Glad y'all found my Monster A Go-Go post, considering I wrote it fairly late in the afternoon, knowing I was going to be up north in Ukrainian Village last night, and there were some great comments, plus GW Ferguson seemed to have shambled out of hiding. His mention of THE CRAWLING TERROR made me at first confuse it with THE EYE CREATURES, a film where the invaders are killed by teenagers using cameras with flash bulbs. Crazy teens. Though I'll tell you, if you read up on GW's favorite film, there are times during the last 8 years where I've often felt that self-propelling myself into a giant slug's mouth might be the easiest way out. Back to MAGG, why Chicago? Well, at one point some guy in a suit is pointing at a map north of Chicago. My guess is that he was NOT pointing at the now closed Glenview Naval Air Station, but rather at the mythical town of Schermer, the setting of several John Hughes' films, most notable FERRIS BEUHLER'S DAY OFF. If that space capsule landed in Schermer circa 1961 with all the radiation pouring out of it, well, that explains a lot. Also, its funny I just posted on viaducts, because at the end (which I can now talk about because Capcom admitted she saw it, just forgot), the actor from 1965 who played the ten foot tall astronaut (as opposed to the 1961 actor, who was maybe six feet tall and looked like Marty Allen) wandered around our BIGGEST viaduct, lower Wacker Drive (seen in the last half of THE BLUES BROTHERS). A sign that reads Wabash Ave, with an arrow point upwards, well, thats still there. And even though its blurry you can indeed see the Chicago Police Star and logo on the squad and motorcycles. And as the men walk around with those Geiger counters, well, some of those short viaduct stairwells looked damn familiar (I've posted about lower Wacker Driver before, its one strange place, the site of Chicago's only death by crossbow.) What's funny, and I didn't know this until today, the next film after MAGG on TCM Friday night was THE GIANT SPIDER INVASION, filmed in the middle of Wisconsin during Polka Days (and yes, I posted about this earlier in the year). To really make it a trifecta, though, the first film shoulda been THE BEGINNING OF THE END, in which giant grasshoppers go from Rantoul to Joliet to Chicago in a film that is uncannily correct in a Mapquest kinda way. Even though I've seen the spider film recently (to me, that means within the last decade), I'll likely watch it late in the night.
