The Endangered List (Case File #34)

"This is Nancy Fancy with Home Economics! Today we’re going to learn about our clothing, and the way we’re going to learn is by making an actual piece of clothing we can wear ourselves or give to a friend! We are going to tie-dye a tie! Now watch carefully! First, we take the tie we’re going to dye and tie it! When the tie is tightly tied, we dip the tie in the tie-dye dye! When the tie-dyed tie is dry, we untie the tie and take the dye we’ve just applied and set it aside! Re-tie the tie-dyed tie, take another dye, dip the tie-dyed tie in this dye too, take it out, let it dry, untie the tie, and you’ve got a tie-dyed tie! And a tie is not all you can tie-dye! You can tie-dye a tutu, too! Take the tutu, tie the tutu, dip it in the dye and let it dry like the tie we dyed, now tear the tutu in two! Now you’ve got two tutus to tie-dye! Take the two ties you tie-dyed and the tutus you’ve torn in two and tied and dip them in the dye!"

-- from "Rock and Roll Classroom" by The Conception Corporation

VOID WHERE PROHIBITED BY LAW (1970)

featuring
THE CONCEPTION CORPORATION

Jeff Begun
Howard R. Cohen
Murphy Dunne
Ira Miller

The Conception Corporation was formed in Chicago in 1969 when Second City members Murphy Dunne and Ira Miller teamed up with Jeff Begun, creator and editor of the national satire magazine The Aardvark, and Howard R. Cohen, a Playboy editor and writer for The Aardvark. Originally the four planned to make a feature film titled MONDO GOLDFARB (Begun owned the Aardvark Cinematheque, the legendary Chicago movie house that specialized in foreign, avant-garde and adults only movies) but - lacking the money necessary to produce their vision - chose instead to write and record a comedy LP. The result, A Pause in the Disaster, was released by Cotillion Records in 1970. Around the same time, the New York-based Channel One had opened a video theater in Chicago and was having great success with their program THE GROOVE TUBE (read more about it here), so the Conception Corp. put together their own videotaped "underground television" show, VOID WHERE PROHIBITED BY LAW, and premiered it in two Chicago locations during the first week of 1971. In an attempt to one-up the Channel One theaters, which featured comfy chairs, big pillows and a refrigerator stocked with soft drinks and snacks (with the program itself shown on three closed-circuit video monitors), the Conception Corporation ran their show in four different screening rooms, including one that contained a giant waterbed!

When the members of the Conception Corporation relocated to Los Angeles a few months later to record a second LP (Conceptionland and Other States of Mind) and to pursue movie careers, they opened a theater at 428 N. La Brea specifically to show VOID WHERE PROHIBITED BY LAW. The group split up after their third LP (The Conception Corporation Live at the Hollywood Bowl) was shelved by Cotillion during the vinyl crunch brought on by the oil embargo of 1973. That long-unreleased LP finally saw the light of day in 2000 as part of Rhino Handmade's Complete Conception two-disc CD compilation, but VOID WHERE PROHIBITED BY LAW hasn't been shown publicly in nearly 40 years.

Ira Miller wrote and directed the skit comedy LOOSE SHOES, which was produced by Mel Brooks, and has appeared in every one of Brooks' films since BLAZING SADDLES. He also turned up in the skit comedies TUNNELVISION and PRIME TIME with Murphy Dunne (who did the music for LOOSE SHOES).

Howard R. Cohen wrote UNHOLY ROLLERS, THE YOUNG NURSES, COVER GIRL MODELS, VAMPIRE HOOKERS, STRYKER, DEATHSTALKER and DEATHSTALKER III, BARBARIAN QUEEN and BARBARIAN QUEEN II, EMMANUELE V, and LORDS OF THE DEEP, among others. He directed SATURDAY THE 14TH (which he co-wrote with Jeff Begun), SATURDAY THE 14TH STRIKES BACK, SPACE RAIDERS (music by Murphy Dunne), TIME TRACKERS and DEATHSTALKER IV. He passed away in 1999 at age 56.

Jeff Begun co-owned the Festival Theatre Corporation, a chain of art (and later adults only) theaters in Illinois and Indiana, with gay porn tycoon Steve Toushin and the late Paul Gonsky. As a producer, Begun's credits include THE SWINGING CHEERLEADERS, SWITCHBLADE SISTERS, STREET GIRLS, JACKSON COUNTY JAIL (co-produced with Gonsky), SATURDAY THE 14TH (co-written and directed by Howard R. Cohen), HARDBODIES and HARDBODIES II, SCHOOL SPIRIT, VENDETTA and PRETTY SMART.

Murphy Dunne has acted in dozens of television shows as well as movies ranging from THE BIG BUS and HERO AND THE TERROR to THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES and THE ONION MOVIE, but is probably best known as Murph the piano player in THE BLUES BROTHERS and BLUES BROTHERS 2000.

It's Saturday the 14th again

[Originally published in Temple of Schlock #17, May 1989]

A sequel to SATURDAY THE 14TH? Yeah, I'm afraid so. Remember, this is from Corman's Concorde Pictures, the sequel capital of the world. They have STRIPPED TO KILL II and WIZARDS OF THE LOST KINGDOM II in theaters now and EYE OF THE EAGLE II, HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD II, SILK II, FOOD OF THE GODS II, ROCK 'N' ROLL HIGH SCHOOL FOREVER and DEATHSTALKER III coming soon. Those Concorde boys are a real imaginative lot, huh? Anyway, I believe that Corman movies are best viewed at drive-ins, so when SATURDAY THE 14TH STRIKES BACK rolled into a nearby outdoor theatre with the rancid NIGHTFALL, it was obviously time for a sleazy night under the stars.

It's been seven or eight years since I saw the first SATURDAY THE 14TH, so it's understandably hazy in my mind, but I do remember that it was pretty weak. Surprise surprise, the sequel isn't any great shakes either, but it has enough bizarre touches and goofy humor to rate as a cheap rental. The dumb storyline revolves around the Baxters, a not-so-average American family that has just inherited an old house from their late Uncle Ralph. The Baxters are strange. Mom keeps the family well-fed with a steady diet of junk food; Dad likes to give everyone stupid, useless health and fitness tips; the teen-aged daughter is obsessed with keeping people out of her room; the grandfather (Ray Walston) raves on endlessly about "the good old days;" and the obnoxious, conniving Aunt Alice and Uncle Bert show up, scheming to get the Baxters to give up the old house. The only normal member of the family is Eddie (Jason Presson), who immediately suspects that there's something fishy about the house when he finds a big crack in the basement. As expected, strange things begin to happen: hairy paws creep out from under the furniture, hooded monsters raid the fridge for food, family members sleepwalk with spoons in their hands, and Dad carves the Statue of Liberty and The Thinker out of chocolate pudding.

It turns out that on Saturday the 14th -- Eddie's birthday -- the powers of evil will emerge from the crack in the basement. Eddie is the heir to the throne of evil, but he doesn't want to join the bad guys. His grandfather turns out to be a centuries-old wizard dedicated to wiping out the basement nasties. Are you following all of this? Just checking. Throw in a few crazy creatures, a sexy vampire named Charlene, and a flimsy song-and-dance number called "A Vampire's Diet" and you have a film that reaches new heights in idiocy. Plus, the finale is one of the coolest I've seen in a while -- an action-packed montage of clips from at least a dozen earlier Corman films, including CRAZY MAMA, AVALANCHE, DEATHSPORT, GRAND THEFT AUTO and ROCK 'N' ROLL HIGH SCHOOL. Geez, some things never change! Avery Schreiber is goofy as usual as Dad Baxter, Ray Walston is fine as the mystical grandfather, and "The Bad Seed" herself, Patty McCormack, turns in a good performance as well. It's no BEETLEJUICE, but it's certainly better than TRANSYLVANIA 6-5000 or any of the other more recent horror-comedies.

[Above photo from the Cinema Treasures site]

Chris says: I saw this at the Buffalo Drive-In, a 3-screener in Cheektowaga, a suburb of Buffalo, NY. The co-feature was actually BILL AND TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE and not NIGHTFALL, which was playing on one of the other screens. I thought we could pay one price and then roam from screen to screen, creating our own double or triple features -- y'know, kind of like making your own salad at Sizzler? -- but the theater had three different box-offices, ruining my plan for a Corman double-header.

Another thing that annoyed me about this theater: the manager tapped into the AM frequency before each feature so he could crack lame jokes and make fun of the movies we were about to watch.

Reading over this review again, I can't believe I forgot to point out that Gahan Wilson did the artwork for the 1-sheet.

The first SATURDAY THE 14TH was written by Howard R. Cohen and Jeff Begun, one half of the Conception Corporation comedy troupe (Ira Miller and Murphy Dunne comprised the other half), whose early '70s shot-on-video feature VOID WHERE PROHIBITED BY LAW should be added to our "Endangered List."