A transcribed magazine interview with us from Throttle Magazine from February 1990.
Gruesome Twosome Speaks by Paul Teeples & Bill Hill
It’s 12:30 on Friday night, you know you’re going to do it again. If you had a job you could watch the lost episodes of “Love American Style” on cable and you wouldn’t have to do it. If you had taken those computer programming classes like your pop suggested, you wouldn’t have to do it. If you weren’t so lazy, you could get up and change the channel, you wouldn’t have to do it. But you don’t, you didn’t and you are, so you will. You will watch Doctor Gruesome’s Movie Morgue, with Skeeter and friends, on Channel 35 again. And again. And again. ‘Till your mind silently screams for the release that only death, or maybe a coconut Yoo Hoo can bring. Relax! Keep telling yourself; it’s only an interview … it’s only an interview.
Gruesome: My philosophical basis for doing this show is, how can I destroy the minds of thousands of tiny Richmonders, and this was the best way. Wreck those impressionable young minds.
Skeeter: When we first started, we were on Saturdays at noon. In October of ’87 we had this guy, Inspector 35 and Lt. Brickhouse. We showed the older Frankenstein, Wolfman stuff, and it was geared more towards kids.
G: We’ve been shifted around the schedule a lot. They can’t seem to decide. The original Bad Movie Weekend with Inspector 35 was one of the most watched shows 35 ever had. They immediately said, “Do another one!” I didn’t want to do the same thing again, so we did Sci-Fi Weekend. We built a rocket ship set. When we were just about to finish Sci-Fi weekend, the general manager called and said, “Do you want to host a weekly horror movie?” And who am I to say no to something like that? Essentially the deal was I could do whatever I wanted, as long as we keep it clean.
Throttle: I remember when you hosted Bad Movie weekend and you had the WRXL people on there.
G: Yes, in fact at the end of Sci-Fi weekend, we dumped them out into outer space.
S: Liz Wilde through the airlock into outer space.
G: When we inter-cut it, it looks real.
T: It’s too bad it wasn’t real.
G: That was out favorite part , blowing them into outer space. They were real cooperative too. I said I want you to go “WHAT!” and “AAAH!” And they did it. On one of those, Paul Shagrue said as he was walking out, “You’re really going to make us look like idiots in this, aren’t you?” And I sad, “Yeah.” And he said, “I thought so.” It’s fun to be evil.
T: Do you have a script for each show?
G: We do the show entirely ad lib. Normally I come up with a plot or some kind of story-line or something that’s going to happen during the show. And then I try to think of a few jokes. And I walk back there and discuss it with him and he goes “What? I’m trying to edit this move! What?” I usually come up with something over the weekend, we discuss it through the week, then we shoot it on Wednesday afternoon. It isn’t done live, but it’s done just like live. The show we did today was number 131, so it’s second nature now.
I will make fun of people who write us. Skeeter had wanted to make a movie real bad, and the guy actually sent a dollar in the mail. We took a Kung Fu movie and overdubbed the voices, and we called it A Fist Full Of Dollar.
T: Do you ever do remote shoots?
S: It’s real hard to go on a shoot. Because we don’t just do this. Dr. Gruesome is the art director, and I edit the films. I mean it would be nice if all we did was this…
G: …if this was our real job. The studio is busy all the time, so it’s very hard to schedule people to go out on a shoot. You have to pack up this stuff and take it with you. Plus you can’t take the whole eight hour day and do it. As a general rule, it’s mostly just two of us and one camera man in an hour or two, and we do the whole thing straight out.
S: We would love to go out to Hollywood Cemetery, you know, and stand in a grave and fall in.
T: Are there any restrictions on the movies you show?
S: What’s available, unfortunately.
G: The movies come in packages, in groups, and essentially you get a bunch of bad movies and a bunch of good movies, and you buy the exclusive rights to them in the market. These packages are in this big book, and all we can choose are movies out of the book, and those are the only ones we can show.
S: They come in edited. The movie The Warriors was changed so the police come and arrest everyone at the end.
G: Sometimes they change the TV version so it has a happy ending. We showed the movie The Other, and it has two endings: the TV version with a happy ending and the theater version where the kid gets away with it. We try to get the theatrical versions.
S: We don’t show them uncut. I actually edit the movies here. We don’t want to show anything too nasty, but we don’t want to show anything too wussy either.
G: We don’t ever get complaints about too much gore or violence, so really we don’t cut any of that out. I mean, one naked body and you get a hundred phone calls. But blood and guts –nobody seems to care.
T: What movies do you have coming up?
S: We have some cool English movies coming up. Hammer movies, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee.
G: That’s a wonderful series of movies. I love some of the Christopher Lee Dracula movies.
S: The horror movies are out there now, but they’re all just slasher movies. There’s nothing wrong with them, they’re just not imaginative. They’re just butcher movies as opposed to Vincent Price, Peter Cushing or even Freddy Kruger. Freddy Kruger, he’s a guy with personality, he’s a guy that makes you say wow, cool!
G: Yeah, the 1st and 3rd Nightmare movies had a lot of personality. They had a psychological basis as opposed to a man in a hockey mask, chopping up people for no particular reason.
S: Yeah, chop, chop. Oh, 90 minutes, time for him to go to an underwater grave.
T: What movies in the past 5 years, even if you couldn’t show them, do you like?
S: Clive Barker’s Hell Raiser. I don’t know if they’d let us anywhere near that really.
G: We’d end up with the TV edited version.
T: We saw The Thing by John Carpenter all cut up.
S: That’s the way it came in. It was ridiculous. If you weren’t watching somebody get chopped up, it was a guys head growing tentacles.
G: There’s a lot of movies that come in like that, but we don’t ever get complaints about too much gore or violence.
T: I remember seeing Death Race 2000 uncut.
G: Yeah. Boy did we get in trouble for that, did we get chewed out.
S: The station had a policy that after a certain time at night, you could show things, not completely uncut, but some things were acceptable — some nudity or whatever. We’ve shown Animal House uncut, Deer Hunter, Shaka Zulu.
G: Death Race 2000 was on at 11:30, and none of the adult stuff happened until after 12:30 — a little nudity and a little bad language — which by the FCC guidelines is perfectly legal. The thing is, you get 15 phone calls complaining about it up front, and then I got 75 letter telling me how much they appreciated us showing it uncut. So who are you going to believe? A lot of people tape our show and watch it on Saturday mornings, there are kids watching so we keep it clean.
S: It could be adult but it’s better the way it is now.
T: Are you often recognized in public?
S: I get recognized a lot, like at Chic-Fil-A. I was at the Coliseum shooting a wrestling thing just as myself, and this guy came up to me and said, “Excuse me. I don’t want to insult you or anything, but are you Skeeter?”
G: It’s really one of those things you can’t come up to someone and ask.
S: Yeah, like what are you going to say? Are you that ugly guy with the wig and the eye-patch that acts like a complete horse’s ass?
T: What plot lines do you have coming up?
G: Skeeter is going to make a deal with the devil to get rid of the Doctor. Skeeter wrestling the Masked Maurauder again. We’ve been talking about doing another game show, only it won’t be Wheel of Torture this time. Maybe Win, Lose or Die. Something where Skeeter will suffer horribly.
S: Funny how his imagination always goes that way. We only had one show where the Doctor got the hard end of it. It’s never like “I’m going to fall into a vat of acid!” It’s always, “You’re gonna be killed this week!”
T: What would you like to see in the future for your show?
S: I’d like to see us back on Saturday afternoons. It would be more kid oriented.
G: I have enough trouble keeping us on at all.
S: We could always use letters. If people like us write in and say so.
T: Who’s you favorite horror movie host besides yourselves?
G: Zacherly, he was a big horror host in the 50’s.
S: I loved the Bowman Body. Bill Bowman worked at WXEX from 1971 until mid-’70s. He had a coffin and a brick wall and that’s all. He had no budget, but a lot of guests, like girl scouts. And Elvira — not really for her horror hosting, but for her “personality!” (rude gesture) And Dr. Madblood at WAVY-10 in Norfolk. The show was really elaborate; they used to run it after Saturday Night Live at 1:00. They had a huge cast of characters, a big budget thing. He was benevolent; he didn’t pick on people. He smoked a pipe and had grey hair. He had a bunch of crazy people around him, but he was mostly a straight man. After that nothing. They had a few things hosted on Channel 8 with the Q-Zoo guys, but it was, like dull. It was dull.
G: I’m my own favorite host.
T: What do you do off set?
G: I’m a movie buff. Skeeter’s a movie psychotic. Skeeter has no life of his own. Skeeter collects old toys and I collect old animated cartoons on video tape. The coolest thing I’ve got now is Crusader Rabbit, which I remember when I was four.
S: When we were on late, when there were no shows following us, we could show Dudley Do Right cartoons or ones that we owned….
T: what kind of response do you get about your show?
G: We don’t get a lot of negative response. There’s one guy who calls in on the answering machine every week and complains about the show and never leaves his name. He obviously watches every week, he’s a loyal viewer. We’re going to dedicate our 2nd anniversary show to him.
S: The only complaints have been, “kill Skeeter.” Kill him, show more uncut movies, and get more good looking women, and kill Skeeter, and oh by the way, kill Skeeter.
G: We get a lot of letters from Charlottesville and North Carolina.
S: Little girls who never left their name or their addresses, or where they live, or what kind of candy they like. But hardly any love letters anymore, cause I never answered back. One time somebody left a phone number and I called it but it was disconnected. I was gonna say “Hey Babe.”
T: Is there anything else you wanted to say?
S: We’re Fox 35. Don Richards is the salt of the earth, wonderful guy, keeps us on the air. We would like to give credit to Mr. Psycho, Barney the Bat, who are semi- regulars, Balloon-on-a-Stick, Swinging Count Dave.
G: And if anyone would like you give us three million dollars, we’d love to make a movie.
S: Skeeter will do a nude scene — if it’s integral to the plot.
S: Did we mention that we work for Fox 35?
END.