Tag Archives: comedy

Happy Halloween! To celebrate, watch a scary movie and the new SCTV documentary

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Around these parts, we love Halloween. It’s long been my favorite holiday, since I was a kid and – because we couldn’t afford to buy one of those awful plastic tunics – I made my own costume by painting a beard on my face with watercolor paint and completing my outfit with an old shirt or hoodie.

If you look to your right on this screen under the heading “what the what,” you’ll find a link to a lot of Halloween posts on this site, going back most of the way to the origin of this site in the early 2010s. You’ll find posts about vintage and recent Halloween costumes and decor as well as Halloween movies to watch.

I have to note, however, a subject that makes me feel equally childlike: SCTV, also known as Second City Television.

With the loss of Catherine O’Hara and Joe Flaherty, two SCTV mainstays, and the aging status of most of the rest of the cast, who appeared on stage for years before landing Second City and SCTV television shows beginning in 1976, I’m really glad we’re in the golden age of documentaries about “SCTV” and its stars. There are good reminiscences of John Candy available and the documentary of the still-very-much-with-us Martin Short’s life, “Marty: Life is Short,” debuted just a few months ago, although I guarantee you’ll get teary before the end credits roll.

Still to come to home video this fall is “You Had to Be There,” the 2025 documentary about the 1972 stage production of “Godspell” starring Victor Garber and many of the geniuses of SCTV.

The Martin Short and “Godspell” docs could serve as bookends for “SCTV: The Greatest Show You’ve Never Heard Of,” which debuted on Netflix last night, I believe. (That’s when I saw it, anyway, and I watched it the minute I could.)

With interviews with O’Hara and Short and Dave Thomas and Eugene Levy and many others, including SCTV fans like Conan O’Brien, the SCTV doc looks back fondly on the show and the cast but doesn’t avoid touching on controversies like the divide among cast members when Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis “took off” – pun intended – with their McKenzie Brothers characters from the Great White North and won not only a comedy album but a movie, “Strange Brew,” released in 1983 and starring Thomas and Moranis and Max von Sydow, if you can believe it.

The SCTV doc made me holler with delight several times as it presented clips from not only Count Floyd’s “Monster Chiller Horror Theater” – featuring Flaherty as the horror film host who also doubles as the station’s news anchor, Candy as horror movie mad scientist Doctor Tongue and Eugene Levy as Woody Tobias Jr., also known as the hunchback henchman – but lesser-remembered bits like “Play It Again, Bob,” with Woody Allen (Moranis) making a movie about Bob Hope (Thomas). The impersonations are the best I’ve ever seen.

The six seasons of “SCTV,” including the NBC late-night seasons, are available on streaming services and online and if you’re an SCTV fan you’ll enjoy a lot of it. The show could get lost in itself at times, but that was the fun of it: the conceit of SCTV being the programming of a basic cable channel called SCTV, the cast and writers could parody every type of TV show, movie and commercial. They built a show around these parodies but made us believe that this was the worst TV station in the world, run by lunatics and egomaniacs.

Definitely enjoy a good fun scary movie this Halloween – or anytime – but you should seek out “SCTV” episodes and the documentaries I cite here.

You’ve somehow stumbled upon the latest of more than 1,100 posts on keithroysdon dot com, stretching back to the early 2010s. Books, writing, movies, TV, obscure pop culture, Halloween, snark and more snark. I’m the author of crime novels THAT OCTOBER and SEVEN ANGELS, co-author of four true crime books including the award-winning THE WESTSIDE PARK MURDERS and hundreds of short stories, news articles and pop culture pieces in spots like CrimeReads, Daily Yonder and elsewhere. You can contact me by leaving a message anywhere on this site or by hollering at me on one of my too many social media outposts.

‘House of 1,000 Dolls’ is vintage sleaze starring Vincent Price

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By the standards of the exploitation movies of just a few years later, there’s not that much shocking about “House of 1,000 Dolls,” a 1967 German-Spanish co-production starring Vincent Price as a magician who hypnotizes women during his nightclub act in Tangiers. The women end up in a house of prostitution, although there are considerably fewer than 1,000 women there. Unless maybe you count the miniature actual dolls that line one bookshelf?

“House of 1,000 Dolls” definitely qualifies as racy stuff for the period and it no doubt titillated drive-in movie audiences with its scenes of kidnapped women wearing bras and panties and filmy gowns.

And Price apparently was a little scandalized. This was during the period the actor was starring in well-remembered, full-color Roger Corman adaptations of Edgar Allen Poe tales and, according to one interview, Price was startled to learn that the makers of “House of 1,000 Dolls” were shooting more explicit scenes on the sets when his scenes were not filmed.

My favorite aspect of the movie, though, is the presence in the cast of an actor named Herbert Fux. He was an Austrian actor who, in addition to appearing in legit and semi-legit films, also appeared in some kind of porn films. And he was in politics as well.

As the old Smuckers commercials might have said, “With a name like Fux, it has to be porn.”

“House of 1,000 Dolls” is available via streaming and it’s worth it alone to see Price running around in a top hat and cape.

It’s the end of the world as we know it, part 1: ‘This Is The End’

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It’s a big year for the end of the world, with “World War Z” and “This Is The End” and the ongoing apocalyptic TV drama “The Walking Dead.” Later we can expect director Edgar Wright’s “The World’s End.”

It’s safe to say that few end-of-man stories besides “The World’s End” and co-directors Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s “This Is The End” play the end of existence for laughs.

And while my expectations for “The World’s End” are high, I wasn’t sure quite what to expect from “This Is The End.”

Some of the early reviews indicated it was gut-bustingly funny, while others said the overdose of crude humor was just that.

I thought “This Is The End” was pretty funny, but your reaction to it will depend totally on your tolerance for penis and ejaculation jokes, as well as the modern-day Rat Pack of Rogen and other young actors that include Jay Baruchel, Craig Robinson, James Franco, Jonah Hill and Danny McBride.

A big part of the joke here is that the actors play themselves, or at least versions of themselves. Baruchel comes into L.A. to visit Rogen. Baruchel doesn’t like Los Angeles or the crowd that Rogen hangs with – including most of the above-mentioned bold-faced names, plus others – and is reluctant to go to a party at Franco’s house.

They do go, however, and Baruchel reluctantly mingles with the likes of Rhianna, Aziz Ansari, Mindy Kaling, Emma Watson and, most memorably, Michael Cera, playing a (presumably) warped version of himself as a bullying, sex-crazed cocaine user.

During the Franco party, something happens: A firestorm rolls over L.A. People are pulled up into the sky in shafts of blue light. The ground opens up and swallows some people whole.

Earthquakes and even a zombie apocalypse get the blame, but Baruchel comes to believe it’s the real apocalypse, as in the Biblical end time. That would explain the disappearance, into heaven, of all the good people – none of whom are at the party, by the way – and the eventual appearance of otherworldly beasts.

Much of the comedy derives from the contentious relationships between the group of “friends” who survive. They argue over the meager provisions that are left, over the sleeping arrangements and over the pecking order.

Rogen and Baruchel and their relationship are the core of the movie, but Hill – as a supernaturally nice guy who nonetheless gets on everyone’s nerves – and McBride as just an awful human being get the biggest laughs.

Some of the funniest moments come from not only the group’s reactions to the seemingly impossible happenings but also to each other.

One standout scene occurs when Watson takes refuge with the group and the hapless Baruchel initiates a discussion, unfortunately within her earshot, about making sure she’s at ease being the only woman in a house full of men. Before long, the others are accusing him of suggesting they rape her. Watson overhears and, wielding an axe, takes things into her own hands.

As trendy as the main cast and supporting actors are, there are a couple of cameos – I won’t reveal them here – that are surprising even in the context of this story.

As apocalyptic comedies go, “This Is The End” ranks pretty high. It’s quite crude but absurdly funny.