From Zombos' Closet

Professor Kinema's Horror Hosts In Magazines

By Professor Kinema (Jim Knusch)

In the 'golden age'- the late 1950s and early 1960s- of monster fandom a lot was happening. A generation weaned on television and made fearful of the evils of communism and the reality of nuclear war was coming of age. That is, they were into their teens. Both the USA and Great Britain began to resurrect (in more ways than one) and breathe a new life into many of these classic monsters in updated productions for the big screen. These new offerings were embellished with color and gore. Life magazine of Nov 11, 1957 featured a two page spread promoting new and upcoming horror and sci-fi releases from American-International Pictures. Big screen horror and monsters were in. Vintage horror movies, especially of the 1930s, were finding a welcome audience on the tube. This acceptance was so strong that it led to a repackaging of select titles being syndicated and offered weekly under the title of SHOCK! The SHOCK! TV package was seen in some areas as SHOCK THEATRE, NIGHTMARE and HOUSE OF HORROR. As was suggested by the SHOCK! promo book, some of these were hosted locally by bizarre personalities. These personalities in themselves became phenomenally popular. This was evidenced by major pictorial articles in national magazines, hundreds of fan clubs, the marketing of premiums and-most importantly-high TV ratings. To the teenage fan caught up in all of this a trip to the local newsstand would result in the purchase of a comic book, a humor magazine or an occasional 'Tales of the Crypt'- type of periodical that was somewhere in between a comic book and pulp magazine. By 1958 something new was added to the racks; the Monster Magazine.

Graphic Book Review: Sweet Tooth, Out of the Deep Woods

Zombos Says: Very Good

Desolation. Uncivilized behavior. Freaky mutations. Must be the post-apocalypse in Jeff Lemire's Sweet Tooth comic series, with the first five issues, Out of the Deep Woods, collected into Vertigo's trade paperback. 

There's more: Gus, who sticks out like a sore thumb with his deer-like antlers and ears; a mysterious stranger, called Jepperd, who rescues Gus from hunters looking for reverse-anthropomorphic mutated kids like Gus; and the "affliction," or plague, or major nasty event that's reduced the human population to a few nasty adult survivors with basic ulterior motives like staying alive at all costs and against all odds.

Raised by his Bible-reading father, Gus must leave the safety found in the woods he's known all his life. As he travels to a sanctuary with Jepperd, a two-fisted, tough as oak and emotionally as thick-skinned man with a bagful of candy and a secret, Gus learns more about the world outside and eventually meets other mutated kids showing different animal characteristics.

There's still more: Gus is nine years old. The affliction started seven years ago. So how can he be affected by mutation before the world was sent to places deep south by the contagion? It's a puzzle that Lemire assembles his minimalist but expressive panels around, showing closeups of Gus and the desperate people he meets reacting to each other and the near overwhelming loss surrounding them--and within them. Gus' innocence and naivete, the adults' complicity and duplicity, and the inevitable conflict between the two are dramatically visualized by Lemire with carefully paced and sequenced scenes and sparse narrative and dialog.

I almost passed this one up. I thought the antler-kid story too cute and indie-artsy based on the first issue's cover. I was wrong. It's about self-discovery, overcoming one's fear, and struggling through desperation. It will keep you reading to discover, along with Gus, what the Hell happened, why, and where more candy bars might be found.

LOTT D: Of Gods and Zombies and Holy Damnation

Godforsaken zombies benefit a lot from religion in horror movies and fiction. Ironic, isn't it? Or is it? Perhaps playing the damnation game makes them more attune to that infinite something that lingers over all of us, commands us, delivers us, curses us, or simply ignores us.

The members of the League of Tana Tea Drinkers ponder that old time zombie religion. No collection box money necessary and you won't need to light any candles or bend a knee.

Monster Land glorifies the undead: Beyond the rotting veneer of your everyday reanimated corpse, there lies a host of archaic religious meanings stretching from Christianity to mythology of Ancient Sumer.

TheoFantastique explores infection versus resurrection: Where once they shuffled, now they run. Initially born of forbidden voodoo rituals or the sign of a religious apocalypse, for the past decade zombies have slowly metamorphosed into the by-products of something else entirely.

Groovy Age of Horror resurrects the Final Judgment: Zombies, vampires, Frankenstein monsters, beneficiaries of monkey paw wishes, etc. are generally thought to embody our fears of returning to life from the dead in some wrong way. But is there a right way?

Gospel of the Living Dead preaches zombies and religion: Zombies are probably the most human monsters.

Dr. Gangrene looks at all that flesh eating: The eating of flesh and drinking of blood are staples of horror movies, yet when you think about it they’re also both major themes of Christian theology, as ghoulish as that sounds.

Vault of Horror gobbles up transubstantiation: Just as Christians yearn to take in the power of Christ, and eat his flesh to do so, so does the zombie yearn to absorb the living.

Uranium Cafe wisely ignores religion altogether in The Invisible Invaders: The story, like many of the period, centers around the evils of atomic power and research. Almost anything evil found in the films of this period could find their origins in atomic research gone awry. And how much awry can an experiment go than to have a hand held test tube suddenly erupt into an atomic explosion.

Lost Highway makes sure to include one token rotten zombie movie for our pleasure: A local witch doctor’s daughter dies from some unnamed cancer and so he opens the door to hell for vengeance on the scientists. Usually Hell is only open weekends and Fridays.

Movie Review: Jonah Hex (2010) The Spell is Broken

Zombos Says: Fair (read the comic series instead)

I miss Doctor Miguelito Quixote Loveless (Michael Dunn), the diminutive villain with grand schemes on the 1960s television series The Wild Wild West. He was a villain to reckon with, one far above John Malkovich's burlap sack portrayal of renegade madman Quentin Turnbull in Jonah Hex. Loveless devoted his creatively criminal and misguided scientific genius to endless schemes embellished with his weapons of mass destruction, gleefully challenging government agent James West to stop him each time they crossed paths.

Paths are crossed in Jonah Hex, but they don't seem to head in any sensible direction. They meander around with the artlessness of that silly Wild Wild West movie with Will Smith, then saunter a well-trod vengeance trail much like The Outlaw Josey Whales, and finally stop plumb cold at the usual quest-between-mundane-here and mystical-there with less force than The Crow.

A weapon of mass destruction, created by Eli Whitney no less, figures prominently. They always do. Mysterious glowing balls of fire provide the triggering mechanism for larger balls of fiery, explosive material. Turnbull does a dry run of the weapon's capabilities by blowing up a small town just after church services. He threatens to blow up the nation's capital on the centennial celebration for July 4th. President Grant (Aidan Quinn) conscripts Jonah Hex (Josh Brolin) into hunting down Turnbull and ending the madman's grand scheme. The bad blood between Hex and Turnbull goes back aways: Turnbull killed Hex's family in retribution for Hex causing the death of his son.

Something truly weird happens in this movie and I'm not referring to Megan Fox.

Yet.

A flashback done in comic book format explains, sort of, how the Indians helped Hex survive to become the I-talk-to-the-dead-bounty-hunter-badass wanted by the law. Watching the colorful but limited animation (it brought to mind those Marvel Super Heroes cartoons in the 1960s) I wondered Did they run out of budget? Was this movie originally planned as animation? Why suddenly eschew perfectly good live action for a graphic novel on screen? Why not pepper this lengthy backstory as flashbacks throughout this leisurely-paced movie to make it less onerous?

I thought about this until "I don't play house" Lilah (Megan Fox) and Hex hook up for a bedtime social visit. Then I started thinking Why is she in this movie? Beauty to his ugliness? She doesn’t have much to do, or much to say, or much to act on. Brolin has even less to work with, but he does have a nifty ability to talk to the dead. He just grabs hold of a moldy corpse and it springs to life. But he needs to talk fast because the fresher the corpse, the faster it starts to immolate into ashes. Aside from Hex's orneriness, this appears to be his best and only mystical ability.

Red-tinted fever-dream flashes of him fighting Turnbull around a coffin with a crow sitting on its lid are the only other mystical touches. They don't make sense, but touches they remain. Eventually Hex talks to enough dead people to find Turnbull. Before he meets his nemesis, he stocks up on the usual badass tricky gunnage that can deliver high explosive impact and flailing bodies flying asunder with minimal effort. He gets it from this movie's equivalent of James West's gadget-buddy Artemus Gordon.

Hex and Turnbull and Lilah square-off on an ironclad ship in Independence Harbor as it speeds toward the capital with its deadly weapon preparing to fire. Union soldiers pull up alongside in their version of the ironclad Monitor and ask Turnbull to kindly surrender his weapon of mass destruction and stop being such a damn nuisance. While they wait for his reply, he locks and loads and blows them out of the water in a shower of little ironclad pieces. I was hoping for a better reenactment of the Battle of Hampdon Roads.

The one thing they got right in this movie is when Hex whistles for his horse to come to him.

At least his horse knows what to do.

.

Movie Review: Splice (2009) Missing Some Genes

Zombos Says: Good (but should have been better)

The Frankenstein brothers had it easier back in the day: just rob a few graves, swap a brain or two, dodge the villagers, and they were good to go. For Elsa (Sarah Polley) and Clive (Adrien Brody), two scientists splicing genetic material for the pharmaceutical company funding them it's harder: they need to quickly come up with a profitable benefit from their work for the company's board of directors while avoiding using human DNA in the process to help. There's all that messy ethical, moral, legal, and congressional-folk just itching to light those political-torches falderol if they give into temptation and cut that corner by doing so. But temptation is the bread and butter of horror, of course, and giving in to it is where Splice begins.

The movie cuts some corners also. It's not quite a horror movie, though we do have a metamorphic monster; it's not quite a character study, though there are glimpses into Elsa's troubled family life; and it's not quite a panoply for all those ethical, philosophical, and legal issues waiting to pounce when manipulations, creations, and terminations of human substance are involved; though fragments of this triplet codon are to be found here. This leaves Splice's horror and dramatic genes only partially joined, spread apart by inadequate dialog (thankfully devoid of too much scientific jargon) and a story that neither emphasizes its philosophical dilemmas or craftily avoids them, nor terrorizes us with their details.

Universal Monsters Iron-On Transfers

These are copyright 1992 from Joy Insignia, Inc. and Troll Company (although the graphics show 1991). I picked them up from eBay a while back, when eBay was still an enjoyable place to find interesting monster collectibles.

Not quite as stylish and colorful as the Mani-Yak iron-on transfers, but still worth adorning your t-shirt to strut around a horror convention or two. Click each one for a larger image.

Movie Review: [REC] 2 (2009) Divinely Horrific

If Prince of Darkness married The Exorcist and they conceived a bouncing bundle of terror while watching Bava's Demons, its name would be [REC] 2.

Zombos Says: Very Good

[Rec] 2 picks up immediately where [REC] left us, only this time we are with a 4-man SWAT team waiting to escort another Ministry of Health official, Dr. Owen (Jonathan Mellor), into the locked-down building. Only he knows more than they do.

With one skittish hand-held camera and three helmet minicams worn by the heavily armed police, directors Balaguero  and Plaza criss-cross the action across apartments and up and down the stairwell with reckless abandon, informing us and terrifying us with what we fully see, partially see, and don't see.

Under Dr. Owen's insistence they head to the attic, stepping over pools of blood as they climb the staircase, guns poised. When they reach the attic, he tells them to record everything, including the newspaper clippings taped to the walls. A frightened voice played from a reel to reel tape recorder hints at an experiment gone out of control. Distant screams prompt an argument when the police want to investigate and Dr. Owen tells them not to. Over the doctor's protests and warnings, Martos heads down the staircase and enters one of the apartments. We see what he sees as his helmet minicam switches on. What he sees in the dim light rushes towards him with ill-intent, leaving his helmet on the floor and him fighting for his life. They rush to his aid but it's too late--"He was fine a couple of minutes ago. What kind of a virus does that?"--He's now infected and attacks them. Dr. Owen stops the attack in an unexpected way and they lock Martos in another room.

How the doctor did it leads to an explanation for what is going on, who lived in the attic apartment, and why they must return there to find a potential cure. The police officers are incredulous and fraying at the seems by the minute. The infected tenants want to pry those seems apart even more. Patient Zero, hinted at in the last minutes of [REC], is also in the attic. Only they need to figure out how to find her...And she's not alone...And the old reliable gimmick of using an air duct big enough for an elephant to fit through is used for a scare. At least it's grimy like it should be and the scare is worth it.

[REC] 2 is an old school horror show dressed up with enough exuberantly creative point of view camerawork to keep you dizzy and jumpy at the same time. Unlike its Americanized version, Quarantine, which resorts to a more "plausible" terrorist-weapon plot line to explain the source of contagion, [REC] 2 unabashedly returns to the roots of cinematic horror to overwhelm the apartment building's tenants with a supernatural malevolence that will not be stopped. By kicking old school for their modus operandi, while playing with our perspective  to the point of disorientation, [REC] 2 maintains a freshness and exhilaration that many American horror movie sequels fail to do.

Better keep the popcorn and soda safely cradled while you watch this movie and your seatbelt fastened at all times. It's a bumpy-in-the-night ride, the ending of which leaves [REC] 3 a strong possibility. And if that happens I'm definitely taking Dramamine before I see it.

Comic Book Review: The Littlest Zombie 1

This is part of what makes it hard to get food now. All of the slow, unarmed survivors have already been eaten.

Zombos Says: Good

Fred Perry's plucky undead kid in The Littlest Zombie (from Antarctic Press) is beset by life's--rather, I should say--undead's challenges of finding food in a world with no Stop and Shops but lots of bigger-sized, and often unsatisfied, consumers competing for scraps of fresh brains and sinewy limbs still flailing.

Issue 1 brings frantically struggling paramilitary survivors and patiently struggling zombies together, and the little fellow smack dab in the middle looking for a leg up, or just about any other body part he can sink his rotting teeth in to. His main challenge this time around is one very large zombie that illustrates the when-he-sits-around-the-house joke quite well. The squabbling living folk use him for a door stopper to keep the horde of onlookers away while they fight among themselves. The living's social disorder is hinted at when mention is made of slavers and marauders, and the final decision to sell out others in order to stay off the menu.  Perry only gives us hints of how the living are making do with scant resources, but this may indicate he has a grander scheme in mind for future stories. Perry's art is light-hearted but detailed enough to play off the usual tropes of zombiedom's nastier habits. It's a shame he only has black and white to work with, although he makes more than adequate use of it. Color and zombies make a better match graphically. Nothing says putrescence like green and ochre.

Perry's morality play approach makes his little fellow appealing, and deceptively less threatening then his adult brethren, but also keeps him feisty and hungry enough to stay  zombie cute enough for a plush toy.

Comic Book Review: Turf 1, The Fangs of New York

Zombos Says: Good (in spite of poor page layout)

If you've ever read a Classics Illustrated comic you're familiar with how the artwork is accompanied by large blocks of narrative and copious balloons of dialog in each panel. By today's standards those comics appear too wordy, but these are literary classics that were transferred to a medium their authors didn't normally worry about. To compensate, the panel layouts were carefully designed to accommodate art and text so neither overpowered the other.

Image Comics' Turf issue 1 is like reading a Classics Illustrated story, but without that careful planning of art and text layout. This gives the impression the artwork was done first, then narrative and dialog text were slapped on top, creating an awkward, crowded, and often contentious marriage of both within panels too small to cleanly hold them. Some pages stretch to ten panels, which are then crammed with text, some of which is either unnecessary or could have been better accommodated by choosing a different page layout or approach. How Alan Moore's penchant for verbosity is craftily handled in comics comes to mind. So my question is why didn't Ross and Edwards do a better job of planning their graphic story layout? Jonathan Ross' story is ambitious and well written--for a novel--and Tommy Lee Edwards artwork captures the grit and flap of the roaring 1929 social scene with detailed precision--when you can see it.

Suzie, the society columnist for the Gotham Herald realizes her dream of becoming a bona fide news reporter when European vampires (their progenitor, shown in one panel, looks like Bela Lugosi's Dracula), led by Stefani Dragonmir, move to eliminate the city's gangs and take control of organized crime. Along with her reluctant photographer Dale (why do sidekicks always seem reluctant?) she's heading knee deep into the belly of the beast. If that's not enough for you, there's also alien cargo runners locked in a space battle above the city, soon to crash the party in issue 2. Vampires, gangsters, and aliens: sounds like a B-movie extravaganza, not to mention a mysterious Old One the vampires are looking to revive to start their war on humanity.

Given panels sized and arranged to fit everything snugly but adequately, issue 1 would be almost exhilarating in its pace and setups. However, as written, the only size to properly make it all harmonize would be a coffee table book format. Without a doubt, for the cover price, this is one issue where you get more than your money's worth.

Comic Book Review: I, Zombie 2, Working Stiffs

Zombos Says: Very Good

You'd be surprised, but sometimes it seems like there's more dead people above the ground than below it in any given cemetery.

For issue 2, iZombie gets a new-look title and picks up momentum with its art and story. Roberson brings us closer to Gwen's ghostly girlfriend Ellie, introduces Scott's pocket-protector inclined IT pals at work, and the vampire girls running the local Blood Sports Paintball attraction have a 'business' meeting. Mister Mummy, Fred's murderer, puts in a brief appearance, although what he's up to or what he might be after is not disclosed. His pet cheetah likes to eat juicy steaks on the couch, though, while watching television.

This issue doesn't add much to Gwen's investigation of Fred's death beyond her meeting his wife and son, awkwardly, in the cemetery, but it embellishes the people we met in the first issue. The two mysterious monster hunters are back, and they're on the trail of a rogue vampire. For a small town it certainly has an unusually high amount of supernatural citizens, much like Buffy's Sunnydale.

The simple, smooth lines of the characters are not effusive or overly energetic, but with a variety of page layouts for them to converse and act in, there's a Dylan Dog-ish quirkiness just itching to scratch through. Eye-candy pastel colors and zip-a-tone keep the story's tone light, but don't overshadow Gwen's moodiness. The difficult balance between art and word is just about perfect, making this series a pleasure to read as much as look at.

This issue was provided by Vertigo for review.

Movie Review: Survival of the Dead (2010) Romero Without Bite

Zombos Says: Fair

Survival of the Dead is a silly zombie movie when it shouldn't be and a terrible zombie movie when it should be terrifying. Revisiting threadbare plot themes, George Romero's once fearsome and unstoppable horde have become as bothersome as pesky mosquitoes in need of swatting when they get too close, and his always quarrelsome living survivors, not surprisingly, are still quarreling.

Only this time he's put them all on Plum Island and split the survivors into two feuding Irish homesteads headed by Seamus Muldoon (Richard Fitzpatrick) and Patrick O'Flynn (Kenneth Walsh). Seamus wants to keep the deadheads tethered or herded like cattle until a cure can be found. Patrick wants to shoot the rotters and be done with it. Almost everyone dresses, rides horses, and shoots guns like this is a Western; but it isn't, although an Old West zombie story might have been more engaging. A zombie riding horseback is even lassoed by a cowboy. I halfheartedly wanted to see the cowpoke heat up a Melody Ranch branding iron and tag the zombie. It would not have made much sense but neither does much of this movie.

Eschewing the grittier and more grotesque Tom Savini-styled makeup effects that made zombies and their habits more revolting and terrifying back in the day (although this storyline does take place a few days after the plague starts), Romero instead enhances the de rigueur skull-splitting with assorted CGI-flavored dispatches including the cranium plop, the flare gun incendiary noggin' (which reminded me of Jim Carrey's Ghost of Christmas Past in Scrooge), and the Looney Tune pop-eyed popper (I was disappointed no accompanying awhooozah! horn sounded when those pupils popped).

Romero's zombies don't look much the worse for being undead here. They continue to shuffle about everywhere, on land and in the water, but he directs Survival like he's planing a piece of wood when he should be gouging deep splintery notches in it instead. Survival's zombies lack bite: Romero prefers to make them loved ones gone bad instead of ravenous fiends looking to tear chunks of flesh from living bodies and play slinky with intestines. This may serve his story but turns his ubiquitous monsters, the same ones he fostered into popular culture, into slow moving hazards his characters avoid on the road to survival, but not too hurriedly. Survival's deadheads would fit comfortably into the undead and not very scary crowd at the Monroeville Mall Zombie Walk.

Sarge (Alan Van Sprang) and his small band of soldiers turned mercenaries, last seen in Diary of the Dead, provide most of the action. One soldier on guard duty watches a late night show poking fun at zombies on his laptop. Another one, Tomboy (Athena Karkanis) masturbates to kill time. They come across a group of hunters who have put CGI zombie heads on spikes for fun. Irritated by that, Sarge kills all of them except for Boy (Kevin Bostick), who shows them a YouTube video with Patrick O'Flynn extolling the fresh air and safety of Plum Island. I wonder if he has a Facebook page? They decide to go there and travel to the docks in an armored truck. After finding a million dollars locked away in the truck, they agree it's worthless given the current situation (the zombie plague, not the recession); but Boy still manages to keep the key.

It's a lucky coincidence the banished Patrick and his small band of followers are at the docks when Sarge pulls up. Over bullets and zombies, and occasional flashes of Romero's wit for dry humor--one man fishing keeps catching zombies, and a stick of lighted dynamite is fortuitously dropped into a zombie's grasping fingers--Patrick and the soldiers make their way to a ferry and sweep it clean of infestation. They power up the engines and head to Plum Island.

The tension does not pick up with this shift in fire power. Romero doggedly undermines it with his feuding patriarchs squaring off on the dietary habits of the deadheads, another you-were-infected-weren't-you? zombie in the making, an inconsequential twist, and a banal approach to showing it all. A few scenes of flesh and organ eating are for perfunctory consumption only. Zombies placed in the barn's stalls like cattle provides a whimsical touch, but Romero's unique ability to balance his story's importance between living and undead falters here. In Survival of the Dead the living are caricatures of people and the deadheads are imitation zombies.