The World Series pales in comparison to what's at GhoulardiFest, Oct. 28-30

Event preview by Charles Cassady, Jr.

Every October for the last several years, local impresario Ron Garstek and like-minded fans of old Cleveland TV have put on GhoulardiFest, a nostalgia convention, talent reunion and tribute to old-timey horror and fantasy flicks as promoted by legendary Cleveland TV personality Ernie Anderson, on WJW-TV's late-night "Shock Theatre."

From 1963 to 1966 Anderson would don a garishly phony goatee and Fu Manchu mustache and spice up B-grade horror and sci-fi flicks for insomniac viewers in beatnik-comic fashion. The silver-tongued announcer, unrecognizable in his fright-wig disguise, would do blackout comedy bits (some including a young sidekick named Tim Conway), sound effects, songs and the catchphrases. "Turn blue!" "Stay sick!" "Ovaday!" "Dorrrothy..."

Ernie Anderson left Cleveland to find national renown in Los Angeles as an ABC-TV announcer (he also put out a series of classic audio comedy LPs with Tim Conway, and one of his sons out west would mature into world-class filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson). But he left a secret stash of himself behind in Cleveland that, like a ticking time capsule or Dr. Phibes, rises again in 2016 to haunt this Halloween weekend Ghoulardifest.

Shouldn’t Trump have accepted the nomination here as well? MonsterFestMania, July 29 and 30 in Akron

Event preview by Charles Cassady, Jr.

San Diego Comic-con is in full swing right now. But if you are reading this, you're probably not there. You're probably still stuck in the Cleveland area, with your own lonely action-figure collection and Hollywood fantasy/sci-fi/horror discs, and VHS tapes. Airfare to San Diego Comic-Con is quite outside your budget - not to mention admission at the door. You probably can barely afford to leave your parents' basement where you've been living for the last 30 years, like a forgotten Ariel Castro hostage in a state of Rust Belt permanent-recession squalor and minimum-wage poverty. A life in which the louche thrills of scary movies and canonical Bela Lugosi/Boris Karloff B-programmers emceed by Big Chuck were the only reliable escape.

No, even if you did sell a kidney or something to get money, San Diego Comic-Con would probably turn you away at the door anyway, just for being a homely Ohioan, not worthy of entry in a southern California public event. That Wonder Woman cosplay outfit is not fooling anybody.

But wait! There is a ray of hope for lonely genre fans here in flyover-land, and it resides in Akron.

CinEvent in Columbus, June 2-5

Why go all the way down to Columbus for a movie convention and expo? Isn't this the CLEVELAND movie blog? Shouldn't Columbus get a movie-blog website of its own?

Well, let's face it. The Republican National Convention is coming to Cleveland next month to determine the nominee for president, and while City Hall is putting a brave face on things, let's just assume for sake of argument that Cleveland is about to be destroyed. Completely. Riots, disorder, protests, dogs and cats living together, all our worst nightmares. You've seen those photos of Stalingrad after the Soviets beat back the Germans? Cleveland will end up being kind of like that.

So it would behoove local residents to get used to going to other cities for their movie conventions, is all we're saying, in case Cleveland is just a pile of smoldering ruins.

There's a second reason, of course. Going downstate to the 50th annual CinEvent Classic Film Convention is simply worth it.

Oriented to the greats and the unsung curios of Hollywood's golden age (sorry, THE FORCE AWAKENS doesn't count), CinEvent is the state's oldest and best established movie-nostalgia expo, and unlike other "cons" it's less focused on celebrity guests (although a few VIP authors and actors do show up) than on memorabilia and relics of a cherished bygone era in film. 

Another thing that won’t be the same without Johnny Manziel: Cinema Wasteland in Strongsville, April 1, 2 and 3.

Cleveland is probably now facing its own destruction at the hands of political rioters at the upcoming Republican National Convention. Police are militarizing, any downtown merchants left who sense the approaching violence are closing up and planning to move far away into the suburbs (preferably suburbs of some other city), and many early refugees are scrambling to jump the border into Canada or Mexico before the Wall goes up.

Looks like hosting the RNC wasn’t such a bright idea after all. If only it had been replaced in this dying city’s drive for recognition by something more benign and socially positive. Like the Adult Video News awards. Or a summer encore of the Cleveland Comic-Con, where the slave-Leia cosplayers would not have been under such heavy fur parkas.

Or, if it could be enticed out of Strongsville, the twice-yearly Cinema Wasteland movie/exploitation/nostalgia convention (but good luck with that; Strongsville is as much a part of Cinema Wasteland as Las Vegas is the AVN show).

Yes, President-Elect Trump orders you to attend Cinema Wasteland. “It’s going to be yuuuuuge!” he says.

GhoulardiFest revives memories of Cleveland television past, October 30, 31 and November 1

Event preview by Charles Cassady, Jr.

Hurricane Patricia was poised to smite North America several days ago, remember, with some of the strongest winds ever measured? So what happened to that alleged "storm of the century?" Now meteorologists finally have an answer; when Patricia got close to the eastern seaboard, all the fatal shootings in Cleveland these days spooked her off, and she dissipated in the mid-Atlantic. So give our community a gold star there.

Still, if one wants to celebrate the Halloween season this year in the inner-ring suburb with the fewest chalk-body outlines, the place to be is Ghoulardifest this weekend in Parma.

Taking place at the LaVilla Party Center at 11500 Brookpark Road, the festival is three days of special guests, local TV and media nostalgia, and the Ghoulardi-grade brand of science-fiction, comedy, fantasy and horror cinema.

It's virtually impossible to imagine North Coast culture
without Anderson, who, as host of WJW-TV's "Shock Theatre," put on a garishly phony goatee and Fu Manchu mustache and spiced up B-grade horror and sci-fi flicks for insomniac viewers in beatnik-comic fashion for a few brilliant years there in the mid-1960s. The silver-tongued announcer, unrecognizable now, would do blackout comedy bits (some including a young sidekick named Tim Conway), sound effects, songs and the catchphrases. "Turn Blue!" "Ovaday!" "Dorrrothy..."

Donald Trump would go over well here too: Cinema Wasteland, October 2, 3 and 4.

[Event preview by Charles Cassady, Jr.]

The Strongsville-centered Cinema Wasteland grindhouse-movie, sci-fi/exploitation and drive-in culture convention happens twice every year – which means at least as often as the Browns win. So which one should you patronize this weekend?

 

Thought so. In the spirit of such movie-memorabilia and nostalgia expos as the Monster Bash in Pittsburgh and DragonCon in Atlanta, Cinema Wasteland is a fan gathering, film marathon, variety show and memorabilia expo at the Holiday Inn Select of Strongsville, devoted to what founder Ken Kish, of Berea, underscores as the B-movie golden era, roughly from the late 1950s to the late 1980s.

Those, affirms Kish, were the glory years of horror, fantasy, science-fiction, Roger Corman, spaghetti westerns, martial-arts, juvenile delinquency melodramas, nudie-cuties, Filipino actioners, Italian "giallo" thrillers, blaxploitation, rock'n'roll and psychedelia, post-nuke car chases, summer-camp sex and slapstick, underground comix-inspired animation and, well, whatever else artists du cinema could make or release quick, cheap and dirty.

An affair to remember: CinEvent in Columbus, May 22-25

[CinEvent takes place Friday May 22nd through Monday May 25th at the Renaissance Downtown Columbus Hotel.]

Event preview by Charles Cassady, Jr. 

Before it became more or less identified with summer-blockbuster kickoffs and superhero sequels, Memorial Day Weekend was actually about memorializing the fallen - remember?

And this Memorial Day we would like you to remember a certain Steve Haynes, who died in April at the age of 68.

Haynes, a film super-fan, was one of the co-founders of Ohio's oldest movie expo, CinEvent in Columbus. A Memorial Day weekend tradition, CinEvent happens this year in its 47th edition. Expect many tributes to Haynes during the three-day festival.