ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour Today (338)

Thank you for joining us today

Before our feature presentation, ACME would like to start the evening with another Daffy Duck/Porky Pig Looney Tunes cartoon, the 1951 The Prize Pest, directed by Robert McKimson.



When Porky was coming out of the closet while shaking, he was speaking gibberish. What he said was, "Really... nothing to be afraid of! Nothing at all! Nothing, nothing! Nothing at all to be--" in reverse.


Before the start of our feature presentation, the staff of The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour would like to know - can we interest you in a short documentary about mollusks:



Ok, not that one? How about if we told you we had one about the periwinkle - a shameless little libertine:



Disgusting, wasn't it. But you didn't switch it off.


We've picked another entry from the excellent reference book, 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die by Steven Jay Schneider. Today's film is the 1964 horror film from the classic B-film production company American International Pictures, The Masque of the Red Death , directed by Roger Corman, and starring the incomparable Vincent Price, Hazel Court, Jane Asher, David Weston, and Nigel Green. (Little remembered is that future director Nicholas Roeg was the cinematographer on the project.) While Corman’s The Masque of the Red Death has discovered new life as a comforting modern parable during the COVID-19 pandemic, when it was released in 1964, many took the film to be a comment on the nuclear nightmares of the Cold War era. The Masque of the Red Death was the seventh of a series of eight Corman film adaptations largely based on Edgar Allan Poe's works. While the film did not do as well as some of his other adaptions, Corman always said the film was one of his favorites..

Jane Asher asked Roger Corman if a friend could visit the set and join them for lunch. She explained that her friend was a musician who was about to do his first gig in London that night. At the end of lunch, Corman wished him good luck with his concert. Roger Corman had never heard of Paul McCartney until he read of the concert's success in the next day's newspapers. So please join us here at The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour and sit back, get comfortable and enjoy watching surprisingly scary work, The Masque of the Red Death.



Roger Corman had originally wanted this to be his second "Poe" picture following the success of House of Usher. He passed it over because he felt that certain plot elements were too close to Ingmar Bergman's recent The Seventh Seal.



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