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Editorials

Ivan Drago: The Horror Icon of the Rocky Franchise

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As a youngling, and to this very day, Stallone’s Rocky character was and is my goddamn hero. The message of the Rocky films, and the character itself is so powerful-which is why it remains such a time-honored classic. Never give up, chase your dreams, and be the best you, you can be. A solid lesson in life that any adult or child should take and run with. As a kid, I was obsessed with these movies (I still totally am) because of the exuberant heart this franchise lies on the line.

OK, the sweet-ass montages might play a part in this as well. Warning: Watching this video may cause a sudden sprout of chest hairs. 

Now, by the time Rocky IV came around in 1985, our Italian Stallion seemed to be on top of the world. He’s the undisputed champion, gained a best friend in his two-time opponent Apollo Creed, and has more money than I think he knows how to spend- I mean, the guy is buying robot slaves for people’s birthdays. Must be nice, eh? Things seem exactly where they should be in Roc’s life, and seriously, nobody deserves it more than him.

But that’s how most horror movies start out, isn’t it?

An up-and-coming Russian boxer, Ivan Drago, invades into the US with his Olympic Gold-medalist wife, and his evil as Hell political posse looking to pick a fight with Balboa. They figure he’s the best, so why not go straight for it. However, Creed who is a bit past his prime opts to fight in an exhibition match with the silent blonde giant in what seems like the result of both a little jealousy, and the fact he needs to prove he’s still got it as a fighter.

BIG MISTAKE THERE BUDDY- IT AIN’T ALL IN THE HIPS.

The sequence we see before the actual match between Drago and Creed, scared the literal crap out of me as a kid. I mean, his silent stance and glaring eyes are intimidating enough. His character really doesn’t need any extra help to look like a goddamn murderer waiting to snap. But hey, enter composing score genius Vince DiCola, and everyone is about to shit their pants.

Then what happens? Drago KILLS Creed. Completely pulverizes this man’s face and bashes his brain in until Apollo is left twitching on the mat. All as his poor wife looks on in horror. As a kid seeing this for the first time, I just sat there and cried my damn eyeballs out. I couldn’t believe this shit. This monster, glaring into Rocky’s eyes, while wife Ludmilla (Brigitte Nielson)  is sitting at her table smoking and smirking like a jerkoff, expresses zero emotion with no fucks given for what he just did. Them’s are the traits of a classic serial killer folks.

“If he dies, he dies..”

What a heartless asshole.

So of course, Rocky needs to seek his vengeance. He heads to Russia (per the terms to fight Drago), grows an epic beard, and trains like a madman to face his most challenging and scariest opponent to date. While an argument can be made that Drago was controlled and treated like a lab rat by his handlers, I like to think he had some sort of control of what he was doing. Towards the end of the fight with Rocky, he clearly lets the higher powers know he IS running the show. So perhaps he’s been influenced a tad, but I really don’t think they were totally to blame here.

In actuality, we really don’t know anything about Drago or his background before his fight with Creed- expect for he was a soldier. The absence of understanding what makes him tick, his tense presence, and that spine-shivering Drago Suite make him a scary character in the world of cinema indeed. I could even go as far to compare him to Michael Myers. Oh yes, we’re going there. Everything I just said about Drago, applies to Haddonfield’s finest maniac as well. Regarding the first Halloween film, Myers was an effective and scary-as-hell villain because he had no rhyme or reason, no background explanation and John Carpenter’s chilling score made him all that much more frightening.

So yeah, as a child fearing for the life of my beloved hero at the hands of a soulless, steroid-infused boxer was quite terrifying by any means. I’m not going to lie, hearing that DiCola theme still gives me a bit of the skeevies. So here’s to you Ivan Drago: the unnamed horror icon hiding in plain sight inside the Rocky franchise.

Worth noting, however, that they missed a glorious opportunity in CREED 2 to bring back the Drago Suite. I would have had a happy heart attack.

Rocky IV

Editorials

‘ANNIHILATING THE WORLD BEFORE YOUR VERY EARS’: THE WAR OF THE WORLDS RADIO BROADCAST AT 85

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“In the thirty-ninth year of the 20th Century came the great disillusionment…”

Tonight, when the clock strikes 8 Eastern Standard Time, it will have been exactly 85 years since The Mercury Theatre on the Air unleashed its version of H.G. Wells’ THE WAR OF THE WORLDS over CBS radio airwaves. Though the national panic resulting from the broadcast has been embellished historically, it made Orson Welles a household name and eight-and-a-half decades later, remains the coolest thing I have ever heard.

When reporter Carl Phillips (the brilliant Frank Readick) breathlessly relayed his observations from the Wilmuth farm in Grovers Mill, New Jersey, it didn’t require much effort to see how channeling Herbert Morrison’s coverage of the Hindenburg disaster the previous year could terrify millions. To my thinking, all it would have required was for someone to tune in a few moments late. Missing the program’s introduction was all it would have taken.

This was 1938. The Golden Age of Radio. It would be a lifetime before 24-hour news networks and social media would conquer our cultural landscape. So, when a reporter on the radio asked for a moment to get a better vantage point during a “news bulletin,” one would have been glued to the radio, nervously awaiting their next communication.

That’s when the magic happened.

After a brief piano interlude, with sirens blaring and the voices of uneasy onlookers murmuring in the background, Phillips re-started his transmission. Only a few words in, Readick–in a stroke of genius–tilted his head away from the microphone asking his broadcast partner, “am I on?” A subtle gesture that added incredible authenticity to the proceedings.

It wasn’t long before Phillips was talking about a small beam of light setting men in the field ablaze, frantically describing the jet of flame as it approached “about twenty yards to my ri…”

Dead air.

Eventually the studio host returned, the show progressed to its next stage, and later it should have been clear THE WAR OF THE WORLDS was all a radio play meant to celebrate All Hallows’ Eve. But the very instant the air went dead is a moment that quickens the beating of the heart to this day. One can only imagine its impact in the fall of 1938. It was Readick, not Welles who sold the program, however. The exquisitely simple act of looking away from his mic, and the mid-sentence cut to dead air was perfection.

When I heard THE WAR OF THE WORLDS for the first time, I was in college. Shortly after, I owned the broadcast on CD and even fashioned an Audio Production group project around those first fifteen delicious minutes.

In fact, during the pandemic I made a return to radio and ordered a face mask featuring Orson Welles, sleeves rolled up and and arm held high as he intensely read the words from Howard Koch’s magnificent adaptation. And whenever anyone glanced at it and asked what it was, I gave them a quick “I can’t work in radio and not hype THE WAR OF THE WORLDS broadcast.” None needed further explanation — they just got it.

One could say that THE WAR OF THE WORLDS radio broadcast is 85 years old, but never could one claim that it’s 85 years in the grave.

Take it, Orson:

“This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character to assure you that THE WAR OF THE WORLDS has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be. The Mercury Theatre’s own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying ‘boo!’ Starting now, we couldn’t soap all your windows and steal all your garden gates by tomorrow night, so we did the next best thing: we annihilated the world before your very ears and utterly destroyed the CBS. You’ll be relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn’t mean it and that both institutions are still open for business. So goodbye, everybody, and remember please for the next day or so the terrible lesson you learned tonight: that grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and nobody’s there, that was no Martian — it’s Halloween.”

Editorials

Tainted Candy: The Most Unnerving Scene In “Halloween II”

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I’ve said it a million times. HALLOWEEN II is by far, in my humble opinion anyway, the scariest of the franchise and is rightfully so for many reasons. HALLOWEEN II goes harder in just about every aspect, from the angrier music as a metaphor for a more pissed-off Myers, to the minute details scattered around the film. One in particular, shoved in by John Carpenter that is brief in nature, but perhaps the most fucked up moment in the whole movie.

And it had nothing to do with Michael Myers.

While Laurie Strode is being tended to her wounds by a drunken Dr. Mixter inside Haddonfield Memorial, a car pulls up to the front of the entrance with a frantic mother gently easing her son dressed as a pirate, out of the car and the kid is gushing blood from his mouth as we can see something shiny stuck up in there good. ‘m going to be completely honest because when I saw this as a kid, I thought it was a fuckin’ ice cube. Maybe it was the low definition on my crappy TV, but I went for YEARS thinking this kid had an ice cube stuck in his mouth. Did it make sense? Not a bit. Did I ever question it? Hell no. All I understood was that shit looked like it hurt and when I finally found out it was an actual razor blade from a piece of candy, it was like an emphatic moment of HOLY SHIT for me, and it just made that movie so much scarier.

We only see the mom and son duo two more times-once checking in and being told to wait as the frustrated mom is putting pressure on her kid’s jaw, and then again upon discharge outside the hospital where Gary French (yes, the kid actually has a name) and mom Leigh, (hey, so does the mom!) attempt to have a conversation, but the kid’s words are muddled from the injury and although Gary lives to see another Halloween, he’s obviously scarred for life.

Watching (and realizing) what I was seeing within that scene as a child, and now a parent myself, just makes it that much more chilling knowing these things have absolutely happened. The genius of John Carpenter sticking this out-of-pocket, non-essential plot point in HALLOWEEN II, comes on the heels of mass hysteria of stories of crazed people tainting candy for trick-or-treaters with poison and, of course, razor blades. The first documented incidents go back to the 1950s, where a California dentist laced over 400 pieces of candy with laxatives, sickening over 30 kids. As if kids aren’t scared enough of the dentist! Another incident came in the 1960s where a mother in New York handed out bags of treats containing arsenic-laced ant traps, metal mesh scrubbing pads and dog biscuits. In the 70s, a boy was killed by ingesting a pixie stick laced with cyanide by his own father, who used the legend of poisoned treated on Halloween to attempt to thwart the suspicion away from him. In Minneapolis, in 2000, James J. Smith, 49, was charged with felony adulteration after four teenagers told police they received chocolate bars that were later found to contain needles. As recent as 2022, a child in New York found a razor blade inside a candy bar she got while trick-or-treating. Bringing this John Carpenter’s horrifying scene here, full circle.

PSAs began in the early 70s, warning children and parents about Halloween dangers in the form of educational videos, and after the infamous Tylenol murders of 1982, one year after the release of HALLOWEEN II, the fears of product tampering reached an all-time high, especially around Halloween, and in 1985, another national PSA video was made containing fifteen-minutes beginning with glorious Ben Cooper masks dancing across the screen to some serious disco music. It tackles such pressing issues as the importance of safe pumpkin carving, costume dos and don’ts, and the all-important candy inspection before digging into your sugar haul for the night. 

Seriously, this thing rocks. Sure, it’s slightly dated, but the message still applies.

Many people shrug off the Halloween candy story as just that, a scary story. And while it’s true, most cases of reports seem to be unfounded and the biggest threat of a kid’s Halloween bucket is a sugar-induced stomachache, urban legends notoriously become reality in the minds of crazed folks where the myth turned into a real-life danger for unknowing innocents. Knowing that John Carpenter really didn’t want to do a sequel to his immortal classic and had a vision of his Halloween films exploring the horror holiday’s urban legends and cautionary tales of lore, this scene in itself, doesn’t seem so, out-of-pocket after all. Speaking plainly now, it truly is the most unnerving part of the entire film as the reality lines blur from Terminator Myers hunting down Laurie in a hospital, into something we know has, can, and may happen again somewhere; and that’s what makes it so terrifying.

So, is this scene the most messed up in the movie? I’ll let Dr. Loomis answer that one…