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| Elvira 2003 |
If you were a male growing up in the 80's, is it possible that your attention was drawn to the horror field by the gothic queen of murderous movies, the boobalicious Elvira? You bet your saucer-like eyes. Ironically enough, just the other day the question had crossed my mind, "Remember Elvira? I wonder what ever happened to her?" Well according to Hollywood Reporter, Elvira is returning to the screen, only this time via the DVD market. Teaming up with Shout! Factory, the morbidly delicious miss Cassandra Peterson will be the spokeslady for the top 300 Movie Macabre films ever shown, introducing each and every flick, as well as tabulating her own top 300 list. Being that Shout! Factory has purchased the rights to all the Movie Macabre films that she introduced throughout the 80's - Elvira should once again be bobbling on over to a TV screen near you very soon, along with some seriously cheesy classic low-budget horror like Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, The House That Dripped Blood, Crucible of Horror, and Roger Corman's Fall of the House of Usher, to name a few. Here is the report as it was released out of L.A.
Growing up in Los Angeles in the 80s, Elvira was on local TV all the time, and though I think my parents thought there was something wrong with me, I couldn't get enough of her. I even begged my mom to let me join her fan club for my eighth birthday (she took me to see Willow instead, and I've never forgiven her). The showgirl turned camp-goth pin-up was totally ripping off Vampira, but I didn't know that as a grade-schooler; in my mind, she was the biggest star in the world (we didn't get cable until like 1990, but I'd find out differently then). And, actually, a quick glance at her website, at which Elvira's accomplishments are organized by year, shows that for a brief period in the mid-80s, she was everywhere: hosting Saturday Night Live and MTV specials, recording albums, syndicating her b-movie showcase Movie Macabre, shilling Coors beer (the first female celebrity to appear in a beer ad), selling almost 3 million pairs of stereoscopic glasses (as the "first personality in history of U.S. television to be broadcast in 3-D") ... the list goes on and on.
Now Elvira's back (and it's about time according to Elvira.com, she hasn't had a "career highlight" since 2002, and I'm not even sure "return[ing] to Hollywood Squares" qualifies), and fans of the kinds of films she used to pimp on Movie Macabre will want to take note. She's teamed up with independent DVD distributor Shout! Factory to release the the best of the 300 cult flicks shown on Macabre, selected by the self-proclaimed "Mistress of the Dark" herself. Elvira's still screening films to pick her greatest hits, but she knows at least one flick that will definitely make the cut. "It's about these killer pigs that go on a rampage and become human-eating beasts," the sometime Cassandra Peterson told The Hollywood Reporter. "Bacon is after you -- you've got to love the concept." I know I do. The series should begin to hit stores around Halloween next year.
