Mr. Lobo and Cinema Insomnia

American airwaves have just gotten a whole lot better because Cinema Insomnia has gone national on AMGTV, including broadcasts in Virginia!  All you have to do is open your mind to the idea that "They're not bad movies--just misunderstood."

At first glance, it would appear that the planets have aligned for Mr. Lobo and Cinema Insomnia.   His show just went national on UATV, broadcasting the show on Saturday nights in more than a dozen states!  In fact, KCTU is web-casting the program every Saturday night at 11 p.m. central time.  His shows are also now available through a major DVD distributor, The Movie Crypt, which is web-casting them too!  Mr. Lobo has entertained large audiences in movie houses up and down the coast of California with sophisticated special effects, great guests and comedy that is genuinely funny.  He even made the cover of FilmFax, not to mention all this cool Virginia Creepers exposure.

However, a lot more than just fortuitous astrological portents determine Mr. Lobo's success.  Unlike other meteoric stars, such as Justin Timberlake, who use Pilates and Satanism to get ahead, Mr. Lobo has relied on an steady supply of java, incredible production values and slick creative energy to produce a show that honors the best of the American horror host tradition.

So, come with us now as we dare to stare into the hypnotic eye and explore the world of Mr. Lobo and Cinema Insomnia.  You won't be disappointed.

So, who is Mr. Lobo?

Hmmmm . . . where to begin?  Enigmatic, understated and subtle, Mr. Lobo sits in a rocking chair on a mostly black set.  The minimalist, displaced hipster appearance of our host (a conscious homage to California's Creature Features with Bob Wilkins and John Stanley) is deceivingly placid.  While at first glance Mr. Lobo looks like a retro pop-culture psychoanalyst sorting out the collective unconscious with a random assemblage of films and clips, beneath the cool exterior simmers an insomniac's spirit guide.  He moves with mildly exaggerated physical gestures . . . pointing with two fingers, jerking his head suddenly to odd angles, engaging in off screen conversations . . . all the while referring to himself in third person.  The effect is a slight of hand that makes the subtle satire all the more enjoyable.

Mr. Lobo is part guide, part observer, part critic and part experimenter.  Like a post-postmodern man, he creates something new out of the cinematic salvage heap left to horror hosts and each trip through Mr. Lobo's domain is like a guided tour of the Island of Misfit Toys.   As a result, Cinema Insomnia is marked by a wonderful displacement in time and culture, full of juxtaposed images from our collective past and present.

And Cinema Insomnia?

Cinema Insomnia has style.  The show begins, for instance, with an extended  intro which is always slightly unique.  Your journey begins with a few vintage commercials for nearly forgotten toys and maybe a Godzilla or B-movie trailer, like you're channel surfing after midnight in an alternative universe.  Then, after 3 seconds of bikini dancers with strange choreography, you are suddenly pulled into Mr. Lobo's domain.  Like a cross between classic Star Trek and Twilight Zone openings with cool West Coast jazz theme, Cinema Insomnia's first three minutes are unique and captivating.

So, from the beginning, you know you are watching something very special.

Mr. Lobo is a scholar of the public domain and his movies often range far outside the regular cable access fare, from Alien knock off Creature to the fuzzy logic Peter Graves documentary, Bigfoot:  Mysterious Monster, in addition to Night of the Living Dead.

There are strangely sudden and yet seamless shifts in and out of the night's movie.  You get the feeling that the movies are a template, not a centerpiece, and the feature really becomes a vehicle for Mr. Lobo's show and not the other way around.   And that's great because Cinema Insomnia is pleasantly surreal and indulgently nerdy. 

Mr. Lobo interviewing Bigfoot's prom date

The show is grounded with regular features, however.   Each show has an intermission, with interviews and long-lost cartoons and theater promos from the past like "Let's go out to the lobby."  But there is no way to tell what is coming next and if you are going to get up and make a sandwich, the intermission is not the time.  Mr. Lobo also has a Mail Sac (you know what I mean) and answers letters in the way only Mr. Lobo can.  And then, there are the special offers like the romantic "Candles, Krankor and You" record album and instructions on how to make your own "Blood-O-Vision" goggles.

The end result is a show and DVD library that is of EXCEPTIONAL quality.   You should go right now to The Movie Crypt and pick up a few of these gems because if you don't you'll regret it, maybe not now but soon, and for the rest of your life.

Cyberhost and Community Pillar:

Mr. Lobo is a truly interactive host, with a long history of film and fan events to his credit.  Just a few months ago he hosted House on Haunted Hill complete with flying skeletons, blood dripping from the ceiling and Vincent Price's strange Emergo skeleton puppet effect.  Pretty cool, eh? 

Don't fret just because missed it.  For those living in California, you can often find Mr. Lobo selflessly providing anti-homogenizing live entertainment.  And if you don't live there,  you still have plenty of time to move there and catch one of the dozens of public appearances each year, with a few coming right around the corner.  Why, there's SiliCON in San Jose, Horror Host Palooza at San Fran's Thrillsville and "Shock It To Me," a horror film festival in the Bay City's haunted Castro Theater Halloween weekend.   Seriously, what more could you want?

The website is an extension of the show and is one of the most extensive and regularly updated sites in the host world you will find.  There are clips and even episodes for download as well as info on the latest public appearances and road show reviews.   If you are not getting Cinema Insomnia in your hometown, there is a list of potential stations you can petition on the Cinema Insomnia site, too.

And there is helpful, if dubious, information to complete your viewing experience in the Fanboy Lounge.  For example, Mr. Lobo provides a few "Things You Never Knew about Devil Doll," as reprinted below. 

Things You Never Knew About Devil Doll (1964)

by Mr. Lobo

• There are many differences between the European cut and the American cut of the film:
  1. The original has a starring credit for Bryant Haliday as "The Great Vorelli," but the American credits Tab Hunter above Bryant Halliday... which is strange because he is not in the film.
  2. The production company credit was orginally "Anglo-Amalgamated" - and on the American print it's listed as "Crackers Gone Wild".
  3. A scene where Haliday and Sandra Dorne leave her dressing room and go into a side room to have sex was cut from the American print. Instead, we are treated to six minutes of kittens playing with a ball of yarn.
  4. In the European version there is a scene on stage where Haliday hypnotizes a woman from the audience into performing a striptease which ends with her topless. In the American version a raccoon in the corner at the nightclub gets his head caught in a cookie jar and fumbles around under patrons' legs.
  5. Also in the European version, Dorne turns in her sleep to reveal a breast - but in the American version she sits up in a baby-doll nightgown and makes sure her Bible and gun are under her pillow.
  6. As Hugo creeps into the bedroom to stab Dorne in the European print, we again see her exposed breast... but the murder is off camera. In the American version the dummy rips off Dorne's head and dances in a fountain of her blood - but luckily the breast is covered.
  7. Sylvester calls his pudgy middle-aged colleague at a Berlin hotel, who is accompanied in bed by a young girl playing with her hair.  In the American print she is wearing a bra and a see-through negligee... while in European print HE is wearing a bra and a see-through negligee.
  8. The original title for the European release of the film was Devil Dog, but a lawsuit brought by the Little Debbie manufacturers - who had a popular snack cake with that name - forced them to change the name for American audiences.
• The British Version cut the sequence featuring the forbidden dance... The Twist.
• Devil Doll was in fact based on a short story written by Shari Lewis.
• The Great Vorelli (Bryant Haliday) mastered the art of transferring souls into inanimate objects. Unfortunately he was unable to accomplish this for the film's cast.
• Vorelli runs into rich, beautiful Marianne Horn (Yvonne Romain) and seeks to hypnotize her into believing she is in a good movie.
• William Sylvester plays the reporter (and boyfriend) of Romain who's writing a travel piece about smoking and talking across Europe.
• It was a longstanding rule that all foreign made films that were to be imported to the US were required to have an American journalist character that does absolutely nothing to advance the story.
• This was the first live action English Horror Film shot in "Supermarionation."
• Ventriloquist dummies used in the film were displayed at the premiere screening - but they got up and left 15 minutes into the film.
• William Sylvester employs an acting style called "the amnesia technique" that allows him to go from Gorgo to Devil Doll to 2001: A Space Odyssey and not be remembered from one film to the next.
• The Horseshoe Crab has eyes in its tail.
• Unfortunately the horror of Devil Doll has been overshadowed by the classic "Ventriloquist's Dummy" episode of Family Matters (1989) in which they made a dummy of Urkel. (shudder)
• The false beard in this film allowed actor Bryant Haliday to be cast two years later as the globe-trotting single father on Johnny Quest.
• Devil Doll's story of an evil ventriloquist controlling the mind of a dummy has inspired many other films, TV shows, and presidential administrations.
• Oddly enough, "Tickle Me Hugo" was the surprise must-have Christmas gift of 1964.
• Before Yvonne Romain falls under the hypnotist's spell, she claims she doesn't know how to dance - and under trance she proves it by doing The Twist!
• Devil Doll was filmed in England, which is the reason the Beatles came to America.
• Yvonne Romaine's character went through many name changes in earlier drafts of the script, such as Yvonne Iceberg, Yvonne Web's Wonder, and Yvonne Butter-Lettuce.
• Bryant Halliday, who was the Devil Doll's dominator Vorelli, later became co-founder of Janus Films, 'home owner' of The Criterion Collection - which made millions of dummies by Laserdiscs.
• This film has many tight shots showing the actors in close-up so that it would play for television... just as stale and boring as it did for the cinema.
• Because of budget limitations, all of the puppets in Devil Doll were made from Bisquick.
• Director David Lynch saw this movie and found it odd.
• It took six of Europe's finest sausage packers to get Vorelli's blonde assistant into her showgirl leotard.
• The Great Vorelli hypnotizes a man form the audience into believing he is held hostage with a loaded gun to his head. He begs, prays, sweats, weeps and eventually cries out as he is forced to imagine a finger pulling the trigger and to anticipate the bullet crashing through his skull. Subsequently, the nightclub stocked spare pairs of underwear for patrons who participate in the stage shows.
• It's hard for us to imagine how a creepy ventriloquist who has the demeaning and dark act performs in front of sold-out crowds in Britain... since humiliating dummies and audience members would not become as popular in America until 30 years later, when The Jerry Springer Show premiered.
• Devil Doll is really slow and tedious and has no sense of direction, and it's really slow and has no sense of - Wait, I already said that. Uh, hold on. Did I say it was slow?
• To make Hugo the dummy truly horrifying, special effects wizards modeled his face on the unholy spawn of Larry Storch and Ernest Borgnine.
• To punish Hugo, now trapped in a doll's body, the evil Vorelli denies him ham, Christmas presents and shiksas.
• Most famously associated with the final segment of Dead Of Night, killer dummies have also popped up in films as diverse as Magic, Dollman vs. the Demonic Toys, Rambo, Red Heat, Cold as Ice, and The Adventures of Ford Fairlane.
• Devil Doll won the coveted Oscar for most absurd eyebrows in a motion picture.
• To save money on false eyelashes, fat fuzzy caterpillars dipped in tar were used.
• A production grant was given to the film Devil Doll by the Milkfed German Prostitute Preservation Board.
• Vorelli's delivery in Devil Doll is so monotone that portions of his dialogue are allowed to be played as an alternative to the Emergency Broadcast System test signal.
• You could fill the crankcase of a Volkswagen ten times with the amount of oil produced from Vorelli's face in this film.
• In Seattle, it's now illegal to air Devil Doll - the result of an incident in 1997 when it allegedly pushed 11,000 more of their depressed and rain-weary citizens to commit suicide.
• Director Tod Browning' was so angry at the confusion between his film The Devil-Doll (1945) and Devil Doll that he shrunk the entire cast and crew into tiny slaves to do his bidding.
• This movie was followed by the sequels Devil Dolls Are Go!, The Devil Dolls take Manhattan! and Beyond the Valley of the Devil Dolls.

It is this kind of energy that keeps Columbian coffee harvesters working day and night. 

© 2008, Horse Archer Productions, LLC  All Rights Reserved.