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Mon 5 Jul, 2004 12:05 am
I was sitting back in my chair last night, watching tv, casually flipping through the channels when I came upon an old Tarzan movie. There was Tarzan's kid, I believe his name was Boy, racing across the screen.
I marveled at how truly free Boy looked as he ran like the wind through the thick growth of the jungle. Smiling I leaned back in my chair to watch the adventures of Tarzan, King of the Jungle.
Boy continued to run, nary a care in the world, when....Blam!.... he runs into a giant friggin' spider web. He is in a state of shock as he struggles to escape from the tenacious grasp of the web, but the more he struggles the deeper he is pulled into the spider's trap.
I started fidgeting in my chair at this point. "Damn it, Boy", I muttered, "Get the hell out of there."
Then the camera panned up to the top of the web and my heart froze. There was this enormous friggin' spider, beginning its descent toward Boy.
A tightness gripped my throat.
Boy looked up, saw the spider coming, and struggled like crazy to extract himself. It was hopeless. He throws his head back and let's out this crazy-sounding Tarzan call that carries through the jungle, seeking Tarzan.
The camera switches to a peaceful clearing. Tarzan in kneeling down by a crystal-clear pool of water. He is just starting to lean down for a drink when Boy's call shatters the silence.
Tarzan's head snaps up and he quickly grabs the knife that is dangling at the side of his loincloth. Knife in hand, he throws his head back and let's out the authentic Tarzan call.
I started to calm down a little bit at this point because I knew Tarzan was on the way, but then the camera switched back to Boy.
The spider was now halfway down the web.
Sweat was pouring down my face now and the back of my shirt was drenched.
Boy let's out another Tarzan yell as the spider approaches.
Camera switches to Tarzan, who is now swinging on a vine through the jungle, the trees in the background whizzing by like crazy. Tarzan let's out another call, supposedly to tell Boy that he's on the way.
Back to Boy. The friggin' spider is inches away!
I leapt out of my chair and screamed, "HURRY, TARZAN! FOR GOD'S SAKES....HURRY!"
And then the spider is there. Its hideous head is right in Boy's face, the beady eyes examining him, preparing to suck the life blood out of the poor young man. It opened up that hideous black mouth and prepared to bite.
I raced to the tv and shut it off, collapsing onto the floor, my breath coming in labored gasps.
I laid there for about an hour trying to compose myself and finally found the courage to turn the tv back on.
Jethro, from the Beverly Hillbillies, was explaining something to Miss Hathaway. Tarzan was over.
What happened to Boy, I'll never know, but that was the tensest tv moment I've ever been through.
How about you? What is your tensest tv moment?
Wondering if Homer is gonna pop, right there on screen, one day - as he stuffs food and drink in there.
Oh - and wondering if Kenny will be killed.
Man - I feel for that little fella.
I was thirteen. A movie called "Stranger in the House" or "Black Christmas" (It was released under different names--I don't know why) was on. I begged my parents to let me stay up and watch it, and for some reason they did.
The plot is that this lunatic is calling and saying these weird, seemingly non-sensical, disturbing things like "just like removing a wart!", in this freaky psychotic voice to whoever happens to pick up the phone at the sorority house. Also, everyone in the house is disappearing one by one, (one of them is shown repeatedly in the movie, dead, in a rocking chair, with a plastic bag over her head, while the killer rocks her and talks to her in this childlike crazy voice) until one woman is left.
So this woman, played by Margot Kidder, is the only one left in the house, and the phone starts ringing.
I swear I thought I was going to go into cardiac arrest. She looks at it, afraid to answer it, and finally she gathers the courage to pick it up. It's the police, and she is relieved. Until they inform her that the phone calls are coming from . . . inside the house.
She hears a noise at the top of the stairs. She drops the phone and starts up the stairs. I'm practically pissing in my pants.
And just then Tarzan, embroiled in a fight with a giant spider, came crashing through my front window. He killed the spider right in front of my eyes by shoving his arm down it's throat and choking it to death. When the spider finally died, Tarzan cut open its stomach, and there was Boy, barely alive and covered in spider guts, but yes Gus, Boy was saved.
By the time I got back to "Stranger in The House", a rerun of Star Trek was on. I'll never know if Margot made it out alive. But at least you can rest easy Gus, now that you know what happened to Boy.
Thanks, Kicky. I am awash in a sense of calm.
now if you could just awash in some soap and water we could let you out more.
Funny. I dont remember rescuing the boy from that spider...
An old Alfred Hitchcock episode. The one about the nurses being murdered and the murderer is a man in drag as one of the nurses. I was just a kid when I saw it. When he ripped open his uniform and revealed that he was indeed a man and not a woman, I was so shocked that I jumped up and ran out of the kitchen and 'found' myself in the living room, as far as I could go without leaving the house.
Another program or movie called "The Trilogy" or something like that with Karen Black in three different stories. The last story featured a killer voodoo doll. The tension wore me out and scared me silly.
That's the one Phoenix. 'Trilogy of Terror'. I don't remember the first two stories but that last one...
Just looked at Karen Black's bio on IMdb. Not only is she a homegirl from Park Ridge, IL, she was accepted into Northwestern University at 15!
I remember tha killer voodoo doll. I recall that I was doing that
Yayayayayeyeyeyayayaya sound it made .
For me it was that Twilight Zone episode where William Shatner freaks out because he keeps seeing this monster on the wing of his plane. How someone with that phobia ever became a Starfleet Captain is beyond me.
When I was real young, I watched some show where some person woke up to find that everyone else he knew no longer existed.
That night, I had a dream that I went knocking on all my neighbor's doors and nobody was home, until someone answered at the home of my best friend, and it was a skeleton! I woke up terrified from that dream, but the next morning I was afraid to go out and knock on my friend's door. When I did finally leave the house, the neighborhood was dead; nobody around. I was freaked out all day!
I've never been that way about any tv show. There was a movie, however, that had me terrified. These people are anchored off this island and the natives kidnap a blond haired woman off the ship. They tie her up just outside the wall surrounding the village and as she screams her lungs out, something huge and powerful crashes through the trees. Suddenly the monster is in the open and that's when fear grips about half the kids in the audience. My neighbor says, "Sve my seat" then disappears forever. The monster Kong is so awful I have to allow myself glimpses through corner vision through the rest of the film. Since that day, no film has ever had a similar effect on me.
Speaking of film, 'The Exorcist' rocked my world. I wasn't right for six months afterwards. 'Til this day, if I'm flipping channels and come across it, I can't flip passed it fast enough.
I was watching this creepy show about some teenage kids and their dog that drive around solving mysteries. We're not talk'n cheesy "Murder She Wrote" mysteries, or the tedious, overintelligent Sherlock Holmes kind. We're talking REAL LIVE GHOSTS!
The thing is, only this one hippy kid and the dog ever see the ghosts. The other three kids, and the Famous Harlom Globe Trotters, who were making a guest appearance, didn't even believe that anything supernatural was at play.
It was a lot scarier since it was at night. And also I was in some stranger's house, which made it a lot spookier. SO I made some prank calls to get my blood flowing faster.
Right when the show is wrapping up, the whole gang has caught the ghost, and they're about to unmask him (some of the gang thought it was just a costume), when all of the sudden who walks up the stairs but Margot Kidder, looking all frightened and sweaty. I, of course, am embarrassed to all get out to be found sitting in her attic watching TV. And to aggravate the situation, I did happen to be stroking the hair of one of her dead roommates. So she screams and pushes me out of the window, and I have to scramble from some cops and nearly get shot twice. Worst of all, I'm up all night wondering how that show ended.
cavfancier wrote:For me it was that Twilight Zone episode where William Shatner freaks out because he keeps seeing this monster on the wing of his plane. How someone with that phobia ever became a Starfleet Captain is beyond me.
Silly boy! Spacecraft don't have wings! Bill was fine in space.
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