Did everyone have a late-night horror show in their local TV market? Cleveland had The Hoolihan and Big Chuck Show (later The Big Chuck and Lil’ John Show), which aired every Friday night at 11:30 PM. As a kid I would relish Friday nights, fighting weary eyes to watch those guys perform corny skits with ethnic (read, Polish) humor in the commercial breaks of mediocre 1960s horror films. It wasn’t so much the movies that made me want to stay up till two in the morning, it was the feeling of camaraderie the audience had with hosts “Big Chuck” Schodowski, Bob “Hoolihan” Wells, and “Lil’ John” Rinaldi. I bring all of this up because when I sat down to watch the Warner Bros. Horror Double Feature DVD with It (1966) and The Shuttered Room (1967), I felt a pang of nostalgia for those Friday nights long ago when a glass bottle of Coke and some Pringles were all I needed to keep me going for a couple of hours.
As Robert Cashill wrote about in an earlier post, Warners is releasing several of their cheesy horror films from that bygone era. The two films I watched this week were particularly bad, at times laughable. Yet I couldn’t stop watching.
