of those episodes were pretty creepy. Compare the old and new versions of the Haunting sometime, the old one is much creepier.

[J.R.]

Same thing with me and the gray aliens. Even in Fire InThe Sky and Communion, where you could see the wires and they were obviously puppets, their faces are just so freaky. There's something about pale insectoid creatures entering your bedroom and taking you away that's frighteneing. The X-Files episode Jose Chung's From Outer Space was funny, but at the same time terrifying.