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)
I caught Zombos just as he was falling backwards, thrown off balance by yet another heavy box of movie pressbooks he had squirreled away in his closet, as he lifted with his back, not his legs.
“How many of these do we have tucked away in here,” he mumbled. I disagreed with his use of the word “we.”
“You mean how many of these heavy boxes you have stashed in the closet?” I corrected him. “I’m thinking a lot. Enough to keep you busy way past my death, so there’s a positive note for you right there.”
He gave me that look of his that could peel paint, then opened the box and rummaged through it. “Oh, here it is. I have been meaning to post this one for some time.”
Again with the we.
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Lord Have Mercy!
I have just finished washing out my ears after suffering through Day of the Dead (1985), the third in George A. Romero’s zombie trilogy. This is one of only a scant few movies I have ever been tempted to turn off after the first fifteen minutes. The language in it is atrocious! Who talks like that?
Now I admit there have been occasions when I have filled the air with some salty language, especially when I have inadvertently burned some Brew or some green beans on the stove, but those instances are few and far between. I don’t cuss like a sailor, the people I know don’t cuss like that, and it is offensive to this old woman’s ears when that is all that comes out of someone’s mouth.
For whatever reason, the producers of this movie decided to give a bunch of military ruffians a very limited vocabulary consisting primarily of the “F” word and the “A-hole” word in dealing with the non-military folk they are forced to oversee. They exhibit little humanity and their language is exhausting and a real turnoff.
In Day of the Dead, a small group of military personnel, led by Joe Pilato as Cpt. Rhodes, and a small group of researchers are trapped together in an underground storage facility while the zombies pose an ongoing threat. The researchers are a motley group, led by Dr. Sarah Bowman (Lori Cardille) who does an admirable job and who seems to be the only one with any real leadership sense. This naturally makes her a foil to the sadistic Cpt. Rhodes. Also present is a wacko scientist who is conducting experiments on zombie bodies and a captured zombie prisoner to try and determine what makes them tick, in hopes of finding a way to train them and co-exist.
I have a problem with zombie movies in general, and Day of the Dead is no different. In each, there seems to be two dangers: the zombies, and degenerate human beings who, for whatever reason, seem determined to bring as much grief as they can to their fellow human beings who are just trying to survive. As is usually the case, the two groups become at odds with each other, and here, the soldiers resort to more and more intimidation of the researchers. If you know anything about zombie movies you know what is eventually going to happen.
The thing that can always be expected is that the meaner the chief antagonist is, the worse his demise will be. This is good and sad in a way because at the end of the movie, the viewer is always cheering for the zombies as they attack the bad humans, and the more gruesome their deaths, the better. Humanity can be lost in the face of extreme adversity.
Day of the Dead drags on with a battle of wills between the soldiers and civilians, and it is only when one of the bullied good guys gets attacked by a zombie and survives, losing an arm through amputation, that he sacrifices himself so that the zombies can enter the underground facility and avenge him. It is payback time as the zombies begin their onslaught. This is where the movie finally gets good in terms of vengeance served and over-the-top movie SFX makeup effects.
The soldiers meet their doom at the hands of the zombies in most satisfying fashion. Two stand-out effects: one soldier gets his neck pulled open by several zombies and his head is pulled off; the other, featuring the obnoxious Cpt. Rhodes, has his stomach clawed open by many zombies and he is pulled apart, his lower half then dragged away. He got what he deserved! Dinner is served with many scenes showing the zombies feasting on various body parts and internal organs.
Zombie movies aren’t for everyone. They are gross and they have to be viewed with a certain macabre sense of humor. I can appreciate them for the neat zombie makeup and the effects, and wondering how they pulled off so many realistic scenes. But the fake blood, gore and intestines – and overacting – get comical after a while.
So, here are the radio spots for Day of the Dead. Listening to the spots and then seeing the movie proves to be a let down of sorts. The spots are good but they imply that this is the day that the other two movies have led up to, sounding like it will be an all-out assault on humanity on a grand scale. Not so. Only a handful of people are involved and the zombies are limited to trying to break through an above-ground perimeter fence. Dozens infiltrate the lower storage facility tunnels, but it is far from an all out invasion. It is too localized. But, it is hype at its best.
Listen…or they will get you!
What makes this Mexican lobby card for House of Mortal Sin stand out is the minimal graphic layout that focuses on key story elements. It evokes a sinister presence from high places, with a victim in distress and looming danger aiming to engulf her.
House of Mortal Sin (aka The Confessional) is a 1976 British horror film directed by Pete Walker, one of his key 1970s “institutional corruption” shockers focused on the Catholic Church. It stars Anthony Sharp as Father Xavier Meldrum, Susan Penhaligon as Jenny Welch, and Stephanie Beacham as her sister Vanessa. For context in Walker’s filmography, it sits alongside pictures like Frightmare and The Flesh and Blood Show in using horror to attack respectable British institutions—here, the Church instead of the family or care system. Stylistically you get modest budgets, a lot of interior work, and a focus on character tension over elaborate set‑pieces. It’s often noted by fans and critics as one of Walker’s more thematically ambitious pieces: less about jump scares, more about oppressive atmosphere, moral panic, and the horror of being disbelieved and trapped inside an abusive power structure.
House of Mortal Sin sits in the same 1970s British religious‑horror wave as The Devils and To the Devil a Daughter, but it attacks Catholicism from the ground level—everyday parish life—rather than grand historical spectacle or satanic conspiracy.
All three films tap into post‑60s disillusionment: distrust of Church, state, and authority, plus anxiety about sex and youth culture (Wikipedia).
The Devils uses a historical possession case to critique church–state collusion and political repression; To the Devil a Daughter riffs on satanic cult paranoia in the wake of Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist; House of Mortal Sin turns the local parish priest into the monster, linking horror to day‑to‑day religious power. (Behind the Couch)
AI research was used for this post. Relevant sources are noted.
“Look, you can’t say she was like an M&M, hard on the outside, soft on the inside. You just can’t, it’s goofy.” I summed it up as best I could, but Zombos wasn’t buying it.
“I fail to see why I cannot say that. It describes Lizabeth Scott’s persona perfectly,” he countered. “And Too Late for Tears shows her like that, although perhaps much less than her usually less murderous and selfish characters.”
“I’ll admit her low, cigarette-smoke voice, her noirish demeanor, and her small facial movements and that stillness about her add to one alluring, somewhat cool and aloof, possibly dangerous if cornered, character, but she is definitely not like an M&M here. Maybe a Twix, maybe, if you want to push it for what she plays here.”
He wasn’t buying my Twix take, but he softened up and we moved on. Shot around Los Angeles landmarks and at Republic Studios, the movie, which may have been a box office keeper or a sleeper depending on the source you were reading, had Dan Duryea playing his perfectly nasty role, Don DeFore before he hired a maid in Hazel, and Kristine Miller, a veteran of westerns and noirs. Lest I forget, Arthur Kennedy lent his mug and gravitas too. The story is typical noir: an accidental event leads to intentional murder. What would you do if someone tossed a bag of money into your car and sped off?
“Okay, what if, instead of an M&M, I say she was like a Choco No No instead?” said Zombos, sparking the argument again. It was going to be a long night.
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This 12-chapter Western serial, filmed by Republic Pictures, was the directorial debut of William Witney, who continued directing serials including Dick Tracey Returns, G-Men vs. the Black Dragon, Drums of Fu Manchu, and others. After Republic, he went on to direct movies for American International Pictures and Associated Producers Incorporated as well as television (he directed episodes of The Wild Wild West series). Quentin Tarantino called him “one of the greatest action directors in the history of the business.” (The New Beverly Cinema)
In the Valley of the Cliffhangers, author Jack Mathis alludes to what might have been, storywise:
Given the story for screen adaptation, writers Barry Shipman and Winston Miller perceived Evart’s [Hal G. Evart] creation in a different and extraordinary light during their work on a novel first treatment in 1936 between November 21 and 24. Based on the premise of the painted stallion as a werehorse, the scripters envisioned a lycanthropic fantasy in which legend stated that the stallion–symbol of man–could be either horse or man and was impervious to bullets. The studio, however, decided against this whimsical approach, and following the Thanksgiving holiday Shipman and Miller wrote the final screenplay from an alternate scenario developed several months earlier by Morgan Cox and Ronald Davidson.
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This just in from Paul over at It Came From Hollywood. Here are his notes…
My wife is a WITCH! -OR- Pardon me, but this concept has legs!
This 1967 Spanish production pick-up by Producers Releasing Organization (PRO) was clearly inspired by the hit television show Bewitched (1964-1972), which itself was inspired by no less than two previous cinematic endeavors, most pointedly, United Artists’ 1942 release of I Married a Witch, and the 1958 Columbia Pictures film Bell, Book and Candle. …
Zorro Rides Again is Republic’s 12-part serial that mixes the slugfests, cliffhangers, dangerous stunts, and derring-do in a 1930s-modern actioner. Yakima Canutt goes all out to deliver the thrills. In one famous gag he transfers from saddle to moving truck, which looks smooth onscreen, but any misstep would have led to serious injury or death. Moving from horse to speeding train, no problem either. One gag for a cliffhanger had his foot caught in a track switch with a train heading in, closer and closer. His whip-work snags the track switch and disaster averted just in time. His straight-from-the-shoulder punches are also a highlight, as well as those taking them on the receiving end, making it look exceptionally punchy. Canutt did all the heavy lifting for John Carroll who played Zorro. With the mask on, Canutt could do the action scenes, saving Carroll from calamity and bruises. Duncan Reynaldo provided the comedy relief bits. Reynaldo played the Cisco Kid on television from 1950 to 1956, with filming done at Pioneer Town, California. Zorro Rides Again filmed at Bronson Canyon, the Iverson Movie Ranch, and other locations. Some shooting also took place in Cochilla, Mexico.
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Welcome, all lovers of Frankenstein and Dracula movies! Welcome to my Radio Spot Reliquary.
Ask any old monsterkid which memories are the most endearing from their childhood and most will say sitting in front of the TV on Friday or Saturday night and watching the latest offering on Shock Theater. On top of the list of favorites will undoubtedly include the old Universal Frankenstein and Dracula movies.
Most monsterkids can easily recite all of the Universal Frankenstein movies in order and tell you who played the monster in each. The same with the Dracula movies. Thanks to magazines like Famous Monsters of Filmland, World Famous Creatures, Horror Monsters and Mad Monsters, the life-long love affair with these movies was kept alive month after month. To fill the void, a lot of kids made soundtrack recordings of the movies onto reel-to-reel tape to listen to at every opportunity.
Amateur filmmakers used their 8mm cameras to construct their own versions of these classics, copying key scenes and duplicating creepy characterizations and lighting effects. Oh, and don’t forget the incredible laboratory scenes with their sparking electrical machines, Jacob’s ladders, and large Tesla coils. Those scenes alone were worth the wait, and monsterkids tried their best to recreate them for their amateur productions.
So it came as no surprise when professional comedy filmmakers decided to pay homage to the movies they, too, had grown up with.
Mel Brooks decided to spoof the Frankenstein series with his Young Frankenstein (1974), a loving tribute to the whole classic series that included atmospheric settings, stereotypical characters and the beloved lab sequence, using some of the original electrical machinery developed and used by Kenneth Strickfaden in the original movies. It was a delight and most fans embraced the movie for the nostalgia it brought.
Across the pond, British studio World Film Services produced a spoof on vampire movies and called it Vampira (1974). After the success of Young Frankenstein, American International Pictures, seeing a golden marketing opportunity, distributed it with a new name, Old Dracula for the United States release. Fans saw it for what it was: a title-play rip-off which lacked the charm and endearment Young Frankenstein had brought. The movie was a very seventies adventure with a sixties air with David Niven as Old Dracula adding a sense of class to an otherwise cheap attempt to copy the success of Mel Brooks’ loving tribute. The two movies were often played together as a double bill.
So, here are radio spots for both movies. Mel Brooks gives a proper approach to his spots which highlight the comedic aspects. A “Wolfman Jack” soundalike (or maybe it is he!) pitches Old Dracula. Looking back, one can see which one is remembered and loved.
Dr. Fronkensteen! Igor! Inga! Frau Blucher! Elizabeth! The Monster! Walk This Way! Dracula! Vampira! Young Frankenstein and Old Dracula!
Old Dracula
Young Frankenstein
After listening to the Wrath of Kahn radio spots, I hunted down this souvenir book that was lost in the nebula that is my closet. After Star Trek: The Motion Picture managed to earn enough money and then some to justify a sequel, Paramount green-lit a second movie, but with a reduced budget. The second movie, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn, was a more energetically paced and tense cat-and-mouse battle of wits between Kirk and an old foe, ending on a daring and very depressing climax for many fans. It cost around 13 million to produce, but took in close to a 100 million dollars. Less than the first movie, but with the lower budget, it did make a greater profit. Helping shaving the production costs down, sets from the first movie were redressed and reused, and ILM reused models and flipped and modified an existing design for the Reliant. The costuming, thankfully, got a more nautical military look to fit the ‘Horatio Hornblower in space’ drama that Nicholas Meyer was going for. The Graphics Group at ILM (which would later become Pixar) also created the Genesis Effect, a 67 second animation demo of Genesis that took ten artists months to produce (web sources say two years). It was the first computer-generated sequence in a movie. A light-sensitive pen on a special screen was used to draw directly into a Cray supercomputer to render the fractal landscape and particle wave sweeping over the planet. Even today it still stands out. By 1985, Young Sherlock Holmes would introduce the first fully CGI character, also by ILM, designed by John Lasseter. For an exciting and informative book on the best original Star Trek movie, read Allan Asherman’s The Making of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn.
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I started off hating B.D. Prince’s 13 Ghastly Tales. Then I liked them. It oddly started around Jaadu. I’m a sucker-punched softie for carnival and railroad stories, seems he is too. Then I noticed his approach with each story, heated a little with campfire scares, then spun a lot from 1950s comic book horror conciseness, and glazed with a simple but jolting ending. His characters start lean and gristled around the chops, then take on meaty weight as they hustle to whatever horror digests them. Short and sour best sums it all up. There is flash fiction here too that also bites.
So, about that Jaadu. Prince mentions Cole Bros. Circus briefly but it immediately hooks me—all ready and gutted to be pan-fried—because I have a nostalgic connection to Cole Bros. as they were a long-running tented circus here on Long Island. But Emma Wilson and her husband are not visiting Cole Bros., just a smaller circus outside of town. A midway barker grabs their attention while they munch their popcorn and they are quickly swept into the oddities tent. Emma is particularly caught up with all the stifling strangeness and that bizarre bovine with two heads and five legs. Poor Emma. She just so badly wants to have a baby. A common element in each of these stories is a longing, a desire, a need. Amazing how much horror can come from those three simple things. …
The 12-page pressbook for National General’s The Light at the Edge of the World (1971) from It Came From Hollywood. Paul says: “It’s a pretty standard NG pressbook, pretty low on frills, but it did come with one outstanding item you didn’t often find within a pressbook. It is a theater herald mock-up with fantastic artwork, and printed on parchment paper. I’ve included a scan of the herald along with a photo. The scan kind of flattens out the greatness of the herald, so I included a photo so people could get a finer look at it. This is another one of those books I’ve had for years but only recently cracked-open to do a scan on. The herald was in the middle of the book, so I had no idea it was there.”
Not a box office fire cracker, this Spanish-American adventure movie was a passion project for Kirk Douglas. Based on the Jules Verne novel, the script turned much darker as pirates mix it up with shipwrecked survivors. The movie adds a female character not in the novel, Arabella, played by Samantha Eggar. It’s a period film set in 1865 centered around a lighthouse. The pirates screw up the light to wreck ships and collect the floating booty. Kirk Douglas as Denton aims to rescue Arabella and stop the pirates. The captain leading the more brutish pirates is Kongre (Yul Brynner), and, of course, he’s cultured but sadistic (a character that Brynner could easily pull off).
Just given what I wrote above, the movie is well worth a watch, but just not one for the 1970s, a decade when movies were transitioning in the New Hollywood. Hard to say what killed the buzz on the movie, but period films were plentiful in the 1970s. By 1975, the birth of the blockbuster kicked in too. While marketed as a Jules Verne adventure, it was not suitable for family audiences given its darker and violent tone and scenes, although the U.S. release to theaters was edited to PG, so the re-editing, the poor miniature work, and the overall tone of an “older” movie, at a time when younger audiences were taking up more seats in theaters, pretty much ran the movie aground. …
The Light at the Edge
of the World (1971)
PressbookRead More »
You have to love the movie titles in the 60s and 70s. Today the title would be more like Door to Door Dangerously Manic Person, which doesn’t quite carry the immediate emotional concern that “maniac” carries. Special thanks go to our resident maniac Paul, at It Came From Hollywood, for this and his research that follows.
“According to the AFI catalog, “Door to Door Maniac” (also known as “Five Minutes to Live“) started production in March 1957. After three years of production and less than 30 days of filming between 1960 and 1961, the movie premiered in Dallas, Texas, in December 1961. The less than 30 days of actual filming make sense if you’ve seen the picture. The three years it was in some form of production is the real head scratcher.
“Produced by Flower Film Productions, a “one and done” production company headed by a mysterious figure known as Ludlow Flower. I say mysterious because Ludlow Flower left no trace that he even existed on planet Earth outside of this motion picture, save for a few mentions in some unclassified documents released by the F.B.I. concerning organized crime. Draw your own conclusions on that one. …