Saturday, November 2, 2019

FUNLAND - "Welcome To The Abusement Park" (1987)

 Halloween's over, so now it's on to Turkey Time, and the first Saturday Night Special of the month, a totally insane movie that was made in 1989 titled "Funland!"

 "Funland" is an amazing piece of Pop Culture garbage with a wild and crazy cast! It would be a pretty good movie if it was only about an hour shorter!

 Funland is an amusement park and one of the main attractions is Bruce Burger/Neil Stickney as the Brewster's Burgers clown. As Neil, he was an accountant for Funland, but after a nervous breakdown, he became the clown Bruce. His best friend and puppet pal is Peter Pepperoni!

 They're getting ready for opening day, and the owner of Funland, Angus Perry, tells all the employees that he intends to keep Funland up and running as a family business forever!
Angus was played by the distinguished William Windom. He's another of the few actors that was ever in one more than one "Twilight Zone." He was in both "Five Characters In Search Of An Exit," and "Miniature," and besides that, he has another 251 credits!

 The next day they find Angus dead! 
Supposedly it's suicide, but a bunch of gangsters knocked him off so they could get their dirty hands on Funland!

 After the funeral, they open the park anyway!
 The hot ticket food item is the Pizza Burger! Yum!
There's not really any foul language of nudity in this film, but there are lots of sexual innuendos, and strange comedy bits!

Of all groups they had to host, of course the main one would be the "American Council On Rectal Surgical Supplies!"

 I don't even know what to make of this sign!

 The gangsters take over Funland and Bruce Burger gets the boot! They kick him out of his dressing room, and send him over to the wax museum which is no longer open to use as a dressing room.
If Bruce looks the least bit familiar to you, it's because it's the iconic 'Squiggy' from the "Laverne and Shirley" TV show, David L. Lander.

 Once inside the wax museum, two of the wax figurines come to life, Bogie and Marilyn.
Bogie was played by Robert Sacchi, who made a career of being Bogie, and he's real good at it!
I played Hell trying to find out who the blonde was, and there was no info on the IMDB, so I watched the ending credits again, and they said it was Dawn Stone as Bogie's companion. I couldn't find any other information on her at all. This whole movie's a joke, so why should the credits be real?

 Robert Sacchi is always cool and his first performance was in a 1972 film called "The French Sex Murders," that you can read all about right here!

 "Funland" was shot at the real amusement park called "Six Flags Over Georgia!"

 Bruce freaks out a little bit when the dead Angus shows up in the cafeteria line.

 Besides being a ringer for Bogie, Robert Sacchi shows that he's not a one trick pony!

 
 And what I meant by that is here Robert is also playing the ringleader of these mobsters, Mario DiMauro!

 "Funland" is chock ful of nutty humor, like this guy in drag who strips down to his skivvies, and the intolerant rednecks in the audience storm the stage. 
There's one questionable bit that has black guys working in a watermelon concession stand, and I swear at one point when all the crowd is coming in through the front gate, there is a group of people in white hooded outfits that don't quite fit in. All in the name of humor I guess, but.....Really?

 They replaced Bruce with a classically trained actor who is not happy about the whole thing at all!

 Like I was saying before...........

 As a disc jockey goes on an endurance ride on the roller coaster, they have a ring card girl counting off the rounds just like in a boxing match!

 The credits say that Donald Trump's ex-wife Marla Maples is in "Funland" as a Mother, but this is about the best shot I could get of any blonde Mothers, so I don't know if that's her or not, because they never show the face of this character.

 So......After being egged on by his dead boss and the wax figure of Bogie, Bruce comes up with a plan to disrupt opening day. He steals one of the DiMauro boy's weapons and starts targeting people like his replacement. He fires off a couple of rounds, but he never shoots anybody. 
What does happen is that he draws the attention of the owner of the gun, who tries to get it back, and gets shot in the process!

Bruce is declared a hero since nobody really knows what happened, and is able to buy the park, and live happily ever after!

Friday, November 1, 2019

DRACULA'S LAB / Richard Olson: Monster Kid Home Movies - 1967

Okay, since Halloween Countdown is back in the grave, I plan on ricocheting all over the place this month since I have a big variety o' stuff to choose from. Today, we gots another episode of terror from those Monster Kids back in the day!

Oh yeah, the dumb kids forgot to make a title card, so, I made one for them...

Well, it looks like someone's in their dime store mad lab, doing something! Wonder what it is...

So, first you add some Dr. Pepper, then some Fizzies and licorice Neccos, add sugar, stir well and drink it all down. What could possibly happen now, you ask...

Here's what could happen... A freakin' little Dracula!

Then the crazy little vampire transforms into a bat after a giant puff of smoke fills the lab...

And viola, he's at the cemetery, in the daytime!!.. What the Hell kind of Dracula is he, anyway?

He starts running, he runs and runs and runs through the gravestones. In the first pic, you can see that Lil' Drac forgot to tuck his shirt in, stupid kids!

He runs a long time before he comes across another stupid kid, taking a nap!! Actually, he's supposed to be dead, because...

The vampire drags the guy all the way to his lab, which was about a mile away from the cemetery according to my estimation. I'd bet the dead guy's left side is scraped raw!!!

Anyway, Dracula somehow gets the dead one on the slab and puts two dealie-bobs at his neck.

He turns on the juice and before long the dead kid just wakes up! What the Hell now?

Drac looks at some x-rays he just made, and, after he checks them out, the stupid movie just ends!!.. So, if I wuz you, I'd tune in tomorrow to see what old Eegah!! has in store for us all, see you there, here, at The Dungeon!!..

Wednesday, October 30, 2019

WITCH'S NIGHT OUT - "Happy Halloween" (1978)

Wow! That month went by really fast, so here ya go, this is our last offering in this Countdown To Halloween 2019, and it is a short animated feature from 1978 called
"Witch's Night Out!"

This is the home of the witch in the daylight hours. It just looks like a rundown olde mansion!

This is the star of the show, the witch! 
The witch's voice is done by the always hilarious Gilda (99 Episodes of Saturday Night Live) Radner! It's a real bummer that Gilda passed away at only 42, a victim of cancer back in 1989!

These two kids out trick or treating are named Tender and Small!
The woman giving out the treats is called Nicely! 
Fiona (Dr. Zonk and the Zunkins) Reid is the voice of Nicely.

Tender and Small try and scare something out of the krazy neighbor lady named Malicious, but that doesn't work! Catherine (Beetlejuice, and the voice of Sally in Nightmare Before Christmas) O'Hara is the voice of Malicious.

The kids are sad because they were not able to scare anybody, and even worse, everybody recognized them! The juxtaposition of the extremely simple artwork of the kids and the elaborate background works well together.

The townsfolk have all decided to go to the olde haunted mansion to have a spooky Halloween party. They don't even know the witch actually lives there!

The witch sees all the creepy people in her house and decides to vacate the premises for the evening!
It's not like they can mess her place up or anything like that!

 
She gets on her broomstick and takes off, and the next thing you know, she's crashed into this window!

Just by sheer luck, the witch has crash landed in the bedroom of Tender and Small.
While the adults are out, a guy named Bazooey is babysitting the kids. They tell the witch that they are not having a fun Halloween because they are not scaring anyone, and she offers to help them out in that situation!

With a wave of her wand, the witch turns Small into a werewolf!

Tender always wanted to be a ghost, and now she is.

Bazooey gets transformed into a Frankenstein character!

The kids finally have a good time and go back to the witch's house and scare all the adults!

Then everything goes to Heck and back. The witch loses her wand and can't change them back.
Malicious finds the wand and tries to change stuff into something with monetary value!
And in the meantime, the townspeople think the kids are missing and that these monsters must have them, and turn into an unruly mob. They only thing they are lacking is torches!

It all gets straightened out in the end, and the witch offers to transform some of the people if they'd like, and Nicely says, she'd always wanted to be a vampire, so...
presto, change-o!

Another character named Rotten gets changed into an angel, and Malicious becomes a fairy princess!

It's all fun, and nobody gets hurt, (just the way it's supposed to be) and the witch invites everybody back to her place for the time of their lives!
We hope you liked the show!

Monster Music

Monster Music
AAARRGGHHH!!!! Ya'll Come On Back Now, Y'Hear??