Here's what I'm waiting for on The Walking Dead: someone wearing a luchador mask kicking zombie butt. Come on, people! In a world filled with zombies, how can you NOT have a person in a luchador mask kicking zombie butt?
Women and monsters: What would horror and science fiction be without them? Here’s the minimalist Mexican lobby card for La Nave De Los Monstruos.
My favorite Johnny Weismuller Tarzan movie: Tarzan's New York Adventure. This Mexican lobby card shows him enjoying the luxury of indoor plumbing.
Here's a wholesome Mexican lobby card for Roy Roger's Down Dakota Way. Note how Trigger, his horse, gets top billing above Dale Evans and Pat Brady. I bet they worked for hay too. I was never a big fan of Rogers, mostly of Gene Autry (the Singing Cowboy). Don't forget it was Autry who gave us Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. Of course, the rest is history.
I've probably seen every Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan movie at least four times. They'd pop up every weekend on local television (Sunday, I recall), along with Abbott and Costello movies. In this one, the natives truly are restless, causing much mayhem for Jane and Boy. I hear a new reboot of the Tarzan storyline is coming from Hollywood. I'm sure they'll muck it up with the usual flair for petulant-scripting you get from writers unfamiliar with how to handle a particular genre. Like jungle movies. Back in the 1940s, there was an aura of mystery and danger you could play with. Today, if Tarzan's not carrying a cell phone and selfie-stick, I'd wonder what the hell was wrong with him.
Caught this movie for the first time during a Famous Monsters Convention (I think it was an FM con) back in the 1970s. Hilarious movie. Photography and scenes are splendid.
It's the buccaneer's life for me in 2016. Swinging around the yardarm all day. Clinging tightly to platinum blond slave girls (with impeccable couture) while wielding my rapier with deft and deadly aim. And you get to wear awesome high boots and poofy shirts with floppy sleeves to work. Perfect.
Here's the beautifully illustrated Mexican lobby card for Tarzan Escapes (1936), La Fuga De Tarzan.
One of the most evocative Mexican lobby cards I've seen, Los Hermanos Del Hierro is mesmerizing in its direct simplicity and expressive illustration. Does it remind you of a Night Gallery painting like it does for me?
What confounded me when watching James Whale's The Invisible Man was how the formula ingested wasn't invisible itself. How could simply drinking a concoction turn you invisible? The 1940's The Invisible Woman side-stepped that by having the invisibility process induced by a machine designed by a slightly eccentric professor (John Barrymore). This imaginative Mexican lobby card is for 1958's Invisible Man in Mexico (aka The New Invisible Man), El Hombre Que Logro Ser Invisible.
Must have been a hell of a wedding. Here's another shameless example of exploitative promotion. You never see guys in ripped clothing lying unconscious in some big ape's arms do you? Here's the pressbook.
Here's more stuff in the closet to go ape over:
Amazing how all these jungle guys fighting lions, tigers, and assorted beasts never seem to get scratched, mauled, or serious f'd up. Hell, the urban jungle's apparently a lot worse if you go by these movies.