STALL TALE

A friend recently mentioned to me that the writing on the walls of the lavatory stalls at his workplace had grown disappointingly barren, both in volume & in its invention & wit. A possible explanation struck me at once: competition. After all, isn’t the bathroom stall the original—& less censorious—Facebook?

RIP to Bill Hinzman, the zombie shuffling through the cemetery at the very beginning of the original 1968 Night of the Living Dead, passed on at 75—he was Zombie Zero in the movies. He was also on the camera crew of that film, & he went on to appear in and/or work on several other George A. Romero productions & eventually became a low-budget horror auteur himself. But his true cinematic legacy is as the face—the lean, hungry, haunted face—of a new franchise, & a new genre.

RIP also to the commanding Ben Gazzara, departed at 81, & to Zalman King, at 70. King’s career was fascinating: After a period as an offbeat leading man—he starred in the TV series The Young Lawyers, played Jesus in the film version of Hugh Schonfield’s The Passover Plot, & was the hero of the strange 1978 thriller Blue Sunshine—King found his real niche writing, producing & directing glossy erotica. He wore one or more of those hats for such familiar lonely-guy late-night premium-cable favorites as Two Moon Junction, Wild Orchid, 9 ½ Weeks & The Red Shoe Diaries.

SPINAL ZAP

On my honor, I don’t watch Dancing With the Stars. But a friend of mine who does told me about Ricki Lake & her partner dancing the tango to Bernard Herrmann’s great Psycho theme, & said that it was excellent. I watched it here, & he’s right, it is.

As we roll toward Halloween, yet again we turn to Turner Classic Movies to provide us with…

Monster-of-the-Week: …our weekly nightmare: This time it’s the title creepy-crawly of 1959’s The Tingler, a sort of big centipede-ish critter which, scientist Vincent Price discovers, attaches itself to the human backbone during moments of terror, on which emotion it feeds. Hence the tingling.

Directed by William Castle from a script by Robb White, the movie is perhaps best remembered for Castle’s notorious gimmick “Percepto”—theater seats electrically wired to produce a mild, tingler-like jolt in audience members. Unless you have a Taser & are masochistic, this effect is difficult to reproduce while watching the film now—it plays, by the way, at 9 p.m. (MST) on Monday, October 17. But even without it, The Tingler, though obviously preposterous, is bizarre & imaginative, probably my favorite of Castle’s films as director.

By the way, I recently became Facebook friends with Castle. Considering that he died in 1977, it’s enough to give you a you-know-what down your spine…