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)
The storyline for Kronos was a mature science fiction about an alien machine sucking up energy as it lumbered across Mexico to LA after landing. Of course, with a $160,000 budget said lumbering involved stock footage taken from The Rains of Ranchipur and The Revolt of Mamie Stover (Trailers from Hell), but the special effects were above average and ambitious for their time involving stop motion, mattes, and animation.
From Granny C…
My cousin Agatha recently sent me a bat-mail, telling me how much she is enjoying my series of radio spots on giant monsters. She told me she knew of one more giant monster from one of her favorite science fiction movies and wondered if I might consider including it. I asked her which one and she said, “That giant colossus of metal, that energy-sucking ravager of planets…Kronos!”
Well, I suppose one could categorize Kronos as a giant monster of sorts, although not of skin and bones. But, it did cause a high level of terror among the populace, and a lot of anguish for the scientists tasked to find a way to destroy it. The theme was familiar, only this time the “monster” was a one hundred feet tall – and growing – giant made of metal. This was before Mogera of The Mysterians, Mechani-Kong of King Kong Escapes or Mechagodzilla.
Released in 1957, Kronos is acclaimed by fans as being a pretty good sci-fi thriller, with interesting visual effects. Most fans get a kick out of seeing Kronos stomping its way through the countryside with that creepy squeaking sound effect of its movement. Jeff Morrow, George O’Hanlon (the future voice of George Jetson), and Barbara Lawrence headline the cast with familiars John Emery and Morris Ankrum. It is interesting to see the wall-sized, tape-driven computer named S.U.S.I.E. How far we’ve come in 67 years!
The spots featured here are part of a double feature with She Devil, starring Mari Blanchard, Jack Kelly and Albert Dekker. It’s a quaint little story about a scientist (Kelly) who creates a serum based on the recuperative abilities of a fruit fly and uses it to cure injured animals. When he and his partner (Dekker) try it on a dying woman, she makes a miraculous recovery. As to be expected, serious side-effects occur, transforming her into a diabolical she-devil who will stop at nothing to fulfill her desires. She is able to regenerate any wound and even change the color of her hair at will. It is up to the two scientists to figure out a way to stop her.
Of the two, Kronos was the better movie, with top visuals blending a model Kronos with cartoon animation of its onslaught, trampling everything beneath its pounding feet. She Devil uses the old red make-up/red-blue filter effect to accomplish some nifty transformation scenes.
So, from 1957, for cousin Agatha and you, here’s Kronos…..and She Devil to assail you with 20, 30, and 60 second radio spots.
Do you have any radio spots you would like to share? Contact Granny (Gary Fox) at [email protected].
American Releasing Corporation eventually became American International Pictures (AIP), which specialized in double bill bookings. This double bill pressbook is for Female Jungle and The Oklahoma Woman. Two separate folded sheets for each movie were put into the folded cover sheet, with the emphasis on newspaper ads touting sex appeal to entice movie-goers. For Female Jungle, it was “Jayne Mansfield…sex on the rocks” and for The Oklahoma Woman it was “a whip-wielding she-devil.” Clearly, young teen men were the target audience. Touch Connors (don’t touch that) starred in The Oklahoma Woman. Connors (no relation to Chuck Connors) eventually came to his senses and renamed himself as Mike Connors (who you may know as Mannix from the television series). The publicity campaign was a no-brainer (actually brainless) with “Put up a big front with Jayne” selling the woman-on-the-floor-holding-desperately-onto-the-leg-of-a-guy theme, and the promise of the Queen of the Outlaws cat-fighting with her female rival and cracking that whip (on guys, ouch) theme.
Roger Corman already had The Oklahoma Woman, which cost $60,000 dollars, ready to go. They just needed a second movie to complete the double bill and did so with the $49,000 Female Jungle, a Burt Kaiser written and produced effort. Female Jungle was shot in six days. According to IMDb, Mansfield was paid $150 dollars for her role in the movie, which was expanded after a serious incident kept Kathleen Crowley from continuing in her lead role. Lawrence Tierney and John Carradine also appeared in this one.
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Female Jungle and
The Oklahoma Woman 1956
Double Bill PressbookRead More »
Female Jungle and
The Oklahoma Woman 1956
Double Bill Pressbook Read More »
This La Isla de la Muerte Mexican lobby card is big, coming in at 17 by 24.5 inches. I have a fondness for Mexican lobby cards that have an illustration mimicked in the inset photo (or is it vice versa?). Baron von Weser (I’d pronounce it vun-weeeeeezer for dramatic effect) keeps people-eating plants on his island in this Allied Artists Pictures production. AAP was a subsidiary of Monogram Pictures. Cameron Mitchell played the baron. Mel Welles (another name that trips off the tongue) directed. He also did Little Shoppe of Horrors and Lady Frankenstein. Mitchell’s voice was dubbed for the English version. Go figure.
Here’s a glimpse into how pressbooks usually wound up on the theater manager’s desk: folded in half and simply mailed in a nice envelope. This MGM example is cool because of the explanation that’s also a bit of salesmanship for The Three Musketeers 1948.
The first Mickey Spillane novel became the first movie too. I, the Jury was filmed for 3D, but by the time it hit theater screens, the short-lived 3D craze of the 1950s was waning, so most first and second run houses showed the movie in standard 2D. Harry Essex adapted the novel (his writing credits include Creature From the Black Lagoon, Kansas City Confidential, It Came From Outer Space, and, okay, Octaman–hey, no one’s perfect).
David J. Hogan in his Film Noir FAQ doesn’t give much love to the movie, but he does point out the action scenes were well handled and that Spillane came from a comic writer background, which could explain why his character, Mike Hammer, is so super macho. Unfortunately, Biff Elliot was a poor choice to play Hammer and drags down the movie. So, dare I say it, he didn’t nail the Hammer. Trekkers know him as Schmitter from the Devil in the Dark episode of the original Star Trek. He also did episodes for Alfred Hitchcock Presents and some horrors, the Navy vs. the Night Monsters and Blood Bath. I’d like to see those on Svengooli.
The pressbook is a big deal at 16 pages. One of these days I’ll figure out the psychology behind the choice of colors used in pressbooks as it doesn’t match the one used in film colors. The color used in this pressbook doesn’t quite match to the violence and grittiness in Mike Hammer. What do you think? One last note: this pressbook must have gone a round with Hammer as two unnecessary cuts ruin two pictures.
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A dying man walks into detective Michael Shayne’s office, holding onto a baggage ticket. The story unfolds from there. With Hugh Beaumont (Leave It to Beaver) as Shayne, the story is more poached than hard-boiled, but this PRC production is directed by Sam Newfield, one busy beaver to be sure as he was prolific and completed 250 feature movies beginning in the silent age and up to 1958. He also directed a lot more too, including training films, shorts, industrial films, and for television. He directed The Terror of Tiny Town 1938, an all small-person novelty western that’s best seen during a midnight show.
Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC) was a Poverty Row outfit but they had their own small studio. Sam Newfield directed so many of their movies he used two other names to make it look like PRC had more directors. Mostly producing B movies, the studio did the usual fare including westerns, horrors, and assorted action dramas. The Devil Bat and The Devil Bat’s Daughter were hits for PRC as well as many other films, and the classic noir, Detour, was also produced by the studio. They even had their own version of the Bowery Boys (Dead End Kids) called the Gas House Kids with Billy Halop. Halop’s career peetered out due to personal problems and his aging (no more playing Tommy), but he did have a resurgence in the 1970s with television’s All in the Family, where he played in ten episodes.
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Cough… cough…wow…the air quality is especially bad today. If only something could be done…
That’s exactly what the producers were considering when they were looking for their next Godzilla project. Pollution was bad everywhere in Japan as various factories continued to spew their by-products into bodies of water and into the atmosphere. People were getting sick on a grand scale.
In the original Gojira (1954), Godzilla represented the dangers of atomic experimentation. Now, seventeen years later, Toho decided that Godzilla should tackle a new threat to humanity: world-wide pollution.
Godzilla vs. Hedorah was produced in 1971, and introduced a new menace: an alien which arrived on earth on a comet and fed on pollution, growing larger the more he ate. He could change shape, from a sea creature, to a land animal, to a flying stingray-looking thing. As a land animal, he could spew out acidic sludge and shoot a red laser from his eye, and as a flying creature, he could emit toxic exhaust.
The producers wanted a “darker” Godzilla movie in keeping with the dangers of pollution. Visuals were often graphic as victims of the “smog monster” were left sick, disfigured or dissolved. Unlike before, dead bodies were often seen scattered about the landscape.
When Godzilla met Hedorah in the final battle, he seemed to have met his match. Blinded in one eye by the acidic sludge, it was only with the help of massive electrical discharge machines designed by the movie’s scientist that he was able to help dehydrate the monster and the world was saved. Or was it? …
Here’s The Three Musketeers pressbook portion that covered advertising. “The Three Musketeers was an extremely personal project for [Gene] Kelly for two reasons” (from the TCM article on the movie). “The first was the fact that he was recreating the character (D’Artagnan) played by his favorite star (Douglas Fairbanks) in his favorite movie (the 1921 version of The Three Musketeers). Kelly was later quoted in Tony Thomas’ The Films of Gene Kelly: Song and Dance saying “I loved playing this part. As a boy I idolized Fairbanks, Sr. and I raised myself to be a gymnast.” The second reason is that Kelly was hoping his performance in The Three Musketeers would convince MGM to let him do a musical version of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano De Bergerac.. Regardless of his energetic performance in The Three Musketeers, the studio brass wouldn’t go for a musical Cyrano even though Kelly pestered them for years about it.”
The TCM article goes on to say how much June Allyson disliked playing the period piece. Lana Turner also had issues with her role as it was not a starring one. After a brief suspension by MGM and a rewrite of her character, she did eventually acquiesce.
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The Three Musketeers (1948) Pressbook
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The Three Musketeers (1948) Pressbook
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Universal Pictures’ Radio Patrol was taken from the newspaper comic strip of the same name. The strip, created by Charles Schmidt (artist) and Eddie Sullivan (a real-life crime reporter), picked up steam when William Randolph Hearst wanted something added to his King Features Syndicate to compete against the popular Dick Tracy comic strip. Radio Patrol was also adapted for radio, a comic book, and a Big Little book (a thick, pocket-sized, hard-covered book with text and page illustrations). The 12-chapter serial was directed by Ford Beebe (Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, The Invisible Man’s Revenge, and lots of jungle pictures) and Clifford Smith (The Adventures of Frank Merriwell).
From the Files of Jerry Blake:
Radio Patrol features many sloppy-looking but energetic fights–brawls that have the lack of staging and wild-looking blows common to most 1930s serials, but also feature some good punches and some nice flips and leaps (as in the Chapter Eight office fight). However, almost all the fistfight scenes are marred by one recurring flaw–directors Ford Beebe and Cliff Smith’s decision to shoot all the fight-scene close-ups of star Grant Withers against the same backdrop (a cement steel-mill wall with the shadow of a ladder in this background); when these shots of Withers are inserted into fights that take place in locations other than the steel mill (apartments, sidewalks, etc.) they have a jarring effect on the viewer–particularly since these mismatched close-ups provide the only glimpses of Withers during the fight scenes; the star’s stunt double Eddie Parker stands in for both medium and long shots, with Beebe and Smith taking few pains to hide the switch.
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