At the Heights Theater Houston Tx. I watched The Killer Shrews and The Giant Gila Monster. The Killer Shrews is on right now on TCM. I will always remember this movie because someone had thrown a stink bomb into the lobby of the Theater and man did it set the tone for two scary flicks. The Theater is a historical site and was recently refitted indoors to be a stage theater. They went in and gutted all the old theater setting and went down to the brick structure to put it in good shape due to the age. It was always an old theater in my early days and I would ride my bike most of the time but sometimes we would walk, it was only about 5 blocks from where I lived one block off Yale street. The place didn't really look much different than this photo even in 58 !!
I saw the original in around 56 all by myself on a cold wooden floor at 1620 Oxford street Houston Tx, so happy to say the old house is still there and in great shape. Friday nights was all mine because I had the TV all to myself until sign off. My bedroom was on the very rear of the house and it was all windows and cold as heck. I can remember so well running to the bed and jumping under a hundred pounds of covers, seemed like it took forever to warm up. You know I watched the very first episode of Gunsmoke same spot and everyone else was already gone to bed. I was waiting for the spook movie to come on but the first episode I believe had Dennis Weaver as the central character for that episode. It was so long ago I can't really remember what the show was about that night. One of my favorites was "Them" with James Arness playing the Detective. Just before I left Houston this past time 14 years ago I passed the old house after making a visit to see Aunts and cousins just two blocks from there. I saw a man working out in the front yard and I pulled over to the side of the road and talked to him and told him I had lived there 50 years ago. The place still had the original tall pecan tree in the front yard. My Grandmother had always burned the worm nest out of the tree using a long cane fishing pole with a torch rag lit. I remembered one afternoon the whole family sat on a quilt pallet and had water melon. My youngest sister was just an infant then and I wish I had the photo now because I gave all the old photos of my Grandmother to my sister to keep thinking she would do a better job than myself. She gave the photos to her oldest son and I doubt I will ever see them again.
I recall The Killer Shrews. I also recall Santa Claus Conquers the Martians because Pia Zadora was in it (we are the same age.) Sadly, the local theatre in my town was converted to a bicycle store. Funny, I've seen the converted lobby through the windows, but I was never curious enough to see exactly what they did in the slanted floor area of the theater itself.
Yesterday the TCM channel The Thing, The Beast From 20,000 Phantoms, Them, Forbidden Planet, Indestructible, Attack Of the 50 Foot Women, The Fly (1958), Queen of Outer Space (starring Zsa Zsa Gabor) and The Killer Shrews.
Yup. As we all know, that was the era when the movies leveraged the unknowns of the atomic age to scare the poopies out of us.
Them was a cut above most sci fi of that era. The curly haired actor who played the Highway Patrolman I always forget his name but he has a very long list of movies he played after that early movie. One in particular was The Green Mile where he played Brooks the librarian which hung himself when they gave him parole.