Halloween Movies 2022: Movies! TV Network

Movies! has really gotten into Halloween this year, with Spooky Season–themed movie marathons running in October—a day of vampire films, a day of ghosts, a day of alien invaders, even a day of Vincent Price! Their Halloween schedule is sort of a blend of those topics, but every one is a classic. Okay, maybe not Earth vs. the Spider, but that has its charms, too…

Here’s what Movies! is offering for All Hallows’ Eve (all times listed are Eastern Time):

6:00 a.m.: Fiend Without a Face (1958): Marshall Thompson, Kim Parker, and Kynaston Reeves battle an atomic-powered invisible monster that likes to collect brains and spinal cords in order to create an army of similar horrors.

7:35 a.m.: Earth vs. the Spider (1958): Ed Kemmer and June Kenney try to save a town from a giant spider out to kill everyone. How’d it get so big? No one knows, but like the Fiend Without a Face, it’s probably nuclear related; irradiated monsters created by atomic bomb testings were all the rage in the 1950s (for example, Godzilla, Them!, Tarantula).

9:15 a.m.: The Blob (1958): Steve McQueen, Aneta Corseaut, and Earl Rowe have to deal with a big jelly monster from outer space that’s come to destroy their town—and eat everyone in its path! It practically oozes terror!

11:00 a.m.: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941): Spencer Tracy stars as the two-sided monster, Lana Turner as the woman Jekyll loves, and Ingrid Bergman as a pretty barmaid who draws the lascivious eye of the beastial Hyde in this adaptation of the classic novella by Robert Louis Stevenson.

1:30 p.m.: House of Wax (1953): Horror legend Vincent Price is a renowned sculptor turned madman (hey, it happens) who now runs a wax museum. Phyllis Kirk (The Twilight Zone), Charles Bronson (Death Wish), and Carolyn Jones (the original Morticia of The Addams Family) costar in this lavish flick about an artist who uses his gifts for revenge—and murder! It was originally presented in 3-D, so don’t be surprised when objects are hurled toward you at certain points.

3:30 p.m.: The Haunting (1963): Based on the classic Shirley Jackson novel The Haunting of Hill House, Julie Harris (The Dark Half), Claire Bloom (Clash of the Titans), Richard Johnson (The Monster Club), and Russ Tamblyn (Twin Peaks) star in this frightfully entertaining story involving a paranormal investigation of a haunted house that goes horribly wrong. Directed by Robert Wise (The Day the Earth Stood Still, Star Trek: The Motion Picture).

5:55 p.m.: House of Dark Shadows (1970): Jonathan Frid, Joan Bennett, and Grayson Hall star in this adaptation of the then-popular gothic soap opera, directed by creator Dan Curtis (The Night Strangler, Trilogy of Terror). Frid is Barnabas Collins, a lovelorn vampire smitten with a woman who resembles his long-ago greatest love; Joan Bennett is a scientist who might find a way to restore his humanity—if only she wasn’t so jealous of Barnabas’s true love… (Fun fact: The movie was shot in Sleepy Hollow, New York—home to the Headless Horseman!)

8:00 p.m.: The Fog (1980): Adrienne Barbeau (Swamp Thing), Jamie Lee Curtis (Halloween Ends), her real-life mother Janet Leigh (Psycho), Hal Holbrook, John Houseman, and Tom Atkins (Halloween III: Season of the Witch) star in this film by director John Carpenter (Halloween, Christine) about a sleepy little West Coast town suddenly overrun by ghostly pirates—and not a Jack Sparrow to be seen!

10:00 p.m.: The Howling (1981): Dee Wallace Stone (Halloween), Patrick MacNee (The Avengers), Dennis Dugan (Happy Gilmore), and Robert Picardo (Star Trek: Voyager) star in this adaptation of the Gray Brandner novel, about a TV news reporter who, after being traumatized by an assault by a serial killer, travels with her husband to The Colony, a secluded resort, to rest. But the residents of The Colony and its surrounding area all share a terrifying secret, and it doesn’t take a full moon to bring out the beast in them… Directed by Joe Dante (Piranha, Gremlins) and featuring a screenplay by John Sayles (Alligator, Eight MenOut) and Terence Winkless, and amazing transformation effects by Rob Bottin (Game of Thrones).

12:30 a.m.: Black Christmas (1974): Olivia Hussey (Batman Beyond), Keir Dullea (2001: A Space Odyssey), Margot Kidder (Superman), and John Saxon (A Nightmare on Elm Street) star in this slasher by writer/director Bob Clark, about sorority sisters being stalked by a murderer during Christmastime.

Tomorrow, we’ll take a look at Turner Classic Movies’ programming. Stay tuned!

Beast Feast Marathon on Movies! Channel

beast-feastHappy Thanksgiving to all you Panatics across the USA—and outside the US, of course (although I’m pretty sure our particular November holiday is just another Thursday for you). It’s a day of celebration and getting together and things to be thankful for, and for monster fans like you and me, it’s also a day to prepare for another horror movie marathon on the Movies! TV Network, this time being held on Friday.

I’ve been checking out Movies! since it got added to Time Warner Cable’s selection of channels, and they’ve got a pretty decent library of films for different kinds of movie fans. But they really outdid themselves this past Halloween, with an all-day marathon of classic frights. Well, they’re following that up with a post-Thanksgiving monsterfest dubbed Beast Feast!

monster-squadThe day starts off with 1987’s The Monster Squad at 8:00 a.m. (ET), the much-loved story of a group of pre-teen monster fans who suddenly find their hometown under siege from the real Dracula, Wolf Man, Frankenstein’s Monster, Mummy, and Gill-Man (in other words, the Creature From the Black Lagoon).

The programming continues with the 1981 fantasy Dragonslayer, starring Peter MacNicol (Ghostbusters II); 1960’s The Lost World, an adaptation of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle novel, with Michael Rennie (the original The Day the Earth Stood Still), Jill St. John (Diamonds Are Forever), Claude Rains (The Invisible Man), and David Hedison (TV’s Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea); and 1985’s Silver Bullet, the adaptation of the Stephen King and Bernie Wrightson illustrated novella Cycle of the Werewolf, with Gary Busey (Predator 2) matching wits with a particularly nasty lyncanthrope.

Those are followed by a triple feature starring the Big G, himself: 1992’s Godzilla and Mothra: The Battle for Earth; 1995’s Godzilla vs. Destroyah; and 2002’s Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla. And then wrapping up the marathon is 1983’s Cujo, another Stephen King adaptation, this one pitting Dee Wallace (The Howling) against a rabid St. Bernard.

Sounds like a fun day of monster watching. Give it a look while you’re recuperating from all that Thanksgiving turkey!

Halloween TV Marathons: Movies! and Get TV

It’s part 3 of our overview of the kind of scare-related programming you’ll find on television this Halloween. This time we’ll take a look at a couple of cable movie channels in the U.S. that are showing old-timey horror films.

movies-halloweenFor the Movies! TV Network, the day starts off with 1959’s The Tingler at 8:00 a.m. (ET), starring master of the macabre Vincent Price (younger Panatics might recognize him as the creepy voice and sinister laugh at the end of Michael Jackson’s hit single “Thriller”: “The foulest stench is in the air/The funk of 40,000 years…”). The Tingler is a parasite that can only be halted from killing you if you scream at the top of your lungs—a plot device that made a lot of sense when the movie was in wide release, because the sales pitch to audiences was that at some point the Tingler would be loosed in your theater! It involved certain seats being wired with an electrical current that would mildly shock the “victims,” causing them to scream—scream for their lives! (In the late ’80s, I saw The Tingler in a small movie house here in Manhattan—and yep, they wired the seats, just like back in the day. That was the best!)

 

swamp_thing1982Movies! continues its programming with 1967’s Berserk!, starring Joan Crawford; 1965’s Die! Die! My Darling!, with Tallulah Bankhead and Stephanie Powers; 1971’s The Mephisto Waltz, with Alan Alda and Jacqueline Bisset; the 1988 remake of The Blob, with Shawnee Smith and Kevin Dillon; John Carpenter’s 1980 thriller The Fog, with Jamie Lee Curtis (Halloween) and Adrienne Barbeau (Escape From New York); Wes Craven’s 1982 adaptation of DC Comics’ Swamp Thing, starring Louis Jordan, Ray Wise, Adrienne Barbeau, and Dick Durock as the walking, talking swamp critter; and 1975’s Bug—about killer cockroaches—starring Bradford Dillman and Joanna Miles. Wrapping up the marathon with 1967’s The Deadly Bees, with Suzanna Leigh and Frank Finlay.

Not a bad lineup at all. So what’s happening on those higher TV-remote numbers?

get-tv-logoGet TV—a cable channel owned by Sony Pictures that runs TV shows and movies from Sony’s extensive library—hosts a brief Halloween schedule, starting late Sunday night (October 30) at 10:00 p.m. (ET) with the one-hour documentary Vincent Price: The Versatile Villain, an overview of the actor’s life and career. It’s followed by the 1954 Price vehicle The Mad Magician, about a murderous illusionist who terrorizes costars Mary Murphy and Eva Gabor.

return-vampireThen comes 1944’s The Return of the Vampire, starring Dracula himself, Bela Lugosi, as he tries to put the bite on Nina Foch and Frieda Inescourt. After a break for a Western (1954’s Jesse James vs. The Daltons—what the hell?), horror returns for a trilogy of documentaries: Bela Lugosi: Hollywood’s Dark Prince; Boris Karloff: The Gentle Monster; and Peter Lorre: The Master of Menace. Then another break, with episodes of the TV series Nanny and the Professor and Ensign O’Toole, before a final, minor supernatural-themed show: an episode of the ghost-comedy series The Ghost & Mrs. Muir, starring Edward Mulhare and Hope Lange as the eponymous characters.

Hey, Get, if you’re owned by Sony, and you have access to their film library, where are the Sony horror movies for a full-out marathon? What about The Howling for the overnight hours? Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters II for prime time? (GB’s producer, Columbia Pictures, is a subsidiary of Sony.) Producer William Castle’s The Old Dark House or Homicidal? Maybe Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre in the 1942 horror comedy The Boogie Man Will Get You?

Let’s…er, get on the ball for next year, okay?