THE BEARD aka THE WEIRD BEARD – This veteran of television and radio – real name Bob Lowrie – first gained the nickname “the Beard” from his time as a rock ‘n’ roll DJ. It is not known if the “Weird Beard” variant nickname started during his radio career or if it was coined to distinguish his Movie Host character from his DJ persona.
The Beard’s Weird Movie aired on Hawaii’s KONA-TV on Friday nights at 10:00 from May 10th, 1963 to September 18th, 1965, with a change to Saturday nights at 10 on April 25th, 1964. The Beard/ Weird Beard presented the kind of So Bad They’re Good flicks that we all love about Movie Host shows to this day.
Assisting the droll host was the beautiful Sugar, played by Letitia McKee, a former Miss Teen Hawaii and Miss Bikini. (She’s shoveling Hawaii’s famed sugar at right.) The program produced 126 episodes.
Sadly, no footage of The Beard’s Weird Movie has survived, just print advertisements and some promotional pieces. The Beard/ Weird Beard sometimes wore different hats or opened his eyes wide into a creepy stare to play into the horror angle of many of the movies he hosted.
Broadcast dates and movie details have survived regarding this 10pm on Fridays program, but virtually nothing has survived regarding Lowrie’s other KONA-TV Movie Host Show titled Beard-Watcher’s Movie, which aired Thursdays at 5:00pm (later on 6:00pm). It is not even certain if Beard Watcher’s Movie simply aired rebroadcasts of the previous Friday’s Beard’s Weird Movie or if it presented different, perhaps more conventional films given its earlier timeslot.
On May 10th, 1963, the very first movie served up on this elusive program was The Ape Man (1943) starring Bela Lugosi as a mad scientist whose experiment misfires and turns him into a half-man, half-ape. He needs human spinal fluid from an involuntary donor.
The final film shown on The Beard’s Weird Movie, airing on Saturday September 18th, 1965, was Lured (1947). Lucille Ball starred but it was NOT a comedy. Ball was surrounded by horror icons like Boris Karloff, George Zucco and George Sanders as she played a woman being used to lure out a vicious serial killer preying on women. Charles Coburn, Cedric Hardwicke and Alan Napier also appeared.
In between came many of the Psychotronic flicks common to these shows. A partial list includes The Beast of Hollow Mountain (1956), From Hell It Came (1957), Robot Monster (1953), Rocketship X-M (1950), Attack of the 50-Foot Woman (1958), The Hypnotic Eye (1960), Not of This Earth (1957), Half Human (1958), The Brain from Planet Arous (1957), Rodan (1956) and Target Earth (1954).
More interesting to me were some of the further off the beaten path schlockers presented by the Beard/ Weird Beard. Among them:
MY WORLD DIES SCREAMING (1958) – Gerald Mohr plays a callous husband forcing his new wife to spend the night with him in a creepy house which she used to have nightmares about. This movie used a quasi-subliminal imaging gimmick that is laughable.
TERROR IS A MAN (1959) – The Filipino version of Island of Dr. Moreau which is so cheap that the mad scientist – called Dr. Gerard here – only makes one creature, a panther man.
SPACEWAYS (1953) – Marital discord among British rocket scientists held in a place like the Village from The Prisoner results in an explosion that may have launched two of the scientists into orbit to cover their murder.
MAN BEAST (1956) – Jerry Warren’s less appreciated flick about the search for survivors of an attack by Himalayan Snow-Men/ Yetis.
THE NIGHT THE WORLD EXPLODED (1957) – A new element is somehow causing a rash of volcano eruptions and earthquakes leading up to a planet-destroying cataclysm. Bing Crosby’s wife Kathryn co-stars under her maiden name Grant.
Some sources claim that beginning with Saturday night, September 25th Bob Lowrie began presenting more “normal movies” but which ones and for how long is not known.
Lowrie remains a broadcast legend in Hawaii. Unfortunately, he suffered from a bone disease and died of a heart attack on October 27th, 1968.
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