First up tonight, we can’t have Halloween music without the master of the weird and wild, Tom Waits. This is “What’s He Building?”, a lovely spoken word piece about paranoia and being neighborly. It’s from his 1999 album Mule Variations.
Then, we…okay, admittedly…I’m not sure what the hell this is. It’s a Japanese coffee commercial starring Ray Bradbury and Kirk Douglas. This seems like an odd pairing until you realize that Douglas was an uncredited executive producer on Something Wicked This Way Comes (which seems to be the only project they’re both listed on). When Uncle Ray was brought back into the fold to fix the adaptation after they were having problems with it, was one of the stipulations that they do an odd foreign language instant coffee advert together? Stranger things have happened.
Update: Alas, it has been made private and I can’t find it anywhere else. If this changes, we’ll revisit it.
Then for tonight’s feature, it’s off to 1958 and The Crawling Eye…or if you’re across the pond, it’s The Trollenberg Terror. It’s a cautionary tale of not going up mountains when there’s a strange radioactive cloud floating about, and people who get too close to the cloud seem to wind up frozen and/or with their heads missing. An important lesson to learn, children! Watch and take notes!
