Zombos’ Closet…a vast trove of endearingly cheap thrills, including movie and book reviews, and scans of his collections of cinema pressbooks, goofy paper-cutout Halloween decorations, and his amazing collection of Mexican lobby cards from B-grade films. If you have time to descend into a serious rabbit-hole of marvelous trash-culture nostalgia, visit that site just as soon as you possibly can.” (DangerousMinds.net)
It Came From Hollywood sends along this pressbook for The Night They Killed Rasputin. Here’s what they had to say.
Distributed by Brigadier Films, this drama picture features John Drew Barrymore as the character Prince Felix Yousoupof, an homage to this father, John Barrymore’s, portrayal of the character Prince Paul Chegodieffin in the 1932 film Rasputin and the Empress. That 1932 Rasputin offering also featured John Drew Barrymore’s Aunt & Uncle, Lionel and Ethel, respectively. Drew Barrymore, daughter of John Drew Barrymore, has yet to make a Rasputin picture. If you’re keeping count, I’ve mentioned the name Barrymore five times and the name Rasputin three times, just in case this turns into an internet-drinking game! Brigadier Films distributed only four films in its existence between 1960-1962. The other three were The Tell-Tale Heart (1960), Kamikaze (1961), and The Smashing of the Reich (1961). Kamikaze & Reich saw some success as a double-bill in 1961, and both showed up in TV packages that were played almost non-stop between 1962 and the mid-1970s.
John Barrymore Jr. (he changed his name to John Drew Barrymore) had a lot of weight on his shoulders coming from such an illustrious family of actors. He did fairly well in American movies and television, and also in Italian movies, but a troubled life with addiction problems, and four marriages, eventually made acting parts dry up and he turned away from public life. “Barrymore eventually withdrew from acting, with his final two appearances being a 1974 episode of Kung Fu and an uncredited role in the 1976 film Baby Blue Marine” (Wikipedia).
Try selling a movie today with the tagline “with guts and a gun and a babe for bait,” I dare you. Yes, there was a time where the male gaze was all over the place in movies, and bosomy women were always depicted with little clothing in the poster art. That’s not to say the movies were bad to watch; just male-centric to a point that wouldn’t be acceptable today. And for good reason. Typecasting beauty could be stifling when the variety of roles was limited. But Anita Ekberg was indeed an eye-full and Dana Andrews, even through his alcoholism, was good to watch, with that raspy, pillowy, voice and his hardboiled edge. From Laura to Night of the Demon, he delivered the goods.
The Cobra, an Italian and Spanish production, imported by AIP, was pure 1960s movie fodder with its drugs, espionage, and spy drama. Anita Ekberg plays a strung out junkie in the film. Given little to do except look pretty (which kind of worked against being strung out), critics still took notice of her acting chops. She is forever remembered for THAT scene in La Dolci Vita where she waded into Rome’s Trevi Fountain. She also appeared in Abbott and Costello Go to Mars and Screaming Mimi.
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Let’s applaud the hapless victims in horror films. They contribute so much to our enjoyment of their terror, their hysteria, and their blood.
They are sliced, diced, minced, blintzed, mangled, strangled, eaten, beaten, slurped, burped–feel free to insert your own action verbs here–and grilled and chilled in countless ways, just to make us jump in our seats, upchuck our popcorn, or tickle our fright-bone. They lighten our distressing job’s tedium, get us through our taxing days and all those tomorrow’s and tomorrow’s and tomorrow’s until death do we part for points unknown. Their brainless, death-attracting, antics creep forth in an endless and frenetic pace from franchise to franchise, keeping us happy because, frankly, we are not them. And we would never ever be that stupid, right? …
Idiot’s Guide to
Being a Good Horror Movie Victim
(Updated)Read More »
The AMC Dine-In theater I go to had these standees in the lobby. Man, if I had a warehouse, I’d start collecting these. As for the dine-in part: sixteen bucks plus change for a small bag of popcorn and a small bottle of water. That’s just me, lone wolf movie goer. It’s either Goobers or popcorn (and the occasional Bon Bons). But a family, or even just two people, “dining in” at an AMC Dine-In, is sardonic, as it is expensively prohibitive. I realize theaters are dying and struggling to survive. Dine-In is not the way to do that. Whoever thought this up didn’t think it through. Either you make it affordable or you keep complaining about how people are avoiding the theater. It’s not entirely streaming (though their play window is a kick in the gut to theaters)–who doesn’t want to catch movies on a BIG screen with awesome sound? It’s the pricing. And the lounge chairs we didn’t need. Give us a bargain or give you empty seats. Just saying. And for chrissakes, get the lighting and focus on the projector right for a change! Oh, right…standees.
Clark Gable, Ava Gardner, and Grace Kelly, along with MGM, remake Red Dust (1932) with 1953’s Mogambo. Extensive location and studio shooting make for a steamy jungle picture about gorillas and messy human relationships. Robert Burns used traditional African music in place of the usual score, and John Ford directed with his usual blunt and grump, giving tension between him and Gable. The on-location shooting was arduous and with some danger, with Gable given an armed guard while in Kenya (Wikipedia). The word, Mogambo, is just a twist on Mocambo, which was a Hollywood nightclub that producer Sam Zimbalist came up with. I suppose he was a regular at the nightclub. John Ford was particularly rough on Ava Gardner because he wanted Maureen O’Hara instead. “Donald Sinden (and all male members of the crew who removed their shirts) had to shave any hair from their chests daily, as Clark Gable (who did not have a hairy chest) thought it an affront to his ‘manliness’ (Classic Movie Hub).
This Special Accessories supplement to the movie’s pressbook goes all out and is filled with enough monkey business (I know, I know, monkeys are not gorillas, but gorilla business sounds awful, so…) to dress up the theater inside and out. There’s also a nifty Color Mogambo Animals coloring mat, 16″x20″, that is a great newspaper or standalone activity.
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Mogambo (1953) Special Accessories
Pressbook SupplementRead More »
Castle of Evil has a disintegrator chamber, a robotic clone, creepy castle with lots of secrets, a ray gun, and an old dark house styled setup with people brought to the place to off them one by one. Tossing together every tried and true pulp magazine ingredient into a cheap dish that was filmed in fourteen days (back to back with Destination Inner Space), you will either get drunk after seeing it to sober up or love it for the cheesy spread of a film it is. Blood Beast From Outer Space (which is the American title, of course), named the more sedate Night Caller From Outer Space in the UK, has aliens abducting pretty girls for breeding assistance to save their dying planet. The aliens method of entrapment? They place and advertisement in Bikini Girl magazine. It would be fun to see a remake today, given our social media environment. Not sure if dating apps are still a thing, though.
It has John Saxon in it, his first sci fil movie. Being properly British, the movie devotes some time to its cinematography and script, giving a noir-ish tone with a moody philosophical (aka thoughtful thriller) runtime. Something most American audiences couldn’t quite wrap their head around since there wasn’t enough of the action or terror they expected from the Blood Beast title. Some idiot decided to colorize the carefully filmed black and white composition around 2011, so if you do want to see it, go with the original version. The poster art for both movies is rather awfully cheap looking, but in that attention-grabbing awfully cheap way, so it kind of works well.
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Castle of Evil and
Blood Beast From Outer Space
Double Bill PressbookRead More »
Zombos Says: A lot more fun and scary than being lost in a corn maze.
I can’t believe Art the Clown got his own popcorn bucket and Frendo didn’t. The selling potential for popcorn during this hayseed, retro-styled, filled with honey-glow lighting and humorous bon mots slasher, is enormous. Frendo is the clown mascot for the burned down Baypen factory that previously had been churning out corn syrup. The town of Kettle Springs (get it? kettle popcorn), in Missouri, has gone bust ever since the factory closed. Instead, a lot of blood has been churned out, flowing from the younger population in town, that looks for a brighter and less stick in the mud future that some of the older population is still mired in. So you not only have a slasher movie with solidly messy kills, you have a socially conscious movie that slashes back at those who can’t deal with needed change and just don’t want to. Both themes don’t trip each other up, which makes Frendo’s murderous clown antics even more fun to watch. Standard stuff we’ve seen before, but done with attention to craft, and the pacing to keep us and the victims running, is to die for. …
The story of a “gentle-man” who was a cad, of an uncouth sheriff who was a “prince,” and of a girl who was taught by better adventure to know the truth (from the pressbook).
Based on the play of the same name, this “photoplay” was directed by Hugh Ford. Unfortunately, no prints of the film are known to exist. The movie’s pressbook, however, provides a lot of information and promotion. What’s really cool is the inclusion of the accessories ordering sheet and pricing sheet, which later pressbooks left out. Early movies were often based on stage plays and their pressbooks were often substantial (this one clocks in at twenty pages). One quickly gets the sense that, back then, given that the printed word was the media du jour, a lot of people read a lot. Unlike today, where we have a lot more multi-media to view, but less people actually reading. Another interesting tidbit is the mention of slides the theater can use for promotion. These magic lantern glass slides, 3.25 x 4 inches (cost .15 cents), would be shown before the main feature or in-between films, to provide a coming-attractions promotion. Today, of course, we have movie trailers, ad nauseum, to zing and pow us into ticket-buying submission.
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The glory days of television and movie westerns faded away by the late 1960s. Personally, I pin the start of their demise with the advent of sputnik in 1957. Its surprise entry into the consciousness and social bubble of the United States provided a dose of reality that westerns could no longer seek to hide. Don’t get me wrong: some of the most engaging and meaningful scripts came out of television cowboy dramas by writers like Gene Roddenberry and Samuel A. Peeples, notable for their Star Trek connections. It was Gene Roddenberry who pitched Star Trek: The Original Series as “Wagon Train to the stars,” referring to the television show Wagon Train, which he wrote for, and Peeples who came up with the “where no man has gone before” line.
But the complexity of life changed. Social issues, moral issues, sexual issues, political issues, religious issues, and technology issues, they all combined into a world that was a far cry from the simplicity of the westerns with their black and white bad guys, good guys, Indians, guns, and the wilderness. Some westerns, like Have Gun Will Travel, went the extra trail to write in more than the black and white, but given commercial-driven television, there was only so much the sponsors would allow. Of course, the more adult-slanted movies had no commercials, so great westerns like The Searchers, Stagecoach, High Noon, and the Spaghetti Westerns are wonderful exceptions to the breakfast cereal wholesomeness to explore. But there’s nothing wrong with a little wholesomeness, like Davy Crockett or The Lone Ranger too.
What drew me to this Davy Crockett, Indian Scout pressbook was the color-in illustration, which pretty much sums up the wild west in one fell war whoop. The exploitation, which includes the Indian Scout Matinee and Sitting Bull Waits for Davy, stunts is pure 1950s.
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You can tell a Tarzan movie with Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan was a big deal by this showmanship pressbook. It’s huge: sixteen colorful, large format, pages of merchandising and theater promotion, printed on cardstock. Check out the cool Ballyhoo! float, the coloring pages, tie ups (that Remotrol game is so period), ice cream cups, giant vampire bats theater marquee (somebody PLEASE have a photograph of that in situ), streamers, standees, hangars (they were double-sided mobiles), tire covers(!), Tarzan Bread(?), and tons more stuff to promote the movie and sell merchandise. Sadly, the giant vampire bats scene was cut because audiences found it too scary. Imagine that!
The original version of this film, titled The Capture of Tarzan, was shown to preview audiences in 1935 and was heavily criticized for scenes of gruesome violence. The most notorious scene was one involving a giant bat attack in a swamp. Hollywood legend has it that, at the preview showing, the sight of these giant creatures carrying off panic-stricken porters sent kids screaming from the theatre. So strong was the negative reaction from parents, critics and media, that the studio ordered much of the film re-shot. MGM replaced the original director, James McKay, with a series of directors with the final credit given to Richard Thorpe. (ERBzine)
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My grandson Big Abner called me the other day, cussing and fuming and about ready to have a conniption.
“Granny,” he said, “I am so tired of doing plumbing! It’s one thing after another. As soon as I get one leak stopped, I turn the water back on and there’s a leak somewhere else! I hate plumbing.”
Abner and his wife Hortense have just recently purchased a fixer-upper house, a beautiful 1889 Queen Anne-style Victorian just off the town square in Squirrel Hollow. It was in excellent shape, just needing some touch ups here and there. Evidently the plumbing had seen better days and Abner was spending most of his spare time down in the basement and crawling around in the cramped crawlspace. And, if you know Abner, any crawlspace is going to be cramped! …
I picked up Marvel’s Doc Savage, The Man of Bronze magazine, issue two, dated 1975, recently at my favorite comic shop, Fourth World Comics. Of course, I read this issue during its original run, but I gave up my comic book collection some years ago, and seeing it for cheap, I couldn’t resist. Looked like some geezer collector unloaded his collection at the shop so there were lots of magazines and comics–of my favorite vintage–all priced to travel fast. Yeah, us older collectors: we don’t just fade away, we fizzle and sputter, lessen the load, then fade away. But before then, we do like to reread the old stuff on paper. Yes! Paper dammit!
Ron Ely was the perfect Doc Savage trapped in an imperfect 1975 movie by George Pal. For some bizarre reason, Pal channeled the campiness of the Adam West Batman series into Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze with terminal effect. One and done, and ever since, Doc fans have been waiting through the endless machinations of Hollywood to get it right. At various points in time, Chuck Connors (The Rifleman), Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson and Chris Helmsworth were associated with bringing the pulp-hero forerunner to Superman back to the screen. A few attempts at television also fizzled. With the current format of streaming stories, now’s the time to greenlight Doc Savage again into a multi-episode offering instead of a single movie. While we wait, here’s Ely’s interview for the magazine.
