YOUR LUNACY TUNES AND MORBID MELODIES: SPOOKY JUKEBOX 2025 W/OTTO VON OTTOMAN!

 

You'll forgive me if I seem a bit...agitated. Heh. It is a very special day...a very special night. Oh, I've forgotten. It is I, Otto von Ottoman, purveyor of the dark, the mysterious, the unexplainable. I emerge from my fetid crypt (in reality, an apartment in an accursed "senior living facility;" woe betide the fates that have cast me here! Here amongst the living dead, those vacant-eyed, bland things with their decaf coffee, quilting projects and Easy-Eye mysteries. I...)

I had forgotten my purpose. I am not here to bewail my miserable fate. I have arrived, like the crow on the wing, to provide you with dark tidings of joy on this most divine of days--October 31st. I a sense, this entire year has been a Halloween "trick" without any "treat" except mistreatment--no laughing matter, even to this ghoulish heart. I assume you have enjoyed my Spooky Jukebox mini-podcast. If not, I entreat you hear it anon. It will disappear from this mortal coil on the morn of November 2nd, so find its entry on this blog and partake of its fermented, demented joys before it's too late.

I had set aside three additional gruesome gems for your consumption (from tuberculosis, perhaps) and arranged them in order of their strength. We shall start with our MILD entry. It's DOUBLE EYED WHAMMY by the great New Orleans vocalist Tommy Ridgely. This topic is no laughing matter. The Whammy, if generated with enough oomph, has been known to elect incontinent citrus-colored blowhards to positions of global power. It can enable a drunken weekend TV host to become the head of an armed force. It has also promoted a Botoxed puppy-murderer to a high government position. The Whammy makes pathetic clowns of anyone it captures with its gaze. You've seen the harm it can do, so duck under something as you listen to Mr. Ridgely's tale of romantic plight. The review people have a wondrous term for it, which you can see below!

Good sounding sock novelty! Well, darn it, that's great--

altho' there are too many holes in it!

We proceed to our MEDIUM strength entry: "Please Help" by Black vocal group The Dukays. They won my respect when they gave everyone "The Bird" and got away with it! They even had a hit for their efforts--not the gangster variety, but perhaps that's for the best.

As a child, I often heard the song THE LION SLEEPS TONIGHT. It so disappointed me that the lion didn't wake up and make a midnight snack of those screechy singers on the radio. THAT I would have enjoyed! Heh. This atmospheric delight has our poor protagonist stranded in the jungle with that lion and other wild weirdies and his song is a panicked cry for succor. It is, if you will, a succor punch, flavored with gorillas, rhinos and the odd giraffe. (I've never seen an even giraffe; do they exist? Do I exist? I'm no longer certain...)

This one is a "rib-tickling jungle-rock poke." I'll take a jab of that, please!

I love to hear things throughout the lid...of a marble vault door!

We now achieve MAXIMUM spooks with "The Web," the theme song for one of my old favorites from my days as a TV horror-movie host. THE BRAIN THAT WOULDN'T DIE is a sleazy, lurid, pretentious Space-Age mad scientist movie about an ambitious surgeon (played with the ham power of a Hormel cannery by Herb Evers). After a pleasure drive turns horrific, he saves the head of his bride-to-be (a career peak for actress Virginia Leath) and hooks it up to assorted science things.

His goal: to graft the buxom body of a nightclub stripper to her noggin. Naturally, she objects to this objectification. Lady's got a mouth on her! Oh, and I forgot Kurt, the mad medico's deformed assistant, who lives in the "country house" where the bad doctor ducks away on weekends to perform his transplant experiments. OH! And there's a monster in a closet in the basement. The Russian writer Anton Chekhov famously noted that if a rifle is shown over the hearth in a play (or movie), it has to be used; the audience expects it. The same for the monster in the closet. This metaphorical beast will burst its way out--but not in the way you might expect!

Add to this psychotic slurry the most overblown dialogue outside of a Stan Lee Marvel comic-book and you've got Entertainment with a capital B! But a good thing is made better by its musical selections--a tossed salad of library music and the pinnacle of 1950s sleaze that is "The Web," as recorded by session guitarist Abie "Available" Baker and his orchestra.

From its opening, with the desolate twang of Abie's guitar, a walking-dead bass line, a vocal chorus making weird phrases and the tink-tink-tink piano also heard in the PERRY MASON theme song (another paragon of Atom-Age sleaze!) "The Web" will have you in its sticky grip. It doesn't let go. Then the greasy sax comes in and, oh, it's Hell! Sheer lovely Hell! This record is incredibly rare. Old Otto searched low and lower for it ever since he first saw this cinema masterwork eons ago. At last I found it. I had to bargain hard to obtain this talisman of tawdriness. Now I have it and can share it with you. Behold...THE WEB! This...is uneasy listening!

This is uneasy listening at its brutal best. Happy nightmares to you!

Click on the film poster to see this magnificent mess of a motion picture. You'll live to regret it--and that's the best guarantee I could ever hope to give such an undying work of art!

I must rest up for tonight. I'm giving a Grand Guignol show at the senior living facility. Ketchup will be shed, and Martha in 202 will bring muffins. It will be...a night to...remember!

Tomorrow Frank will bring you another spooky gem, since we can't let the Halloween spirit slip away too quickly! Film actor John Leyton delivers a Joe Meek-produced single that was banned by the BBC in 1961. Weird, wonderful, windswept: the three Ws that spell entertainment!