When we went to Llano to visit, we would go to the movies at the Lantex Theater. I remember seeing such theatrical greats as:
“Cinderella”
“The Lone Ranger and the Lost City of Gold”
“Andy Hardy Comes Home”
“The Plague of the Zombies” – I didn’t see all of this one.
“Man’s Favorite Sport”
Roy Hallmark took me to see “The Plague of the Zombies”. This was one of the English Hammer Productions horror films about zombies. We were visiting Uncle Bill and Aunt Adelaide during the Llano Rodeo as we did every year for a while. Uncle Bill had made souse. I’m not 100% sure what souse is, but I think it is head cheese is meat from the head of a pig pickled with vinegar. Mom insisted that I try it and I did eat some. Later Roy took me to the Lantex Theater in his Ford Falcon station wagon. Roy and I sat together until he saw some girls he went to school with and left me sitting alone. The movie started. There was a scene of a foggy, spooky 18th century English village funeral. The pallbearers are carrying a coffin and one of the men slips and they all drop the coffin and the lid comes off giving the audience a close up of a green dead guy’s face. Later in the movie a young English lady decides it’s a good idea to take a short cut through the spooky old English cemetery. She starts feeling that someone is following her so she begins to panic and run. She approaches this big spooky headstone. Suddenly the dead green guy from the coffin scene jumps from behind the headstone. The hair on my head stood up on end, I got hot and broke out in a cold sweat. I went to the lobby water fountain and the next thing I remember was Roy picking me up from the lobby floor and then carrying me to his car. On the way back to Uncle Bill’s and Aunt Adelaide’s I proceeded to throw up all over the inside of Roy’s Falcon. I don’t think I was actually scared, I think that souse just didn’t agree with my tummy. Roy never took me anywhere in his Falcon again for some reason.
The last movie I remember seeing at the Lantex Theater was “Man’s Favorite Sport” with Rock Hudson. It was a sixties romantic comedy. I remember Aunt Adelaide saw it also and her movie review was that it was a dirty movie too indecent to be shown or something to that effect. In the movie Rock is chasing Paula Prentiss. Turns out Rock was really acting.
I did see another movie with Roy, I guess enough time had passed that he forgot the zombie movie fiasco. I guess mom was having one of her family get-togethers? Roy, Sissy, Evelyn and I went to see Steve McQueen in “Nevada Smith” at the, as you probably guessed, the Cowtown Drive In. The Cowtown was on the intersection of highways 183 (River Oaks Boulevard) and 199 (Jacksboro Highway). It had a giant mural of a longhorn steer on a hill with a B-36 flying over it. When the B-36 became obsolete and Convair was building B-58’s, the mural was updated with a B-58 flying over the longhorn. The Cowtown burned down one night. I remember hearing an AM radio disc jockey reporting the event. He said that Debbie Reynolds gave a blazing performance in “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” last night at the Cowtown Drive In Theater as the Cowtown burned to the ground. Anyway back to the story.
The summer Jamey Wardlow lived with us, while he was working for Uncle Frog, there was a movie excursion to the Cowtown. It was Alfred, Jamey, Gary, Ronny and me. We saw the Clint Eastwood / Lee Van Cleef movie “For a Few Dollars More”. This wasn’t mom approved “Walt Disney” fare. Instead it was full of bloodshed, fights and the basic premise was Lee Van Cleef being after the bad guy some Italian actor was playing who had assaulted his sister before she shot herself. I think it embarrassed Jamey that Gary and Ronny were with us since they were so young.
Alfred took us to the movies when he lived with us and he lived in Fort Worth. He took us to see “Cat Ballou” at the Cowtown (I loved the Cowtown). This is the only Jane Fonda movie that is not only good, it’s actually great. Alfred took us to Houston once; we visited our Davis relatives there, went to an Astros game at the Astrodome and saw the Cinerama movie “Grand Prix” at an actual Cinerama equipped theater. It was amazing. You actually leaned in your seats when the GP cars cornered, you couldn’t help yourself. I had a 1964 Corvair that I drove to high school (and UTA, later to General Dynamics). The car had dual glass pack mufflers. The guy we got it from gave us another dual exhaust manifold with glass packs which he said were too loud for the street. When we got home from Houston I swapped the exhaust out to the louder setup so my Corvair would sound more like the GP cars. It wasn’t loud enough, so I came up with a process. I would come home from school, remove the mufflers completely driving around the neighborhood racking the exhaust pretending to be Phil Hill or Dan Gurney until it got close to time for daddy to come home from work. I would then reinstall the quieter exhaust setup. I did this for a few weeks until I realized it was too much work.
When I was very young I would get up early on Saturday mornings before daybreak, sneak into the den, turn on the Wards Airline TV set and watch “Rocky Jones, Space Ranger”. That was my favorite show up there with “The Lone Ranger” and “The Adventures of Robin Hood”. In my memory those shows were so realistic, but there was one episode I never watched completely through because it was too scary. It was the episode where a robot went around crushing people. The victims couldn’t run away because the robot had some kind of magnetic field that would suck the victim into the robot’s people crushing arms. It was as scary as the time the movie “King Kong” came on our black and white 14” Airline screen and I crawled under the couch and hid. I have slowly redeemed my manhood by watching the endings of these movies that scared me: “King Kong”, the robot episode of “Rocky Jones, Space Ranger” and “The Plague of
the Zombies”. A restored version of “King Kong” was re-released in 1970 and I saw it on a date with Nancy. She didn’t really want to see it and she still pretends that it wasn’t good, but it was great. In my defense, I did see “Love Story” with her and she pretended that it was good, when we all know it wasn’t. My next vindication was at Halloween time a few years ago. Turner Classic Movies had a horror film marathon and one of the films they showed on TV was the “Plague of the Zombies”. It turns out that if you watch this movie past the point that I passed out, it gets extremely stupid and laughable. The green guy jumping out from behind the headstone was the last scary scene in the movie. I only had one more scary show to watch to completely vindicate myself, “The Rocky Jones” episode. Last week Nancy went to play Canasta with a church ladies group and I was home alone. Through the miracle of the Al Gore invented internet, I was able to figure out the title of the episode that frightened me so much. It was “Out of this World”. I discovered that I could watch any Rocky Jones episode that I wanted via YouTube. “Out of this World” consisted of three half hour episodes. I watched episode one, no scary robot. I watched episode two, again no terrifying robot. It had to be in the final episode. I remembered the extremely realistic robot, the elaborate sets and the complex terrifying action scenes. I watched the episode. The robot looked like a child made his own robot outfit for Halloween, it was filmed on a small soundstage with cheap cheesy sets and the terrifying crushing attacks were nothing more than hugs. It wasn’t anything like I remembered, but I now feel vindicated, I faced my fears.
Except I don’t watch vampire movies or any movies with blood. These
movies make me queasy ever since I saw a movie on TV where the invisible man, either Claude Raines or Vincent Price transfuses the blood from some guy so he could become visible again. After seeing that I couldn’t sleep without my feet being covered because I was afraid Vincent Price might stick a needle in my foot and take my blood.
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