Sinister Cinema: The Shadow of Bill Arney

Dropped in on a memorial party for the late great Bill Arney last night in 891 Post, tales were told of his exploits, we found the raw footage of his epic toy tank battle filmed in Death Valley or someplace, and a clip was shown of Bill’s snappy patter as “Gil Trisco, P.I.”

You can catch the P.I. bit at the start of The Cheese Theatre presentation of Frankenstein Meets the Space Monsters — and watch more Cheese stuff on YouTube under its own channel, thecheesetheatre, if you catch the bug.

I was reminded of Cheese just a few minutes ago when I came across a scrap of paper listing three proposed movies I could have sat in on as a Guest Host.

In the first season I did some commentary on Dead Men Walk, starring Dwight Frye, and also the original D.O.A.

Then I returned to talk about The Fat Man, spun off a Hammett radio show, and the Ur zombie flick The Last Man on Earth.

Bill asked me to figure out more to do, but we never got back to the mics in the recording studio.

The note proposed the original Night of the Living Dead — the original The Most Dangerous Game with Fay Wray — and a curious 1936 film titled The Walking Dead, starring Boris Karloff and Ricardo Cortez. We could even have slipped in the first movie version of The Maltese Falcon from 1931, where Ricardo plays Sam Spade.

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