Rudy Panucci On Pop Culture

RFC HORROR THEATER II: THE SPOOKENING!

Part Two of RADIO FREE CHARLESTON HORROR THEATER is online now! This episode features more of our tribute to old-time-TV horror movie hosts.  We’ve got music videos from Under The Radar and Go Van Gogh, a short ghost film by Rich Allen, scary-freaky animation from Wladislaw Starewicz, plus a studio full of Zombies. Make sure you watch Part One, first!

You won’t want to miss the Zombie chorus line, or the all-star Zombie jam session at the end of the show! In addition to yours truly, this episode of RFC features Chelsea Cook, Liz McCormick, plus RFC Big Shots Brian Young and Melanie Larch. Full details follow, after the jump!

The Zombie massacre continues this time, as our cast continues to swell the ranks of the undead. One bit of unscripted brilliance that Chelsea and Liz started in our last episode is that the Zombies, after springing back to life from having their brains eaten by other Zombies, are really friendly with the Zombies that killed them.  There’s even a Zombie group hug in this show.  I was very lucky to have a cast that “got” the material and was able to add to it.

My cast was so good that I only had to do a second take of one segment during both episodes.  And that was because Brian came up with a really cool bit of comic timing during the intro to the Go Van Gogh video.

First up in this show is a film by Rich Allen, which I won’t give away the title of, since that’s part of the charm.  Rich is  a talented singer-songwriter (you may remember him from RFC 35) but he’s also a filmmaker with a sense of humor every bit as twisted as mine. You can check out more of his work at his YouTube page, and you can expect to see more on RFC in the future.

Under The Radar is Rusty Marks, Bill Robinson and Mark Lanham, and as soon as I heard “Mothman Prophecy #1” I knew I had to have it on the Halloween show. We shot UTR at St. Albans City Park in September, and I did the animation and synched the live performance up to the studio version of the song on Monday, October 27.  You’re getting it fresh out of the video oven!

I’ve wanted to see Go Van Gogh’s video for “Planet Of Psychotic Women” finished since I first saw the unfinished version in the early 1990s.  Stephen Beckner had done an incredible job of recreating the look of a low-budget sci-fi movie from the late 1950s, but he’d never managed to edit in footage of the band performing the tune.  When I found an old video tape of the band performing the song at The Levee, I decided to put together a “finished” version.

Which is not to say that this is the final version of the video.  Stephen performed at the RFC Halloween Party last Saturday (the place was packed–we were turning people away at the Interstate exits).  He tells me that he recently found all the production elements from the original shoot–the film, soundtrack recording and more–and he’s thinking of having the footage professionally transferred to a digital format so he can re-edit the entire thing.

Until that happens, dig what I was able to do with the clip.

One other note on this video. While the recording features the classic four-piece line-up of Go Van Gogh, the performance we captured on video was by the expanded “Traffic-like” line-up, which included Mark Mangrone on keys and either Bane or Jason on percussion (Stephen, if you can, set the record straight in the comments). This was in addition to Stephen and Mark Beckner and Johnny and Tim Rock.

Our animation is more of Wladislaw Starewicz’s “The Mascot” which is being serialized over at the RFC TV Archives, where it’s taking the place of Pentagram Flowerbox in our older shows. This imaginative and bizarre Polish film from the 1930s was a fixture on the old Night Flight show, a major inspiration for RFC.

There you have the behind-the-scenes details on part two of our horror show.  I hope you guys had as much fun watching it as we did making it.  Otherwise it’d be sort of a self-indulgent waste of time.

1 Comment

  1. Elvis Capone

    What a fine tasty bowl of placenta puddin’.

    More Halloween shows, mom!

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