Yeti Hideout

Fiona Lewis (1946- ) This red-headed English beauty popped up on my television a lot during my childhood. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, growing up in front of the television – specifically with HBO – inadvertently educated me with an early recognition and fondness for unusual performers and background personalities. One film from this period that has been etched in my mind is the 1983 oddity, Strange Invaders . An homage to 1950s science fiction movies, Fiona Lewis played an alien undercover in human form. As she put it, “I played an alien who, daintily disguised as an Avon lady, preys upon the residents of a small town, a current of molten green lava bubbling beneath my replicant skin, which before the film’s denouement spectacularly exploded, a geyser of ooze, as I screamed myself to sci-fi death.”* A pretty memorable scene made all the more interesting by Fiona’s elegance: a gorgeous juxtaposition of large, icy blue eyes and thick auburn hair. The ...

Ernest Borgnine (1917-2012) Ernest Borgnine is an important example of a character actor who had the opportunity to play not just supporting parts but also leading roles. In Marty (1955), a film that won him an Oscar for Best Actor, you had a film where the character actor was promoted to a starring role. Here was an actor who looked like a typical, everyday guy and he was the lead for a major Hollywood film. B orgnine had a wildly varied career that ranged to all points of the spectrum, from starring on television series like "McHale’s Navy" and "Airwolf" to voice-over work on animated films like All Dogs Go to Heaven 2 (1996) and Joe Dante’s Small Soldiers (1998) (a film in which he voiced an action figure alongside his Dirty Dozen co-stars George Kennedy, Jim Brown and Clint Walker) to classics like Johnny Guitar (1954), Ice Station Zebra (1968), The Wild Bunch (1969) and, what is probably his most famous role, that of Mike Rogo in Th...

About five years ago I started profiling different character actors that I was particularly fascinated with. It was a fun project, but I quickly stopped after a few entries. I decided to pick the idea back up again and write some new thoughts about my favorite performers. Glenn Shadix (1952-2010)   I first noticed Glenn (as I'm sure most people did) in Tim Burton's Beetlejuice (1988), where he played Otho, the snotty interior designer. It was a funny and memorable role and he got to deliver some great lines. The famous quote, "Don't mind her. She's still upset because somebody dropped a house on her sister", was his own and he was thrilled that Burton let him use it in the famous "Day-O" dinner scene. Soon after, I began seeing him in more films, like his bits in Heathers (1989), Meet the Applegates (1991), Sleepwalkers (1992) and his second most well-known role, as Associate Bob in Demolition Man (1993). I loved his role...

Day Twenty Nine: Black Christmas , Lee Hays. This year is the 40th anniversary of the groundbreaking horror classic which has enjoyed an incredible resurgence over the past fifteen years or so. A few years ago I was shocked to find this novelization on eBay.  It's a very short read and is based on the original screenplay so certain scenes are slightly different. There is some expanded character development and some brief perspective from Billy's point of view! It's about that time of year again for a visit to the Kappa Gamma house. This book is pretty hard to find, but it appears on eBay every now and then.

Day Twenty Eight: Duel: Terror Stories by Richard Matheson . Quite possibly my favorite author. This is a great collection of some of his short stories, but honestly, every compendium of his stories are great.  This one contains "Duel" and my favorite, "Trespass", which was also made into a TV movie called The Stranger Within . As I've mentioned several times with these authors, go ahead and read everything they've written. Copies can be found on Amazon .

Day Twenty Seven: House of Stairs , William Sleator. Five kids find themselves trapped in a bizarre environment: a world made up entirely of flights of stairs, forming an incomprehensible labyrinth. The kids are forced to interact for survival.  Amazing young adult sci-fi by one of the best, most creative authors, the late William Sleator. The book reminded me of the 1997 film, Cube . Copies can be found on Amazon .