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)
Zombos Says: This movie and The Haunting (1963) are required viewing for any horror fan.
I first watched The Legend of Hell House at a drive-in in 1973. Unfortunately, the fog started rolling in, obscuring the screen, just when it was getting good and nasty. It took some years to finally watch it again, to the end, and fully appreciate the depth of both the screenplay and the camera work. The onscreen timestamp, counting down the one week given for the investigation conducted by physicist Lionel Barrett (Clive Revill), spiritual medium Florence Tanner (Pamela Franklin), and the sole survivor of a previous but failed investigation, Ben Fischer (Roddy McDowall), adds a documentary tone around the growing tension, both psychological and supernatural. …
Welcome, all lovers of things that go bump in the night! Welcome to my Radio Spot Reliquary. To follow up on my post, Dracula, Yorga, and Frankenstein Oh, My!, here are more vampires than you can shake a stake at.
Twins of Evil
Vampire Circus and Countess Dracula
Lust for a Vampire
The Fearless Vampire Killers
The Vampire Lovers
The Velvet Vampire and Scream of the Demon Lover
Welcome, all lovers of things that go bump in the night! Welcome to my Radio Spot Reliquary.
Listen…it’s that time of year again for crunching leaves, cool, howling winds, and the sound of spooks and monsters of all kinds.
Take a deep breath: Do you smell it? That unmistakable smell of burning pumpkin, caused by the candle flame licking the base of carved-out lids of eerily illuminated jack-o-lanterns sitting ominously on the porches of households eagerly awaiting the arrival of dozens of ghastly apparitions demanding treats of various kinds.
Can you taste it? The sweet taste of hauntingly delicious goodies, from chocolate to peppermint, and everything in between.
Can you feel it? The apprehension of not knowing what is coming to visit your house. Who or what is behind that mask you see staring into your eyes, into your soul? Is it friend…or foe?
Fear! Terror! Horror! Trick or Treat! Tricks with no treat! Nowhere to run! The night ‘he’ came home! The night no one came home! Halloween….One, Two and Three!!!
Halloween
Halloween II
Halloween III: Season of the Witch
If you have radio spots you would like to share or talk about with Gary (the Radio Spots Guy), you can reach him at [email protected].
Zombos’ Says: So bad it’s good.
“What the hell, Paul?” I said to Paul Holstenwall.
We had just finished his latest dreck of choice, Rawhead Rex, from 1986. I sipped my pumpkin spiced latte, seeking comfort after watching it. He studied the Blu-ray box liner, took a sip of his latte, and looked at me with all innocence and surprise.
“What? You didn’t like it?
I swallowed another sip of my latte and gave him the look of death. My perfectly fine cool October day was ruined by his biking over to the mansion with this stinker while Zombos made a run for it, knowing full well from past experience how Paul’s tastes in horror could swing like Poe’s pendulum. And yet, there he sat, looking like a thinner Quentin Tarantino, dressed in faded blue jeans and a Fright Rags hoodie. I imagined him having worked in a video store too, doling out questionable movie advice to susceptible customers, while making too many runs through the beaded curtain in the back to the schlock and X’ers. So here I sat, trapped like Andre Delambre in The Fly. …
Welcome, all lovers of vampires and monsters! Welcome to my Radio Spot Reliquary.
They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so I guess it comes as no surprise that the makers of horror movies would capitalize on the tried and true names of horror to seek box office success.
As I was clearing out some of my radio spot files I saw that the vampire and monster-making genres still had some energy left after the great Hammer films had run their courses. Feature vampire lovelies and gruesomely-made monsters and the audiences were sure to come, right? Evidently.
I have come up with eighteen titles of screen shockers that took the Dracula and Frankenstein legends to new directions, many with increasing doses of gore and female nudity. As the 1970s unfolded, the screen became more exploitative. Many of these films lacked quality, but some were adequate. Liberties were taken with the original canon legends, and stories were created to make use of the screen’s new-found freedoms.
So, here are the spots. Most are quite good…some are overly screamed. See how many of these bring back memories…and nightmares.
Blood! Fangs! Crosses! Corpses! Beautiful, and sometimes nude, women in peril! Cadavers! Body parts! Mad labs! Monsters! Dracula and Frankenstein movies continue!
Count Dracula and His Bride
Count Yorga Vampire
Dracula (Frank Langella)
Dracula vs. Frankenstein
Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror
Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks
Guess What Happened to Count Dracula
Lady Frankenstein
The Return of Count Yorga
There’s an east wind coming, Watson. All the same, such as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind nonetheless, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.” His Last Bow, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1917.
The east wind that Sherlock Holmes told Watson about alludes to the east wind mentioned in the Bible, beginning with Moses. It is a powerful, destructive, but potentially beneficial or malevolent element of nature or divine intervention, take your pick. Artificial intelligence is our east wind for the ages, and whether it proves beneficial or not, it certainly will be powerful and destructive and oddly beneficial too. But for whom remains to be seen. It is the closest we have come, so far, to realizing science into magic. With the ongoing technologies in robotics and quantum computing, that magic can become either white or black depending on who wields it and, more concerning, who can make money from it.
But here we are. You and me and everyone else are like that unseen character in Zork, suddenly standing in an open field, given a few hints and hoping to make the right decisions to figure which way to go. AI is the white house with the small mailbox, but the front door is wide open. You must go through that door, willingly or not. That east wind of AI is too strong now and it is pushing all of us in the same direction. Frankly, it is a coin flip whether AI will eventually work well for all of us. Or not. But for right now, you can use it as your assistant to benefit your writing and anything else you care to.
I say now because we are still in the first level of AI, the generative stage. It means we prompt AI–provide input–and hopefully it generates good responses as outputs. The next stage is general AI. That is when robotics merges seamlessly (one can hope, right?) with AI, when prompting is no longer needed by us. Instead, AI does the thinking and takes actions or provides outputs based on what it learns (just like us). All those science fiction movies where room-sized computers took over the world or tried to, well, that’s general AI. So you can breathe a little easier as my guess is we still have some years before that kicks in. Once we have self-determining humanoid robots that can do lots of varied jobs people do, that techno-cat’s clawing out of the bag pronto. …
Zombos Says: Makes me stay away from creepy-looking haunts on dead roads for sure.
Four girls (Harper, Bailey, Angela, and Mallory) and two guys (Nathan and Evan ) leave the safety of a bar-party on Halloween night looking for a little more fun and excitement. That was the goal anyway. Instead, they find an extreme haunt attraction that has maybe three cars in the lot, down a lonely road that sees more activity with roadkill than cars, with a really creepy clown (okay, yeah, when aren’t they creepy?) silently ushering them into the warehouse (though the set was filmed in the closed A.J. Jolly Memorial School in California, Kentucky). The fact he takes their cell phones doesn’t phase them. Top this off with an opening credits during which ominous scenes of the haunt setup sell the terror to come and you have a tidy Halloween horror just begging for victims and you to watch.
Scott Beck and Bryan Woods build the eerie vibe and suspense until the group realizes it’s all real and then the movie switches everyone into survival and escape mode. Good luck with that. Soon the group does the de rigueur divide and conquer when they come to a fork in the maze. Before this, they witness a tableau vivant where a person in a witch mask does something nasty to an earlier guest — who definitely got her money’s worth of terror for the evening. They shrug it off. We, of course, know what’s coming. We also soon realize, as they do, the haunt is run by a band of psychos who have a mask fixation.
Bailey (Lauryn McClain), Nathan (Will Brittain), and Angela (Shazi Raja) go one way, and Mallory (Schuyler Helford), Harper (Katie Stevens), and Evan (Andrew Lewis Caldwell) go the other way. Evan, the Uber guy, you just know he’s heading for a nasty fall. Pretty early on you know who the final girl will be too because she gets the backstory. For the rest, well, let the haunt — I mean hunt — begin. I admit I’m not a serious haunt kind of guy; crawl spaces, dark spaces, foreboding orifices, and silent scare actors make my skin shrink and my mouth dry and they are par for this movie. Unfortunately, for this group, the scare actors, better called death actors here, play their part very well. The kills are gruesome but quick and the pacing and tension, with perfectly timed silences and music, make the view to a kill a treat for us, a desperate struggle for them.
Sam (Samuel Hunt), Harper’s ex with the hand trouble, tracks them down to the haunt and steps into it too. Short step, though. Bit by bit, the men behind the masks reveal themselves, providing for a cool prequel if that ever happens. As for Harper, she needs to overcome a troubled childhood while avoiding pitchforks, shotguns, and other sharp and blunt objects, while the camera goes wide than close, stays still, and then moves around. The makeup and practical effects really set a gritty mood and the tone is sans humor. The movie comes close to generating a video nasties coating but, dare I say it, with more of a modern indie horror movie’s mechanics. It received limited release when it first hit theaters, but you can catch it on Shudder.
An engrossing noir, 20th Century Fox’s The Dark Corner has Lucille Ball, making it even more entertaining to watch. Pretty much a Queen of the Bs before her I Love Lucy (six years) and Desilu Studios days, she was always notable in every movie she played in. Star Trek fans know full well how her taking over the management of Desilu led, among other things, to spending the money for two pilots and providing a hefty budget — all while ignoring her board’s desire to cancel it — to put the science fiction Wagon Train in space television series on the air. You can thank her for promoting and backing Mission Impossible too. In The Dark Corner, she fights for her man, played by Mark Stevens, who never seemed comfortable while acting. Clifton Webb, who played Waldo Lydecker, the snobby, stern-faced, would-be lover in Laura, plays a Waldo Lydecker here too, only with the name changed to Cathcart. William Bendix is always a delight to watch in action. He was the go-to for blue collar toughness and earthiness, and made the perfect street-tough character. He gained notoriety through The Life of Riley (on radio and television). He also played Babe Ruth in The Babe Ruth Story. He actually was a bat boy for the New York Yankees, but was fired after getting Babe Ruth sick before a game by bringing him hot dogs and sodas. The Babe had a habit of eating large. Bendix appeared in other noir movies, including The Blue Dahlia (1946) and The Glass Key (1942). At twenty pages, this pressbook certainly goes all out to sell the movie.
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Zombos Says: Good when the horror kicks in.
Once you get past the irritatingly sophomoric and time-wasting improv at the beginning, we follow S.P.I.T (Spirit Paranormal Investigation Team) as they prepare for an episode of their show that will film at Hollows Grove, a derelict orphanage and hospital. This collected-footage narrative of their would-be fake investigation turns into a screamer with some good chills.
Lance Henriksen provides a cameo at the beginning as the special effects guy who sets up the fake scares for every episode. Only this time around the scares are on him and the rest of the crew as they are suddenly faced with malevolent occupants who like to play; and by this time, are probably very bored at not having anyone living to slay with for a long time.
Probably the worst evil monsters you can write about in horror are kids gone bad and this orphanage has a lot of them. The backstory has the children dying from disease and cremated in the basement. I know a lot of the usual horror outlets downgraded this movie when it first hit digital in 2014, but they’re wrong: there is a lot to like here, with most of it coming from a really downbeat mood — that always important constant dread — permeating every scene the minute these bozos realize it’s all real. Films like the recent Until Dawn may have more graphic kills, but the tradeoff is no mood, leading to a rote checklist of you die this way, you die that way. The fun in watching Hollows Grove is seeing everyone on the team suddenly step knee deep into it and realizing that they are knee deep into it, while still falling for the old divide and bicker and die alone formula. Given their earlier goofiness I enjoyed this even more. With Until Dawn, I kept looking at my watch and wondering when a gritty and emotionally pummeling story was going to kick in. Hint: it never did. Towards the last quarter of Hollows Grove, the manic panic is well executed, along with the team.
The wrap around contrivance isn’t the most stellar. An FBI agent sets up the disturbing collected footage to watch, but the actor is really bad at being an FBI agent, so it lands with a thud; especially when given the weird (not in a good way weird) epilogue where agents supposedly captured some evidence. The frantically paced ending before that deserved better.
Of course, every good horror story usually has an idiot leading the way to doom. In this one it’s Tim (Matt Doherty). Ignoring the grounds keeper Hector’s warnings (Eddie Perez), they blow past him and enter the building after he removes the thick chains on the front door. Setting up the cameras and beginning their walk-through of the premises, the first and best reason to not continue pops up in the kitchen. It’s a sudden blunt statement of get out now or else, clearly punctuated with a splash of blood. For the horror movie to continue though, they ignore it and keep going. Go team.
Interesting use of two cameras to provide the footage is a novelty: Chad (Val Morrison) handles the closeups with his camera, though rather clumsily and we never really see his footage, while Harrold (Matthew Carey) tags along with his camera, capturing the team and Chad filming them. The rest of the team includes Julie, who handles the logistics, and Roger, who handles the EMF gadget.
Camera batteries dying, weird noises, bad smells, a cold spot, and things moving by themselves are par for the investigation. At one point both Chad and Julie (Bresha Webb) are left alone in the staging room on the first floor. He turns on his damaged camera to see if it is still working and captures the best scene in the movie. It’s all downhill for the rest of them from there. The next best scene is when Harrold screams for Tim to close the damn door, for good reason.
Pretty soon the lights are going off and the No Exit signs are lit. Watch this one late at night. And feel a little pity for Harrold. The poor schlub just needed the job to perk up his career. He should have stuck to comedy.
Zombos Says: Hey, it’s Steve Ditko, what more do you want?
This book has been around for a while, but nothing says Happy Holidays more than fifteen tales of dread and more dread drawn by Steve Ditko and written by Archie Goodwin. Now, these stories appear in other tomes too, but Mark Evanier’s introduction provides interesting background for Ditko’s amazing artistic growth and personal philosophy.
I originally read these stories fresh off the news rack in Joe’s Luncheonette on the corner of West 12th Street and Avenue T in Brooklyn. Joe’s was a short walk from my house. I’d hit him up for my monthly fix of Marvel comics, Charlton, some DCs, and all the Warren and horror magazines I could tuck under my arm and hide from my mom as I ran up to my room to devour them. To read them again is to bring back memories, but also to realize how good his art and Goodwin’s stories were and still are.
Twist endings, dead endings, and sometimes a little salvation, but all were action-driven and made eye-grabbingly memorable with Ditko’s precise physical and metaphysical lines, shadings, and panels. He captured fevered dreams, night sweats, and bizarre alien landscapes like no other could in foreboding chiaroscuros. Paired with Archie Goodwin’s EC-styled, pulp horror narratives, the match is made in hell — perfect for horror fans — giving us vignettes of terror carefully measured in a few pages each. Today’s magazines that mimic the Warren magazine oeuvre just don’t cut it like Warren did, so these older tales are well worth reading. This book has stories from both Creepy and Eerie magazines.
Ditko first showed up in Eerie. He was three months away from ending his stint as storyteller and artist of The Amazing Spider-Man when he came to Warren (James Warren, Empire of Monsters by Bill Schelly). Marvel’s loss was Warren Publishing’s gain. Ditko was looking for freedom to do things his way and he got it. No comics code. No Stan Lee. Perfect.
In the two years (1966 to 1968) he spent with Warren, he explored his newfound freedom beginning with Eerie No. 3 and Room With a View. Black and white never had it so good. A man insists on renting the room no one wants to stay in. Cross-hatching lines create depth and a frenetic background as the man learns why. In Collector’s Edition (Creepy No. 10) this technique lends a tension throughout that runs across faces and the droopy, sweat-enveloped eyes (using a little Zip-A-Tone) shown in close-up at the bottom of the pages. Marker and ink wash create moody and sinister effects in The Spirit of the Thing (Eerie No. 8) and Deep Ruby (Eerie No. 6). In Spirit, hypnotism and astral projection lead to a showdown and in Ruby a gemstone leads to another world filled with terrors.
The sword and sorcery stories included here were something Ditko especially liked to explore, with their leanings to the mystical and occult. I agree with Mark Evanier in his sentiment that it would have been cool if Ditko could have had a hand in drawing Conan the Barbarian (especially the magazine version, Savage Sword of Conan, 1974) for Marvel.
Of the sixteen stories Ditko drew for Warren Publishing, here are 15 (one was not written by Archie Goodwin) to gift to your budding Ditko, comic book fan, or anyone who loves horror and hasn’t experienced Warren’s Creepy and Eerie.
First, I really love these folder-style movie pressbooks. They were especially made for the drive-in circuit. Second, while I categorize war pressbooks as non-horror, let’s be real: wars are horror; we just don’t have the luxury of fantasy to wrap it in that we do with most horror movies. These AIP budget movies, using stock footage, are par for the course. Tank Battalion at least had Frank Gorshin (simply the best Riddler, tell me I’m wrong), Barbara Luna, and Leslie Parish. They appeared on Star Trek TOS. Funny thing department: Tank Battalion‘s budget allowed for one tank. I haven’t watched the movie, but I can imagine how well that works onscreen when you’re fighting a war. An AI prompt brought up information about the cheapness of the set design, especially with the interior of the tank. To save money, convenient damage to the tank early on keeps it stationary for most of the movie. Now you know I have to watch this one.
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Hell Squad and Tank Battalion
Double Bill PressbookRead More »
Kidnapped Coed, also known as Date with a Kidnapper, is a grindhouse (low budget, gritty, quickly shot) movie that was paired with Axe, which made the video nasties list in the 1980s over in the UK, and Hitch Hike to Hell (1977) on double bills. Both were directed by Frederick R. Friedel. I’ve not watched either, yet, but Kidnapped is either ignored as a boring, not so action-packed, grindhouse effort or praised as a pensive meditation with some artsy flair and carefully planned tracking shots. Either way, I found the pressbook’s cover interesting enough to share it with you. It sells the exploitation and the leering quality that grindhouse should be edged with, art or not. I love that tagline too.
Born in Brooklyn in 1948, Friedel had no training in film, no experience on a film set, and no idea of what actually was involved in film production. But he did know that Orson Welles had made Citizen Kane when he was twenty-five and decided that he wanted to make a feature by that age himself. (Cagey Films)
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