American Scary: 40 Out Of 100 Stars

I can't quite recommend this in general and I'm not sure I can recommend it even if the subject matter interests you, because believe me I was interested in the subject matter as well, but about 40 minutes in it started to get rather ponderous and repetitive. I'm not even really blaming the film makers really as I'm not sure how they could have gone about keeping this fresh.

American Scary is a documentary about horror hosts. You remember the late night horror shows that would feature a character introducing, and doing silly skits during breaks of any number of silly old time horror movies. It seems that for a time most major markets around the US had one of these shows. I myself was always a huge of Saturday Night Dead in Philly. It came on at 1am, right after SNL and featured what a young Joey considered a pretty hot, big boobed, Elvira knock off.

Anyway, the film dissects the origins of the horror host, and features a great number of them telling their stories about how they got started and what not. The problem is that almost all the stories are pretty much the same. Station has a surplus of old horror schlock, station puts a guy out on stage to introduce and do whacky skits during the airing of the movies, rinse and repeat.

Not that every host did the same thing, but it's close enough that by the time they're talking about the dude from Akron or the dude from Toms River it becomes monotonous.

There's also the problem that most of the people interviewed seem to have this reverence for what it is they do, that while understandable, becomes a bit laughable at a point. I understand a dude waxing poetic about watching Mickey Mantle when he was a kid, I kind of don't understand a guy waxing poetic about watching Zacharly for the 6th time in 10 minutes.

Maybe it was me, maybe it just isn't my cup of tea, but I just couldn't help but feel that a better structure and more explanation of the hierarchy and the linear history of the horror host would have been a bit more interesting than the way the film spends 7 or 8 minutes on a subject and then moves on to another guy in another city doing basically the same thing. There comes a point in the film where you know you're just gonna get the same story and the same romanticism over and over, and I admit that I sort of zoned out and was just waiting for it to finish up.

If you think the subject matter will interest you, give it a shot. If you have no interest in the subject matter it's really not a good enough documentary to capture you, so go to bed early. No need to stay up late for this one.