“Weirdsville 19: Haunted Oddities from the Archives” October 8, 2010

Event: “Weirdsville 19: Haunted Oddities from the Archives”.  Curator Pete Gowdy and Oddball Films present an evening of rare, weird and some highly entertaining 16mm shorts, movie trailers and commercials culled from the 50,000+ archive at Oddball Films.  This month we dig up some spooky celluloid October surprises- highlights include: Haunted Spooks (1920), the controversial Harold Lloyd silent film classic; D*sney’s Haunted Halloween (1984), Halloween’s origin and customs with classic animation; The Haunted Mouth (1974), spooky dental health film- an Oddball favorite!; Ghost Rider (1982), cult School Bus safety film, advice from a ghost- killed in bus accident; Halloween Safety (1985), razor blades in apples, drugged candy bars!!; Ashes of Doom (1970), kooky anti-smoking vampire short; The Mummy’s Tomb/Dr. Cyclops (1942/1940), condensed versions of two horror classics. Plus, a rare 1950 interview with Bela Lugosi, spooky movie trailers, commercials and more straight out of Weirdsville!
Date: Friday, October 8, 2010 at 8:30PM
Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street, San Francisco
Admission: $10.00 RSVP Only to: 415-558-8117 or [email protected]
Web: http://www.oddballfilm.com/oddballftp/Weirdsville_19_PR.pdf
"Weirdsville 19”
Haunted Oddities From The Archives
Screens at Oddball Films

On Friday, October 8, Curator Pete Gowdy and Oddball Films present an evening of the strange, the bizarre, and the sometimes baffling short films, commercials and trailers from deep within the Oddball archive. These “found” films surface in the process of research for other programs: too good to languish on the shelves, they demand to be screened! This month we exhume spooky oddities for the month of Shocktober! Weirdsville is a monthly companion program to the Strange Sinema series. Showtime is 8:30PM and admission is $10.00. Seating is limited so RSVP is preferred to: [email protected] or 415-558-8117.

Highlights Include:

Haunted Spooks (B+W, silent, 1920)
Haunted Spooks is perhaps best known as the film that almost cost daredevil silent-film comedy legend Harold Lloyd his life -- a not-so-propish bomb exploded in his hand, costing him a couple of fingers -- but it's also one of the earliest movies to feature the ol' "spook" stereotype (although at that time, I suppose it might not have been that old).

Lloyd stars as "The Boy", a brokenhearted gent seeking to commit suicide when he stumbles upon an equally desperate woman, "The Girl" (Lloyd's real-life soon-to-be-wife Mildred Davis). It seems her grandfather has just left her his mansion in his will, but with the stipulation that she must be married and must stay in the mansion with her husband for a year. So, they up and get hitched and prepare to move in.

Trouble is, The Girl's uncle wants the house for himself and is determined that she not make it through the whole year. In Scooby Doo-like fashion, he plots to scare the couple out of the house -- which, judging from the number of black servants, is more like a plantation -- by pretending it's haunted. He first plants a seed of fear in his butler, played by Blue Washington, saying, "Didn't you know that every fourth year the ghastly grinning ghosts of the dead creep from their graves and roam these rooms?" The butler of course freaks out and warns the rest of the help in Negro-speak: "An' de whole graveyard turns upside-down! Gassly, spookey ghosts come heah to room dese roams." The servants' knees all start a-shakin', and when they see a ghostly figure on the staircase (the uncle in a sheet), they skedaddle -- just as The Boy and Girl arrive.

The butler, too scared to run, explains to the couple that spooks have invaded the house. The Boy, being white, says that he doesn't believe in ghosts, but gets jumpy when he sees one of the servants' kids (played by "Sunshine Sammy" Morrison, later of East Side Kids fame) covered in flour. Or cocaine; whichever was most prevalent in 1920.

It's all mildly offensive by today's standards (You have to wonder if the titular "Spooks" refer to ghosts or black people -- or both, as the script is rife with puns.) but is nothing out of the ordinary for the time, and the butler actually has the last laugh when he discovers that the ghost is really the uncle dressed in a sheet and single-handedly captures him. - Mark Harris (blackhorrormovies.com)

D*sney’s Haunted Halloween (Color, 1984)
History and traditions of Hallowe’en, All Hollow’s Eve, etc., illustrated by classic animation from the ol’ mousey studio. Also some live action and scenes from the Haunted Mansion…

The Haunted Mouth (Color, 1974)
Spooky educational film narrated by Cesar Romero about the dangers of not brushing and flossing. This is a wild one!

Ghost Rider (Color, 1982)
This school bus safety film has developed a cult following for its unusual (for an educational film) supernatural/love interest plot: Kevin (Doug Edmunds) is the sad and lonely new kid in town. After enduring his first day of junior high school, Kevin is befriended on the bus ride home by a sweet girl (Wendy Taylor) who offers him a sympathetic ear. She drops her pencil and Kevin picks it up, only to find that the girl has vanished. Her name is inscribed on the pencil - Tracy Donnelly.

The next time Kevin sees Tracy on the bus, she gives him a bus safety manual and begs him to read it. The other kids wonder who he's talking to. Then Kevin finds out that Tracy is a ghost. She died in a bus accident, and what's more, she used to live in the same house as Kevin…

Trivia: Actor Doug Edmunds went on to co-found the 90s powerpop band the Gladhands.

Halloween Safety (Color, 1985)
How to be safe while out “Trick or Treating”- everything from costume construction, being seen, to vandalism and the big fear- tainted candy.

Ashes of Doom (Color, 1970)
Anti-smoking short from the National Film Board of Canada and the fertile mind of Grant Munro

The Mummy’s Tomb/Dr. Cyclops (B+W, 1942/1940)
Two all-time horror classics condensed Reader’s Digest style by the folks at Castle Films. All killer, no filler!

PLUS- a rare 1950 interview with Bela Lugosi and spooky movie trailers, commercials and more straight out of Weirdsville!
Curator Biography:
Pete Gowdy (aka DJ Chas Gaudi) is host of San Francisco’s Shellac Shack, a weekly 78 rpm listening party and a DJ specializing in vintage sounds: soul, jazz, country, punk and new wave. A graduate of the Vassar College Film Program, he is an associate producer of Marc Huestis Presents, the long-running movie legend tributes at the Castro Theatre.

About Oddball Films
Oddball films is the film component of Oddball Film+Video, a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Summer of Love, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.  
Our films are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educationals, feature films, movie trailers, medical, industrial military, news out-takes and every genre in between. We’re actively working to present rarely screened genres of cinema as well as avant-garde and ethno-cultural documentaries, which expand the boundaries of cinema. Oddball Films is the largest film archive in Northern California and one of the most unusual private collections in the US. We invite you to join us in our weekly offerings of offbeat cinema.

Official Website: http://mim.io/84016