TRACK #438:

Blackmail by Avalon

Getting back on track, tonight’s song was a selection set to be featured in the next Halloween episode of Shindig Radio.

It comes courtesy of an obscure and short lived AOR outfit named Avalon. This, along with 3 more of their tunes, are all featured in the 1982 slasher parody Wacko from director Greydon Clark.

While not as good as its 1981 predecessor Student Bodies, I think Wacko is easily the best from a trio of slasher parodies released in 1982, including National Lampoon’s Class Reunion and Pandemonium.

Despite where you personally slot it in the roster of OG slasher parodies, one thing is for sure, it’s definitely the only entry that takes place on Halloween. It’s so Halloweeny, in fact, that it features a Halloween Pumpkin Prom and a killer with a giant Jack O’lantern head. It might even hold the record for utterances of the word “Halloween” in a single film.

OK, now that I’ve made this dumb joke, I have to actually look into it.

OK, I’m back. Thankfully, I was able to find an incredible website called subslikescript.com, that provides viewable subtitles for just about any movie you can think of wanting to search.

Even though I was kind of joking, it turns out I wasn’t far off. The word “Halloween” is uttered a total of 20 times throughout Wacko, which from my digging, is just shy of being #1. That honor goes to The Halloween Tree which contains the word “Halloween” 24 times. Nice!

Well, it’s #1, that is, if you don’t count the Silver Shamrock Theme in Halloween III. When factored, H3 has a grand total of 84 utterances of the word “Halloween.” Holy Samhain! However, if you just account for the dialogue, that number drops to just 16.

It’s a similar story for a Nightmare Before Christmas, which boast a total of 45, but just about all of them are from the opening number. Remove that tune and the count drops to a measly 6 utterances. Pssh. Pumpkin King my ass.

Right behind the Halloween Tree in 2nd place is Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers, which manages to have its characters say the word 22 times.

Trick ‘r Treat, from 2006, edges out Halloween III just slightly with a total of 18 occurrences. Not a bad showing.

Hollow Gate is coming in hot at number 5 with 17 utterances. Nice job Mark, ya nut cake. But it’s also in a 3-way tie with Spirit Halloween (yikes) and Satan’s Little Helper.

More recently, Goosebumps 2 provides a shocking 16 occurrences, tying it with Halloween III for 6th place. But more than anything that begs the question of how many of these Johnny-come-lately Halloween movies do I need to be searching? I’ve been keeping it relegated to the movies we usually talk about around here, but there’s an army of dumb shit that’s come out in the last 20 years with an overtly Halloween focus. Where do they rank? Eh, I don’t know if I care.

Alright, I had to look, at least a little anyway (hence the Spirit appearance above) and after further review, maybe I should care, because V/H/S Halloween from last year is apparently the new leader at 33! I guess bump up all those all those previous rankings by 1. I suppose I could do that myself cause this hasn’t published yet, but I’m feeling pretty lazy amidst all this, admittedly unlazy, scrubbing of scripts. I ain’t rewriting all that, we’re just gonna push through.

Now this new (and potentially not even fully correct information – God, that’s gonna wreak havoc on my OCD) information pulls Hack-O-Lantern into a tie for 9th place with 14 separate utterances along with 2015’s Tales of Halloween.

Perennially favorites Halloween 4 and Trick or Treats and Night of the Demons now all tie for 10th position, with appropriately, 10 instances each.

And just to be thorough, how do the OGs themselves stack up? Well, John Carpenter’s original only mentions the word 7 times, as does its sequel. For shame!

So, what have we learned here from this foolish exercise?

Well, for one, that Wacko is definitely not the champ, despite my joke. It puts in a good goddam showing though, and it was not a bad random guess on my part. I really does sound like everyone keeps saying “Halloween.”

And two, we learned that’s there is a load of other movies that I didn’t even search which could prove to be the top dog around town, but I have to put and end to all this and get back to something real. Well, something more real than counting stupid mentions of the word “Halloween” in movies. Yeesh.

With that moronic tangent out of the way, where the hell were we? Oh yeah, Wacko.

So, Wacko’s pretty fun and it has a stacked cast, including genre staple and star of Arnold, Stella Steven’s.

We also get Naked Gun’s Ed Hocken and Hector Savage, an ex-boxer named Joey Chicago who fought under the name Kid Minneapolis.

Russ Meyer regular Charles Napier shows up too, along with the guy who played Weather Wizard in Legends of The Superheroes, and the guy who played Zanti in Critters. Weird. And that’s not to mention a very young E.G. Daily, and an even younger, so much so that he didn’t have the “dice” yet, Andrew Clay.

And, then there’s this band, Avalon, who are actually playing on screen during the Halloween Pumpkin Prom, which is pretty awesome. Though they can be heard performing all 4 of their contributions, it’s Messin With My Baby that is featured most prominently. As such, it’s probably the song I should have selected for the playlist, but out the 4 tunes, I like Blackmail the most. Incidentally, it’s the one featured the least, but it does make an appearance again during the credits.

Ultimately, I think there’s some fun to be had with Wacko, despite it’s reputation. It’s humor, while more successful than that of Pandemonium (in my opinion anyway) suffers a lot from the same dated comedic style and shifting audience tastes. With its seemingly unending slew of incestuous and inappropriate jokes concerning high schooled aged girls, I’m not sure how palatable it remains to a modern audience.

The same might be said of this song, which, now definitely 44 years old, may also not be palatable to a modern audience. But hey, if I worried about that, this playlist might only be like 23 songs deep. So, here’s Avalon’s Halloween Pumpkin Prom hitter, Blackmail, cause this is Halloween Shindig goddamn, and unpalatable is what we’re all about.