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.
Here are the various radio spots for The Incredible Shrinking Man.
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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Crazy Gary here with part two of our Sword and Sandal extravaganza…(see part one).
Summer, 1959, was a turning point for a lot of monsterkids. A movie opened which fired our imaginations and introduced us to a new type of movie. I’m talking about the movie Hercules which got a lot of us interested in weight training and classical literature, especially Greek mythology.
Starring an unknown –at least to us–actor named Steve Reeves, the movie was complete with heroes, beautiful scantily-clad women, fighting, adventures at sea, ape men, a dinosaur that roared like Godzilla, and many feats of strength. The music was awe-inspiring. And Steve Reeves…wow, was he built. Every guy wanted to look like him. Turns out he was a former Mr. America, Mr. World, and Mr. Universe.
I was only nine when I first saw it, and by the time it had finished its run in the second-run theaters, I had seen it twelve times. I even received the Hercules soundtrack record for Christmas that year.
In the summer of 1960, Hercules Unchained was released and I saw it many times, too. By then, Steve Reeves was a worldwide star and both movies were box office hits. Articles on Steve Reeves and his training methods regularly appeared in the muscle magazines of the time.
Reeves went on to star in several more “Sword and Sandal” type films and his last one, A Long Ride From Hell, was a western. By the end of his career, the term “sword and sandal” referred to any movie set in antiquity, primarily Rome or Greece. Within that genre there were two types of movies: one where the hero possessed great strength and went about righting wrongs. He could be Hercules, Samson, Ursus, Maciste, Goliath (see last week’s article about the two “Goliath” movies), or one of the Sons of Hercules. The other type was where the hero was a regular guy, often a great warrior or Roman soldier, but possessing no exceptional strength. Two of Reeves’ movies stand out in the latter category: Duel of the Titans, with Gordon Scott, and The Slave. …
Here’s my review for Threshold by Murphy St. John that appeared in The Horror Zine.
Malcolm is having a rough night. First there is the suicide in the apartment next to his, smelling up the place, and then when he tries to wheelbarrow the body as far away from his nose as he can, his mouth suddenly tastes salt water and his feet are slipping on a sandy beach. The jungle nearby clues him in on the something-is-wrong possibility. Of course, he soon learns he is dead too, but that turns out to be the least of his problems.
Murphy St. John keeps pushing the threshold for Malcolm and his fellow bewildered travelers he meets in this self-published novel, aptly titled Threshold. I will state up front that the book is good, with a fast, pulp-style pace, is descriptively weird enough with ample monsters to beset them—especially if you are into religious-based nightmares—and certainly well worth your summer reading time spent alongside a nice cold glass of lemonade (or, if you prefer, in the fall, with a nice cup of hot tea). I felt I needed to say this now because self-publishing has a stigma attached to it for some readers, but Threshold is not problematic regarding editing or writing cred, not one bit.
But the problems Malcolm and his confused companions face are definitely a mix of unpleasant things, following one after the other. Ellis, Annette, Cameron, Doug, and Travis, each with a good reason bad enough to get them running room only in limbo, have to face various challenges orchestrated by Thalia, a mask-wearing demi-god, with demonic leanings and a tight schedule to keep. Winning each challenge, to work together to survive, gets them further up the celestial sphere so they can go back to the living, properly chastened. Losing means a fast trip to the hot basement of endless torment.
So, of course, they start fighting among themselves as much as they try to outlast Thalia’s dark minions, the frayed, and her wicked games of damnation. All of which provides the story’s momentum through dialog, puzzling solutions, and escalating fraying nerves and tempers. Interestingly, St. John set up Malcolm in the beginning—will he or won’t he survive, what’s his story anyway?—as something of a leader for the group, but then St. John twists Malcolm to a different direction; one decidedly more downward leaning. Another takes his leadership role to keep everything together (as in body parts) and moving forward. Bodies and minds begin to buckle under the strain of trying to stay alive, which paradoxically, in their cases, means less dead, and trying to figure out where each portal is to the next dire situation before the frayed gobble them up.
Like in a video game with multi-levels, each win or loss brings with it a new terror-filled scenario to surmount. St. John creates his symbolic monsters based on the sins each person has committed, although they cannot remember those sins, as Thalia reminds them, “whether you remember or not, you’re in my domain for a reason. Rehabilitation.” She has a funny sense of rehabilitation.
In Greek mythology, Thalia was one of the Muses, presiding over comedy and idyllic poetry. Clearly, St. John’s Thalia is not in that family. She has none of that refinement, unless black comedy, and a penchant for deathtraps like you see in the Saw movie franchise could be called poetic. But that is not to say there is gore because the action is more sardonic than gratuitously bloody. St. John makes both monsters and victims players in a grander scheme involving redemption versus damnation, with both acting as pawns. His limbo is a dark landscape filled with trapped people looking for souls to leverage their escape, and a lot of doom and gloom to spice it all up. And always at Malcolm’s and the others’ heels are the frayed, dark things that devour everything in the wink of an eye, employed by Thalia to keep things lively.
Malcolm and the others also have a mystery to solve: what ties them altogether? Slowly, memories return and past deeds reveal themselves, but they are running out of time and as Thalia clarifies it for them, “You’re all on the express train to hell.” Lucky for us, St. John makes it one hell of a ride.
Here’s the exciting pressbook for The Lodger (1944) with Laird Cregar. It’s almost as big as he was. As David J. Hogan in his Film Noir FAQ notes, while some consider this a remake of Hitchcock’s The Lodger (1927), only the name and the Jack the Ripper storyline match to the previous film. Both, however, are based on the 1913 novel of the same name by Marie Belloc Lowndes. In this one, Cregar uses his immense stage presence (both figuratively and literally), and his piercing eyes, to create a multi-dimensional character that vacillates between sinister and innocuous, innocent and guilty, with a definitely male-gaze problem toward women and his dead brother. The last minutes of the chase through the catwalks of a theater provide a thrilling noir backdrop and pace. The fog-bound streets, darkly lit byways, and confined spaces filmed entirely on the Fox backlot give this noir a classic status. Unfortunately, Cregar’s body size kept him from being a leading man and he died from trying to lose enough weight to open up those roles for him. He was 31.
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I have a confession to make. I’m addicted to Peplum. That’s right. There’s nothing more exhilaratingly earthy than a super-strong brawny guy in loincloth kicking ass and tossing around large objects like they were wiffle balls. Whether he’s fighting mythological monsters, fighting his way out of Hades with a swooning woman tossed over his shoulder, or rippling his dew-dappled muscles against enemies and assorted monsters, I’m in Heaven. It’s a guilty pleasure.
Maciste Against the Vampire became Goliath and the Vampires for AIP to provide a sequel, of sorts, to their box office hit, Goliath and the Barbarians, starring Steve Reeves. Bringing sword and sandal movies over from Italy proved a profitable endeavor for AIP.
I grew up watching sword and sandal movies on television every Sunday. Steve Reeves and Gordon Scott were big, handsome, and always in command. Although they gave me one hell of an inferiority complex they still provided a lot of wholesome, he-man action against the supernatural and the bad guys.
Maybe I should confess…I have a weakness for Mexican masked wrestlers, too… …