#sam pancake presents the monday afternoon movie

[bitter69uk]

I am unrepentantly garrulous about my obsession with the Sam Pancake Presents the Monday Afternoon Movie podcast, in which our effervescent host disinters and forensically (and hilariously) analyzes ultra-kitsch unloved made-for-TV movies from the seventies and eighties. In his latest installment Pancake is joined by guest Andrew Hopf to discuss freaky 1973 ABC thriller Scream, Pretty Peggy. (The weirdly un-tantalizing tagline “A pretty co-ed’s part-time job leads to a bizarre pay-off!” barely hints at what an oddity this movie is). The titular Peggy (played by Sian Barbara Allen) is a hopelessly naïve and gauche mooncalf-type who takes a housekeeping job at the Elliott family mansion presided over by sculptor son Jeffrey (Ted Bessell – aka Marlo Thomas’ fiancé Donald from That Girl!) and fearsome gorgon-like alcoholic mama Mrs. Elliott (special guest star Bette Davis, pictured. Wait until you hear Pancake’s Davis impression). If Peggy wasn’t so damn unworldly, alarm bells would be ringing. Jeffrey’s menacing satanic sculptures are clearly the expression of a troubled psyche. Then there’s the conspicuously absent mysterious sister Jennifer everyone keeps referring to. “She went to Europe, I think,” Mrs. Elliott explains not very convincingly. “Yes. Europe.” What follows is heavily (and I mean HEAVILY) indebted to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. For Davis completists, Scream is a must. This dates from her wilderness years when her opportunities were limited to obscure films no one saw (like Connecting Rooms (1970), Bunny O’Hare (1971) and The Scientific Cardplayer (1972)) and flop TV pilots (The Judge and Jake Wyler (1972), Madame Sin (1972). Davis is on ferocious hagsploitation form here and her delivery of the line “I fell. I’m sorry. I’m afraid. I’ve. Broken. My. LEG” alone makes this gem worth catching. (Scream, Pretty Peggy used to be viewable on YouTube (that’s where I watched it years ago) but has since been deleted. It IS available on DVD and Blu-ray as of 2021).  

[elcomfortador]

Jerri Blank is a Pansexual Sex Predator

“Blank Relay” (August 13, 2000)

Honestly, we could have picked just about any episode of Strangers With Candy to focus on for this podcast about queer themes, but we ended up deciding on the one where we see Jerri Blank at her most girl hungry. It’s light on Mr. Noblet and Mr. Jellineck, but we can always circle back to this one in another two hundred episodes, right?

Watch the Exit 57 “Down in the Basement” sketch, which does not translate especially well to an audio-only format.

Watch The Trip Back, the 1970 PSA featuring Florrie Fisher, the real-life inspiration for Jerri Blank.

Listen to the two-part Rasputin episode of the Unexplained podcast.

And we dropped a whole hell of a lot of Sam Pancake Presents the Monday Afternoon Movie episodes. Here are all of them:

Angel Dusted with Gedde Watanabe (the one where Helen Hunt doesn’t jump through a window)

Desperate Lives with Arden Myrin (the one where she *does* jump through a window)

It Happened One Christmas with Sarah Thyre

The Cat Creature with Becky Thyre

And finally Crowhaven Farm and A Vacation in Hell, both with Rose Abdoo

Listen now!

[patronhunt]

Featured creator of the day ❤️ Sam Pancake Presents the Monday Afternoon Movie

[bitter69uk]

Recently watched: compellingly bizarre 1977 made-for-TV psychodrama The Strange Possession of Mrs Oliver. Tagline: “She wanted to be someone else. But when she became “Sandy”, her new friends wanted her dead.” Wikipedia’s synopsis: “Its plot follows a bored housewife who takes on an alternate persona that starts wreaking havoc on her life. Karen Black plays the title role, a dowdy, downtrodden housewife plagued by recurring nightmares of funerals, black flowers, fires and a woman called Sandy. Seeking an escape from her stifling lifestyle and dull husband, who only wishes her to have a baby, Black dons a low-cut red blouse, blonde wig, garish makeup and a new identity. She is also compelled to buy a house in a beach community where it would appear a woman who looks just like her once resided - before her tragic demise. It turns out that the woman Black pretends to be may actually exist—and may have more than a passing knowledge of the occult.”

Told in a deliberately fragmented, jarring and nightmarish style, Mrs Oliver’s themes of shifting, merging and uncertain female identities recalls Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and anticipates David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) and Robert Altman’s 3 Women (1977). (I could easily imagine Lynch remaking this with his muse Laura Dern in Black’s roles). No one played “women on the verge of a nervous breakdown” quite like the reliably volatile Black, and the dual roles of Miriam / Sandy showcase her at her most alien and tormented. Sandy is associated with a disco-fied version of Frankie Avalon’s 1960 hit “Venus”. When she dances to it, we get copious cleavage and crotch shots – ah, the seventies! The men in Black’s life are portrayed by George Hamilton (as Miriam’s straightlaced husband) and Robert F Lyons (as a hunky ominous stranger whose mustache makes him look an escapee from a 1970s gay porn film). Watch for guest star appearances from two incredible veteran character actresses: Gloria LeRoy and Lucille Benson. Thanks to Sam Pancake for bringing this curio to my attention via his essential Monday Afternoon Movie podcast. The YouTube print is murky but watchable.

[elcomfortador]

In the House Had RuPaul Play a Heterosexual

“Boys II Men II Women” (December 4, 1995)

Twenty-five ago, long before he’d become a media mogul and the face of an international franchise, Rupaul made 1995 his most mainstream year yet. Not only did he have his mainstream debut in The Brady Bunch movie, but he also did one-off guest roles in a number of network sitcoms. But only In the House had him playing a drag queen who was an avowed heterosexual.

Drew talked with In the House creator Winifred Hervey about her time on Golden Girls. Read his roundtable interview with her and other Golden Girls writers here.

Here is the In the House episode that has Debbie Allen playing opposite her real-life sister, Phylicia Rashad.

And here is an episode of Friday Night Videos that has Debbie and Phylicia hanging out — and Debbie referring to eldest daughter Saundra as “the older one.”

Drew appeared on last week’s Sam Pancake Presents the Monday Afternoon Movie to discuss Don’t Go to Sleep, a made-for-TV oddity that features Ruth Gordon getting killed by an iguana and Valerie Harper menaced by a child wielding a rolling pizza cutter. It’s weird!

The Easy Spirit Playoffs: Purple vs. Metallic!

Buy Gayest Episode Ever shirts, totes and more on our TeePublic page.

Buy Glen’s movie, Being Frank.

Support us on Patreon!

Follow: GEE on Twitter • Drew on Twitter • Glen on Twitter

Listen: iTunes • Spotify • Stitcher • Google Play • Google Podcasts • Himalaya • TuneIn • SoundCloud

And yes, we do have an official website! And we even have episode transcripts courtesy of Sarah Neal. Our logo was designed by Rob Wilson. This is a TableCakes podcast.

This episode’s outro track is Black Book’s “You Must Change (Mystery Woman),” which isn’t on any of the streaming services so maybe just listen to it on YouTube?

Listen now!

[bitter69uk]

I am unrepentantly garrulous about my obsession with the Sam Pancake Presents the Monday Afternoon Movie podcast, in which our effervescent host forensically (and hilariously) analyzes the realm of kitsch unloved made-for-TV movies from the seventies and eighties. In his latest installment Pancake has exhumed a true gem: ABC TV-Movie of the Week Satan’s Triangle (1975). For connoisseurs of made-for-TV flicks, this supernatural horror thriller genuinely qualifies as a cult film. All children of the seventies remember Satan’s Triangle! I would have caught a repeat of this one on Canadian TV some afternoon when I was in my early teens. It comprehensively blew my mind and haunted my imagination ever since. And then Satan’s Triangle vanished into the ether. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it never received an official release on home video or DVD (made-for-TV movies were widely perceived as disposable trash). Over the years, collectors apparently began paying top dollar for bootleg tapes. More recently, versions of Satan’s Triangle occasionally surfaced on YouTube, but they were of such poor quality they were essentially unwatchable. But – KLAXON! – there is now a pristine copy of Satan’s Triangle viewable on YouTube, so I finally got to re-visit it all these decades later. So, does Satan’s Triangle live up to the hyperbole as “one of the scariest films ever made”? Truthfully - no! But it’s still eerie, riveting and abounds with irresistible campy moments. 

The synopsis on Rotten Tomatoes is nicely concise: “a mysterious woman is the sole survivor of a boat wreck caused by a sudden terrible storm off the coast of Florida.” The location is The Bermuda Triangle to be precise - aka The Devil’s Triangle aka Satan’s Triangle. (The Bermuda Triangle was a major conspiracy theory in the seventies). Hunky Doug McClure is the Coast Guard who arrives to investigate the SOS distress call. Once aboard, he discovers a battered, seemingly abandoned fishing vessel littered with corpses. But below deck he finds the only survivor: a traumatized mystery blonde (sultry screen goddess Kim Novak in a rare TV appearance. Our first glimpse of Novak is unforgettable: we only see her feline green eyes framed by shadows). Via flashbacks, Novak recounts to McClure how all the men onboard met their grisly deaths. (Note: one of the deceased is Jim Davis – Jock Ewing from Dallas!). But how reliable a narrator is she? 

As ever, Novak collapses distinctions between “good” and “bad” acting. Depending on the director and material, she can be hauntingly remote and ethereal, or vacant, dead-eyed and catatonic. In Satan’s Triangle Novak alternates between both – but is always compelling to watch. And her early seventies look is fierce: heavy dark eye make-up, a pale frosted “nude lip” and a long blonde Dynel wiglet (it resembles Barbie doll hair) secured with a headscarf (think Valerie Harper as Rhoda in early episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show). But seriously: it’s easy and fun to mock certain aspects of Satan’s Triangle (the marlin-fishing scene with the stock footage!), but the last ten-minutes will leave you gasping. No spoilers, but towards the end there is a jump cut to a close-up of a character grinning maniacally that will give you goose bumps! 

Link to the podcast (wait until you hear Pancake’s impersonations of Whisperin’ Kim Novak). 

Link to Satan’s Triangle on YouTube. 

[elcomfortador]

Hey all. What you’re seeing above is a trailer I made for the 1972 made-for-TV horror movie Something Evil, which is probably the least talked-about Steven Spielberg movie today. The reason I made it is that it’s the subject of the first episode of a new podcast I’ve started. It’s called Sam Pancake Presents the Monday Afternoon Movie, and it features my friend Sam, who’s an actor you’ve seen on Arrested Development and Will & Grace and Curb Your Enthusiasm. The show is Sam talking about these more or less forgotten TV movies from the 1970s that back in the day were a young horror geeks’ only means to watch bizarro thrillers and haunted house movies pumped directly into their living rooms. 

You can listen to episode one here. 

You can subscribe on iTunes here. 

I hope you guys give this a go. It’s gay and funny and dark you’ll probably learn something. 

[elcomfortador]

Hey all. Please enjoy this trailer I made for the 1970 made-for-TV feature THE HOUSE THAT WOULD NOT DIE. It stars Barbara Stanywck and Barbara  Stanwyck’s extensive wardrobe by Nolan Miller. It’s weird as hell, and it’s also the subject of episode two of Sam Pancake Presents the Monday Afternoon Movie, a cool new podcast project I’m doing. You can listen to the episode here. This one features special guest Selene Luna, who’s not only one of the voices in Coco but also the first person I’ve ever met who got killed off in a horror movie. WHEE!

Subscribe to Monday Afternoon movie here.

Get all the links you want on the official website here.