I have a few Go To films. Like old friends they're easy company and I enjoy knowing the lines.
Under Siege from 1992 is such a one, a naval actioner starring the cool cook Aikido 7th Dan Steven Seagal and one frantic terrorist Tommy Lee Jones. And oh yeah, the always exciting Gary Busey as a scorned XO. There's just something about the basic plot, the snappy dialogue and the sparse Terminator-style synth soundtrack that does it for me. Do you like it?
Watching again I realised I knew the Captain, played by veteran actor Patrick O'Neal (✝️ age 66).
A face so familiar from appearances in just about every American TV of the 1970's, with that distinct rich voice of his, I knew he'd been in a movie significant to me as a kid.
Bingo!
Chamber of Horrors. Yes! A rarely shown horror about a wax museum and it's crazed owner, the prosthetic hand madman played by ... Patrick O'Neal.
I adored this film as a kid. It was released in cinemas in 1966, so it must have been a good few years later when it was on UK TV. Probably a Midnight Movie or an Appointment with Fear slot in the early 1970's. I was 10 Christmas 1970.
Chamber of Horrors was made even more memorable by a William Castle-style gimmick to keep the audience 'hooked'. It was called The Fear Flasher, along with it's Horror Horn and appeared just before anything gruesome happened! It must have been great at the flicks, popcorn flying everywhere!
It had me good and proper watching it on TV; hook, line and cleaver!
Do you remember the Fear Flasher and Horror Horn readers?
Favorite Films is a subject dear to my heart. I recently updated my running list of Fave Horror/Sci-Fi flicks for a friend, and was amazed to discover there were over 150 titles! Also intriguingly, I noticed that these films all fell withing a rather narrow range of time, from the early 1950s to the mid-1980s. I guess that's my own personal "Golden Age." SFZ
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