WOODSTOCK FOOTAGE

Check out my review, on Phoenix Magazine online, of Hippie Family Values...

 
...Beverly Seckinger's documentary which screens this Sunday, May 27, at Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts.

So, just because hippies...

Monster-of-the-Week:  ...our honoree is Bert, the shaggy, dune-buggy-driving title character of The Werewolf of Woodstock...

...a curmudgeonly local farmer, furious about the mess left behind at Woodstock after the festival. He's ranting in a lightning storm, like Lear, about the "miserable freaks," until he gets lightning-struck, which turns him, as lightning strikes so often do, into a werewolf.

If you get a chance to see this rather hilarious 1975 shot-on-video TV movie, made by Dick Clark's production company and filled with vets like Michael Parks, Harold J. Stone, Ann Doran, Richard Webb, Meredith MacRae and Belinda Belaski as the goodhearted hippie-chick hostage, I highly recommend. Bert was played, in his human form at least, by Tige Andrews of The Mod Squad. The guy had to put up with hippies throughout his career.

SICK-LICAL AND TWISTED

In recognition of actor Luke Askew’s passing…

Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s give the nod to the title character of The Beast Within, a 1982 shocker about a kid, the product of a rape, who starts to molt into a vengeful cicada monster when he turns seventeen.

It’s a pretty unpleasant, unsavory ‘80s sickie, but it has a wonderful cast—Ronny Cox, Bibi Besch, L.Q. Jones, R.G. Armstrong, Logan Ramsey and Askew, as the hapless mortician…

RIP also to American Bandstand host Dick Clark, passed on at 82. My favorite of his TV appearances was this cameo on the ‘60s-era Batman series, in which the Caped Crusader observes how you can tell he’s from Philadelphia because “he dipped his diphthong…”