Pressbooks (Horror, Sci Fi, Fantasy)

I’m reposting this pressbook, with new and improved images, to coincide with Granny Creech’s House on Haunted Hill radio spots. Lots of promotion in this Allied Artists pressbook, including News About Emergo.

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House on Haunted Hill (1959) PressbookRead More »

The pressbook for Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks is only four pages, 11 by 17 inches, but the illustrations are really pretty good and they help sell a movie that needed more visual and script goodness devoted to it. As it stands, assuming you don’t poke your eyes out half-way through, it is a fun romp with a little alcohol consumption to loosen up your critical faculties. It falls into the category of it’s really bad, but cheeky enough to make it worthwhile to see. If you can see it with friends, even better. Make a party of it, pour the wine but hold the cheeses. The movie has enough of them. How you can put Michael Dunn and Rossano Brazzi together and come away with this weird tale is a self-study course in what bad movies are all about. Even the director, Dick Randall, is questionable. No one really knows who directed it. Dick’s a fake (now I’m thinking how many times I can say Dick in this article and get away with it, all legit like).

So what if it’s “one of the trashiest horror movies produced in Italy in the 1970s” (Roberto Curti, Italian Gothic Horror Films, 1970-1979), trash can still be fun. What does Roberto know that we don’t? Well, yeah, he’s an expert film historian and all that. But anyway, what’s very interesting is the stapled, typed notice on the cover. There’s some questionable moments in the movie that are definitely not PG, so not sure who went to lunch during the ratings screening, but the note is a tad off.

Ook, the giant running amok killing people, is Salvatore Baccaro, but they gave him the name Boris Lugosi in the credits. Now that’s a movie I’d love to see: someone cloning Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi and a tragic lab accident renders them one-half each of the same body. Wild, right? I got dibs on the screenplay.

This La Isla de la Muerte Mexican lobby card is big, coming in at 17 by 24.5 inches. I have a fondness for Mexican lobby cards that have an illustration mimicked in the inset photo (or is it vice versa?).  Baron von Weser (I’d pronounce it vun-weeeeeezer for dramatic effect) keeps people-eating plants on his island in this Allied Artists Pictures production. AAP was a subsidiary of Monogram Pictures. Cameron Mitchell played the baron. Mel Welles (another name that trips off the tongue) directed. He also did Little Shoppe of Horrors and Lady Frankenstein. Mitchell’s voice was dubbed for the English version. Go figure.

The third entry into the Mad Max franchise, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome boasts a good soundtrack ,Tina Turner, and a chart-topping song, We Don’t Need Another Hero. It also boasts one of the rare times that critic Roger Ebert awarded four stars to a science fiction post-apocalyptic actioner. Like he said, “the fight between Mad Max and Master-Blaster is one of the great creative action scenes in the movies.” This Columbia-EMI-Warner British pressbook isn’t too shabby either. You wouldn’t think a movie like this would get promotional items like a crossword, maze, word search, and spot the difference newspaper competitions, but there you go. At a $10,000,000 cost, the movie netted $36,000,000 at the box office, though less money than its two predecessors. Its effect on popular culture in general, and the apocalyptic, dystopian, and wild hairdos in future movies? Priceless.

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Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)
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An intriguing movie from the cold war era (or rather, the first one), The 27th Day involves an alien from a dying planet giving five persons the ability to destroy human life on a massive scale. Is it a test? Is it a trick? Directed by William Asher, who did a lot of television-episode directing for I love Lucy and Bewitched, and a screenplay by John Mantley (author of the novel), who went on to write for Gunsmoke, The Wild Wild West, and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, the story has themes of global destruction, communism, and political tensions that are still relevant today. William Asher also directed the AIP beach party films of the 1960s and a forgotten slasher called Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker 1981 (check out Moria for more information). The one shot of the alien spaceship interior is taken from Earth vs. The Flying Saucers (both that movie and this one were produced by Columbia).

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The 27th Day (1957) PressbookRead More »

If ever a movie needed a horror host, it would Reptilicus, a Danish import distributed by AIP. Bill Warren in his Keep Watching the Skies! American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties (okay, so it wasn’t American or the 1950s but…), unloaded both barrels in his usual stye. “Reptilicus has the dubious distinction of being a movie so bad American International almost refused to distribute it.” The monster twist here is that if any part of Reptilicus survives it regenerates the rest. As in The Giant Claw, the monster is a puppet, with “the body…dragged around by the head.” He goes on to mention that Reptilicus flew in the European prints of the film, but they were cut for the American release. Some suing went on between AIP and Sid Pink (he wrote the story and co-directed) over the originally delivered movie, and then some suing went on between Sid Pink and AIP and Monarch Books after the novelization hit the bookshelves. Apparently the novelization was rather racy containing “lewd, lascivious and wanton desire…” Of course, none of that was in the movie, unfortunately. You be the judge! I think a double bill viewing with this and The Giant Claw should be mandatory.

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Reptilicus (1961) PressbookRead More »