NOTE: Special thanks to Mike Pieper – part of the creative team on this program and the man who played the first Elmer the Mummy for three years – for correcting, clarifying and providing a wealth of additional information about this Movie Host series. He was a friendly and helpful man!
ANGIE LABANSHEE (Joan Kelley-Cordt) hosted the B-Movie show Spooks Hotel Friday nights at 10:30 in Marshalltown, Iowa. The program was initially aired on the local college’s Iowa Valley TV station – Channel 22. Then Spooks Hotel was on KDAO TV, Channel 39, then back to Iowa Valley TV after that.
As for Angie, 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 the entire creative team writing the show, including Mike Pieper. Angie hosted Psychotronic movies accompanied by Host Segments from October 1985 to October 1993. Episodes were taped Wednesdays for their Friday broadcast.
The program’s success let Joan simultaneously host the station’s Monday through Friday show Marshalltown Today during 1987 and 1988. In 1991 Joan Kelley-Cordt began playing a new character Mrs. Spooks, who at last returned from her world travels with her hubby, mad scientist Dr. Spooks (Steve Scheiding).
She, Mike Piepers and some of her Spooks Hotel backup characters did a Spooks Hotel special titled The First Annual Elmer Awards, complete with various categories of Bad Movies that featured several nominees and ultimately a winner read from an envelope. Two more Elmer Awards shows followed in time.
Among the milestones on Spooks Hotel during its original run was a 1992 Double Feature consisting of 1) Planet of Blood aka Queen of Blood (1966) Dennis Hopper, John Saxon, Forry Ackerman and others star in this movie about a spaceship rescue mission which pits its crew against a bizarre space-vampress and her offspring. And 2) The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (1962) Jason Evers in the infamous film about a mad doctor keeping his fiancee’s decapitated head alive after an accident while he looks for a woman to kill so he can use her body for his fiancee.
Some of the 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. 
