The Giants scoreboard on Creature Features Night at AT&T Park in San Francisco on August 29, 2009.

Sitting in the outfield grass of a major league ballpark is a strange place to watch a zombie movie. But there, on the same 103-foot wide screen that showed replays of homeruns and strikeouts only an hour before were black and white zombies munching on intestines and other assorted body parts. The sounds of gunshots and flesh-eating echoed through the mostly empty arena, making Night of the Living Dead even a little creepier than usual. In the stadium’s upper deck, clean up crews swept up the trash left over from the day’s Giants/Rockies game. In the distance, the workers resembled the shambling ghouls from the film we were watching. Back on the outfield, clusters of monster movie fans huddled together in the cold San Francisco fog to watch a movie that they’d probably seen several times before; the film that taught us to board up the doors and windows in case of a zombie invasion. If the undead did rise however, all of us in that ballpark would be toast—or at least a nice carpaccio.

The San Francisco Giants promotional team has gone nuts with special events this season. There have been Carlos Santana and Manny Pacquiao bobble-head nights, two Irish nights and a singles night. Saturday was Creature Features Night, celebrating a Bay Area monster movie show that hasn’t been on the air in 25 years. From a demographic standpoint, it didn’t make much sense for a major league franchise to open its hallowed outfield to fans of a long-cancelled local TV show. I just turned forty this year, placing me at the younger end of the show’s fans. But despite short attention spans, 500 fans stayed after the game to romp with a guy in a Japanese monster suit, score glow-in-the-dark t-shirts, meet a star of Night of the Living Dead and watch the movie that launched an enduring but gruesome pop cultural mania.

Bob Wilkins, San Francisco’s almost incongruous answer to Ghoulardi, The Ghoul and Elvira.

I was surprised by the turnout but I probably shouldn’t have been. During its run on Oakland’s KTVU Channel 2 from 1971-84, Creature Features was as intrinsic to the Bay Area’s oddball identity as Carol Doda and the Dead Kennedys. Its host, Bob Wilkins, looked more like a mid-tier insurance salesman than the cut-rate Caligaris that were haunting the airwaves of other major cities. Puffing cigars and cracking wise through such clunkers as The Creeping Terror or The Brain that Wouldn’t Die regularly propelled Wilkins ahead of the coke-crazed madness of Belushi era Saturday Night Live in the local ratings books. NBC execs couldn’t figure out what was going on in San Francisco, but they knew it was weird.

When Wilkins left the show in 1978, KTVU replaced him with San Francisco Chronicle writer and monster movie expert John Stanley. Stanley continued with the weirdness and even did interview segments with Penn and Teller and Whoopi Goldberg (take that SNL). He also directed a strange short film where he fought Chuck Norris. Despite Stanley’s zest for the show, the home video market took the starch out of Creature Features’ ratings and KTVU pulled the plug on the show in 1984.

Creature Features nostalgia has been building throughout this decade through appearances at comic conventions, film retrospectives and the release of a documentary titled Watch Horror Films, Keep America Strong (named after the kooky motto seen in the background of Wilkins’ set). But I still couldn’t help but feel that Creature Features night at AT&T Park was a final good bye to the old show. Wilkins and Bob Shaw, a CF producer longtime KTVU movie critic, both passed away earlier this year, leaving John Stanley to keep the televised memories alive. While future Creature Features events are planned as well as a DVD release of the public domain Horror Express with Stanley’s segments and wrap-arounds interspersed into the film, how can any of it get any bigger, or more San Francisco, than an event at the Giants’ bayside Ballpark (following a 5-3 Giants victory no less)?

On Saturday, Stanley had help from Judith O’Dea (pronounced O-Day), who played the harried Barbara in Night of the Living Dead. O’Dea looked great but it was hard not think of how together she seemed since my only previous contact with her was through her freaking out for 90-minutes of screen time in a George Romero horror flick. And then there was that high def print of Night shown with the aid of three million LEDs and the atmosphere provided by wisps of fog creeping into the stadium.

“Creature Features” host John Stanley interviews “Night of the Living Dead” star Judith O’Dea at AT&T Park on August 29, 2009.

NOTLD was really the perfect film to show at this event as no other movie was more closely identified with Creature Features than the Pittsburgh produced shocker. In those days before IMBD, Bay Area residents attempted to claim the film as their own. I remember hearing adults say that it was filmed in the graveyards of Colma (the necropolis that lies just south of San Francisco) and that Wilkins played the character of Johnny in the movie’s opening scene (they do look alike). Interviews with George Romero and other people involved with NOTLD in mags like Fangoria revealed the movie’s Pennsylvania roots long before Wikipedia became the final arbiter of all such cinema-inspired arguments.

Channel 2 was one of the first stations in the country (if not the first) to show the proto-splatter film on broadcast TV. “There’s one scene in there where the little girl hits her mom with a garden tool and I think she does it about 36 times in the movie,” Wilkins said during a video piece that ran before NOTLD on Saturday, “We cut it down to seven times and we’d get complaints. People saying, ‘Hey what are you doing to this film!?!’”

The opening titles of “Night of the Living Dead” on the high def, 103′ wide screen at AT&T Park in San Francisco.

Watching NOTLD now, it’s striking how it still manages to remain a prism through which to view black leadership in America. In 1968, the role of Ben, the film’s tragic African American protagonist, reflected the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Today, because actor Duane Jones looks and sounds ever so slightly like Barack Obama, the conflicts among the zombie-plagued human characters eerily parallel the healthcare debate. Ben calmly makes rational suggestions on how to proactively meet the zombie invasion while an angry white male named Mr. Cooper (Karl Hardman) just shouts him down like a tea-bagger at a town hell. When Ben and Mr. Cooper finally come to blows during the film’s climax, it looks like what would happen if Obama slugged it out with a combination of Glenn Beck and Dick Cheney.

During a lull in the movie before the zombies storm the farmhouse, I wandered up to O’Dea as she was packing up her merch table. “Did you ever think that this movie would just keep going when you were filming it all those years ago?” I asked.

“All we wanted to do was make the best movie with what we had to work with,” she answered with a smile. “We didn’t have the resources but we had a lot of energy.” She then chuckled and told my girlfriend and me to get in out of the cold.

As the atonal music played over the film’s grainy, closing montage, we exited the arena onto Third and King Streets. We started to walk towards downtown San Francisco to catch a train home but the sight of human figures moving on the dimly lit block ahead of us made us think twice. Not knowing if the people slowly ambling towards us were the living or the undead, we decided to take a cab. We were scared.

Creature Features events are coming up including a screening of Watch Horror Films Keep America Strong at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles on October 6 and a showing of The Creature Walks Among Us with Bob Wilkins footage on October 13 at the Balboa in San Francisco. Click here for info.

A manic satyr and a mini nun drag gameshow contestants to hell in TV Azteca’s Asgaard.

Oh Mexican game shows. How we Norte Americanos used to smugly laugh from the comfort of our first world luxury as your contestants were buried in glass coffins filled with centipedes and scorpions all for peso prizes that only added up to a few of our American dollars. That was all before NBC’s Fear Factor hit the airwaves in 2001 and had So Cal’s aspiring stuntmen and actresses scarfing down pig anuses and being mauled by German Shepherds for about $50K and the chance to pad out their demo reels. As the gap between rich and poor widened in this country during the Bush years, once proud Americans were willing to sink to third world levels of televised humiliation to chase a buck (often literally). This was hardly Jeopardy here. For a time it seemed that Mexico had lost its game show mojo to her super powered NAFTA trading partner.

However with TV Azteca’s Asgaard, the South of the Border boob tube contest comes thundering back with the power of Thor’s hammer. While there’s little ground left to conquer as far as putting everyday schleps in harm’s way, Asgaard reclaims the mantle of “what the fuck” TV on a purely conceptual level. The show takes the imagery of Pan’s Labyrinth and World of Warcraft and combines them with the risk-taking of American Gladiators and Fear Factor into a reality show that is surely giving small children nightmares and freaking out viewers of The 700 Club. But that description still doesn’t quite nail it. Asgaard is also kind of like watching a game show from the creators of Turkish Wizard of Oz or a reality show produced by Sid and Marty Krofft. If Lidsville had people jumping over jets of flame for cash, it would be something like Asgaard.

Before we continue, I have to warn you that I only understand about every thirtieth word of Spanish on a good day. The question that now must be asked is: can anyone understand the bewildering mishmash that is Asgaard? On that, I’m not so sure.

A rune faced demon and sexy fairies populate the magical land of Asgaard.

Much of the show’s action takes place on a soundstage that resembles a spookier Fraggle Rock. This realm is populated by a hooded dwarf who plays the violin, an excitable demonic elf with runes drawn on his face, a cloven hoofed satyr, a midget nun and hot chicas in skimpy fairy outfits who make contestants appear and reappear through their mystic command of Adobe After Effects. This cadre of mythical creatures, some benign and others malevolent, force a pair of hapless couples garbed in the latest Middle Earth athletic wear to undergo Sisyphean struggles for points and prizes. What any of this has to do with the Norse mythology implied by the show’s title is anybody’s guess. There is a Viking with a Day-Glo red beard that shows up from time to time as a kind of Æsir tiebreaker but the rest of Asgaard remains a random fanstasia culled from the Jungian collective unconscious.

Music does little to sooth the savage beast in Asgaard.

Over the course of the competition, the male/female teams must climb trees of woe and endure wheels of pain. There are gusts of fire, exploding cakes and other incendiary devices. During one labor, contestants had to carry lit bombs through an obstacle course and dunk them in tubs of water or risk having the things explode in their hands. (The bombs packed enough wallop to blow a hole in one of the aluminum tubs.) Luckily for them, they were given oven mitts and ridiculous foam costumes for protection. During this segment a disclaimer flashed on the screen reading: “Todos los juegos han sido supervisados y realizados por expertos. ¡No lo intente en casa!” In other words folks, don’t try this at home!

¡No lo intente en casa!

Another couple is force fed a rancid platter of paella that is covered with chicken heads (cabezas del pollo), hearts (corozones) and still writhing minnows. “¡Muy delicioso!” our demonic host exclaims while shoving wiggling pescados into the mouths of his charges. But that’s far from the worst of it. Later on, we’re treated to the site of the rune-faced demon forcing a dwarf to chomp on a jalapeño pepper to prove how hot it is. Then the demon and the dwarves smear a salsa made from the same peppers all over the face of one of the male contestants (female players seem to be spared the most humiliating or torturous labors here). The segment gets especially gnarly as the demon tries to rub the concoction into the dude’s closed eyes as he screams in agony. Now that’s gotta be against the Geneva Convention! Did Dick Cheney produce this show? Is Asgaard really a CIA black ops site? If you’ve ever wondered what Survivor Guantanamo Bay would look like, Asgaard comes pretty damned close.

Demons forcefeed peppers to little people and then smear scalding hot salsa into the eyes of game show contestants.

The grand prize, displayed among the enchanted trees of Asgaard, is a pair of bright yellow Honda scooters. Neither couple was able to rack up enough points to take the scooters outright however, meaning they’d have come back and brave more Biblical plagues on the next show. And once again, we gringos can titter at the plight of Latinos who undergo the torments of Hades for so paltry a prize. Even in today’s economy, you’d at least have to pony up a Chevy Cobalt to get Americans to have their heads shaved by demons in off-network syndication.

“Asgaard” airs this Sunday August 30th at 3pm on digital channel 15 on Directv in the San Francisco Bay Area. Please check local listings for air times in other areas.

The framed photograph of El Homo Loco standing triumphant in the middle of the Incredibly Strange Wrestling ring that still hangs in the hallowed lobby of The Fillmore in San Francisco, in between pictures of Jim Morrison and The Charlatans. This picture of a picture was taken last Friday during the Lucha VaVoom show.

The San Francisco Bay Guardian has a big cover story on San Francisco alt/indie pro wrestling that doesn’t contain a single mention of Incredibly Strange Wrestling. Making matters even worse, their cover image is of a Los Angeles based lucha show (Lucha VaVoom!), not a Bay Area one. While not every article on today’s Bay Area wrestling scene need mention my old dog and pony show, I felt that the Guardian’s take, promising a history of non-mainstream pro wrestling in San Francisco, was left with a gigantic hole made by its exclusion of what was the Bay Area’s most successful alternative wrestling show. (The classic Roy Shire promotion that’s mentioned in the article was mainstream wrestling in Northern California during its pre-WWE heyday.) Below is my letter to the San Francisco Bay Guardian editorial staff, pointing out their oversight followed by some additional thoughts on the article:

Dear Andre Torrez, Tony Papanikolas and SFBG editorial staff:

It was strange, maybe even incredibly strange to see an SFBG cover article touting “pro wrestling’s past and present stronghold on the Bay Area” that didn’t contain a single mention of Incredibly Strange Wrestling. ISW ran from 1995 until about the mid-2000s and was the first promotion to run alternative wrestling shows that played with “the politics of mainstream wrestling” in both the Fillmore and the DNA Lounge. We also had GLBT baby faces (good guys) and grown men wrestling in chicken suits long before Lucha VaVoom brought its LA based show to our old stomping grounds. A picture of ISW “softcore” champ El Homo Loco standing triumphant in the middle of our rickety ring still hangs among the framed photos of rock legends in the Fillmore’s lobby. The reporting on Fog City and LVV in your two pieces was good, but any look back at SF’s history of envelope-pushing pro wrestling shows without a sentence or two on ISW is wholly inadequate.

Regards,

Count Dante AKA Bob Calhoun
former Incredibly Strange Wrestling ring announcer and performer
and author of “Beer, Blood and Cornmeal: Seven Years of Incredibly Strange Wrestling”

In the Bay Guardian piece, author Tony Papanikolas reports with a sense of surprise that the Fog City Wrestling grappler Angel the Hardcore Homo “is clearly the hero in the contest, reconfiguring some of the mainstream’s predictable gay panic tropes into a slapstick offensive that plays off his opponent’s increasingly comical discomfort.” While Fog City Wrestling is commendable for being willing to play with the paradigm here, Papanikolas and the Guardian make it sound like this is something new when ISW was pushing El Homo Loco as it’s number one fan attraction over a decade earlier (albeit also “minstrelsy” as Papanikolas says of FCW’s Angel).

Papanikolas also notices “a sizeable number of bohemian types” while scanning the audience at an FCW show at the DNA Lounge and again seems surprised by their attendance although ISW sold out both the DNA and the Fillmore with “bohemian types” as a large part of its fan base. Papanikolas hedges a little as he writes, “San Francisco doesn’t seem like the kind of community that goes in for (nonironic [sic]) professional wrestling.” The use parenthesis is his and the word “nonironic” is his only thin reference to any previous Bay Area wrestling entertainment that may or may not be ISW. And that’s always the knock by other wrestling promotions (that do make use of thematic irony whenever it suits them) against ISW – that it was ironic. It wasn’t “real” professional wrestling, whatever that is.

It’s sad that the Bay Guardian is so quick to cover up or ignore San Francisco’s homegrown, underground, subversive, DIY wrestling show. Sure we had our moments of utterly craven tastelessness (which I write about regretfully in “Beer, Blood and Cornmeal”) but we also brought matches that tackled religion, local politics and gentrification and we did more than our share of “reconfiguring” of the “mainstream’s predictable gay panic tropes.”

In closing, I leave you with this shaky footage of ISW’s gay panic trope the Cruiser dropkicking and violating an effigy of Mayor Willie Brown in front of San Francisco’s city hall while Tom Amiano, Kirk Hammett and Green Day watched from the side of the stage. It’s doubtful that the workers of Lucha VaVoom or Fog City Wrestling will ever find themselves so politically active. For those of you who feel more than slightly nervous at the sight of a white man abusing an effigy of a black politician in this age of town hall disruptions, please remember that The Cruiser was the original tea bagger, in the traditional sense of the word:

The author in his backyard with his Adventure Team G.I. Joe. His Big Jim Kung-Fu studio is propped up on a fence in the background.

Sure, your G.I. Joe fought Cobra and Destro, but he was always seen jumping out of your exploding turbo battle vehicles like a wussie. Your Joes also had the annoying habit of shooting above everybody’s heads so nobody got hurt. Your Joe is only 3 ¾ inches tall. My G.I. Joe is 12 inches mother f—er! Are you feeling envious you damned Gen Y sons of bitches!?!

I’m not talking the “Real Hero American Hero” here. Naw, that shit is strictly for squares who were playing with their Transformers in their sandboxes while Ronnie Reagan was glad-handing Gorbie in Reykjavík. I’m talking about the Adventure Team. My Joe sported a bitchin’ cool afro and came complete with Kung-Fu grip and eagle-eyes. Now Hasbro didn’t make any G.I. Janes for him to put the moves on, but that never stopped him from swingin’ by Malibu Barbie’s Dream House and doin’ what comes naturally. Barbie kept Ken around as a sugar daddy, but really dug the company of that more with-it and now bearded, medallion wearing G.I. Stud while her regular man was off closing some boring insurance deal or whatever the hell Ken did. Sure, neither Joe nor Barbie had genitalia, but you couldn’t tell them that while Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” was playing on the portable transistor radio.

Adventure Team Joe hung with Mike Power the Atomic Man and Bullet Man the Human Bullet. He fought this space dude known as the Intruder in a battle of bearded beefcake. Joe also duked it out with a wicked undersea mutant called the Hammerhead Stingray (two great tastes that go great together), captured a giant squid, and went in search of this abomination called the Pygmy Gorilla. AT Joe shot white tigers with a high powered rifle, but probably cried about it to show his sensitive side when my sister’s 8” Mego Cher doll was around. Did I mention that AT Joe did all of this ballsy shit while being 12 inches of hard plastic with “life-like hair”?

I’d like to see Snake Eyes do this!

So while all you snot-nosed kids are crying about how they got Snake Eyes wrong in this new G.I. Joe flick, remember that my hardscrabble generation never got its Adventure Team movie with John Phillip Law or James Franciscus going up against a Hammerhead Stingray animated by Ray Harryhausen or The Intruder played by Andre the Giant. All we had were our backyards man, and, um, that episode of The Six Million Dollar Man where Steve Austin fights Bigfoot.

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra opens this Friday without even a single strand of facial hair.

Special thanks to Tom Calhoun’s (no relation) Adventure Team page.