Monster Chiller Horror Theatre: Madame Blitzman

On the very first Monster Chiller Horror Theatre, Floyd Robertson's Count Floyd promises his young viewers a truly frightening film, while admitting he hasn't actually seen it. The feature is Madame Blitzman, a stiff period melodrama in the mould of Madame Curie. An aged Madame Blitzman, accepting an honour from the Academy of Science, recalls how she fell for the lecturer Louis Blitzman, married him the next morning and joined his laboratory, only to find his research amounted to dead rats and a slide smeared with sandwich mustard. She quietly disproves his theory and credits it to him anyway, while his recurring headaches hint that something is badly wrong. After Floyd's break, the rival academician Milos Hatrick urges her to abandon her husband, and her race to cure Louis ends in a deflating revelation about the cause of his illness. Floyd returns baffled by the anticlimax and blames the distributors for sending him duds, promising a scarier picture next week.

This was SCTV's first Monster Chiller Horror Theatre segment. The film-within-the-show parodies the 1943 biopic Madame Curie, and its opening card bills the stars as "Greer Muni and Paul Garson".