From Zombos' Closet

Movie Review: The Perplexing Case of Shrooms (2006)

Zombos Says: Fair 

Down a forgotten street somewhere in New York City there stands a used-up, ashlar-surfaced office building waiting to be torn down. Should you enter through its bell archway, walk towards the solitary elevator that's seldom used, and turn right, you would find yourself in a narrow hallway.

In its heyday, you could find the finest business agencies rubbing elbows, hustling and bustling, here, along with the home away from home, cubbyhole, sanctuary, and hideout for the New York Globe reporters.

But that was in its heyday. Now all the hustle and bustle is done digitally, behind flickering screens, and piled up cups of coffee. Most of the tenants are now tech-related. How boring.

If you walk past those frosted-glass doors now, with their chipped and peeling lettering looking like the worn names on tombstones, and continue all the way to the end, you would come to a frosted-glass door whose lettering still shines. That's my office and my home away from home: the New York Globe’s old hangout.

My name is Artemis Greensleeves. Since my regular business has been slow of late, I decided to pick up some extra cash by working for the League of Reluctant Reviewers. I didn't realize how busy I'd be. I prefer the peace of quiet here, though, so they send me what I need when they need to.

I'm always here until three in the afternoon, waiting, with one eye on the door’s metal mail slot, and the other nestled in a good book. After three I head to my regular job, making sure to stop at Starbuck’s for a dark roast coffee on the way. I like my coffee strong.

It's always the same. I like that, too. A knock hasn't sounded on the New York Globe’s door since the war, but the sound of footsteps clicking down the hallway lets me know when another movie is coming my way for review. Quick footsteps. Click, clack, click, and another DVD pops through the mail slot; then click, clack, click echoing back down the hallway and the silence returns.

While I waited for the sound of footsteps today, I stared again at the lithograph hanging above the Globe’s trophy case. They sure did win a lot of writing awards. There’s even a Pulitzer in there, on the second shelf, just behind the large crack in the case’s glass door. I’d love to win a Pulitzer one day. Hey, I can dream, can’t I?

The lithograph is called The First Prayer of Congress. Every man in it is either bowing his head and kneeling or looking up towards heaven, very pious-like, as if seeking spiritual guidance—or maybe looking for forgiveness? If you look close enough you can see places where it's torn and foxing, and fading.

I still like it, though.

When the click clack of footsteps came this time they sounded unusually hurried. Before the DVD slid free of the mail slot and hit the floor they were already retreating, leaving me alone with Shrooms. I read the cover, looking for a clue as to what I could expect. The tagline, "Get Ready to Get Wasted," didn't fill me with confidence.

The soundbyte "Blair Witch on Acid" from a lucyvine.zoo didn't do it for me either.

Who the hell is lucyvine.zoo?

I got to work writing my review.

 

Once again a group of American teenagers head abroad to get into mischief, and as usual in these low budget horrors, the actors look a tad older than 'teensy' would allow, but I won't quibble. They do a wonderful job with a listless, by the body count, story for the most part.

Heading over to Ireland they meet up with shroom master Jake, who drives around in a Mystery Machine reject (minus Scooby Doo). I guess being a mushroom expert doesn't pay all that much these days. Funny, but when I travel, which is seldom, I don’t usually book mushroom tours. I don’t think many people do, either. Only too old-looking college kids in horror movies book tours like that.

Soon they're off to find magical mushrooms in the forest. Only this forest is populated by two drooling, unwashed, dim-bulb—stop me if you've seen this before—axe-carrying ne'er-do-wells who don't communicate well; which is fine since after seeing them you wouldn't want to hang around and chat anyway.

Unperturbed, the magical mushroom seekers venture deeper into the woods to steep some toadstool tea. At this point, you realize all of them are expendable because no one is likable and the catholic girls are having non-catholic thoughts while the boys aren't catholic to begin with.

So you can see what's brewing goes well beyond a simple cup of mind-bending tea.

Stirring the pot and plot, Jake tells them the creepy tale of the evil black brothers of Glenn Garig, who tortured and murdered their young charges—orphaned boys with no place to run except these woods. After one abused boy sneaks some bad-ass shrooms into the communal soup, seventy-eight kids, assorted brothers—and the janitor, I’d warrant—wind up massacred by one crazed surviving brother carrying a sharp blade.

And that brother might still be stomping around the woods since no one really knows what happened to him!

At this point, the girls can't take it anymore and tell Jake to zip it. Lucky for them, Glenn Garig is not close: sure, it's about a ten minute walk from where they're camped, but it's not that close, so they should be able to sleep in their flimsy tents without any trouble whatsoever.

Right?

 

While I waited for the sound of footsteps today, I stared again at the lithograph hanging above the Globe’s trophy case. They sure did win a lot of writing awards. There’s even a Pulitzer in there, on the second shelf, just behind the large crack in the case’s glass door. I’d love to win a Pulitzer one day. Hey...wait a minute...

The plop of the DVD hitting the floor nudged my attention. I picked it up. It was Shrooms.

Again.

I was just watching it, wasn’t I?

Maybe I was having visions like Tara (Lindsey Haun), who went off to enjoy nature while Jake was giving his lecture on which mushrooms to stay away from. In a fit of pique, Tara eats the bad-assiest one of the "don't" group.

After her near death experience, she becomes a regular Esmeralda the Fortuneteller, and has visions of her friends being stalked and butchered, one by one, by a hooded creepazoid with long nails, a sharp blade, and rotted teeth; looking like a cross between your typical J-horror vengeance ghost and a Hills Have Eyes mutant, this black brother is a tree-hugging nightmare.

But is he real, or are they all just tripping from the mushrooms?

Her friends, meanwhile, have made themselves pretty damn easy pickings with their sudden arguing. Just once I'd like to see a horror movie with friends that act like they are friends and not acquaintances. Of course the group splits up to make the slaughter, and the writer's job depicting same, easier. While a group of people screaming at each other is somewhat easy to victimize, it's just easier to victimize screaming singles instead.

"Don't forget to tell them about me," said the cow.

"Sure, I won't—." I blinked.

For a minute there I could have sworn a cow slid through my mail slot, blew up to full size, and talked to me, like in the movie. I mean, there's no mail slot in the movie, just a cow that talks to Bluto (Robert Hoffman), who goes running off —that would be Bluto who ran off, not the cow—after drinking the entire pot of mind-tripping tea. Of course—sorry, but "of course" is a natural with most horror movies these days—that action makes him the first idiot to get whacked.

On a personal note, I really have to stop drinking those venti-sized coffees from Starbucks. I pulled myself together. This review was starting to get to me.

 

Hack and slash, and run run run...to Glen Garig.

The one place in the forest they really shouldn't be going is where they wind up. Before that, everyone is screaming at the top of his or her lungs for everyone else.

So my question is this: when being stalked in the forest, can anyone hear you scream? Based on this movie, the answer is NO.

As panic sets in, Tara manages to do a Looney Tunes bonk! into a tree, face first. While I think Elmer Fudd had better timing, she's not bad at it.

Holly, meanwhile, runs to the scary-looking dilapidated shack nestling ominously in the woods. Now who, pray tell, would be living here? You guessed it: the Jonas Brothers!

No wait, it's not them.

It’s Ernie and Bernie, the two drooling, dim-bulb conservationists seen earlier in the movie. She—sorry, but I can't avoid it this time—of course walks right into the shack as Burt and Ernie—I mean Ernie and Bernie—look on and drool a lot. Maybe because there are no carcasses or raw meat hanging around she doesn't realize you don't enter decrepit shacks in the woods looking for a phone while two unwashed guys talk a lot about goats with fondness in their voices.

And you wonder why the academy awards doesn’t take horror movies seriously anymore?

While there's a bit of oh-my-god-how-stupid-can-she-be? in watching Holly walk into that shack, the tension doesn't quite build enough to raise the scare factor beyond tepid. Director Paddy Breathnach also lingers on peering-through-holes-too-closely moments, but builds little suspense. His direction is by the numbers with little V8 creative juicing to liven up the one down, two down, three down slasher momentum. There is one bright moment regarding how the black brother, real or not, can sneak up on you unawares, but that's the brightest it gets.

 

Well, it's almost three in the afternoon. One more thing before I go.

You will find out at the end whether the black brother is real or not, if that's any consolation. Shrooms is not all that terrible. It's just not the acid trip it could have been.

None of the creative people involved in this movie apparently ingested any shrooms during its production, making it one big, unmagical, mystery tour.

The mystery is how it ever got green-lighted in the first place. 

Virginia Creepers: The Horror Host Tradition of the Old Dominion

Virginia Creepers Documentary by Horse Archer Productions

Horse Archer Productions, is producing a documentary this summer about Virginia's rich horror host tradition called Virginia Creepers: The Horror Host Tradition of the Old Dominion. Here's the lowdown from Sean Kotz:

I think we will do most of the filming between the last week of April and the first week of June and we are currently planning a theater event in Richmond at the historic Byrd theater which seats 1300.

A couple of years ago, I formed a film company with my friend, Chris Valluzzo, and our first documentary, 2007's HOKIE NATION, a film about Virginia Tech's incredible football fans, has done very well and is now in a second pressing. The success of that film has given us the resources to pursue other projects that reflect our personal interests, including VIRGINIA CREEPERS.

As a kid, I lived in the Tidewater area of Virginia and became hooked by Dr. Madblood on WAVY TV 10, but I was also able to pick up a fuzzy signal from Channel 8 in Richmond and get Bowman Body on nights when the airwaves were generous. We moved to Northern Virginia in 1978 and soon I had Count Gore DeVol to keep me entertained. In other words, I was a host junkie back in the day, so perhaps it was inevitable that I would want to do something to capture that tradition as we experience it here in Virginia.

For this film, we want the microcosm of the Virginia experience to speak to people wherever they are. Naturally, we are interviewing the hosts, and a big part of our goal is to open up that history as well as the great hosts from the state who are still practicing the craft. At the same time, however, we really want to capture the fan experience and try to reveal why our hosts are so important to so many people. We don't want to define the experience so much as celebrate it, and in that way, I think the film will be very unique.

Currently, we are inviting anyone who has an interest in this film to get in touch with us. We are looking for fans who have great stories, powerful memories and interesting memorabilia and perhaps some old clips unknown to the rest of the world. We are also seeking corporate and individual sponsors, AND we are looking for venues in Tidewater, Richmond and Northern Virginia for fan interviews and media events.

Movie Review: The Sick House (2008)

Zombos Says: Fair

"I don't have time for this," said Anna (Gina Philips), the comely archeology student in The Sick House.

Zombos and I looked at each other. We agreed with her. Once again Paul Hollstenwall, the scion of inconsequential cinema, had underwhelmed us with another exercise in pointless moviemaking.

Anna has just discovered the four punk metal wannabes who are freaking out because one of them appears to have the plague. For shame: that will teach them not to go kicking about in stolen cars for joy rides and breaking into bio-hazard excavation sites previously used as plague hospitals. And shame on Anna, too. Here she is yelling at them for breaking and entering when she did it first, releasing a centuries old evil—and former member of that notorious 1665 London touring group known as the Black Priests—in the process.

The five of them, the usual mix of underachieving and overachieving victims you’ll find slamming into each other in slasher movies, are in for a rough night of it. So is everyone else watching this whoozy, blurry, head-spinning shock-cut apparition, and zoicks! musical extravaganza. Whatever originality and novelty to be found in the story is undercooked by director Curtis Radclyffe's palsied camera and over-reliance on J-horror hackneyism.

"Why can he not keep the bloody camera still!" cried Zombos.

"He's sustaining the tension by forcing your disorientation with his constantly moving frame," explained Paul.

"Tension? My neck is tense from all the quick-cut splicing and visual chittering," Zombos retorted. "And those flickering fluorescent light fixtures must go. Could they not afford better lighting? I cannot see what is going on."

Plague doctors? London's Black Death of 1665?

A capital idea for gut-wrenching suspense and terror is reduced to a half farthing's worth of overdone digital and cutting room trickery, making sense the first victim in this suspense-less nonsense. My mind drifted among the possibilities if less confusing herky-jerky motion and more stillness were the norm, to let the actors convey the terror overwhelming them.

Gina Philips gives a fair performance, though she seems too calm, too emotionless at times when you'd expect some "oh, sh*t, it's the plague, we're so f**ked!" or "blimey, what the hell is that thing what wants to eat our souls and kill us!"

Instead, she's so proper, so academic. At least the others provide some frenzied bickering and craziness, and run like the dickens through the halls of the orphanage away from the not so good reawakened evil doctor making his terminal rounds. Lots of aimless running is part and parcel to horror movies, but here it’s more aimless and unintentionally confusing.

"Help me out here," pleaded Zombos. "Are you pondering what I am pondering?"

"Not if it involves cocoa butter and bananas," I said.

Zombos and Paul stopped arguing and looked at me. I quickly pulled my thoughts back to landfall.

"I'm sorry, what did you say?"

"What do you think? asked Zombos. "Paul thinks this bloody movie is a punky masterpiece of new horror style and I am too old to appreciate it. Talk some sense into him will you."

I took a deep sip from my hot mocha latte, embellished with Chef Machiavelli's secret mix of herbs and spices he calls the Bombay tincture. I looked at Zombos, then at Paul. They waited expectantly with folded arms. I took another long sip and pondered. Was it simply bad direction or bad directorial choices? Was the acting mediocre or just hacked to pieces by all the scene juggling? Was the story poorly written or intentionally ground into a confusing mash? The Bombay tincture fortified my thoughts enough to proceed.

"It's obvious the choices made here point to commercially shaping the movie for a younger audience, especially with the odd addition of that acid-drenched-metal song screeching over the opening credits. Today’s kids' snippet-drenched YouTube attention spans are primed for choppy narrative, so they probably wouldn't notice the yawning chasms of missing structural coherence in the visual narrative of this movie."

There. I said it.

Zombos and Paul continued to look at me. Each slowly unfolded his arms. They ignored what I said and started arguing again. Good. At least now they would leave me alone to enjoy my mocha latte in peace.

But what ails The Sick House?

Although it contains cliché after cliché repeated in numbing succession, the acting is strong, the historical context very intriguing, and the atmosphere almost menacing, in spite of the overused Saw-styled tinting in the saturated lighting.

Ludgate Orphanage, aside from its spookhouse-flickering fluorescents, is dark—often too dark to make out what is happening—and filled with brooding rooms and hallways. Then there's the tall, unstoppable, plague doctor dressed in his bizarre clothing and bird-like mask, stalking around with a bevy of grotesque children, murdered by him back in the 1600s. There is also a kicker ending that twists the story back on itself; but it will leave you just as confused as before.

The archeological dig that Anna's been working on in the basement of the orphanage leads to another chamber further down. Before she can dig deeper, the authorities find evidence of lingering plague. Being an A student, Anna ignores the grave danger to herself, and the public at large, and breaks into the condemned orphanage after hours, to continue her work.

While she's digging around in the basement, the four miscreant fun-loving  hoody-punksters crash their stolen auto near the orphanage. Finding the door open—thanks to Anna—they hustle inside to avoid the English Bobbies and all those nasty lectures on grand theft auto and public menace behaviors they've obviously heard before.

It all goes down at midnight.

Time becomes frozen for everyone in the building as the plague doctor (John Lebar), brought back from the netherworld by Anna's academic zeal, makes his killer appearance. There seems to be satanic purpose to his malevolence, but in J-horror fashion, the story doesn't give you much to go on and the director is so hellbent on gimmicking the action, it becomes impossible to follow at times, actually, most of the time, to the point of annoyance.

One clue: it all revolves around a baby to be born, but that is all you get.

Although there is not much gore, you do have people yelling at each other a lot and frantically running to or away from danger, people becoming possessed and frantically chasing other people, and people slippin' 'n slidin' in something white, gelatinous, and filled with pukey-looking nastiness.

Leading up to an illogical but plot-convenient bathing scene—this is the creepy, insane killer infested orphanage remember—in thousands of blood sucking leeches (used to treat the plague back then: go figure).

The ending neatly leads into a sequelization antic for another set of plague doctor's rounds ad nauseam in a round of franchise sequels, but I don’t think this doctor got to make another house call on DVD yet.

Maybe Paul is right. Maybe Zombos and I are too old to appreciate the style of The Sick House. Or maybe a script doctor and a steadier hand at the camera would have made this a more memorable, even classic, frightfest instead of another victims-offed in factory assembled horror movie storyline, with added visual confusion to make it appear youthfully fresh.

Interview: Peter Normanton From the Tomb

Peter Normanton is usually buried under, what with just completing The Mammoth Book of Best Horror Comics, and the rigors of publishing his From The Tomb magazine. But his love of the dissolute images and outrageous stories that spring from the unsavory pages of horror comics, to linger in our minds long after those pages have yellowed with age, makes him the kind of person we like to be interred with, too...for a little chat.

What is it about the horror comic medium that's made you such an uber fan?

It goes back to my childhood. Like so many other kids I loved to be frightened by Doctor Who. I was convinced as a six year old the yeti was on the landing, stood outside my bedroom door. Twenty years later I had that rotten feeling all over again after watching Aliens at the cinema. I think I got my first collection of ghost stories when I was about nine, I loved that book. After that I was hooked.

I was always reading comics, mainly titles published over here in the UK such as TV21, Sparky, Beano and Jet. In 1972 Marvel Comics began reprinting the Silver Age Hulk, Spiderman and Fantastic Four in The Mighty World of Marvel. This was an incredible revelation because American comics were that rarest of treats; now I had the opportunity to keep up with these legendry stories. The love of horror, however, wouldn't go away. It was stimulated still further by an afternoon programme with British comedian Bob Monkhouse, who was an avid comic book fan. He had in his hands several old horror comic books with the most lurid images you could imagine. They were ECs and I just had to have one of them. How, I had absolutely no idea. I wasn't to know these titles had ceased to be published almost twenty years before. They appeared so taboo, offering the most disturbing imagery you could ever dream. I picked up a couple of DC's one hundred page Unexpecteds, while the covers promised much the interior stories rarely satiated my lust for terror.

A few months later I came across Skywald's Nightmare 17. It's one of those moments I will never forget, catching sight of the cover through the newsagent's window, with that half naked woman and the beast in the background. I had to ask for permission from my mum to make such a purchase. I still don't know what I would have done if she had said no. I ran all the way back to the shop clutching my eighteen pence (the US equivalent would have been around 40 cents) dreading someone had already snapped it up, but no, it was still there. It seemed so adult and at last satiated my craving for that darkest kind of horror. Well almost; typically I had to have more, but those Skywalds would prove to be incredibly rare. Marvels line of black and white terrors would appear over here in the weeks that came and while I enjoyed them immensely nothing quite matched the feel of that issue of Nightmare.

In the years that followed my love of these titles has just grown. Towards the end of the 1980s, pre-Code comics became available in this country and those ECs finally came my way. Over the years horror comics have dared to unsettle and offer some amazing artistry. At their best they refuse to conform or offer any degree of compromise. I think those horror comics that attempt to be too mainstream are never going to survive. A good case in point is DC's Hellblazer, which after twenty years is still as challenging as ever.

LOTT-D: The League of Tana Tea Drinkers

Blame Brian at The Vault of Horror blog.

When he honored Zombos Closet of Horror with the E for Excellence Award, which is given from one blogger to another in recognition of their undying efforts, it got my little gray cells humming.

Horror bloggers are a unique group of devoted fans and professionals who keep the horror genre, in all its permutations and media outlets, alive and kicking. Often spending long, unpaid hours to keep their blogsites fun and interesting, horror bloggers share their unique mix of personality and knowledge to fans out of passion for a genre difficult to describe, but easy to love.

Horror bloggers hail from all walks of life, but their passionate love for horror movies, terrifying books, scary comics, and unearthly music--you name it--unites them.

I'm proud to be a member of this divers group. In the spirit of the E for Excellence Award, it's time to honor exemplary horror blogs with our own special insignia: one that signifies the heights to which we aspire, and the code of excellence we follow to promote horror in all it's wonderfully frightening forms, from classic to contemporary, from philosophical to schlockical.

I present the League of Tana Tea Drinkers insignia, in recognition of horror bloggers who go the extra line, who toil away the extra midnight hour to present the best in horror blogging. This insignia lets readers know you belong to a select group of bloggers that reach the heights of horrifying excellence, who know what rapture it is to sip Tana Tea by the full moon, and trod the dark passageways beneath the earth in search of the unusual, the terrifying, and the monstrous.

Keep watching the skies, and reading the horror. LOTT-D is coming for you!

Movie Review: The Mad Magician (1954)

Zombos Says: Good

When Price's performances failed as touching works of naturalistic brilliance, they usually succeeded as thrilling romps of stylish theatricality. As a result, almost any Price performance is worth watching--for one reason or another. (Mark Clark in Smirk, Sneer and Scream: Great Acting in Horror Cinema)

Crypt of Horror's DVD offering of 1954's Columbia Pictures' 3-D The Mad Magician is quite the trick indeed. It fooled me into thinking I was going to have a wonderful evening of murder done with panache, prefixed by that delightful glare of homicidal haughtiness, so patently and masterfully executed by Vincent Price in many of his films. Instead, the DVD's murderously shoddy performance got in the way; enough to make me as mad as Gallico the Great.

The DVD case cover blurb "Homicidal Maniac weilds Buzz Saw horror against beautiful young women!" is quite foreboding to begin with. It's not bad enough horror fans must constantly battle a public and familial image of being either illiterate ignoramuses or pimply, basement-dwelling, punk-rocking misfits lusting after beautiful young women (Goth babes especially), but misspelling a simple word like "wield" instead of the more complex word like "homicidal" doesn't help our case at all now does it? And which homicidal maniac wielding a buzz saw against beautiful young women are we referring to? There's certainly no one in this 1954 period movie that fits that description.

Following on the heels of Warner Brothers' successful 3-D House of Wax in 1953, Price once again dons a vengeful smock, this time playing an inventor of magic tricks and stage illusions who dreams of performing his creations in front of the footlights. On the night of his successful debut performance, performing as Gallico the Great, he's stopped by his unscrupulous employer who holds an ironclad contract not even Lucifer himself could get out of.

Just as Gallico was stopped from performing his magic, I was stopped, repeatedly, by Crypt of Horror's DVD-R cheapie disc duplication process as it brazenly jumped scenes and unexpectedly paused, taunting me to the brink of homicidal ideation. I was ready to lose my head, but Gallico the Great beat me to it.

Turning slightly daffy, he gives his soon-to-be-former gloating employer, Ormond, a really close look at his buzz saw illusion in action. That horrific scene, with Price's demonic glaring and vibrant voice spewing invectives, and the whirring blade swinging closer to finally slice off Ormond's head--conveniently done out of sight to avoid those messy 1954 censorship issues--is still frightfully effective. But there's no blood! Not one drip nor spray nor streak. If remade today there would be buckets of blood flying in all directions, along with bits and pieces of tracheal innards. Yet due to Price's theatrics, and the tightly framed action, it's still a highlight in an otherwise disappointing directorial effort by The Lodger director, John Brahm.

Not being a mentalist, Gallico the Great Klutz promptly loses his severed head when he places it in a leather bag that matches the one his comely stage assistant (Mary Murphy) is carrying. Off she goes to dinner--I wonder what she was carrying before she switched bags because she doesn't seem to mind the extra weight--and Gallico frantically runs after her to get it back. Not being an assistant to a mentalist either, when he catches up with her he finds she's gone and forgotten the bloody thing in a hansom cab. But not to worry: the cabby played good samaritan and turned it in to the local constabulary. This ghoulishly humorous interlude, made memorable by Price's naturally subtle comedic instincts, ends well for him, though his odd behavior running down the bag piques the interest of his assistant's detective boyfriend (Patrick O'Neal).

Inexplicably, Gallico pretends to be Ormond, and donning a mask and changing his voice, he rents a room from the local nosy mystery writer. No sooner can you say "sinister Sam Spade snookers six slithering snakes," Ormond's wife and Gallico's ex-wife are invited in for tea by the meddling mystery writer who recognizes her new boarder from a newspaper photo. Ormond's wife (Eva Gabor) surprises Gallico thinking he's Ormond. Not having the buzz saw handy, he has to rely on good old-fashioned strangulation to let her know how much he doesn't like her anymore.

So far, she's the only beautiful young woman he kills, and he didn't even use a buzz saw. His next victim is definitely not a beautiful young woman: he gets even with the conniving Rinaldi (Kronos' John Emery), a rival magician. The climactic scene with the cremation illusion jumped past the point of my patience after repeatedly going through Crypt's Disc of Horror torture test, but it's a sizzling climax when seen in its entirety.

The illusions in the film, including the buzz saw, the cremation, and the water fountains, are based on noted stage illusions made famous by such magicians as Horace Goldin and Harry Blackstone Sr.--though Ricciardi threw in the innards and blood for the buzz saw, and the Great Rameses performed a version of the cremation illusion. One illusion in the film done with mirrors reveals the secret. Perhaps done in 3-D it wasn't noticeable.

The bug-eyed music is distinctly 1950s terror in flavor, and adds to the overall mood of the film, especially in tandem with Price's sinister stare. Introducing the movie is Lon Midnight and his equally odd friends. Lon's cheesy horror hosting shenanigans, which didn't suffer from the dubious duping process, were in keeping with the movie's theme and are fun to watch. 

 

Interview: Austin Williams Exploited

The body on the floor spread like the hands of a giant clock, with the arms pointing to ten and the legs tucked tightly together at the half-hour mark. Drops of crimson marked the second hand sweep around the chapter ring, and the contents of the small room stood at the various hour marks around that ring. At twelve stood a chipped desk with a Remington-noiseless laptop on it. The laptop's standby mode had been turned off, and at three stood a leather sofa that showed signs of too many sleepless nights spent tossing and turning on it.

A forensic photographer was sweeping around the body in a clockwise direction, taking shot after shot. Every now and then he paused, appeared to suppress an urge to move something in front of his lens to a better position, then continued. He had an annoying habit of popping the gum he was chewing every time he snapped a shot.

"You about done Brady?" asked the detective, pulling on his right ear, which was a tad shorter than his left. No matter how hard or how often he pulled on it, it didn't get any longer.

The photographer took another few shots. "Yeah, okay, that'll do it. Who is this stiff anyway?

"Some sleaze author. Name's Austin Williams. He just wrote a fictitious book about some fictitious exploitation film called Crimson Orgy. No publisher had the balls to bring it to print except, I hear, Borderlands Press.

"Take a looksy," said another detective standing by the laptop. "Looks like he was chatting up a storm with some goofball blog site called Zombos Closet. Some sort of interview."

They huddled around the small screen and read the interview, hoping to find a clue.

 

What inner demon inspired you to chronicle this whole sordid affair in Crimson Orgy?

I don’t know about inner demons but it’s fair to say Crimson Orgy is the byproduct of countless hours wasted watching some extremely dubious movies. At least I used to think they were wasted. Since I got a book out of all that cinematic dreck I now have to conclude it was a worthwhile expenditure of time.

You often mention Herschell Gordon Lewis's film, Blood Feast, in Crimson Orgy. Why is that?

That movie is the prototype for the movie at the center of my book. The release of Blood Feast in 1963 was a watershed event, not only for exploitation cinema but American pop culture at large. Absurd as that might sound, it’s true and has been noted by Danny Peary, John McCarty and other film historians. Prior to Blood Feast, graphic violence was taboo in cinema. Obviously, gore had been a staple of 20th century popular entertainment in other forms, from the Grand Guignol Theatre in Paris to the great E.C. horror comics of the ‘50s. It was inevitable, perhaps, that blood and guts would eventually make their way to the silver screen, but that’s easy to say with half a century of hindsight.

Back in ‘63, Blood Feast didn’t just push the boundaries of good taste, it deliberately demolished them. The whole appeal of the movie was its glaring lack of anything redeemable. Carnage for the sake of carnage, period. For better or worse, director Herschell Gordon Lewis and producer David Friedman redefined cinematic violence and horror with Blood Feast. Our culture has never been quite the same since. Whether this pioneering pair deserves praise or damnation is a matter of personal opinion, but their contribution can’t be denied.

What is it about exploitation cinema that's captured your passion?

For one thing, exploitation movies from the early to mid-’60s dealt explicitly with subject matter that Hollywood could not even obliquely reference at the time. Sex, violence, insanity, addiction, disrespect for authority... everything a good story needs, basically. Mainstream movies eventually caught up as the ‘70s approached, with Bonnie & Clyde making explicit bloodshed acceptable and Last Tango In Paris doing the same for sex. Those are just two examples, but iconic ones. The question is whether those movies could ever have been made, much less released, in a society that hadn’t been at least marginally exposed to the work of filmmakers like H.G. Lewis and Russ Meyer.

Another source of interest is that exploitation movies often provide a much clearer picture of their respective era than mainstream films released at the same time. This is because filmmakers like Lewis had no money to spend on wardrobe, props, locations, etc. The actors wore their own clothes and scenes were shot in personal homes, apartments, or motel rooms. In this way, exploitation films are essentially glorified home movies and offer a certain intimate fascination that’s impossible to fabricate on a soundstage. Finally, movies like Blood Feast are an embarrassment of riches for people who, like myself, appreciate the “so bad it’s good” school of cinema. Unintentionally hilarious, mind-numbingly inept and yet genuinely disturbing, there’s just nothing quite like a Herschell Gordon Lewis production.

The events in Crimson Orgy pretty much take place in one general area: Hillsboro Beach, Florida. What's the significance of this area in the history of exploitation cinema?

For a brief window in the 1960s, Miami was the exploitation film capital of the world. Aside from Lewis and Friedman, filmmakers like Doris Wishman set up shop down there and churned out countless Z-grade features for drive-in screens across America. One of the key elements of Crimson Orgy is that the filmmakers find themselves forced to operate in an alien, slightly hostile environment. Hillsboro Beach is a tiny rural community about 90 miles north of Miami, very remote and under the jurisdiction of a redneck deputy. Crimson Orgy’s production team needs total isolation in order to make the type of movie they have in mind, but aren’t prepared to handle the consequences of the events they set in motion.

Meyer and Hoffman, the director and producer of Crimson Orgy, stand prominent in my mind as fully-developed characters, though I can't put my finger on exactly why. Are they based on real-life counterparts?

Shel Meyer and Gene Hoffman are purely original characters but it’s fair to say that Lewis, Friedman and others on the Miami exploitation scene served as prototypes. Something Weird Video has done an incredible job in releasing hundreds of obscure exploitation titles on DVD, offering tons of bonus material including audio interviews. Lewis and Friedman, who had a falling out in the late ‘60s and didn’t speak for years, got together to offer their memories about the three gore movies they made together: Blood Feast, 2000 Maniacs! and Color Me Blood Red. Both men are extremely engaging and their commentaries definitely offered some inspiration, but the characters in my book are not based on anyone in particular. Meyer and Hoffman have to take full responsibility for all the trouble they cause in making Crimson Orgy.

In the story, Barbara gets Meyer to open up about an antisemitic experience involving his mother that contributes to her death. Of all your characters in Crimson Orgy, he's the one you put the most history on. Why?

Shel Meyer is the driving force behind Crimson Orgy. The movie is his personal obsession, whereas Gene Hoffman seems to approach it mainly from a business perspective. The death of Meyer's mother when he was a child, and his suspicions that antisemitic tendencies were at least partially responsible, are very much in the back of his mind during the writing and production of Crimson Orgy. He's determined to make a point with this movie, to strike back in some way at the perceived bigotry that cost him so much. The problem for Shel is that he never takes the time to examine his buried motivations or question where they might be leading him. Ultimately, he gets exactly what he's looking for and pays a terrible price for it.

Cliff the Grip is quite an enigmatic character in Crimson Orgy. You hint at his background, but never really explain it. How about giving ZC readers an exclusive scoop on Cliff. Why is he so screwed-up?

Yes, this is a cloudy issue that has perplexed some readers. What’s known beyond question is that Cliff was committed to the Calm Shepherd Sanitarium in Naples, FL, for nine months as a teenager. Diagnosed with manic depression, he was released when his condition seemed to improve somewhat with therapy. Unfortunately, a fire destroyed the sanitarium in the winter of 1968 (the precise cause of which was believed to be arson but never definitively proved) and thus all medical records relating to Clifford Schepps were lost. I think it’s safe to speculate that if some of today’s antidepressant medications had been available back in 1965, the tragic events surrounding Crimson Orgy might have been avoided. On the other hand, the world would be robbed of the most notorious cult film of all time and I wouldn’t have a book, so I‘m not sure where I come down on this issue.

If you could work at any part in the production of an exploitation film, which part would you prefer? Writer, actor, director, victim, etc, and why?

None. I have a feeling it’s a lot more fun watching exploitation movies, or writing about them, than actually working on one. Long hours, little or no pay, bad food, crummy accommodations, and not much glory when it’s all said and done.

Tell us about your writing background, and what's your writing regimen like? Are you a thousand words a day junkie, too?

I studied film in college, from a critical rather than creative perspective. I’ve never taken a creative writing course, just learned by doing a lot of bad writing and gradually recognizing what was bad about it. As far as a regimen, I wish I had one. It astounds me that someone like Stephen King can sit down and write for 7 or 8 hours a day, every day. With me it comes and goes, which I think most writers would agree is not an ideal approach. A good writing day is 2,000 words or more. I’d love to do that every day but it just doesn’t happen. I need time to let ideas formulate in the back of my mind before I can set them down coherently. I could also turn procrastination into an Olympic event.

In our email discussions, you said "A year or so ago, I stopped by Forrest J. Ackerman's house for one of his regular Saturday morning memorabilia tours (he lives about a mile from me.) It was a great honor to meet the man who's rubbed elbows with so many legends and rightfully become one himself." Okay, you realize you've got to spill the beans on that visit, right? What was it like?

As someone who started reading Famous Monsters magazine at about nine years of age, I was extremely fired up to meet this giant of the genre. As you know, Forry personally coined the term “sci-fi” and provided vital encouragement to multiple generations of filmmakers, some of them with last names like Spielberg, Lucas, and Coppola. He’s a straight-up legend. Forry lives in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, in a bungalow called the Acker-Mini-Mansion, a smaller version of the rambling Acker-Mansion he inhabited for decades. The collection of memorabilia on hand is staggering, including many items that were once personal possessions of Karloff, Lugosi, Lorre, Price, and countless other icons. Forry himself is a charming and gregarious host, with an endless supply of anecdotes and a buoyant enthusiasm that belies his physical frailty. He generously opens his home for tours most Saturdays when he’s in town, and I’d strongly encourage any fan of Zombos Closet who happens to be in the L.A. area make this pilgrimage.

(ZC Note: Forrest J. Ackerman died on December 4th, 2008)

What can we expect from you in the future?

I’m currently finishing a new novel called Harpoon City. It shares nothing in common with Crimson Orgy in terms of plot or setting, but I’m hoping it will appeal to the same audience by combining suspenseful and horrific elements with some dark humor in an edgy story populated by memorable characters. And now that the book about the movie Crimson Orgy is finally available, I think it’s a foregone conclusion that the movie about the book about the movie should be unleashed upon the world. Stay tuned for updates on that front.

What question would you love to be asked and what's your answer?

Q: How exactly did you manage to write a genre-bending book released by a small indie publisher that steadily built a mainstream audience until it topped the New York Times Bestseller list?

A: I don’t know, but I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

 

"Seems normal enough," said Brady as they finished reading the interview.

"Yeah, but what about that last question. How do you think he did it--top the Times' list I mean?" asked another.

"That's easy. Talent. No mystery there."

They nodded in agreement.

"This Cliff the Grip seems like someone we should look into."

They nodded in agreement.

"Maybe check out Something Weird Video, too. My money's on them."

"Okay, let's wrap it up. I'm starved. Let's get dinner--"

"You mean breakfast."

"Damn, it's that late? Okay, breakfast. Then we'll call on Cliffy boy."

"What about Borderlands Press? Should we pay them a visit, too?"

"Yeah, yeah; looks like we got our work cut out for us."

Graphic Book Review: The Mammoth Book of Best Horror Comics

Almost side by side came the violence of the crime comic and the sugariness of teenage romance, then at the very end of the decade a handful of horror comics clawed their way onto the distributors' schedules. Each spawned an abomination, the like of which had never before been seen in a comic book. Within a matter of years outrage followed on outrage as the contents of these so-called comics emerged to become the most notorious in the industry's short-lived history. (Peter Normanton in The Mammoth Book of Best Horror Comics)

Zombos Says: Excellent

I am tired. The air is turning colder. My most singular experience is almost at an end. This is my last hope of conveying the enormity of the maddening horror, the numbing terror that has seized my heart, my mind. Sweat from fear makes it difficult to write, but I must...I must relate this most sordid of affairs, this break in the fabric of normalcy, of decency. I neither solicit your belief nor disbelief--you must listen, I beg you to listen, to heed what I say. My time grows ever shorter. He is coming closer...so damned close now. I must leave some record, some thoughts--if only I could focus better, calm my racing mind---some words to warn you before it's too late, before he finds me...

"There you are!" said Zombos. "Time's up. You've had it long enough." He held out his hand.

"But I'm not done yet," I pleaded. "Just another hour. One more hour, surely," I begged.

"Nope. It's my turn to read The Mammoth Book of Best Horror Comics. Next time, Zoc, listen to me when I tell you to order two copies."

The grandfather clock in the hallway scolded me, or was it just striking the midnight hour? Was that the flittering of bat's wings? Perhaps Zombos was right; maybe I had spent much too much time with these ghoulish, morbid horrors from the 1950s, 60s, and 70s? I reluctantly handed the book to Zombos. He cackled with glee and scurried back into the darkness to gnaw away on his prize--or so I imagined.

Edited by Peter Normanton (publisher of the essential From the Tomb magazine), the fifty crème de la crème horror comics and graphic stories presented within its moldering pages are enough--happily--to wake the dead and incite parents everywhere. Over four hundred pages of memorable atrocities, clawing up from the grave into your nightmares; it's a dream come true for horrorheads everywhere!

Describing how he became hooked on horror comics after seeing Sebastia Boada's long-haired naked babe lounging with hairy ape-thing cover illustration for Skywald's Nightmare No.17, in 1974, Normanton quickly jumps into the thick of it starting with gruesome gems from the 1940s and 50s in his section entitled The Dark Age of Comics. Although he writes "it wasn't the bare flesh that got me excited , it was the beast looming in the background and the threat this moody scene invoked," regarding that suggestive cover, it's obvious his wife was looking over his shoulder when he wrote his remembrance; so I'll cut him some geek-slack. It took me a few minutes to even notice the chained, uni-horned, beast in the moody background anyway.

Normanton gives a capsule history of this outlandish dark age, outlining publishers, titles, and the terminal impact notorious psychologist Dr. Frederick Wertham--"whose work maligning horror and crime comics appeared in an assortment of women's journals during the 1940s and on into the early 1950s"--had on the demise of the lurid, but lucrative, bloody mayhem originally printed in four colors every month.

Each delectable story, reprinted here in ominous black and white, begins with the issue's cover and background notes on the artist and writer (often the same person); a great way to give credit where it's due (or the blame for that matter). For the horror comic reader, it's information frightfully useful when compiling a must-read list of influential talents in the genre. Here you will run screaming from Don Heck's Hitler's Head in Weird Terror No.1, and sweat profusely along with Rudy Palais' travelers in dire trouble in He, grippingly told in Black Cat Mystery No.38. Recurring macabre themes of the newly animated dead, the reluctantly dead, and the soon-to-be-dead, shadow dance their way among the graveyards, castles, and dark forests, partying it up with ghosts, ghouls, vampires, werewolves, and the depraved indifference exhibited by the usual neo-Nazis, scheming relatives, and whip-cracking, radiantly beautiful and well-endowed women with ill intent.

At their zenith, 1950's horror comics contained torture, masochism, depravity, numerous dismembered and rotting parts, numerous rotting and decapitated heads, and numerous, radiantly beautiful and well-endowed women in various stages of distress (and undress). Monsters, zombies, witches, ghoulies and ghosties, leered, jeered and scared their way across the pulpy pages, leaving shock and delightfully gruesome death in their wake. Maybe Wertham wasn't so off the mark after all?

--Hello, stop staring at that moody, chained hairy beast already and pay attention!--

In the next section, The Terror Returns, horror comics published under the dubious auspices of the Comics Code in the 1960s and 1970s are represented quite well, beginning with my all-time favorite, The Monster of Dread End, from Dell's Ghost Stories No.1. Gone are the more graphically executed uses for a cat-o-nine tails and the colorful eye-dangling from socket, axe-split decapitated head--held by the hair--covers and plotlines. The hideous artwork of the 50s gave way to the toned-down, more suggestive and parent-friendly stylizations of Dell, Gold Key, Charlton, Marvel and DC. That is, until publisher James Warren realized the Comics Code didn't apply to magazines. He used the black and white magazine format for more freedom in expressing horrific storylines graphically, and with the birth of his Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella magazines, brought sophisticated adult terror to eager young, and old, readers, alarming everyone else in the process. Other publishers sought to emulate the format after the success of  Warren Publishing's offerings, and soon the luncheonette and newsstand magazine racks were filled to the brim with imitators and innovators. As the competition heated up, so did the mature content, which reached its creative pinnacle in Skywald's Horror-Mood  Psycho, Nightmare, and Scream magazines.

Normanton mixes in engrossing stories from Psycho and Nightmare, as well as Charlton's Ghostly Haunts and Ghostly Tales, and adds a story from Eerie Publications' Weird . Eerie Publications? They're the ones your mom warned you about. With the nastiest covers and grindhouse-level storylines imaginable, their titles stand as the epitome of entertainingly tasteless horror-fare. Normanton tosses in one of their tamer offerings.

When reading this section of Mammoth's Best Horror Comics, the differences between the Comics Code-restrained stories, and the unfettered black and white forays into terror, offer a fascinating comparison between the creative talents involved working under both circumstances. In the comic book format, more suggestive and imaginative excursions into the supernatural are the norm, while the black and white horrors in the larger print format relied on more visually-appalling panels, and a simpler, more direct approach in story-telling.

After the explosion of horror titles ended in the 1970s, Normanton goes on to the lean years of the 1980s and 90s, and more recent horror titles in the book's last two sections entitled, The Faithful Few, and A New Millennium for the Macabre -- the 21st Century, respectively. Having rekindled my love for illustrated horror within the last two years, these sections provide a wealth of reading-list material for me to explore. From Peter Von Sholly's photo-montage remake of John Stanley's The Monster of Dread End, to Cal McDonald: A Letter From B.S., these stories highlight the continuing sophistication in both artwork and writing that keep the illustrated-horror genre evolving and vibrant.

The Mammoth Book of Best Horror Comics is a treasure-trove that will provide hours of pleasure to the horror lover, and mortify just about everyone else. So  better read it late at night, when the rats in the walls have quieted down, and "For the love of God, Montressor!" no longer echoes loudly through the dark, fungi-soaked catacombs, but whispers oh-so-softly at the edges of your mind. Just make sure to buy two copies, so you'll be left in peace when the walking dead come calling to read it, too.

Movie Review: House on Haunted Hill (1959)

Zombos Says: Classic

In his book, Step Right Up! I'm Gonna Scare the Pants Off America, William Castle describes his chance meeting with a depressed Vincent Price in a coffee shop on a rainy evening. Price, melancholy over losing out on an important picture earlier that day, listens to Castle's pitch on the role of the scheming millionaire Frederick Loren, who’s out to murder his wife.

"Sounds interesting," he [Price] said. "Go on."
"During the night, many strange ghostly things happen...blood dripping from the ceiling...walls shaking...apparitions appearing. The millionaire—the part I want you to play—has plotted to kill his wife. She plots to kill you…It's a battle of wits."
Price smiled. "Who wins?"
"You do, of course. She tries to throw you in a vat of boiling acid."
Price's eyes gleamed. "How charming! I think I'll have another piece of pie."

Castle sums up by saying "the deal was made on the second piece of pie that same rainy night."

While the 1940s had Universal's iconic Monsters and RKO's Val Lewton and Jacque Tourneur, the 1950s had William Castle's spook show entertainment. Your ticket price guaranteed receipt of thrills and chills not only on the theater screen, but in the aisles as well. Realizing his B-movies—mostly written for a younger audience—needed a little something extra to generate buzz, Castle ramped up the marketing hype by using lurid trailers, tawdry poster art, and clever—silly—gimmicks to hawk his movies. Like that wonderful prize you can't wait to get to in a Cracker Jack Box, Castle's gimmicks were always simple and sweet in effect, and perfect for the Saturday matinée crowd.

Whether it was the insurance policy handed out during Macabre, or Percepto tingling your theater-seated butt in The Tingler, or squinting through Illusion-O glasses to see all Thirteen Ghosts, you always got your money's worth. While he didn't quite scare the pants off America with his theatrics, he did put a nice crease in them for many horror fans.

For House on Haunted Hill he used Emergo, which was an inflatable, glow in the dark skeleton moving across a wire hung overhead. It emerged during a key scene to allow the audience much frightful merriment derived from throwing a concession stand’s worth of candy and popcorn at it. My guess is it also increased sales for those items, so the theater owner was quite merry, too.

Vincent Price had already proven his mettle at playing a smarmy, sinister sophisticate (The Mad Magician, House of Wax, and Richelieu in The Three Musketeers), so the role of Loren was right up his dark alley as Castle shrewdly knew. Price's star presence would give the movie a touch of class plus a delightfully petulant malevolence that would bolster ticket sales to the young audience members making up the majority of theater-goers in the 50s. With adults staying home to watch the new novelty of the small screen, kids and teenagers ventured forth in record numbers to have a good old corny time in front of the big one. And with the major studios cutting back on A-movie, and especially B-movie productions, and their studio system of star-grooming and film distribution in tatters, the era of carnivalesque promotion and independent stars had begun.

Gimmickmeister Castle ate it all up like a kid eagerly scarfing down popcorn, Milk Duds and Chuckles in one mouthful, but he did take movie distribution seriously: his melodramatic send-ups of spook show horror clichés, done in remarkably simple dark and light, accompanied by shrill screams and throaty groans, were family-friendly terrors Joey and Janey could enjoy while their older siblings smooched in the back rows with their boyfriends and girlfriends. The film's haunted-house-ride styled opening, with the screen kept black as a piercing scream rips through the theater, followed by moans and chains clanking, was astutely tailored for hugging and smooching.

To play against Price's more sober Loren, Castle cast the master of the wide-eyed stare, and perennial fall guy, character actor Elisha Cook Jr. (Captain Kirk's anachronistic lawyer, Samuel T. Cogley, in the Classic Trek episode, Court Martial) as the woebegone house owner, Watson Pritchard, to scare up the gruesome with his tales of disembodied heads never found, blood stains dripping from ceilings, and that vat of boiling acid awkwardly placed in the middle of the gloomy cellar's floor.

It's all ludicrous fun in a slick, schlocky package that, surprisingly, exhibits some memorably eerie terror moments, hinting at J-horror stylization long before Japanese horror came to the forefront: a floating apparition with long hair, albeit blond, appears in lightning storm flashes through a barred window high above the ground, and the cloudy-eyed housekeeper with her annoying habit of gliding—more like rolling—quietly across the floor in the darkest places antes-up the fright-sights. Also unusual for a low budget film, composer Von Dexter's music rises above its B-movie assignment to become an evocative and melodramatically creepy as hell—in that 1950s creepy as hell sort of way—accompaniment priming shivers of its own.

The flimsy plot has Frederick Loren inviting five guests to spend the night with him and his wife in the notorious house. If they survive, each guest will receive ten thousand dollars for their unwitting part in his cat and mouse game to do away with his adulterous wife. The cheerless Loren, along with the cheerless Pritchard, greets everyone amid the cobwebs. Loren carefully chose each guest, they all need the money badly, and chauffeured them to the house in cheerless hearses. His droll sense of humor continues when he hands out the party favors: handguns, neatly packaged in mini-coffins.

Before you can say "cheese dip anyone?" Pritchard leads them on a murder-highlights tour of the house, ending with the vat of acid in the cellar for his show-stopper. "You mean that's still filled with...?" asks one astonished guest. He picks up a dead rat, tosses it in, and in a few roiling seconds up comes the bony white skeleton picked clean.

No one wanted cheese dip after that.

In venerable horror movie victim tradition, everyone decides to go it alone after one guest's nerves start to unravel and the mysterious housekeepers high-tail it before midnight, locking everyone in. Nora Manning (Carolyn Craig), the screamer of the bunch, keeps finding reasons to scream her fool head off, and the frisky Lance (Richard Long)—all frisky guys in horror and pornography movies are named Lance by the way—insists on walking into pitch dark rooms to get knocked unconscious or trapped. The spookiness kicks in gear when they stay behind to explore the gloomy cellar; actually Lance stays behind hoping to explore Nora. By the way, did I mention there's this big vat of corrosive acid carelessly placed in the middle of the cellar floor where anybody could kind of trip into it...or get pushed into it?

There are two really chilling scenes in House on Haunted Hill.

The first happens when Lance disappears into a dark room, leaving Nora alone in the gloomy cellar. The doors to the many rooms Lance opened, to poke his head into for a quick look, one by one slowly close on rusty hinges as the lights wink out in turn. What's that you're thinking? Why yes, of course; a spook sends Nora screaming up the stairs to get the party started. The other terror moment happens when spook-magnet Nora gets all tied up by a floating apparition during a lightning storm. With Von Dexter's music dramatically pounding in-between the lightning flashes, it's a hair-raising moment. Toss in the organ playing by itself and the hairy monster hand reaching for her throat from behind a door (a set up first seen in The Cat and the Canary and later exploited for laughs by Abbott and Costello), and off we go to the visually impressive, but implausible, climax where the cat and mouse game turns nasty.

The ticket sales for House on Haunted Hill impressed Alfred Hitchcock so much he was inspired to do his own B-movie: Psycho. The IMDb notes in their trivia section that while only orchestral theme music was used in the film, lyrics for the music were written by Richard Kayne. Here they are:

There's a house on Haunted Hill
Where ev'rything's lonely and still
Lonely and still
And the ghost of a sigh
When we whispered good-bye
  Lingers on
And each night gives a heart broken cry
There's a house on Haunted Hill
Where love walked there's a strange silent chill
Strange silent chill
  There are mem'ries that yearn
     For our hearts to return
And a promise we failed to fulfill
But we'll never go back
No, we'll never go back
To the house on Haunted Hill!

I hope you will pay a visit to House on Haunted Hill. It wouldn't be too hard to hook up an Emergo gimmick yourself. Just make sure to have lots of popcorn, Milk Duds and Chuckles on hand for your guests. You can leave out the cheese dip and handguns.

Picture courtesy of Dr. Macro's High Quality Movie Scans website.

Interview: Mark Clark

It's not that actors no longer give good performances in horror films (they still do), and it's not as if direction, editing, and special effects weren't important in the classic horror film era. But in most modern horrors, concept is more important than cast. Horror has become a director's genre more than an actor's genre. During the classic era, the genre's biggest stars were Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Vincent Price and Peter Cushing. In the years since, its brightest luminaries have been Mario Bava, George Romero, Wes Craven and M. Night Shyamalan. (Mark Clark in Smirk Sneer and Scream)

 

Director Justin Channell's company acronym, IWC Films, seen on his Heretic Film's distributed Die and Let Live zombies and pizza flick, sum's up the current state of horror cinema rather well: IWC stands for Idiots With Cameras. While I admire his light touch of humor, I fear the ring of truth in those three letters is precisely why horror cinema is mostly relegated to backhanded reviews or begrudging nods of minor acceptance. Making the situation worse, it's not just the idiots holding cameras, but also the ones pretending to act in front of them. Then you have the ones writing incomplete scripts without a hint of drama, pathos or depth, and others directing with those scripts, with nil basic training, because the digital age makes it appear so gosh darn easy to do--and Aunt Edna and Uncle Joey are available Tuesday for free.

Before the digital age gave any idiot with a camera the potential to become another Hitchcock or Romero, but not the sense to learn first, shoot later, horror movies more often than not had drama, pathos, and good acting that was sometimes even great. Even though many of these films were made for a quick buck, too, actors still acted, and writers wrote complete--if not always stellar-- scripts. Directors learned their technique and approached their films seriously. Even if the script was underwhelming and the direction uninspired, you could still count on yesterday's classic horror actor to give it his (or her) stylistic all. It may not have been naturalistic acting, but it was acting that convincingly and realistically entertained. Mark Clark, in his Smirk, Sneer and Scream: Great Acting in Horror Cinema, reminds us of this golden age.

If your looking for detailed plot synopses, look elsewhere: Clark focuses only on the memorable performances that show each actor's ability to bring the house down. And while his predilection for classic horror actors fills part one, the other two parts of his book examine mainstream actors--those thespians briefly caressing the horror genre to leave their permanent scars--and the often neglected leading ladies of fright. From Boris Karloff to Anthony Perkins, and Bette Davis to Jodie Foster, Clark lists the roles that bewitched us into becoming horror fans in the first place.

After reading his fascinating book, I invited Mark Clark to step into the closet and talk about Smirk, Sneer and Scream...

Tell us about your background and how you came to write Smirk, Sneer and Scream?

I loved the classic monster movies as a kid, and even imagined someday writing a book about them after reading (and re-reading) Edward Edelson’s Weekly Reader type book, GREAT MONSTERS OF THE MOVIES. After college, I worked as a newspaper reporter and film critic for about 10 years. I eventually left that line of work because I wanted to write what I wanted to write, instead of having to write about whatever I was assigned to cover. Toward the end of my newspaper career, I discovered Tom Weaver and the Brunas brothers’ UNIVERSAL HORRORS, which brought back for me the idea of writing about horror movies. I also began writing articles and reviews for magazines like MONSTERS FROM THE VAULT, MIDNIGHT MARQUEE, SCARLET STREET and FILMFAX and launched my online DVD review column.

Why write about acting in horror films? I mean, it's generally assumed that horror actors are not good actors, right?

Well, I wanted to write a book about horror films, but didn’t want to write a simple history. That had been done to death. I wanted an original angle, and it occurred to me that nobody had ever provided a real appreciation for the great acting performances that had been given in horror films over the years. Horror actors are usually treated like second-class citizens by critics and Academy Award voters, but that’s pure snobbery. Many fine actors worked in the horror genre, and did superb work there. I think Boris Karloff’s work in FRANKENSTEIN or THE BODY SNATCHER, for instance, stacks up with the best screen acting by anybody in any picture.

Also, I wanted to turn the spotlight back on the actors a bit. Even those people who write seriously about horror films these days tend toward narratives where the major players are directors. This is, I think, largely due to the influence of the “autuerist” film theory which emerged in the 1950s and quickly became dominant in critical thought. Personally, I believe that auteurism can be limiting, especially when oversimplified. Sure, directors are important, but film remains a collaborative art. And, as I note in my book, back in the 1930s, nobody went to see a movie based on the name James Whale or Tod Browning. They went based on the name Karloff or Lugosi. Actors and their work, as I see it, went a long way toward defining and shaping the genre, especially during its infancy.

Would you say the acting in classic horror films is different from today's? If so, why?

Wow, these are great, thought-provoking questions!

Thank you. I amaze myself sometimes, too.

Film acting in general is much different than it was in the 1930s, 40s and 50s. And of course it’s completely different from silent film acting. During the classic movie era, actors performed in a manner that was very stylized and distinctive. It wasn’t necessarily naturalistic, but it could be very expressive. Stars tended to develop a recognizable persona they carried from film to film, but the best actors among the big stars (Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Cary Grant, for example) were able to take that persona in a lot of different directions through subtle variations. With the rise of the Stanislavsky “Method” school of acting, all that changed. Naturalism became the new ideal, and anything stylized was dismissed as “phoney” or “camp.” The best screen actors (Marlon Brando, Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep) seemed to vanish into their characters and became almost unrecognizable from film to film. There are a few performers today who have an approach that’s a sort of a hybrid between the classic era and the modern era – actors (like George Clooney, for instance) who have a true star persona, but are capable of submerging into character when necessary.

Of course, this tectonic shift in styles was felt in the horror genre, too. Plus, other changes also had a major impact. The breakup of the studio system brought the death knell for typecasting in the classical definition of the term. Studios couldn’t force an actor to make a career out of one type of character or film. Or, at least, not as easily. If actors had always been free agents, as they are today, we might never have known such a thing as a “horror star” in the first place. Nobody wants to get pigeon-holed as one type of character or too readily associated with one type of film. It’s seen as a bad career move. Left to their own devices, most if not all of the great horror stars would have abandoned the genre to stretch their muscles in different sorts of roles. In the last 20 or 25 years, the only actor who comes close to being a true horror star is Robert Englund. Now, I’ve interviewed Robert and I like him a lot. He’s very intelligent and very funny. But let’s face it, his body of work isn’t going to make anybody forget about Boris Karloff or Peter Cushing. Anyhow, the lack of horror stars has turned horror into more of a director’s genre. Although there are still good performances given in horror movies, often the acting almost seems beside the point. CLOVERFIELD, for instance, strikes me as pretty well-acted, but the film derives most of its power through technique, rather than performance. That’s common now.

You devote a chapter to the leading ladies of horror, including actors like Bette Davis, Jaime Lee Curtis, and Simone Simon. Why? Isn't horror a man's game?

Now you’re baiting me! Actually, I found writing that particular chapter more enjoyable than any other in the book. In retrospect, I think an entire book could be written on the subject of women in horror films – not a compendium of biographies like Gregory Mank’s two-volume WOMEN IN HORROR FILMS, but rather a survey of how women’s roles in horror films have reflected the changing place of women in American society over the past century. It’s a fascinating subject, which I touched on (again somewhat indirectly) in SMIRK, but which deserves further consideration and discussion. In the context of SMIRK, my primary focus was to draw attention to the many great performances by women that have graced the horror film, like those by Mia Farrow in ROSEMARY’S BABY and Sissy Spacek in CARRIE in addition to those you mentioned. There were so many great ones, it was tough to narrow it down. That was the hardest part of the entire project, actually -- keeping it from growing as big as the NYC yellow pages. There are so many great performances out there, it was impossible to cover them all. My book was intended to be a starting place for discussion, not the final word.

In our email discussions, you mentioned there were  elements you were trying to weave into Smirk, Sneer and Scream you don't think fully came off. Can you elaborate on them?

Some of them I’ve already touched on, like the impact the rise of method acting and the breakup of the studio system had on horror film acting, and on the evolution of the genre itself. While writing the book, I tried to deal with these developments in a way that, looking back, was too subtle – you can get the narrative, but it’s broken up in bits and pieces in several different write-ups, rather than being stated in a clear, unified manner. I won’t be making that mistake again. In my current book, all my ideas are up front, offered in a clear, linear way. For better or for worse!

Who's your favorite actor in classic and contemporary horror, and why?

Among the classic horror performers, it’s almost impossible to go wrong with Peter Cushing or Lon Chaney Sr. I think Lionel Atwill and George Zucco are underrated. I love Bela Lugosi and Vincent Price. But my favorite is definitely Karloff. He was just such a master. At the top of his game, his performances could be tremendously subtle and moving. He could scare the hell out of you, or he could break your heart. I don’t think any other horror star has a filmography as full of varied, three-dimensional characters as Karloff, and I don’t think any other star had as significant an impact on the development of the horror film. For decades, he was the face of the genre, the same way John Wayne personified the Western. In terms of contemporary horror films, I tend to like individual performances more than particular actors.

How did you conduct your research for Smirk, Sneer and Scream?

I watched and rewatched hundreds of movies and took copious notes. Very detailed notes. Lots of rewinding, pausing, jotting things down. I tried to break down the physicality of the actor’s performance – not just the line delivery but posture, gait, gestures. What was he or she doing in the scene that really brought the character to life? How did he or she relate to the other players in the scene? How did the actor’s choices differ from or align with the performer’s work in other films? Or with the way other performers had approached similar roles? The hardest part was not getting distracted by other elements in the film, staying focused on just the acting aspect. It required a great deal of discipline and could be exhausting, frankly. Try it some time and see!

As a writer, what's your regimen to get words onto the page?

A source of ongoing pain, frankly! I tend to write in fits and starts, working very intensely for a while and then not at all for a while. This is absolutely not the way to approach writing, and I am trying to become more steady and disciplined. It’s also a big reason why I took me so long (over six years) to write SMIRK. I need to improve if I’m ever going to write all the books I want to write.

What other books can we see from your digital pen? More on horror, I hope.

I’m currently co-authoring (with Bryan Senn) a book with the working title SIXTIES SHOCKERS: HORROR FILMS OF THE 1960s. It’s going to cover, comprehensively, one of the richest, most varied and most dynamic periods in the history of the genre, a time when the classic horror era overlapped with the dawn of the modern era. I’m especially interested in writing about the way the social upheavals of the era played out in that decade’s horror films. I’m very excited about it. I hope to finish it this year and have it on the market in 2009. Again, McFarland will publish it.

Shameless plug department: By the way, if anybody else out there liked SMIRK, I urge them to check out a book called SCIENCE FICTION AMERICA. Edited by David Hogan, the book contains essays from several writers (including me) about the way social issues have been portrayed in sci-fi films over the years. All the essays are excellent. My two (about I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE and the first two ALIEN films) are the best work I have published so far. SCIENCE FICTION AMERICA is available from McFarland.

What's the one question you've been dying to be asked, if any, and what's your answer?

Q: Can I buy the film rights to SMIRK for a million bucks?

A: Yes. Just make the check payable to me.

Movie Review: Cloverfield (2008)

Zombos Says: Very Good

In 1954's classic horror movie, Gojira (Godzilla), the atomic age of mass destruction spawns the monstrous reptile Godzilla, a prehistoric creature rising from the depths of the Pacific Ocean to wreak havoc on Tokyo. As city buildings crumble to dust and thousands of people die, a humbled military fight back in a futile attempt to stop the destruction. A renegade scientist is finally convinced to use his own weapon of mass destruction to destroy Godzilla, but he takes his own life to make sure the weapon will never be used again.

In Cloverfield, we have a newer horror movie more suited to our age of uncertainty and unreason, in which a monstrous creature of unknown origin comes from the depths of the Hudson River (or so it seems) to destroy New York City. With no conclaves of nodding scientists struggling to understand why and no military strategy sessions to explore best options for defense, it's not clear where it--a huge bat-like creature that looks very much like the huge bat-like creature in The Angry Red Planet--comes from or why it's destroying everything in sight; but the sudden appearance leaves no time for heroics, strategies, or any of the characters making sense out of what is happening. As Manhattan crumbles into dust and people die, a desperate and overwhelmed military fight on as the creature and the many smaller multi-legged beasties tagging along with it wreak havoc and death.

This is not the first time New York City has been laid waste by a giant monster that comes out of the harbor. In 1953's The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms another prehistoric reptile, awakened by nuclear radiation, stomps and chomps down on the city and Coney Island until a radioactive isotope, shot from a rifle held at the top of the Cyclone roller-coaster, enters the creature's earlier bazooka-induced neck wound to stop it cold; but not before a virulent contagion, spread by the blood oozing from that neck wound, takes it's devastating toll on the population. The Manhattanites in Cloverfield do not fare much better.

What is different here is we get to see the carnage from the civilian perspective, at street level, without miniatures being stomped on, when a going-away party turns into a nightmare for five twenty-something friends. There is no renegade scientist (sane or questionably sane) to save the day, no atomic age rationale to explain and provide a simple solution, and the friends are only trying to stay alive under killer circumstances. Keeping us shoulder-to-shoulder with them is director Matt Reeves shaky camcorder view of the carnage and chaos throughout. Yes, it is one of those point of view, found footage movies. But stick with it even if you are not all that into such techniques of storytelling as it is worth your time.

What you will see is the non-stop recording of Rob’s (Michael Stahl-David) party by his friend Hud (T. J. Miller) morph into a reasonable contrivance for the found footage delivery. We follow Rob and friends up to the rooftop to see what is going on after the building shakes and the power goes out, then hastily run down the stairs and onto the street with them as things heat up. When the Statue of Liberty's head comes, very impressively, crashing and rolling down the street, confusion and fear kick in, leading to an escape run to get out of Manhattan. The rough handling and sudden gaps in scenes as Hud mishandles his camcorder creates realistic, nerve-wracking tension, and a damn-it-Hud-stand-still annoyance from us; but the quality of his experience, and therefore ours, is exactly what you would expect from anyone using a camcorder during a crisis situation, responding to events unfolding in rapid succession while trying not to trip over their own feet in the process.

This is where a suspension of disbelief comes in handy: Hud keeps filming EVERYTHING through his camera, even though any normal person would chuck the bloody thing and run like hell for safety. All found footage movies must, eventually, rely on the viewer to disengage common sense for the story to work; some use a more natural integration of it, like Troll Hunter, where a bunch of college students are already filming a documentary within the movie’s framework, so they would, naturally, want to record everything that happens. Their found footage is plausible enough, because of this, for us to accept.

Cloverfield integrates its shaky cam with precision, providing enough visual teasers to keep scenes tense and visually engrossing. Given the twenty-something generation's need to be constantly connected socially to share every storm and urge, it is not a long stretch to believe Hud would keep filming through thick and thin. YouTube and Instagram love you-are-there footage like that. I wish I knew the brand name of that camcorder, though, since its battery life is amazing. It never wears down

Also amazing are the claustrophobic and dismal scenes of turmoil. While the man-in-suit Godzilla and Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion monsters were state of the art for the 1950s, today's minute-timer, media-savvy, audiences require more realism and relevance. Seen through Hud’s camcorder, the mix of scene staging, tantalizing creature glimpses, and frenetic action stay believable through its lens. Highlights include Rob turning on the camcorder's night vision in the subway tunnel to see what's spooking the rats—really should have done that sooner—and Hud's close-encounter of the monster kind, giving us a long hard look at the skyscraper-sized creature's face: classic terror elements jazzed up for the digital age. Scripter Drew Goddard knows his horror: the Brooklyn Bridge encounter, reminiscent of a similar monster-whump in It Came From Beneath the Sea is a terrifying jolt.

While Cloverfield is classic horror at heart, there is a love story driving the action in the right direction too (gladly for us horror fans; sadly, not really well for the characters).

After Rob has a blow-out with his girlfriend at the party, when she later calls his cell phone, hurt and pleading for help, he is off and running to save her, even though his path leads right into the chaos. His friends decide to stay close. Reaching the building where Beth (Odette Yustman) lives, Hud's "don't tell me that's where she lives!" line sums it up best. This is when the struggle really begins.

For all its social-generational look and feel, Cloverfield relies on good old-fashioned horror themes like big monsters whumping big cities to deliver the shocks.

Movie Review: The Mysterious Case of The Blood Shed (2007)

Zombos Says: Poor

Although the chandelier was unlit, light from the brightly burning logs in the large fireplace shimmered through its crystals, sending beams of white into the high, dark corners of the ceiling, across the walls, and across the richly carpeted floor. Facing the fireplace stood a high-backed Chippendale wing chair with exquisite cabriole legs. The chair was upholstered in the same deep color as the carpet. A short man briskly entered the room and walked toward the chair.

"Ah, Mr. Bolton, you are early." A small, stark white hand briefly appeared on the right side of the chair, flicked the ashes off a long cigar, then disappeared. "It must be a serious matter then?"

Bolton looked down at the ashes piled in the bronze ashtray resting on the oval-topped trestle table beside the chair. He pulled a DVD case from his worn messenger's pouch. He addressed the back of the wing chair.

"Yes, it's a serious matter. Seventy-three minutes of bloody hillbilly debauchery that defies sanity, convention, and good people's decency. Bluntly put, it's schlock with a capital S."

"Excellent, I love a challenge!" said the voice, accompanied by a single clap of hands.

From the left side of the wing chair a stark white hand reached out expectantly. Bolton was relieved to hand over the DVD.

"You will find sherry and a polished Stiegel glass by the couch. We will be a short time, I'm sure."

Bolton removed his overcoat and retreated to the couch in the other room. He sat down, poured the sherry, and waited, as he normally did, for the review that no one else would do; no one, that is, except for the League of Reluctant Reviewers.

 

What are we to do with Alan Rowe Kelly, then? The man is incorrigible. What infantilistic need drives him to dress like an aging, demonic Little Lulu, carry wicked-sharp garden shears, and wreak gory havoc worse than the dogs of war? Why does he find subject matter like inbred New Jersey hillbillies with a penchant for cannibalism and sadistic nut-cracking with pliers—not Walnuts, mind you—gleefully choreographed to the tune of the innocent Little Lulu song (and my sincere apologies to Marjorie Henderson Buell), fit for decent horror fans?

As the grotesque Beefteena Bullion, who dreams of becoming America's Next Top Model, he charges ahead with a nightmarish blend of over the top gore, grievous over-acting, and unsavory, outlandish scenes that play parody with too much off-the-wall seriousness. From the shallow end of the genre pool he drags it up with elephant stomps, falling short of delivering unnerving terror or witty black humor.

Yet his compositions are executed with a keen eye for ominous camera angles, foreboding, lingering shots of dread, and the conventions of glistening viscera, sadism with a laugh, and uncouth characters overstuffing this independent horror.

In sum, The Blood Shed is art-house schlock that will appeal to some, be avoided by most, and provide ample forums for discussion by both. Given a healthy budget and a mainstream script, no doubt Kelly would be a force to reckon with. But until that time comes, if ever, we must, reluctantly, direct our critical attention to The Blood Shed.

On the plus side, Sno Cakes (Susan Adriensen) is fun to watch as she and Beefteena chit-chat, sell sour Lemonade, and join in the murder spree with reckless abandon. With her corny drawl, over-done makeup, trashy clothes, and silly hairdo, she's repulsive yet oddly sexy and funny; a bright spot in this drive-in disappointment.

And it's not that the acting is bad, it's more a case of story-telling for the sake of being as outrageous and naughty as possible. Rhyme and reason do not put in an appearance here; not when Beefteena playfully pulls her little stuffed rodent Flapjack on a string as she skips through the woods; or when a local brat is "accidentally" pulled apart in a tug of war; or when dad pulls the shotgun trigger to shoot down airborne squirrels, with comic close-ups of the rigor-mortised rodents lying on the ground, while he and the boys whoop it up.

When the local sheriff's most important asset is attacked with a pair of pliers, the absurdity becomes more disgusting than put-on-funny. Kelly works this gory theater of blood angle with heaviness throughout, putting The Blood Shed out of the range of parody, satire, comedy, or even serious horror because he doesn’t stick enough with any one of them to make a difference.

Beefteena' climactic birthday party scene—why is there always a deviant party or wacko dinner scene in these inbred, cannibalistic, hillbilly movies?—with decaying bodies of past victims wearing party hats seated around a festive table, and terrified future victims waking up to the festivity. It’s a mélange of grossness, bright colors, Little Lulu song playing, and humorless torture. The buzz of the electric carving knife while it’s used on the long-suffering sheriff, and Beefteena's ire at the modeling agency personnel who laughed at her photo session induce nausea throughout this ham-fisted spectacle of tasteless scripting.

Yet throughout this repugnant romp you will find quietly competent cinematography by Bart Mastronardi, who frames each scene with loving precision, making colorful use of inexpensive string lights in unusual settings to cast a deceptively warming palette across scenes of depravity. The resulting dissonance creates a disorienting atmosphere that invites you in, but subtly warns you to stay away.

I heartily recommend you stay away unless you just want to enjoy the scenery. Watching paint dry would be a more productive expenditure of your seventy-three minutes; possibly not as much fun for some of you, but definitely more productive.