Cheepnis

Frank Zappa: ‘Let me tell you something, do you like monster movies? Anybody? I love monster movies. I simply adore monster movies. And the cheaper they are, the better they are. And cheepnis in the case of a monster movie has nothing to do with the budget of the film, although it helps. But true cheepnis is exemplified by visible nylon strings attached to the jaw of a giant spider. I’ll tell you, a good one that I saw one time, I think the name of the film was “It conquered the world”, and the... did you ever see that one? The monster looks sort of like an inverted ice-cream cone with teeth around the bottom. It looks like a, like a teepee or a sort of a rounded off pup-tent affair, and uh, it’s got fangs on the base of it, I don't know why but it’s a very threatening sight, and then he’s got a frown and, you know, ugly mouth and everything. And there’s this one scene where the, uh, monster is coming out of a cave, see? There's always a scene where they come out of a cave, at least once, and the rest of the cast…it musta been made around the 1950s. The lapels are about like that wide, the ties are about that wide and about this short, and they always have a little revolver that they’re gonna shoot the monster with. And there is always a girl who falls down and twists her ankle! Of course there is! You know how they are, the weaker sex and everything, twisting their ankle on behalf of a little ice-cream cone. Well in this particular scene, this scene, folks, they uh, they didn’t wanna re-take it ‘cause it musta been so good they wanted to keep it, but they... when the monster came out of the cave, just over on the left hand side of the screen you can see about this much two-by-four attached to the bottom of the thing as the guy is pushing it out, and then obviously off-camera somebody’s goin’: “No! Get it back!” And they drag it back just a little bit as the guy is goin’: “Kch! Kch!”. Now that’s cheepnis. Alright. And this is cheepnis here.’

Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention: Inleidende monoloog bij ‘Cheepnis’. Van het album ‘Roxy & Elsewhere’ (1974).