ANGIE LABANSHEE (Joan Kelley-Cordt) hosted the B-Movie show Spooks Hotel Friday nights at 10:30 on KDAO Channel 44 in Marshalltown, Iowa.
This sultry banshee with the Transylvanian accent was the manager of the Spooks Hotel, whose owner Mrs. Spooks was traveling the world off the money the hotel made for her.
Joan Kelley (Cordt after her February 1986 marriage) and her brother Kevin were inspired to create, direct and produce Spooks Hotel by their fondness for the 1960s and 1970s Movie Host show Gravesend Manor, broadcast out of Ames, IA.
Among the supporting characters they came up with to appear alongside Angie LaBanshee were Elmer the Mummy, who was the Bellboy; multi-ethnic Master Chef Pierre O’Brien, expert pizza maker from Germany; French Maid Fifi; and Kevin himself as the voice of the cheap, ugly puppet Old Man Dan, Elmer’s father. Somehow.
After the success of the pilot episode, Spooks Hotel aired as a series, with Joan producing, Kevin directing and both of them writing the show. Angie hosted Psychotronic movies accompanied by Host Segments from October 1985 well into 1986. Episodes were taped Wednesdays for their Friday broadcast.
The program’s success let Joan advance to hosting the station’s Monday through Friday show Marshalltown Today during 1987 and 1988. In 1991 Angie LaBanshee and some of her Spooks Hotel backup characters did a one-off Spooks Hotel special titled The Elmer Awards, complete with various categories of Bad Movies that featured several nominees and ultimately a winner read from an envelope.
You can’t keep a good banshee down, however, and for Halloween 1992 Spooks Hotel was back with a special Double Feature consisting of Planet of Blood (1966) and The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (1962). In 1999 the show returned for a new series of episodes, this time with Joan Kelley-Cordt hosting as Mrs. Spooks herself instead of Angie LaBanshee. That limited run of 5 episodes aired during the closing weeks of 1999 into Y2K.
Some 1985 episodes of Spooks Hotel: Continue reading
SHOCK ARMSTRONG, THE ALL-AMERICAN GHOUL bore a name that was a play on the old radio series Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy. Even in 1964 that was an obscure reference, so it’s possible that many fans of this Bad Movie Host were oblivious to the connection. At any rate, from 1964 to 1968 Shock Armstrong hosted Double-Features on Shock Theatre Friday nights at 11:30pm on WTVT out of Tampa Bay and St. Petersburg, Florida. 
Reynolds donned a quasi-Frankenstein Monster mask worked up by the station’s art department and an old University of Tampa Spartans football jersey sporting the number 13. Paul was already in his 30s by 1964 and remembered the old Jack Armstrong radio show, so that inspired his character’s name. 
DISCLOSURE DAY (2026) – Did Steven Spielberg forget what he accomplished with the ending of Close Encounters of the Third Kind? How does he think that an elderly alien getting brought out in a wheelchair even compares, let alone equals, the wonder of his earlier film? Maybe if Disclosure Day ended with Richard Dreyfus’s character having returned to Earth and standing there beside the alien, he might have had something noteworthy. 
VAMPIRA SHOCK THEATRE was hosted by Margaret “Marty” McGuire as Hawaii’s very own Vampira, no relation to Maila Nurmi’s original Los Angeles version from 1954-1955. McGuire’s program aired LIVE on Honolulu’s KTRG-TV Saturday nights at 8:30pm from November 3rd, 1962 until June 6th, 1964. 
CAR CRASH (1981) – Travolta … Joey Travolta. Yes, it’s Barbarino’s older brother in this Italian-Spanish coproduction. Ever wonder what the Fast and Furious franchise would be like if Frank Stallone was the overall star? This movie provides the answer – sped up footage to (unsuccessfully) lend the illusion of speed, and model cars just one step above Hot Wheels toys passing for the race cars much of the time! 
D-DAY ON MARS (1945, 1966) – Obviously, the Sixth of June marks the solemn remembrance of World War Two’s Normandy Invasion, but I did my annual salute recently. For today I’m reviewing D-Day on Mars, the edited down feature film version of the 1945 serial The Purple Monster Strikes.
FRANK & DRAC (1987-1988) – Frank & Drac was this Movie Host show’s title, and Frank & Drac were the stars. Frankenstein’s Monster was played by Allen Christopher while Dracula was played by Robert Kokai. This show aired on WOIO in Cleveland, Ohio from October 1987 to June 1988. Kokai and Allen had the potential to be among the biggest Movie Hosts ever but clashes with station management over budget issues ended with their show getting shut down. 
Elvira’s syndicated show Movie Macabre had technically aired its final episode in November of 1986 but several channels across the U.S. continued airing reruns for years. During 1987 the ratings for the Elvira reruns were bottoming out in Cleveland, so WOIO decided to give its own home-grown Movie Host show a try in Movie Macabre’s former time slot on Saturday nights. 
And comedy was one of the strong suits of Frank & Drac. The other was the show’s conceit that the hosts were the actual Frankenstein Monster and Dracula, airing “biographical” movies about themselves and other Universal Studios monsters. 
COLLISION COURSE (1989) – Yes, it’s Pat Morita and Jay Leno as reluctant investigative partners. For starters, I owe an apology to 
Despite this Pat Morita-Jay Leno joint having a bigger budget and a supporting cast made up of real actors (Chris Sarandon, Al Waxman, Soon-Tek Oh and others), this production sucks like a Hoover vacuum. Not even some 80s street cred in the form of Randall “Tex” Cobb could save Collision Course, which was recognized as such a bomb that it didn’t get released – on video, at that – until 1992. And even then it was done solely to exploit Leno taking over The Tonight Show from Johnny Carson.
SATEENA, THE DEVIL’S DAUGHTER hosted horror and sci-fi movies on Shock Show, which aired on Atlanta’s WSB-TV from January 2nd to December 18th, 1958. This devilishly mischievous hostess was played by Joanne Good aka Joanne Goode aka Joanne Gould. Unlike the usual Movie Hostesses whose characters were vampires or witches, Sateena was the impish daughter of Satan himself. 
MACABRA – This hostess of Omaha’s Theatre of the Macabre (1982-1985) has accomplished the seemingly impossible – she has managed to keep her real name a secret all these decades! She was an Omaha businesswoman who beat out over 150 other applicants for the position of WOWT’s Movie Hostess for their new Friday night at 10:30pm Bad Movie show. 
On top of that, Macabra rejected the over-the-top humor that characterized Elvira and her cash-in imitators in favor of a wry, understated approach that put me in mind of a combination of Movie Host legends like Moona Lisa and Fritz the Nite Owl. For an airing of Attack of the Mushroom People (1963) this hostess munched on mushrooms completely deadpan rather than hit the viewers over the head with the joke. 
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