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)
Extend your arm and open your hand, and imagine this tabloid-sized herald being distributed in theaters to promote the movie and you are about to take one. Now we have popcorn and drink container promos to hype today’s movies. Yes, I do collect them too! I was bummed to not get the Beetlejuice shrunken head drink container (sold out), but I still enjoyed the movie. But these paper heralds were free and, frankly, awesome. Now, that is. I’m sure no one back then was thinking about posterity and collecting such giveaway fare with an eye toward the future.
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What the movie lacks in special effects and storyline, this sales brochure for Konga makes up for with exciting graphic style. I love the synopsis on the second page, which includes “Sandra falls into some mysterious man-eating plants.” The first page is a die-cut showing only Konga’s eyes, a nice pricey printing touch. There was a fascination with apes, as primal terror or comic relief, to scare and cheer audiences from the early days of Hollywood, beginning with 1918’s Tarzan of the Apes, up until the 1970s. Of course, the usual primate sidekick did still appear, here and there, in movies. Monkeys could be pretty scary too, but apes have the size and bulk more suitable for being visually menacing; and, let’s face it, look funnier dressed in human clothing.
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Zombos Says: Good (for gore and Trash Cinema fans, mostly)
We were in the cinematorium discussing what the hell Hobo With a Shotgun was about. I love Rutger Hauer, and he’s perfect in the role of Hobo, with his craggy face and sparkly eyes under all that grizzle, but really, what the hell?
“Hey, where’d Zombos go?” he asked.
“He left during the busload of children fricasseed by the flamethrower interlude,” I said.
Trash cinema isn’t Zombos’ usual thing anyway, especially when it concerns fricasseeing kids. Come to think of it, it isn’t mine either.
While not as sexually outrageous and bizarre as Tokyo Gore Police or as repulsive as Street Trash, Jason Eisener and writers do a wild job that comes close, saturating this golden turkey with over the rainbow colors, plotting an absurd predicament even Albert Camus would find mind-numbing, and serving up a heapful of over the top—and under the bottom—caricatures.
There’s a golden-hearted hooker (Molly Dunsworth), a hobo with a dream of owning a lawn mower (to start a lawn mowing business, of course), and The Drake (Brian Downey), a criminal boss crushing the heart and soul out of Hope Town to create his own Scum Town. It’s silly, stupid, insulting, crazy, trashy, exploitative, and quite aware of all these things. Not to be taken seriously, it is seriously grindhouse as the blood flows, heads roll, and blacklight poster situations increasingly take on the look and feel of a psychedelic-fueled withdrawal.
“So, what did you think?” asked Paul Holstenwall, purveyor of the midnight run of filmdom, running his hands through his long black hair. His blue eyes beamed at me expectantly. He had mired our attention on this one.
I took a deep breath. “I have conflicted feelings about it. Hobo With a Shotgun is like passing a bong around, with each toke building to a highpoint of intoxication only to eventually downslide into nausea.”
“Exactly! That’s the beauty of it. It’s mired in dirty realism and transgressive angst,” beamed Paul.
Maybe to a Charles Bukowski fan, I thought, but didn’t voice my assumption. My impression pretty much formed when Abby, the heart-of-gold hooker with a bear fetish, gets her hand mowed off, then uses the boney stump to stab The Drake again and again. I admit there’s a sense of poetic justice tucked away in there somewhere, but it’s buried under the gore and screams. Irony and sardonic mawkishness go ozone when Hobo walks into the Pawn Til Dawn pawn shop and sees his heart’s desire, a lawn mower for $49.99. There’s nothing that says ‘home’ more than a freshly mowed lawn. To get the money he lets a sleaze-ball (Pasha Ebrahimi) with lots of cash and a video camera tape him getting his teeth knocked out by another bum. Money in hand, just when he’s about to pay for the mower, schizo-robbers come in and threaten a mom and her baby.
The shotgun hanging on the wall in back of the counter is also $49.99. He makes the tough choice all trash cinema heroes must eventually make. So instead of mowing grass he mows down bad guys, cleaning up the streets one shell at a time.
In-between the hospital hangings, the manhole cover necklaces, the mobs turning against hobos, and the Plague Twins showdown—motorcycle creepizoids dressed in Boilerplate—Abby, the hooker and hobo’s only friend, spends a lot of time with blood on her face, and hobo finds out if he can solve the world’s problems with a shotgun bought at $49.99, shells gratis.
Of course, if this movie was called Hobo With a Lawn Mower, things might have been different.
“The Creature is back! He needs a doctor! A plastic surgeon. He’s been touched to the quick…slowly. It’s a sad tale, the creature who walks among us sings. He is the last of the strolling troubadours…the very end. Listen as he sings, ‘Who is the fairest one of all?’”
Most monsterkids will recognize that little intro from the album Themes From Horror Movies by Dick Jacobs and his Orchestra. The intro, written by Mort Goode and narrated by Bob McFadden, sets the scene for the theme “Stalking the Creature” from Universal’s 1956 entry The Creature Walks Among Us (1956). I was listening to this worn-out album this past week, reliving in my old mind the scenes these themes accompanied. What visuals they conjure up!
I had an idea: I went over to the Witchwood Cemetery to visit my old friend, The Radio Reaper. I found him in his tomb, doing some much-needed housekeeping.
“Reaper,” I said, “I’m looking for some old spots to a certain movie. Do you have The Creature Walks Among Us?”
A gleam lit up his old sunken eyes and a smile came across his withered lips.
“I believe I do. Let’s see.” he said.
He grabbed his old reliquary and blew off the dust. He opened it, thumbed through some things, and pulled out a red, 12” record.
“Here you go,” he said and handed it to me.
“Wow!” I exclaimed. “Only four spots?”
“Yep,” he replied. “I guess they figured the public knew who the Creature was and what they could expect.”
I thanked him and went on my way.
The movie is the third installment of the Creature franchise, the first two being Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954) and Revenge of the Creature (1955). This time around scientists, led by Jeff Morrow and Rex Reason, attempt to capture the Gill-man again, this time in the Florida Everglades, in an effort to study him up close. After they examine a sample of his blood, Morrow goes off the deep end and decides to try and develop a new species through blood and genetic manipulation. While hunting the creature, they soon become the hunted, and the creature jumps into their small boat, gets shot by two spears containing the anesthetic rotonone, and accidently douses himself with gasoline. Gregg Palmer’s character throws a gasoline lamp at him which ignites him. Falling into the water, they soon rescue him, his body now covered in third-degree burns and having trouble breathing. They take him back to their science yacht where they discover that his scales and gills have been burned away but that he possesses human-type skin underneath and a rudimentary set of lungs. His eyes mutate into human-like eyes and his body shape changes, due to his inflated lungs (and to match the drawing we see of him early in the movie showing a much bulkier creature than we have previously known). The creature is provided clothing to cover his sensitive skin and is eventually locked in an electrified enclosure where he observes man’s inhumanity to man – and woman. Out of fear he escapes, and the last we see of him he is staring remorsefully at the ocean before slowly making his way to it.
Don Megowan gives a heartfelt, emotional portrayal of the creature, mostly through eye movement and body language. We feel sorry for him as he tries to adjust to a new land environment and to learn the good and evil ways of his captors. The movie uses a lot of underwater footage from the two previous movies and some new underwater scenes with Ricou Browning, this time in the old suit and in the new suit.
Here now are the four spots as Creature fans heard them in 1956. So, dive in…and enjoy.
Just missing the creepy ambiance of Spirit Halloween, Home Depot still manages enough animatronics to keep the spirit of terror going strong each year. This year’s must have monster is, of course, Frankenstein’s creation. Here’s hoping HD keeps the theme going with Creature from the Black Lagoon and Dracula (Bela or bust!) I’ve snapped a few pics of my favs for you to oggle at while you dream of never-ending storage space.
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It’s 3am in the darkened all-night Stardust Bijou theater. Time when the popcorn is well past soggy, the soda is quite flat, and the motionless people in the front row have stayed long past their bedtime. The projector starts, sounding like a lonely werewolf howling at the waning moon, and the images, flickering across the screen, start to come alive.
Something in Martin’s Basement
by J.M. Cozzoli
Friday 10:30am, July 8th, 1940
Ancilla Scott was typing as fast as she could. I was dictating as slow as possible. We still were not meeting anywhere near the middle so the letter was taking a lot longer than I had planned. I sipped my coffee and thought of various ways I would like to take her pretty blond head and chop it off. Then again, maybe it would be more satisfying if I took the red scarf she wore around her pale neck and strangled her with it. No. Too much effort and I liked her as a person, just not as my secretary; and trying to get her corpse down the Chrysler Building’s elevators would be a nightmare. I had enough of those to deal with already: nightmares, not corpses.
“Why don’t we take a break?” I recommended. She sighed with relief.
“I’ll file these, then,” she smiled in that soft, raspy, voice of hers that made me think she was a heavy smoker, but I never saw her light up. She grabbed the folders on her desk, got up with determination, and then walked over to the filing cabinet. I usually refiled the folders after she left for the day, otherwise I would never find anything. As she opened the top drawer I imagined I could just push her head in and slam the drawer shut real hard a few times. I shrugged and retreated from the outer office to my own desk. I read in the pulps that private investigators sat at their desks with their feet propped up, waiting for clients. At least I could do that. I could also watch Ancilla through the tinted glass, in the outer office, at her desk, imagining she was a real secretary.
The sound of the door from the hallway opening was followed by Ancilla saying hello. She walked Captain Raphael Ligotti of the NYPD into my office. …
I’ll be blunt. I never liked John Carradine as Dracula. His stagey opera cape and top hat, wild-eyed approach left me thinking more Snidely Whiplash than Count Dracula, royalty to the undead. I will admit to loving one scene, though: in House of Frankenstein, when he hypnotizes Anne Gwynne with his ring, well, that scene is awesome. He plays it perfectly and generates such a sinister persona, I just wish he had carried that throughout his stint as Dracula.
But what an actor for other roles, especially as the bright spot in the bad movies he appeared in. A New York boy, he made his first appearance on stage in Camille, a New Orleans production. He was a painter and got his start working for Cecil B. DeMille, doing scenic art in Hollywood. That led to acting roles in DeMille’s films, branching out to directors like John Ford and Victor Fleming. In the 1940s he moved over to horror films (The Horror People, John Brosnan, St. Martin’s Press).
Billy the Kid vs Dracula was a terrific idea. Horror Westerns are few and far between, but can provide a large landscape for terror. Unfortunately, not much of that landscape is used creatively in this one. If you want to see a really good vintage vampire western, catch Curse of the Undead. Still, with John Carradine involved, I can always watch him in action, even as Dracula.
It Came From Hollywood sent along these cool-looking lobby cards (though the coloration seems more suited for Ib Melchior’s The Angry Red Planet).
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Hello, My Children,
Your old Granny is back after attending to my ailing mother. She is better and is now able to function on her own, bless her heart.
Many thanks go out to my nephew, Crazy Gary, for keeping The Crypt functioning in my absence. I hear he did a pretty good job, and the spots he highlighted were well received. He’s a good nephew, even though he is crazy at times. I will forgive him for snooping on my computer because last week’s installment was pretty good. I had never heard many of those spots and they were pretty good! He did good….and yes, after much screaming, pleading, begging and stomping around, I promised him he could do more columns in the near future.
I had a lot of free time while Mother napped and recovered, so I was able to catch up on my reading and movie watching. The Late, Late, Late, Early Show on Channel 13 featured some oldies I hadn’t seen for awhile and one in particular stood out. When I got back to my humble abode I searched through The Crypt and, again, thanks to The Radio Reaper, I found the spots to that movie. So, this week I’m featuring the original radio spots to Universal’s The Incredible Shrinking Man.
Based on Richard Matheson’s story idea/novel The Shrinking Man, it is considered one of Universal’s best, and is a special effects bonanza and a treat to watch. Clifford Stein and crew used every trick in the book for this one including forced perspective shots, high and low camera angles, rear projection process shots, split screens, sets with oversized props, and traveling mattes. Rotoscope artist Millie Winebrenner had her hands full combining split screen and forced perspective shots and having Grant Williams walk from one into the other, and having the shrinking man fight and eventually walk behind the dead spider. I’m sure fans back then wondered, “How did they do that?” many times. The special effects team put in an admirable effort with much pre-planning involved to make sure eye line-ups matched and that when the traveling mattes of Scott stepped up to a higher plane they matched the live action plate.
Even though I love spiders…I have two tarantulas, Charlotte and Arachne, I must say I was more on the edge of my seat during the cat scene. It was very well done, and Butch the cat (performed by Orangey) put in a great performance. His trainer put him through his actions and Grant Williams’ reactions were filmed later to match.
This is the one movie that didn’t have a happy ending as such. At the end, The Incredible Shrinking Man resigns himself to his fate and realizes that, in the great scheme of things, to God, there is no zero and that he still matters.
The great Orson Welles narrates the radio spots. They are good, although different than what we are used to hearing. Give a listen and, if you can, catch this movie. It is a feast for the eyes.
 
Old Crazy Gary here again…Granny is still taking care of her ailing mother but she hopes to be back here soon.
I was just sitting around the other night reading my newest book when I decided to take a break and snoop through Granny’s computer to see what she has in store for the coming weeks. Wow! What a line-up! Anyways, I saw a folder titled The Radio Reaper and I decided to take a peek inside. I know he has been supplying Granny with a bunch of neat stuff, but I wanted to see what all else was in there. Oh boy! I spent the rest of the night going through over 2000 spots of all kinds from all genres. I had a ball.
I heard spots from horror and science fiction movies I was familiar with and some I was not. I wrote down the names of the ones I thought were especially good and thought you should hear them. These are crazy good and have received the “Five Thumbs-up Crazy Gary Approval Rating”.
Granny would more than likely never feature these because they are not from the 1950-63 time frame she specializes in but they are too good to pass up. They will make you shudder; they will make you scream; they will make you want to see them; they are that good.
So listen, if you dare, to these tidbits from The Radio Reaper’s Reliquary. They will haunt you forever!
13 Terror Radio Spots for Alligator, Crocodile, Midnight, The Bat People, The Black Belly of the Tarantula, The Legend of Spider Forest, The Projected Man, and The Twilight People.
I was happy to see a Spirit Halloween store, by me, open up this early. Every year they do a nifty store display and carry a ton of merry terror merch to lighten your wallet and clutter up your living space. But such clutter! Along with the dark carnival theme for 2024, there’s more merch that would give Lurch a backache. One hot item for monsterkids, a Frankenstein’s monster bust, looks like it is selling out. I saw one lonely Frankie on the shelf. Where’s Dracula I ask? Here are highlights of what caught my eyes. …
Loved watching his movies every Sunday (along with the Abbott and Costello movies) on television. Reeves was born in Montana. Here’s a quote attributed to him from IMDb:
Filmmaking in Europe was a little different from working in the United States. There’s a scene in ‘Hercules’ where I’m in chains — they looked like steel, but they were actually made of wood — and I had to swing these chains at my supposed enemies who were advancing towards me. Well, I didn’t want to really strike someone so I kind of held back with my motions. The director yelled, ‘Swing those chains! Swing them hard!’ I said, ‘I don’t want to hurt someone.’ And the director yelled back, ‘If they don’t get hurt, they don’t get paid!’
Growing up, I wanted to look like Steve Reeves. Then I wanted to look like Gordon Scott. Then I gave up and just enjoyed watching their movies. You can, too (either looking like them or watching their peplum movies) Either would have made a superb Superman with muscle not built into their rubber suits.
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