Saturday Nightmares

When I was a kid, horror on TV was hot, hot, hot (and that's a nod, I think, to the late, great Buster Poindexter). Every weekend, horror got shoved down our throats and up our middle school asses by the almighty arm of the cable television programmers, who decreed that all things "kvlt" were where it was at. To that end, we had cable network channels such as USA give us entire evenings of show after bloody, haunting show, shows that were bigger, better, and more colorful than Sid Ceaser's old Your Show of Shows, mainly because they were full of coke-addled Eighties chicks with big hair, lipstick, lots of jewelry, and high, rouged cheekbones. Yowza.

Saturday Nightmares was USA Network's cheap, cynical attempt to cash in on the horror TV boom, and, brother, it provided the entertainment value if you were the sort of kid who lingered at the grocery store magazine shelf in excited/disgusted shock, flipping the slick and affordable pages of magazines such as Fangoria and Gorezone, relishing and reeling from the psychic assault of vintage straight-to-video dreck such as Maniac Cop, Blood Diner, and Jack's Back. (So I'm dating this article's era a little here, what's it to ya'?)

USA Saturday Nightmares Intro

There was so much genre programming on TV back then, a kid didn't know where to begin: Monsters, Friday the Thirteenth: The Series, Tales from the Darkside, Freddy's Nightmares, War of the Worlds, The Hitchhiker, just to name a few. And, man, that didn't even count the numerous horror movie hosts, such as Elvira (who was fascinating to me, personally, for an entirely different reason) and Commander USA (and of course, our local ghoul, the redoubtable and much-lamented late Bob Carter, a.k.a. "Sammy Terry"); Granpa Munster and the completely forgotten "Phantom of the Opry" (which was like the movie host on the Nashville Network) also dished out the darkness in the dead of night. But only on Saturdays, mostly. (Actually, Granpa's show came on in the early afternoon, as I remember.)

Getting back to it, Saturday Nightmares featured a feature, or feature presentation as its weekend centerpiece, but this was preceded and then followed by shows like The Ray Bradbury Theater, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and the terrifically sexy HBO original produced in Soviet Canada, The Hitchhiker, starring the tight jean-clad ass of actor Page Fletcher, who seemed as if he'd be more comfortable playing the "badboy" on an old soap opera than walking the length and breadth of the world like a refugee Ancient Mariner, delivering opening and closing monologues of curt wisdom between which were sandwiched EC Comics-style stories of desperate men and women pulled down into the quagmire of their own destruction by the vengeance of an irate cosmos, befouled by the sinister but doomed plots they hatch right before the first commercial break.

Saturday Nightmares Intro & Bumpers 1986

Saturday Nightmares also featured short student films. (After Saturday Nightmares, after all, it was time for Night Flight, that mind-bending cultural bong hit that paraded punk and new wave videos, rock band interviews, experimental animation, truncated old movies in the manner of the later Reel Wild Cinema, and well, student films.) One of those films, Living Dolls, can be seen on Youtube, which is a platform no one in 1987 could have ever conceived of existing. I watched it recently, and this is what I grokked.

The film opens with shots of department store mannequins frozen in a hell of suspended animation, representatives, perhaps of the "body beautiful" consumerism of Reagan's America. (Or maybe not.) They want life and beauty and youth and to remain in the stasis of desirable attractiveness forever. And then there is Melvin.

Melvin cleans up at some fashion shop owned by some old battleaxe and her coven, and upstairs, in the symbolic repository of Melvin's tortured mind, far more beautiful artificial constructs ("mannequins" to give them their proper nomenclature) are stored in the sub-horror darkness. This place of the brainpan made flesh, of fantasy stored away in Melvin's mind (Melvin here, manifestly, NOT falling into a vat of toxic waste to be transformed into a "hideously deformed crature of superhuman size and strength") haunts him as he climbs the psychic staircase upward, to listen to the mannequins speak to him in voices only he can hear.

Yak, yak, yak, the brood of Karens below continue their gossipy gaggle, but Melvin is terrorized by the frozen beauty queens in the diseased attic of his mind coming to life, accusing him of wanting "girlfriends like us" (which, you know, probably is true), bitching at him, and leaving poor Melvin reeling. They open their eyes (or Melvin discovers one of them has human eyes), and they back him into a dark corner.

At the end, well, we have a nice image of a bride in a veil. But, there's something wrong here.

Something wrong. With the eyes.

As for my eyes, after watching such stuff, I slept with one eye open, as they say. So that was my Saturday, growing up, nightmares notwithstanding.

(Sings)

"Let's get a time machine, you and me baby, so we can go home again!"

LIVING DOLLS (1980 horror short)

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