Friday Fromage: Super Duper Twilight New Moon (*sigh*) edition

I know, I know, it's redundant to put New Moon and "fromage" in the same post title. Let those hormone-hopping tweens and menopausal moms have their fun, and we'll have ours.

Hope you caught my flashback to movies, some even worse than New Moon, featuring teenage werewolves. Of course, my favorite is 1957's I Was a Teenage Werewolf that, along with Jerry Lewis' transformation scene in The Nutty Professor, were the movies most likely to make me soil myself as a child. I'll take Michael Landon going lupine-loco over Taylor Lautner's shirtless pouting any day.

We also need to provide evidence that teenage vampires were done before and better than Robert Pattinson overdoing the glitter skin creme in daylight. Quoting a commenter on my New Moon review: "Vampires. Don't. Sparkle."

Oddly enough, even with I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (a great double feature that came around almost annually), nobody ever thought to title a movie I Was a Teenage Vampire. It should tell you something when schlockmeisters of that era wouldn't even touch the idea.

But if we skip ahead of the usual Friday Fromage time frame -- cheese needs to age properly, you know -- to 1987, we find The Lost Boys starring both Coreys (Feldman & Haim) and Jack Bauer (Keifer Sutherland) before they even earned their first arrest records. Oh, were we ever that young?

And, just for good measure, this trailer for 1972's The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! that reminds me of New Moon fever, for some reason. Again, the minds that slapped this piece of bat guano together decided vampires were too dumb to add to the mix. Enjoy!

Friday Fromage: So long, Lee Majors, and thanks for all the Killer Fish

Maybe it's the tilapia Princess Di baked last night that led me to today's Friday Fromage pick, 1979's Killer Fish.

Dinner was tasty, baby, but there simply wasn't enough cheese.

Killer Fish is part of the genus underwatica stupidus, evolving from Steven Spielberg's Jaws. After that blockbuster, if it could swim there was a movie about it.

The bait for moviegoers here was the chance to see piranhas munching on the Six Million Dollar Man, Lee Majors, and a better cast than usual for such soggy entertainment: Oscar nominees Karen Black (Five Easy Pieces) and Marisa Berenson (Cabaret), former NFL quarterback/playboy Dan Pastorini, the granddaughter of a famous author (Margaux Hemingway), the guy who went searching for Charlton Heston in the second Planet of the Apes flick (James Franciscus) and Gary Collins, semi-famous for marrying Miss America, Mary Ann Mobley.

They're all on the trail of stolen jewels dumped in the ocean for safekeeping. Turns out that piranhas work better than guard dogs. You'll never experience a Long John Silver's snack the same way again.

Enjoy!

Friday Fromage: Every time a bell rings, a Cannibal Girl eats her wings (or else Eugene Levy)

After Thank You for Smoking, Juno and the upcoming Up in the Air, Jason Reitman has proven himself to be one of today's best young filmmakers. His father Ivan wasn't bad for a while either, with Meatballs, both Ghostbusters flicks and Stripes among his hits.

Thanks to those successes, junior didn't need to break into the business with a chunky slice of cinematic gouda like 1973's Cannibal Girls. Ivan Reitman did, dragging along SCTV stars Eugene Levy and Andrea Martin for this horror comedy. (Levy's the guy in the trailer wearing the Jew-fro and smoking a cigar before getting smoked.) "Tongue-in-cheek" is the least of what these shapely taboo breakers shove in their mouths when they're hungry.

Reitman also employs one of the signature ballyhoo stunts of the drive-in era, that the trailer makes triply sure viewers know about: a bell clanging whenever "scenes of an especially gruesome or erotic nature" are about to flash on screen. "Those in the audience of a squeamish or prudish disposition" could use that sound that sound as a signal to close their eyes or turn away.

But, really, if you paid to see a movie titled Cannibal Girls, would you miss the best parts?

Enjoy!

Friday Fromage Halloween Throwdown: Dracula vs. Frankenstein... and it's on TV!

For the first time in the annals of Friday Fromage (but how large can annals be after only five months?), we present the trailer for a trash-classic that you can actually witness in full glory on TV this weekend.

If you have the This TV channel (Ch. 463 on Verizon FIOS, at least) you'll find 1971's Dracula vs. Frankenstein playing at 5 p.m. Saturday. That's Halloween, if you haven't heard. Finding the channel may be a trick but the flick's a treat.

In this corner weighing 242 pounds and heavily in your nightmares is Dr. Frankenstein's monster Groton, played by Lon Chaney Jr., who made a nice living for decades off his more talented father's name.

In the other corner, weighing 168 soaking wet with blood and even less when he transforms into a bat -- Dracula, aka Zandor Volkov, aka Roger Engel (which isn't a scary name, so Famous Monsters of Filmland publisher Forrest J. Ackerman suggested Zandor Volkov). Volkov's movie career wasn't as durable as Chaney's; only one movie besides this one, 1972's Brain of Blood. You'll see why.

Enjoy!

Friday Fromage: Get your ya-yas out with Girl in Gold Boots

Go-go girls. Hippie mobsters. heroes named Critter and Buz (z's were at a premium in those days). A dozen entirely forgettable songs for the hip generation. The 1968 drive-in hit Girl in Gold Boots has them all.

But let's just let the movie's hyperventilating taglines speak for the flick:

"The glitz and glamor of being a big time Hollywood Go-Go dancer looked good from a distance, but up-close it was another story...this story.

"She Murdered for Fame, but the Price Tag Was Too Much!

"She Hungered For Fame... The Men In Her Life Offered Love, Danger, Excitement!"

I don't think I need to urge you to enjoy!

Friday Fromage double feature: Teenage Tramp and The Explosive Generation (Shatner attack!)

They don't get any cheesier than any movie starring William Shatner. The Explosive Generation put the future Capt. Kirk/T.J. Hooker/Denny Crane in a high school classroom, teaching (gasp!) sex education to students, some looking old enough to already be grandparents. Moms and dads are aghast, "teenagers" aren't as promiscuous as feared and Shatner... brings... them all together... for... a group hug.

Teenage Tramp (aka That Kind of Girl) stars the "startling new discovery" Margaret Rose Keil, a Tuesday Weld lookalike whose career progressed regressed from here to obscurity in Italian skin flicks with translated titles like Suppose... I Break Your Neck and Put Your Devil Into My Hell. Keil plays Eva, the titular tramp setting off "a chain reaction of explosive love affairs" that apparently includes a perv making dirty phone calls.

Enjoy!

Friday Fromage: Maybe the Bucs need a boost from Satan's Cheerleaders

These are hard times for Tampa Bay Buccaneers fans; horrible times, in fact. Like an old William Castle ballyhoo stunt, nobody should be be admitted after the first five minutes of a Bucs game because they're already too far behind to matter.

Maybe those Swashbucklers prancing on the sidelines aren't doing enough to motivate the team. They could take a few lessons from Satan's Cheerleaders, a 1977 grindhouse hit co-starring Lily Munster herself, Yvonne DeCarlo.

DeCarlo gives a tour de farce performance as high priestess of a Satanic cult seeking a virgin to sacrifice. Of course, a cheerleading squad isn't the easiest place to find purity but Satan's Chess Club or Satan's 4-H Club wouldn't look as attractive on a poster.

We also get John Carradine doing his crazy old coot schtik, the wonderful character actor Jack Kruschen as Billy the janitor (the high school equivalent of the butler who always did it), and Charlie Chaplin's underachieving son Sydney. The Internet Movie Database also lists Dennis West in an uncredited role as "Gyppo, the evil dwarf," and you can never have too many of those.

Enjoy!

Friday Fromage: Tune in and trip out with 'Hallucination Generation'

Bummer, man, that the makers of 1966's Hallucination Generation couldn't afford color film stock. Or maybe the movie's tripping on bad black-and-white acid. At any rate, this is the kind of movie that posed as a public service warning to hippies about the dangers of psychotropic chemicals but mostly made Timothy Leary look like a genius.

Longtime Western hero George Montgomery probably signed on thinking Hallucination Generation would make a positive difference, in society and his fading film career. Then again, when you're married to Dinah Shore and pals with Ronald Reagan, every day must feel like an LSD trip.

Thrill to "hipsters, beatniks and sickniks" with their "debauched dreams and bizarre sensualities." Hallucination Generation also poses the eternal questions: "Do you know the taste of purple? What color is the rainbow of passion?" I think we should ask Gary Busey for advice on such matters.

Enjoy!

Friday Fromage: Jack Nicholson saves a deaf hippie chick in Psych-Out

Friday Fromage: Playing catchup with Trog and The Man with the X-Ray Eyes

You don't know how guilty I felt last week, high in the Rockies and low on ambition to post a Friday Fromage. Well, kiddies, here's a double feature as an effort to French kiss and make up.

No other Roger Corman schlock flick of the '60s sticks with me more than The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, starring Oscar winner Ray Milland as a doctor who discovers a serum enabling him to see through anything. Pretty nifty when you're at a cocktail party doing the geriatric Twist, or a blackjack table in Las Vegas. Soon the doc starts going insane wiith the power of his discovery, leading to one of the most chilling climatic freeze frames of my childhood.

I only wish the trailer included a shot of comedian Don Rickles, who I once impressed during a telephone interview by bringing up this movie. "Gee, Steve, you really do know my career," he said. Then he called me a hockey puck.

Our second wheel of cinematic cheese also stars an Academy Award winner: Joan Crawford as an anthropologist who discovers Trog, short for "troglodyte," which is a fancy word for caveman. He isn't the Geico species (hairyus mopealotis) but has a sensitive side that Mommie Dearest takes to heart.

Enjoy, and I'll see you Monday.