Monsters

LOS ANGELES -- In the hills above Los Angeles stands th Acker mansion, wherein reside Forrest J. Ackerman, dozens of Draculas and Frankenstein monsters, and a ghoulish army of mummies and monsters.Mr. Ackerman -- his friends call him "Forry" -- isn't a bit scary. A jovial man of 75 with a trim mustache and horn-rimmed glasses, he has methodically amassed the world's largest private collection of treasures from horror and science fiction films.At his gate, a large black spider has spun a web. "Don't step on it," Mr. Ackerman warns.

Monsters, Ghosts, Goblins & DemonsThe Essential Halloween Party Collection (Hip-O 314 545 048)Rob Zombie PresentsThe Words & the Music of Frankenstein (Hip-O 021 153 814)DraculaMusic by Philip Glass, performed by Kronos Quartet (Nonesuch 79542)Why is it that some holidays seem more musical than others?There are dozens, if not hundreds of Christmas songs, but can anyone name more than one Easter song? What about Passover? Fourth of July has a host of songs (George M. Cohan's "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy," to name just one)

IT'S NOT easy being the last person on Earth without a DVD player. At cocktail parties, when people go on and on about the director's cut of Saving Private Ryan and turn to me for a comment and I murmur, "Uh, I don't have a DVD player," a sickly silence descends upon the room. Finally someone will say "Oh," and someone else will pat me on the arm, as if they'd just learned I have a fast-growing tumor that's worrying my doctors. When visitors come over to my house and see my old VCR perched above the TV, they gaze at it in wonder, as if studying a butter churn or an old gramophone or some other relic from long ago. Meanwhile, the VHS section of my video store keeps shrinking, until soon it will be a tiny, cobwebbed, carpet-stained ghetto where only losers with bad hairpieces and "I'm With Stupid" T-shirts and eyeglasses held together by masking tape congregate.

One of the now-vanished staples of the old B movies was the "vs." film. "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers" is probably the genre's tacky masterpiece, but who can forget Mamie Van Doren's "The Navy vs. the Night Monsters" or the immortal "Billy the Kid vs Now along comes "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle," which is a classic "vs." movie, except that the monster doesn't ride a big Frisbee or arise in slimy, gooey splendor from the depths of the sea or suck necks. She dresses in Villager clothes; she's a yuppie from hell.

The 1950s were the decade that was afraid of everything -- of communist infiltrators, of the H-bomb, of mutations caused by radiation, of science and, perhaps most of all, of sex. It's no accident that the 1950s were also the decade of the monster movie.If the '50s were a repressed decade, horror movies provided an outlet for those fears. And those fears found some of their most interesting expressions in "The Creature from the Black Lagoon," which will be screened with its 1955 sequel, "The Revenge of the Creature," at the Orpheum beginning tomorrow through Aug. 4. These movies, directed by Jack Arnold, were once derided as simple B-movie fare.

The monsters are back. Yes, for your fall movie-going, genuine scary monsters of the sort that so rarely make it to the screen anymore.We have very scary professional hit men John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson in the intensely awaited "Pulp Fiction." We have the big guy himself, in "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein," with Robert De Niro throwing the long shadow as he clomps around in cement boots. We have that blood-sucking freak Lestat, the vampire himself, as personified by Tom Cruise, and won't that be a fright?

I REMEMBER my eighth-grade Latin teacher's explanation of the derivation of "carnival." "Carnival," she said, "is a combination of two Latin words: carne, meaning flesh, and vale, meaning farewell."Indeed, when the carnival rolled into my little New England town each August, there was an element of "flesh, farewell." It symbolized excess, temptation, festivity, anything but restraint.The long caravan of trucks carrying disassembled parts of dTC amusement rides arrived about the same week every year.

Even after four rides, Tracy Wolfe could not describe everything she saw and felt on the Chameleon."So much is happening when you're on it," Miss Wolfe said of the high-tech, "virtual reality" amusement park ride. "It's incredible though. There's no doubt about that."Chameleon came to Fort Meade on Friday for MeadeFest, a four-day fair that continues today and tomorrow from noon to 11:30 p.m. Admission is free.The machine's 3-D graphics and motion-based simulation let riders "fly" their aircraft through tunnels of the planet Terium and shoot down enemy Graaks -- evil, green monsters -- while dodging exploding mines.

Nothing is wrong with Ben McDonald that can't be cured by more fastballs at the knees and more curveballs that go where he wants and some time spent studying films and a bent front leg on his delivery and more confidence and more experience and a little less bravado and maybe a forkball and, let's see, did I mention more fastballs at the knees?It's a Moby Dick of a "things-to-do" list, particularly for a 23-year-old just 27 starts into his major-league career, still encumbered by what pitching coach Al Jackson calls "rookie-ism."

IF THE JOYFUL sounds of African-American gospel music represent the optimism of the American dream set to song, the plangent strains of the country blues bespeak a different world, one devoid of redemption or even the hope of it.I was reminded of this distinction by Center Stage's current production of "Thunder Knocking on the Door," which playwright Keith Glover playfully subtitled "A Blusical Tale of Rhythm and the Blues."The critic Maynard Solomon called the blues "as close to a naturalist or determinist music as we will ever produce, in which a hostile environment is so overwhelming as to be virtually accepted as the eternal state of things."