Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

If movies such as Tourist Trap and Rituals are the nuggets fans sometimes find by sticking around for the B picture (and no one is so optimistic as the dyed-in-the-wool fan), a moment such as this one is the equivalent of the gold dust that can sometimes be panned out by the faithful toiler. Or to put it another way, there is that marvelous Sherlock Holmes story, "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle," where the Christmas goose, when slit open, yields up the beautiful and priceless stone that has been lodged in its gullet. You sit through a lot of shlock, and maybe-just maybe-there is that frisson that makes it at least partially worthwhile.

*Home Box Office, in its endless quest for prime-time filler, is now making many of these "little" films available in a way that such spotty distributors as New World Pictures have never been able to do. Of course, there's no shortage of dreck on HBO either, as any subscriber will tell you; still, there is an occasional prize in the pay-TV box, which is usually full of such mouldy cinematic Cracker jacks as Guyana: Cult of the Damned and Moment by Moment . In the last year or so HBO has offered Croenenberg's The Brood and an interesting AIP picture called The Evictors (starring Vic Morrow and Michael Parks), which got no American theatrical distribution . . . and Tourist Trap .

There is no such frisson in Plan 9 from Outer Space , unfortunately, to which I reluctantly award the booby-prize as the worst horror film ever made. Yet there is nothing funny about this one, no matter how many times it has been laughed at in those mostly witless compendiums which celebrate the worst of everything. There's nothing funny about watching a Bela Lugosi (who may actually have been a stand-in) wracked with pain, a morphine monkey on his back, creeping around a southern California development with his Dracula cape pulled up over his nose.

Lugosi died shortly after this abysmal, exploitative, misbegotten piece of trash was released, and I've always wondered in my heart if maybe poor old Bela didn't die as much of shame as of the many illnesses that were overwhelming him. It was a sad and squalid coda to a great career. Lugosi was buried (at his own request) in his Dracula cape, and one like to think-or hope-that it served him better in death than it did in the miserable waste of celluloid that marked his last screen appearance.

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Before we move on to horror on TV, where failures in the genre have been every bit as common (but somehow less spectacular), it seems appropriate to finish here by asking a question: Why have there been so many bad horror movies?

Before trying to answer that, let's be honest and say that a great many movies are very bad-not all the turkeys are gobbling in the horror pen, if you take my meaning.