FIEND / Don Dohler Productions - 1980

It's Halloween Countdown Friday with Tabonga, here at The Dungeon!.. We gots another flick from the Baltimore area by writer/producer/director Don Dohler, who also brought us the super low budget movies like THE ALIEN FACTOR, NIGHTBEAST, HARVESTERS, ALIEN FACTOR II, CRAWLER and more. Unbelievably, the budget for this one was just $6,000, something the Dungeon movie crew knows all about!

Eegah!! sent over a great little sound clip from this flick for our earjoyment, sooooo, you can push the big red 'GO' button over by our own Atomic Meanster, NOW, Rufus The Gnat!.. Here's a taste of... FIEND!

The story starts with an evil spirit entering into a gravesite and reanimating a moldy corpse into the form of Mr. Longfellow. To stay alive, it needs to absorb the life energy from a victim by Longfellow wrapping his hands around their throat!

Don Leifert is Mr. Longfellow, he was also in five other Dohler productions. Sadly, Don died in 2010 at age 59 from a heart condition.

Longfellow, a music instructor, is ready to snatch this girl's life force but is interrupted before he can seal the deal. By the way, this girl is the worst student in the history of music and actually deserves to die after hearing her play!

George Stover, who has a total of 73 movie credits (6 now either filming or in post!) and appeared in many Dohler projects, plays Mr. Longfellow's assistant. Here, they're having a tense conversation concerning music books!

This guy hears a girl screaming and goes to her aid, only to succumb to Longfellow's choke hold. There are always plenty of characters with goofy hair styles in Dohler flicks.

Gary, a nosey neighbor, decides to check out the spirit world for an explanation to the mysterious deaths occurring in the neighborhood.

Gary goes to a graveyard for clues where he meets a weirdo grounds keeper who sneaks up behind a tombstone and slaps him on the shoulder, and, for some strange reason has a newspaper clipping in his pocket of the dead dude that was reanimated into Longfellow!.. Seriously... WTF, Man?!!

In the meantime, Longfellow has tricked Gary's wife into coming over to his house. She goes in and down some stairs into the basement where she's attacked by the Fiend!

Here's a close up of the makeup job for... The FIEND!!

Gary finds his dead wife and has to go a round with Longfellow. Don Dohler's son, playing Scotty, grabs a sword from the wall and jabs it deep into Longfellow's back.

He looses the life force and drops dead on the floor, bringing an end to the insanity. The evil life force then heads back into outer space, from which it came!.. Do I hear an echo?

Tomorrow is another Halloween Countdown Saturday with Eegah!!

OSWALD THE LUCKY RABBIT - Walter Lantz - "Spooks" (1930)

 Welcome to Day 6 of the Halloween Countdown down in The Dungeon, and tonight's special little feature called "SPOOKS!"

 Oswald The Lucky Rabbit was actually the first Disney animated character predating Mickey! It's a long, wild, and convoluted story that contains the names of heavy hitters Walt Disney, Ub Iwerks, Carl Laemmle, and Walter Lantz, and can be read in full detail on Wikipedia, and I suggest that you do!

"Spooks" has a real sketchy almost unfinished look to it, but it's the simplicity that makes it work!

I didn't know they had slim fit pants back in 1930! This dude makes Olive Oyl look like a porker!

This shot makes for a perfect Halloween owl wallpaper!

Next thing you see is this phantom of a character entering an opera house! That's right kids, you might not know who Oswald The Lucky Rabbit is, but almost everyone has heard of "The Phantom Of The Opera" these days, and this cartoon was made as a tribute to Lon Chaney and the very first "Phantom Of The Opera" movie that was made in 1926!

So Let's Get This Shindig Started! Take it away Maestro!

See the little guy on the right, that's not Mickey!

"Tongue Tied Tongue Twister" - Try saying that real fast 13 times in a row, and see what happens to you!

The opera house has a pretty tough crowd on this particular night!

The Phantom hooks the young tongue-tied vocalist up with a wind-up phonograph (Record Player) stuffed into her bustle that she can mime to! What you'll hear in the little sound clip is the record skipping, followed by the phonograph running down and have to get wound back up, kind of like one of those bad Superbowl halftime shows!

She's told by The Phantom that everything will always be fine, as long as she doesn't try and remove his mask!

So, what's the first thing the stupid girl does? Remove his mask of course! Now he's mad because his ugly mug has been exposed!!

This is probably the weirdest shot in the whole cartoon! Also, not Mickey again!

Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks created Oswald The Lucky Rabbit in the 1920's! It was later that Walt Disney went another direction and ended up creating Mickey Mouse! Woody Woodpecker's Dad Walter Lantz carried on the Oswald cartoons until 1943! Oswald returned to the Disney family in 2010 in the video game called Epic Mickey!

In an effort to save the young lady, Oswald is of course, put through a series of obstacles like this giant spider.......

.......and then these dinosaur critters that run through Oswald's legs with sharp fins on their backs effectively denutting him! How they used to get away with wanton destruction of the family jewels gags in children's cartoons I will never know!

The story ends with The Phantom chasing Oswald down just in time to get in one last gag!

 

The Phantom asks Oswald a simple question! "What does a chicken say when it lays a square egg?" When Oswald doesn't respond correctly, The Phantom slaps him to give him the answer to the question, "OUCH!"  It's all that simple, see you on Saturday!

There are many free streaming versions of Oswald in "Spooks!" Here's the link to just one of them!

ALIEN / Brandywine Productions, Twentieth Century-Fox - 1979

It's Halloween Countdown Monday with Tabonga, here at The Dungeon!.. This is a movie I saw at the theater in 1979, and, wow, what a broken roller coaster ride it was! It's all about a crew aboard a deep space mineral towing vessel, the Nostromo, on its way back to Earth when an SOS transmission is received from a distant planet. For scientific reasons, they decide to make a detour to the planet to check out the source of the mysterious signal.

Eegah!! sent over a moody musical sound clip from this flick for our earjoyment, sooooo, you can push the big red 'GO' button located there by our cute little Alien egg, NOW, Ralphie The Tarantula!.. Here's a taste of... ALIEN!

The crew takes a shuttle down to the planet to investigate, will they discover alien life?.. Only your hairdresser knows for sure!

They come across a spaceship and strange machinery in a weird giant cave, apparently where the SOS signal originated from.

They find a huge skeleton in the pilot's seat, and, the mystery gets pretty damn weird. Then, crewman Kane is attacked by some unknown creature in another part of the cave and is taken back to the ship for medical attention.

After Kane's helmet is cut off, a creepy spider-like thing is found stuck to his face, YOW!!

When the doctors try and remove the parasite, it tightens its grip. When they try to remove a leg, the cut causes acid to spurt out and it immediately melts its way through the floor and nearly through the hull before it stops!

When checking on Kane's condition, they discover the face hugger has disappeared, so, they have to look for the infernal thing! After some tense moments, they find it dead after it falls onto Ripley's head! I still cannot figure out why they looked for it in the dark when they could have just turned the lights on! Oh, right, it's scarier that way!

M-m-m-m, here's the yummy new Alien Pot Pie being created at Mary Colander's bake shop!

John Hurt plays Kane, he was Caligula in my favorite mini-series I watched on cable in the early eighties, the BBC production of I, CLAUDIUS. Here, Kane has just been victim to giving birth to an ugly little baby Alien!!

Everyone's paranoid after the Alien has deep-sixed a crewman or two, now loose in the gigantic Nostromo vessel, so, time to break out the handy dandy flame throwers!

Ash goes haywire and gets his head knocked off, revealing his robot innards!

A look of the Alien with its metal teeth as it closes in for another kill!

Ripley escapes in a small emergency ship and watches as the Nostromo blows the Hell up!

Sigourney Weaver plays Ripley, here in this scene putting on her spacesuit after discovering the hideous creature hiding in the shadows!

In a tense moment, she opens the air lock and spears it before it gets lodged in the exhaust shield. After more quick thinking, she hits the full throttle button and turns the Alien into a crispy critter!

The next three Monday posts will showcase scary fun flicks from the eighties, you'll want to check those out! Tune in Wednesday as our Halloween Express continues on its trip to Hell!!