Shamless Plugs :: Meanwhile, Over at the Morgue...

In case you missed it, we're spending the entire month of November throwing  a spotlight on the first wave of 3-D films to hit theaters back in 1953-54 over at the Morgue. Here's what you've been missing:

 

So click on over and take a gander if you haven't already. 3-D updates will continue for the rest of the month.

Favorites :: Vintage VHS :: When Sybil Danning Says Watch, You Watch, Pilgrim.

Here's a batch of Sybil Danning's Adventure Videos courtesy of U.S.A. Home Video, a combination of standard and over-sized boxes that used to be littered all over the lost and lamented Video Kingdom, to which I will always be thankful for introducing me to Women in Cell Block 7.

Hrrmmmmmm ... Now Where I Have I Seen that Before?

 

The Haunting (1963): Robert Wise

The Evil Dead (1981): Sam Raimi

Now take a breath, Boils and Ghouls. I'm in no way insinuating some kind of rip-off, here. Far from it as I love both films unconditionally. I had just re-watched The Haunting last night and the quarter kinda dropped. That's it, and nothing more.

Good Reads :: Verily, Get Thee to the Bookstore, True Believers! 'Nuff Said.

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"[Martin] Goodman never missed an opportunity to change a name, and Marvel Comics became Marvel Mystery Comics with the second issue. The Human Torch started to act like every other costumed crime-fighter; whether the threat he defended against was Martian or a trigger-happy racketeer, it could just as easily be a job for Superman -- indeed, following in Superman's footsteps, the Torch took on an alias (Jim Hammond) along with an upright-citizen day job (policeman). Namor, on the other hand, stayed true to his anger: He kidnapped a high-society woman and killed a cop. 

"Namor did find one human he liked. Betty Dean was, of course, a pretty girl; less predictably, she was also a policewoman, friendly with the Human Torch's alter ego Jim Hammond and thus in the unique position to act as a go-between for Timley's two most popular characters. And so it was that in Marvel Mystery Comics #7, a seemingly throwaway moment -- in which Betty warns Namor that the Torch is now on the police force and looking for him -- carried the seeds of something revolutionary: the fictional universe of two characters, conceived by two different imaginations [Carl Burgos and Bill Everett], were in fact one in the same."

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One could easily argue that this moment, predating the birth of Kirby and Lee's The Fantastic Four by nearly two decades, as the point where the Marvel Universe as we know it truly began. And as a dyed-in-the-wool FOOM, this passage from Sean Howe's The Untold Story of Marvel Comics sent such a charge of endorphins down my spine that I shivered at the magnitude of something this simple having that much impact on the industry.

Howe's book, a mind-boggling, well-researched effort really gives the reader a sense of total immersion into the famed Bullpen and it's denizens. A great read, The Untold Story of Marvel Comics runs the gambit from frustrating (over the company's treatment of it's employees from the beginning to this very day), hilarious, awe-inspiring, and heart-breaking, as the author pulls no punches or shies away from any sacred cows as Marvel Comics went from upstart to king through several cycles of booms and busts; from the humble beginnings, to the meteoric rise, to it's cratering into bankruptcy, and caps off with its eventual recovery. It also shed some light on a lot of things I wasn't aware of (-- I had no clue that in the late 1980's DC was ready to get out of the comic book business and sign over it's characters to their chief rival until Marvel pulled out at the last minute) but also reaffirmed most notions on the players involved:

Jack Kirby got screwed, and one can't blame his bitterness and the fan outrage despite any court-rulings. (But he wasn't the only one. On that front, the line forms on the left. I almost cried when Howe transcribed some of Herb Trimpe's diary after he was unceremoniously dumped with a form letter.) And Stan Lee may have co-created some great comics, but like Chuck Jones, when one thinks about the artists of Termite Terrace and the Looney Tunes, probably gets too much credit for the magic that happened because he was the only one left around or willing to take a bow -- which Lee was more than happy to do, because, unlike Jones, Lee comes off as less of an elder statesmen and more of a self-aggrandizing schmuck. And according to Howe, turns out Jim Shooter wasn't just an asshole but a control-freak of pathological dimensions. And though he's still one of my favorite artists, John Byrne was quite the vindictive prick. And I didn't think it was possible, but Rob Leifield is actually a bigger hack and an even bigger tool than we all figured. And one can only boggle what the world of comics would have looked like today if Frank Miller had never been mugged not once but twice. Wow.

Overall, Howe's The Untold Story of Marvel Comics is better and more fun in the early stages, but kind of hits warp speed after the Image defections, and bogs down a little in the minutiae of the corporate raiders who ran the company into bankruptcy and the resulting court battles when the book became less about the comics and more about the malignant business side of it. And the history lesson ends with the events of Civil War and the death of Captain America, with what felt like a tacked on coda about Marvel's recent successes in Hollywood, ending as it began, with Marvel once more going through a quantum shift to start all over again. And if nothing else, the book has convinced me that I must track down some golden age reprints and witness those slobber-knockers between the Torch and the Sub-Mariner first hand.

Recommendations :: What I've Been Watching. And So Should You (or Not.)

  

By no means great, but, when considering it's lackluster reputation, even among William Castle's fans, Macabre wasn't nearly as bad as I'd anticipated. In fact, I found it to be pretty good. (Who knew Jim Backus had that kind of a heavy in him?) A bit clumsy, structurally, sure (--there might have been a flashback inside a flashback), and though this tale of kidnapping and buried secrets threatens to derail itself, the ending twist works and those closing credits are simply ADOREABLE! Recommendation: You'll never get to cash in your Fright Insurance policy, but still worth a look.

So. Finally saw the 7 Faces of Dr. Lao, where a small town with a lot of skeletons takes a spin on the Wheel of Morality. But this morass of maudlin is lost in a metric ton of George Pal silliness. But you probably won't care as Tony Randall runs completely amok through all those characters; and watch and boggle as uptight school marm Barbara Eden gets the -- *ahem* vapors after hearing the siren call of the decadent goat-man. Recommendation: How it took me so long to watch a movie where cowboys fight the Loch Ness Monster is beyond me.

Though it isn't much of a mystery due to a limited amount of suspects (--- who keep getting bumped off), and hamstrung by a reliance on hypnotic hookum to explain away a few plot-holes and make the bad guy's nefarious scheme work, Dr. Morelle: The Case of the Missing Heiress works thanks to the efforts of Valentine Dyall as our pompous sleuth and (most credit to) Julia Lang as his danger-prone assistant; the inappropriately named Ms. Frayle (c'mon, really?), who does most of the heavy lifting until our "hero" swoops in, saves the day, and gets all the credit. Recommendation: A bit slow and stodgy, but I would love to have seen more adventures with this crackling, crime-solving duo.

Gorgeous set designs, arresting cinematography, and a completely whackadoodle script should equal a demented good time in my book but it's easy to see why Tomb of Torture (a/k/a Metempsyco) was director Antonio Boccaci's only film  because he executed all those elements so incompetently. And while I was kind of mesmerized by the mounting stoopidity and inherent eh, why-the-hell-not-ness of the proceedings, odds are you probably won't. Recommendation: Skip it.

Interesting social experiment disguised as an ersatz slasher movie where a deranged killer traps three people in a remote ATM kiosk. But instead of attacking, the killer just kind of pokes and prods and lets the "rats" trapped in a maze of his own design devour each other. But, in the end, this scott free modus operandi of ATM doesn't hold water if one thinks about that fire-hose a little too long. Recommendation: New twist but nothing you probably haven't seen before.

The Post Halloween, Holiday Seasonal Effective Disorder Blues...

I had big plans for October this year. Massive, creepy and kooky updates for the Brewery, the Archive and the Morgue, and even toyed around with idea of participating in one of those 31 Days of Horror blogathons. And then things kinda fell apart. To sum up, I'll recount a phone conversation I had with my sister just as October was waving goodbye to September. "Rob," I said, "I need some advice. I know this guy whose having some health issues..." And after rattling off several symptoms that included horrific indigestion, chills, inexplicable pains that wouldn't go away in certain left leaning appendages, and acute chest pain that flared up horrifically at times but then never seemed to go away, I asked, "Should this guy go see a doctor or just get to the emergency room?"

Without missing a beat, my sister, a trauma nurse, saw through my ruse and told me to get to the emergency room as soon as possible. And so, after a quick call to my parents and boss, I did just that and announced to the attendant behind the desk "I think my heart is trying to kill me." With that, I was soon prone and wired up and answering a lot of questions multiple times with the same answers multiple times for each new set of faces coming in with a battery of tests to follow ... In the good news/bad news department, after an overnight stay at the hospital for observations, prodding, poking and ultra-sounding, I was told my ticker was fine and was definitely not on the verge of plugging up as I'd feared. Perhaps it was the small gallstones they'd discovered, but the general consensus was this attack was some form of hiatal hernia, where my guts, no longer satisfied with protruding outward decided to advance upward, putting pressure on certain nerves that mimicked a heart attack. So, it was all good news but no real answers as to what exactly happened. I am feeling a lot better -- and the psychological effect of knowing your heart ISN'T about to explode is quite a relief, believe you me, but I've also been taking it kind of easy, and since hunching over a computer keyboard for extended periods only seemed to exacerbate the problem meant October was pretty much lost as posts withered and died, including a contribution to the latest Italian Horror Blogathon, and Hallowe'en memes were left unanswered.

I still managed to post a bunch of Horror and Midnight Spookshow ads at the Morgue, and I encourage you to check those out, along with several articles on the nation's reaction to Orson Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast of 1938. Beyond that, I will keep on keeping on, knocking on wood, and hope my guts don't try to kill me again. And hopefully, these sporadic posts will become a little less sporadic if things keep improving -- knock on Tobanga. With that out of the way, we'll let the Rosedales put a cap on both the infarction episode and the Hallowe'en season and play us out...

Video courtesy of  pwclaeys.