Mr. Lobo is the host of the late night movie program Cinema Insomnia--a cult sensation for over 14 years. He is the emcee for film festivals like BLOBFEST and provides background on the films, with comedy, games, and prizes. In the first hour, Lobo announced that he had been nominated for a “Rondo” award as best horror host. He did not watch the Oscars this year, but does believe that horror movies are getting better of late, and that “there’s more variety of them.” He welcomes the return to “making an atmosphere” in films that were the hallmark of classic horror and science fiction movies of the 1950s. As a horror host, he is aware of the rich history of personalities who have presented good and bad movies on TV. The genre was invented, he said, as a way to “keep ratings up” in the major cities where they worked.
Lobo said that as children or young adults we experience the fear and shock of seeing a scary film for the first time and it becomes a rite of passage in the culture because “it’s a horror we can control and at the end of the day we can walk away from.” Asked to comment on some older films, Lobo characterized Rosemary’s Baby as “a classic” and believes that the original Night of the Living Dead was “the one that changed everything.” Lobo thinks that some horror plots and characters can be recycled. As an example, he observed that “a lot of western stories are now zombie stories: instead of shooting at Indians, they’re shooting at zombies.” In the second hour, George and Lobo took calls from listeners with their recollections of classic horror movie hosts from around the country.
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During Open Lines, Jim called from Illinois to mention old TV hosts that he recalled, but then added a story about a spectacular UFO sighting he had in 1973 with an extremely skeptical brother-in-law. While driving through southern Florida, they observed two “large silver disks with a bulge in the middle” which crossed the highway no more than 50 yards from them. After they disappeared into the distance, Jim said that his brother-in-law declared, “I don’t want to hear it, and I don’t want to ever hear about it again.” Bill called from California to tell his story of inspiration from an old horror movie host that set him on a life path in the entertainment industry as a makeup artist and actor. He told about touring with a road show of Planet of the Apes in the 1970s and did spot-on impersonations of the actors from the original movies.
John in Texas recalled the old TV Program One Step Beyond and its haunting theme music which he said was “so eerie, and then it was time to go to bed.” Responding to an earlier tweet about the subject, Greg called in from California with a suggestion to change the American judicial system by eliminating judicial immunity, meaning “you can’t sue a judge” over something that you disagree with during a case they are trying. Steve in Arizona believes that we “would probably save a million gallons of gas every minute” if sensors were installed to let large amounts of traffic pass through stoplights if only one car was waiting to go in the other direction. In the last half hour, Brooks Agnew spoke on the hollow earth in a legacy rebroadcast.
News segment guests: Michael Shedlock, Peter Davenport, Tim Binnall