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Saturday, August 09, 2008 ( 8/09/2008 12:08:00 PM ) Bill S. SONG TITLE OF THE YEAR: From the new Wreckless Eric/Amy Rigby collaboration: "The Downside of Being A Fuck-Up." # | Friday, August 08, 2008 ( 8/08/2008 07:38:00 AM ) Bill S. DOM: Fun to see Dominic Da Vinci (Nicholas Campbell) as a doomed hostage taker on last night's Flashpoint. Recognized his voice seconds before we saw his face . . . # | Thursday, August 07, 2008 ( 8/07/2008 07:20:00 AM ) Bill S. KAMEN: Read on Mark Evanier's blog this a.m. about the death of EC artist Jack Kamen. A prolific artist for the fifties era comic line, Kamen was much maligned in his day as the least favorite of the EC artists. Though a six or seven-pager with his byline could usually be found in most of the line's horror, s-f and crime comics, it's telling to note that when the horror comics first started seeing reprints in the sixties as Ballantine paperbacks, neither of the first two collections contained any of Kamen's pieces. The first Kamen illustrated horror comic I remember reading was his sole entry in the Nostalgia Press collection, EC Horror Comics of the 1950's, a humor piece entitled "Kamen's Kalamity" that made fun of his place in the comics line. Per Mark, it's the artist's "clean shiny drawings" that seemed most out of whack with the rest of the line's artists, though some of the other ECers - Johnny Craig and Wally Wood, in particular - could be just as spotless with their work. To my eyes, it was more the fact that Kamen never seemed capable of truly letting himself go in the more outlandish horror comics. Unlike the equally prolific Jack Davis, for instance, you rarely got a sense of unrestrained imagination at play. The artist was at his best, though, doing twisty crime comics. His acquisitive dames (there is no other word for 'em), in particular, are lovingly and believably rendered - as are his male dupes. Picked up a volume of Crime Suspenstories this morning to page through one of Kamen's entries: there's an appealing B-movie flatness to it that more visually inventive artists never quite attain. Kamen had it down, which is one of the reasons EC kept him in the bullpen. # | Wednesday, August 06, 2008 ( 8/06/2008 06:51:00 AM ) Bill S. "DID SOMEBODY SAY 'MATTRESS' TO MISTER LAMBERT?" For this week's mid-week music vid, let's join the boys of Marcy Playground as they pop in on John & Yoko with "It's Saturday." # | Tuesday, August 05, 2008 ( 8/05/2008 07:00:00 AM ) Bill S. GAUGES: Gotta admit I'm more than a little irritated by the stoopidity of the current Republican campaigners' recent ridicule of Obama's suggestion to keep your tires properly inflated. Living in a rough-road part of Arizona, I've grown more aware of my tires' inflation levels than I was in Illinois, but I know there were years when I didn't check my tire inflation as consistently as I do today. I've seen and read this simple suggestion in a multitude of news stories and articles over the past few months - most of which make the point that do so could result in regular savings for the savvy car owner. So, what? It's not a candidate's place to make common sense suggestions? # | Monday, August 04, 2008 ( 8/04/2008 11:57:00 AM ) Bill S.  "A GREAT PLACE TO DIG UP THE DEAD – OR BURY YOUR CAREER!" In the grand tradition of top-heavy horror hostesses, corny puns and low-rent cinema, Morella's Blood Vision is the latest in a line of drive-in DVD anthologies provided courtesy of movie cheese-master Fred Olen Ray's Retromedia and Infinity Entertainment Group. A collection of three obscuro horror flicks from the sixties and seventies, two of which get introduced in shot-for-video sequences featuring the zaftig Morella, Blood Vision features Del Tenney's Zombies (which also was released under the much more evocative title, I Eat Your Skin), a Philippine horror item entitled The Blood Seekers and the seventies Southern survival tale Blood Stalkers. According to the DVD case, there's also supposed to be a trailer for something entitled Blood of the Man Devil on the disc, but I'm damned if I could find it.Morella's brief opening sequences aren't much to speak of, though they do have that all-important one-take local channel middle-of-the-night feel to 'em. Don't know why there isn't an intro segment for Blood Stalkers, though I liked the way she stabs a turnip as a comment on the relatively bloodless nature of Blood Seekers. As a dirty-minded post-post-post-adolescent, I know I'd gladly watch more Morella. As for the movies themselves, Zombie proves to be a very of-its-decade mid-sixties cheapie. In it, Tenney, who is perhaps better known for The Horror of Party Beach (once featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000), tells the tale of a swingin' bachelor novelist (William Joyce) who travels with his agent and his agent's blond bimbo wife to Voodoo Island to investigate dire doings on the tropical isle. Said evil deeds involve a mad scientist and his predictably fetching daughter, plus an army of zombies with bug-eyes and what looks like an excess amount of calamine lotion on their faces. In one of the movie's proto-dumb moments, our hero swims across a lagoon with a pistol in his pants, then pulls it out to fire at a zombie. Even the kids in the audience were shouting aw, c'mon! with that one, though they probably dug the bit where a fisherman's head gets lopped off by a machete wielding zombie. For the record, no skin-eating actually occurs onscreen, but we do get a lot of movie-padding voodoo dance scenes. The Philippine-shot Blood Seekers is a notch more smoothly constructed, even if the speaking extras occasionally sound as if they learned their lines phonetically á la Abba. The plot centers on "a strange blood cult" that operates out of a barrio nightclub: its blond-haired leader is draining the blood of young girls to keep herself young. Our hero (Robert Winston) is an American (yup, another one!) called to the island to investigate the serial killings; though not as much the jaunty swingin' bachelor as the hero of Zombies, he still manages to romance the adopted sister of the island's dim police inspector - and, of course, rescue her when she's captured by the cult leader's bulbous headed henchman. Though originally filmed in black-and-white, Blood Seekers was tinted post-production to give the illusion of being shot in color. Thus, scenes set in the movie's Barrio Club are bathed in a lavender glow, while the exterior daytime sequences are shown in a sickly sepia. Infinity's version of the film has a distinctly muttery soundtrack, but since much of our hero's dialog is comprised of unfunny wisecracks, it's no big loss. It's not as if you're missing any subtle character nuances here. The third "Blood Vision" feature, 1978's Blood Stalkers, actually lives up to its gory title, though it takes its own sweet time getting there. The only entry with a vaguely familiar face (Ken Miller, who played the bongos in I Was A Teenage Werewolf and was one of the menacing gang members in Orson Welles' Touch of Evil), Stalkers attempts to blend Deliverance with Legend of Boggy Creek. If the results are a mishmash, at least you can see writer/director Robert W. Morgan (who also casts himself as one of the movie's overripe poacher swampbillies) trying something interesting. The flick concerns a quartet of flare-wearing tourists, led by brooding Vietnam vet Jerry Albert, who run afoul of the title Stalkers when they stay the night in a grunged-out deserted cabin built by the hero's dad. Two moments in particular stand out: a sequence scored to a rousing gospel hymn where our hero futilely attempts to get help from a group of resistant townsfolk and a grisly reveal framed like something out of Herschel Gordon Lewis' Blood Feast. The lingering coda, where our shocked and bloody vet stumbles through the town past the people who originally refused to aid him, is also a nice moody touch. Too bad the director blows it by cross-cutting with end credit shots of the main cast grinning into the camera, a moment reminiscent of the timid finish to the movie of The Bad Seed - which also brought its cast back for an on-camera curtain call as if to tell us, "Hey, that little girl didn't really kill Henry Jones! He's just an actor!" Still, that Blood Stalkers even has an ending to flub is more than you can say for a lot of flicks of this ilk. Its inclusion on the package makes Morella's Blood Vision a decent purchase for lovers of old-style southern-fried exploitation cinema - even if the folks at Retrovision couldn't bother to film an intro for it. # | Sunday, August 03, 2008 ( 8/03/2008 07:45:00 AM ) Bill S. "THIS TOWN WAS BUILT ON SEX AND MONEY, SON." The central idea behind Vampyres of Hollywood (St. Martin's Press), credited to actress Adrienne Barbeau & Michael Scott, is an admittedly amusing one: it's that most of the big names in Hollywood, the glamorous ones who never really seem to age, are in fact vampyres. Many of the legends that Hollywood has concocted about the creatures were created by real-life Tinseltown bloodsuckers (Dracula director Tod Browning among 'em), while even Bram Stoker's original novel was influenced by a lovely vampyress who Stoker called "my Lucy." The increased otherworldly look that many big stars get over time isn't the result of excess plastic surgery but physical manifestations of their vampyre nature becoming more apparent as they age. The reason Orson Welles wore capes during the latter years of his career, we're told, was to hide a growing tail. The Chatelaine of Hollywood - the one responsible for turning Welles and Browning, Charlie Chaplin and Rudolph Valentine (who chafed at having to fake his own death) - is a sexy genre actress named Ovsanna Moore. Moore has managed the neat trick of "killing" herself and coming back as her own actor daughter twice, thus sustaining a career in the movie biz that goes back all the way to the silent era. That she's been able to get away with this under public scrutiny can in part be explained by the fact that the present Ovsanna primarily labors in self-produced horror flicks with titles like Tell Me What You've Seen and Vatican Vampires. It's not as if she's under a hyper-intense A-List entertainment news spotlight. That situation changes, though, once a series of murders attached to Ovsanna's movie company, Anticipation Studios, begins. Promising young vampyre actors who were themselves turned by the scream queen start showing up dead for real at the hands of a serial killer called the Cinema Slayer. The increased attention makes more than a few Hollywood vamps nervous, and, when a high-profile homicide detective named Peter King gets assigned the case, Ovsanna is given a deadline to herself solve the murders. As the body count grows, it seems increasingly less likely that our heroine will be able to keep her secret from at least getting uncovered by the hard-nosed police detective. Barbeau & Scott keep it all moving quickly, troweling on the sardonic movie biz wit and occasionally sneaking in a decent little in-joke. At one point, for instance, the narrating Ovsanna notes of HBO, "I think they lost their touch when they cancelled Carnivale." The book's narration alternates between Ovsanna and our seen-it-all copper, and, though the writers try to spice up the human's part of the story by making him a movie buff whose mother sells movie memorabilia, the fact remains that it's the shrewd vampire businesswoman who keep the story truly moving. If Vampyres had contained a genuine mystery we might have cared more strongly about Detective King, but the writers are more concerned with serving up and skewering Hollywood attitude than they are with inventing a truly twisty whodunit. That noted, Vampyres of Hollywood proves a diverting zippy read: nicely gory, if not particularly scary, with beaucoup hard-earned industry cynicism. I could see Barbeau's former hubby John Carpenter (who provides the obligatory back cover blurb for the book) having a ball with this material. Perhaps they could pull the undead Orson Welles out of seclusion to play himself? # | |
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