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COMPLETELY IN THE DARK!
by Judson Fountain
($15.00,
Innova Recordings)
Review by Mark Campos
Another jewelcase for the "Incredibly Strange" shelf. Judson Fountain and his pals recorded these no-budget radio dramas in the late '60s, releasing them on LPs, sending them to radio stations for possible airplay. The best of these shows have been gathered on CD by the legendary Irwin Chusid.
Fountain was a big fan of spooky shows like "Lights Out" and "Inner Sanctum", and in trying to recreate the thrills of that earlier era, managed to create something you will either find wildly hilarious and entertaining, or not. Fountain's speciality character, a screechy-voiced old hag, turns up in almost every one of these skits (most vividly in "Granny, Sing No More!", in which she holds one horrible note, a la Jerry Colonna). His other character is a gruff-voiced old man, usually an aged tough guy like Pop Serriano in "The Old Woman of Haunted House": "See this phone? I still got connections! I'm Pop Serriano!" His pal Sandor Weisburger both acts and announces, essaying both tasks through his thick Live From Brooklyn accent. When he impersonates a stern Irish dad, his brogue slips sideways and starts coming out more like an angry Jamaican.
The scripts seem half-improvised, but were probably completely written out – words pile up like train cars in a wreck – phrases like "garbage can from Thailand" and "You blew the whistle!" are repeated until backward reels the mind. The skits were recorded "live in the studio", which means nothing is edited out, and if you want you can gloat over every dropped cue and vocal flub, and there are so many.
Frequently, to indicate some unnameable horror coming to get somebody, Judson would drop the needle on a spooky effects record. He does this in a couple of skits, and it convulses me that it's the exact same record each time. A very consistant unnameable horror! Elsewhere, a wifebeating sequence is signified by another effects record, which makes the skit sound dead similar to Monty Python's "Mary, Queen of Scots" routine.
And, of course, the skits are full of wonderfully quotable bits of surrealism: "Standing there in back of you, face-to-face, is now the old man you killed! He's old, horrible looking – and he's dead!" You'll chortle yourself sick.
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