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Matthew Warner

I Predict . . .

Was the Amazing Criswell . . . amazing?  I don’t know.  But I do know he was damned strange.

Jeron Criswell Konig (1907-1982) was a mentalist known for his flamboyant style and crazily inaccurate predictions about the future, such as that space rays would convert all metal in the city of Denver to a rubber-like substance, and that the world would end in cannibalism in the year 1999.  (He also predicted the world will end in 2012, according to the Mayan calendar.)

He was sometimes a guest on the Johnny Carson Show, but his most celebrated role was as the MC to Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space, a 1950s sci-fi film that’s legendary for how bad it is.

Well, my friends (as he would say), although the Amazing Criswell is no longer with us, he has been given a new life in the form of Mr. Lobo, comedy host of the syndicated horror TV series Cinema Insomnia. Darkstone Entertainment has cast Lobo as Criswell in their forthcoming remake of the Ed Wood film, now titled Plan 9.

Where do I come in to this?  The answer is Darkstone’s ongoing web series to promote Plan 9, Criswell Predicts! (with the exclamation point).  The episodes reuse the Ed Wood title screen and always contain Lobo/Criswell’s hilarious intro and outro about the nature of time.  What changes is the meat in the middle of this sandwich — which brings me to the airing of the first episode I helped to write, “Weight Wars”:

Watch my headline feed for news about more Criswell Predicts! episodes co-written by Matthew Warner!