With Halloween 2006 upon us, I thought we'd travel back in time 11 years for a tale of a Halloween past. The year was 1995. The network was NBC. The broadcast was a two hour special called ATTACK OF THE KILLER B-MOVIES. I'm fairly positive it has never seen the light of day since that particular evening. That's probably for the best. Considering the show really seemed to be an infomercial for the season premiere of a bunch of NBC Saturday morning teen oriented shows disguised in the form of a lame Mystery Science Theater 3000 rip-off, there's probably good reason ATTACK OF THE KILLER B-MOVIES was a one-shot deal.

I can attest to being one of the very few people that ever saw this special the night it aired, which is probably another reason why it never aired again or led to another such special of its type. To paraphrase Frankenstein: "Ratings baaaaaad!" I even recorded the thing on tape but ended up recording over it because A) it stunk and B) who'd have ever thought it would be something I'd want to revisit. When I think about some of the things that I once had on VHS that are virtually unheard of and impossible to find today that I recorded over I start to feel a little depressed. Remind me one day to recount for you my memories of another one-shot special: THE INTERCEPTOR, hosted by Erik Estrada.

For some reason, I'm still not sure what brought it on, memories of this show popped back into my head recently and I decided to take a look around the internet to see if anyone else had ever heard of it. According to IMDB, only one other person has. I decided to look it up on ebay and much to my shock, amazement, and abject horror, someone was selling a copy. I plunked down $15 hard earned dollars so that I could relive the experience of watching ATTACK OF THE KILLER B-MOVIES, an experience I this time thrusted upon my friend, co-worker, and Foywonder.com webmaster, John, with little warning as to what I was about to subject him to. Suffice it to say, time did not make this special any more special. The program’s worth more as an interesting curio for fans of Elvira or MST3K than it is for what little real entertainment value it provides. It's an oddity more than it's a comedy.

The concept was to take four not-so-classic b-movies from the past, in this case THE WASP WOMAN, KILLERS FROM SPACE, MONSTER FROM GREEN HELL, and NAVY VS. THE NIGHT MONSTERS, and chop them down to roughly 20 minutes each in order to be riffed on by the hosts during cutaways. For reasons unknown, NBC actually felt compelled to colorize the footage from the first three films. God forbid something that was originally filmed in black & white ever find its way onto network television, even if the only reason its being aired is to be made fun of. The super condensed movie was then interrupted every 30-90 seconds by a cutaway to the riffers sitting around this living room set so that they could spout off some not-so-witty witticism one at a time.

The mistress of ceremonies was none other than Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. The set-up has her having tied up five NBC Saturday morning TV teen actors on a living room set so cheap looking I suspect they borrowed a set from Saturday Night Live and decorated it with a few knick knacks bought from the world's most impoverished novelty store. Those teen actors are from shows that were part of something called "TNBC," a Saturday morning line-up of live action teen oriented sitcoms whose season premiere was the following weekend, as they were so nice to remind us in an out and out plug at the show's end. These teen hostages included blonde Kelly Packard and token black William James Jones from a show called California Dreams, short-haired brunette Megan Parlen of some show I've never even heard of called Hang Time, and from Saved by the Bell: The New Class, long-haired brunette Natalia Cigliuti and the incomparable Dustin "Screech" Diamond.

Elvira's specialty is delivering really bad puns at the expense of really bad movies and she's a pro at it. The woman knows how to deliver even the punniest of jokes in a manner that at least let's you know that even she knows how bad the line was. Her teen co-stars do not have that experience and deliver their riffs in the exact same manner they'd deliver a bad punchline on any of their respective sitcoms. It takes some pretty bad acting when all that's asked of you is to sit on a couch and pretend you're heckling a bad movie and you can't even make that sound convincing. Combine that with the subpar scripted quipping they've been provided with and - let me give you an example. During the famous scene in NAVY VS. THE NIGHT MONSTERS where an unlucky sailor gets his arm torn off by one of the tree monsters, the film cuts away to a bored sounding Kelly Packard who indifferently cracks, "They should have called this movie A Farewell to Arms." Kneeslapper, huh?

Hmmm... A pretty blonde reciting bad dialogue in a stiff, unconvincing manner; would it surprise any of you to know that Kelly Packard would go on to become a cast member of Baywatch?

Even worse, they found a way to toss in lines that were less jokes than just cheap cross-promotional plugs for other NBC programming. Case in point, a scene from MONSTER FROM GREEN HELL that had someone lighting their way through a cave with a torch prompted Screech to look directly into the camera and say, "This reminds me; the '96 Olympics are right here on NBC." That's not even a joke. It's just a plug. Another quip with an angry character brought us the humdinger, "He's really taking Mad About You's move to Sunday nights hard." These are the moments that remind me why I originally copied over my tape of this one-time-only special.

ATTACK OF THE KILLER B-MOVIES is a fairly innocuous, inoffensive programming for a one-airing-only TV special being used as a backdoor infomercial for other network programming of the time, but given the combination of Elvira and Frank Coniff it sure is a letdown in the humor department. That's right; I said Frank Coniff, aka TV's Frank from Mystery Science Theater 3000. NBC hired one of the top writers and performers from MST3K to script a two-hour special designed to rip-off the basic concept behind show, only replacing a guy and two robots puppets at the bottom the screen with Elvira and a quintet of teenage automatons. I joked to my friend John that so many of the jokes bombed to such a degree that I couldn't help but wonder if maybe Coniff intentionally set out to sabotage this MST3K knock-off from the get-go. John agreed with me on that one. I'd be bold enough to say that John & I fired off funnier riffs during the movie portions of the show than anything that came from the actual scripted material.

Now that's not to say that there aren't any funny moments. I'd speculate that the joke ratio was about 20-1 in favor of jokes that either completely missed the mark or might have been funny if they'd actually come out of the mouths of someone that knows how to fire off a good zinger. Most of the funnier moments came when they actually interacted with the movie itself: pretending to be on the other end of a character's phone call, superimposing the disembodied head of Dustin "Screech" Diamond over someone else's head, or even having Elvira appear like the center square on Hollywood Squares during a multi-screen moment in one of the movies. Given their ability to do so, ATTACK OF THE KILLER B-MOVIES could have used more amusing moments like that and fewer unfunny puns delivered by people that haven't quite mastered the art of reciting pre-scripted movie riffs.



Oh, and the ultimate punchline of the show has the teens getting revenge on Elvira by (after plugging next weekend's "TNBC" season premieres) tying her up and subjecting her to a non-stop marathon of Full House episodes. Har-Dee-Har-Har. When you're a cast member of Saved by the Bell: The New Class you really don't have much room to be taking shots at a show like Full House.

The only real laugh out loud moment for me came during one of the segue segments between the films when Elvira would introduce the next one they were about to watch. In introducing NAVY VS. THE NIGHT MONSTERS, Elvira mentions that it stars the guy that played "Bud" on Father Knows Best, who she described as a kid actor whose career was totally washed up by the time he was 17. There's a clap of thunder and a lightning flash right as she says the part about being washed up by 17 and all the teen actors begin glaring at her in an uncomfortable manner. Elvira then nervously assured them that would never happen to any of them. This was damn funny because... Well, let's just say that Elvira lied. The most famous of the bunch remains Dustin "I couldn't even get you to buy a t-shirt to save my house, so can I at least interest you in a sex tape instead?" Diamond. Thankfully, this video does not end with Screech giving Elvira a Dirty Sanchez.