Own the Mask of Satan!

Barbara Steele in Mario Bava's BLACK SUNDAY.

I was recently contacted through Facebook by a representative for Timothy Ramzyk, who - some years back - had published THE MONSTER BOX, a set of 25 restored reproductions of the original box art for 8mm Monster movies sold in the 1950s and '60s which I had reviewed for VIDEO WATCHDOG. (There have since been two additional MONSTER BOXes released, available through his website Pulp Novelties.) I was told that a gift was coming my way and to be on the lookout for it. It later arrived, a sizable box addressed to both Donna and me, so I awaited her availability so we could open it together. To say that we were astounded by what rested inside its styrofoam support casing is an understatement.

It was a full-sized reproduction of the Mask of Satan, as seen in Mario Bava's classic film La maschera del demonio (1960), better known as BLACK SUNDAY! It was sent to us as a belated but most generous thank you for writing and producing MARIO BAVA - ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK.

The original Mask, of course, was sculpted by the director's father Eugenio Bava, a great cinematographer and special effects technician of the silent screen; Timothy's Mask is the culmination of his meticulous study of the film's images and some enriching embellishments of his own. The piece has incredible presence. It's a powerful object to behold and a most impressive object to display. It has the authority to overwhelm every other object in a room, and is a tribute not only to Timothy's love for the movie and his attentive craftsmanship, but the thunderous vision of the original artifact. 

Javuto (Arturo Dominici) rises from unhallowed ground in BLACK SUNDAY.

Since I received this staggering gift, Timothy has taken the necessary steps to make his Mask an authorized product - it has been licensed through Naor World Media Film, the present owner of the film - and he is beginning to accept orders TODAY. 

For the curious, here are some views of the Mask from different angles - including the reverse side, which people automatically want to know about. 

Please note: The Mask of Satan is manufactured by hand, not mass-produced; therefore, while the item is licensed for years to come, the presently available quantity is limited. If you're interested in acquiring one (and who wouldn't be?), I would recommend you stake your claim now - especially if you'd like to have yours in time for the holidays.

It is priced at $272.00 plus postage, and it can only be obtained by writing to Timothy here. 

(c) 2018 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

For the Love of Toho IV... PLUS

EBIRAH - MONSTER OF THE DEEP
aka GODZILLA VS. THE SEA MONSTER (Kraken Releasing BD)
After the 1966 theatrical release of GHIDRAH THE THREE-HEADED MONSTER (1965), the correct chronology of Godzilla films started getting confused in the American consciousness. Here, the release of Ishirô Honda's wonderful MONSTER ZERO (aka INVASION OF THE ASTRO-MONSTER, 1966) got skipped over and delayed until 1970, while this subsequent 1967 adventure seemed to pop up out of nowhere on television in the late 1960s. I had seen the dubbed version televised two or three times over the years, but this was my first viewing of the Japanese version with English subtitles. A young man in search of his missing brother talks a group of peers into lending their boat to his purpose, which takes them to an irradiated island guarded by a giant lobster, and inhabited by a dormant Godzilla. Not frightening in the least, which the series hadn't been since the first film, but somehow appreciably less of a monster-fest than the most recent films, even though Mothra and a somewhat flea-bitten-looking giant condor make cameo appearances. In addition to monster tennis, this one includes some absolutely superb optical and matte shots (not the work of the credited Eiji Tsubaraya but his successor Sadamasa Arikawa, who was supervised by Tsubaraya), and I like the Godzilla suit in this one; it has a certain scrappy character. I miss the Peanuts as the Infant Island Twins, though; they are played here by a less endearing sister act, Pair Bambi. There's absolutely no doubt in my mind that Masaru Satô occasionally surf-poppy score is where the B-52s' Ricky Wilson got the inspiration for his “Rock Lobster” riffs. Fun movie, gorgeous looking and sweet-sounding Blu-ray presentation - the packaging says DTS HD Master Audio mono, but I could have sworn there was some stereo separation going on. Order here.

LATITUDE ZERO (Tokyo Shock Media Blasters DVD)
From a distance this looks like a homogenized ATRAGON warm-over, so it's not surprising it hasn't garnered the cult audience it deserves... but track this thing down and buy it. Till then, just imagine this: Cesar Romero is cast as a cackling mad scientist, who - miles below the ocean surface - single-handedly removes the brain of a sedated lion and replaces it with the brain of his coldly discarded mistress, then grafts two wings of a woebegone condor (yes, the same one from EBIRAH!) onto its back, while two screaming observers are forcibly restrained by a pair of leering half-human bat creatures that look flown in from TWILIGHT PEOPLE. Romero is so carried away by his own genius that it never occurs to him that his ex’s brain might carry a grudge. Incredibly, this mayhem was rated G (!!!) at the time of the film's release. Joseph Cotten and his wife Patricia Medina are also aboard. The special effects are once again credited to Eiji Tsubaraya (who died not long after the film's release) though actually executed by Sadamasa Arikawa and others; they are among some of the best to be found in Toho's output. Also, this film being a co-production with America, you get to hear suave Toho regular Akira Takarada speaking his English lines in his own voice. Alternately impressive and uproarious - time well spent! Originally produced in stereo, the DVD upgrades the mix to 5.1 and includes other special features, like deleted scenes and the Japanese cut. Order here.

HORRORS OF MALFORMED MEN (Arrow Video) 
Teruo Ishii’s Kyôfu kikei ningen: Edogawa Rampo zenshû is ostensibly a surreal, over the top, tongue-in-cheek adaptation of the complete works of Edogawa Rampo; it started out as an adaptation of a single story but, realizing during production that it might be his only such adaptation, he proceeded to a rewrite that threw in everything but the proverbial kitchen sink. I realized about halfway through this often fascinating, occasionally repugnant, and operatically overdone feature that is it, is in some ways, the movie APOCALYPSE NOW should have been - it depicts the madness that Kurtz should have been up to - so it owes something to Joseph Conrad as well as Rampo. Now available on BD from Arrow Video with two expert commentaries and various extras ported over from a previous Synapse Films DVD release, this is for the adventurous, worthy of sharing a shelf with Moctezuma’s DR. TARR’S TORTURE DUNGEON (MANSION OF MADNESS), the complete works of Alejandro Jodorowsky, and MALATESTA’S CARNIVAL OF BLOOD. Order here.

(c) 2018 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

RIP Stan Lee (1922-2018)

Stan Lee promoting DOCTOR STRANGE with Ditko hands.

My mother taught me to read, but Stan Lee and Forry Ackerman probably encouraged me to read more than anyone before I could find my own way. When I was a kid, he (or at least the work he signed, it usually carried his unmistakable voice) gave me most of my ideas about what it meant to be a responsible adult, about how sometimes people’s best intentions were not enough, about the importance of continuing on when it just didn’t seem possible. I understand that he had flaws and faults of his own, as always seems to enter the picture with money and success, but when I think of all the talent he introduced and gave a regular platform and voice for so many years, how can I not be eternally thankful? 

I was actually there when what we now know as Marvel's Silver Age was starting up; I have vivid memories of getting THE AVENGERS #3 and THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #14 off of drug store spinner racks.  I remained a serious Marvel collector well into my early teens, when the company's product began losing its character as various of its classic creators left to pursue something closer to their real worth, and when Stan himself began relinquishing his writing duties - around the same time I was beginning to favor actual novels. To me, that decade of real time experience was every bit as privileged as having been around to witness the The Beatles.

Excelsior!

(c) 2018 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

Finally Seeing THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND

Peter Bogdanovich and John Huston.

Now I can say that I have experienced Orson Welles’ THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND (playing this month on Netflix and in select theatrical engagements), but have I seen it? Is it possible to really “see” it in a single go? 

The storyline is simplicity itself: it's a portrait of a maverick film director (John Huston) on his 70th birthday, trying to find the funding for one last masterpiece that he's basically trying to will into existence without a script. Meanwhile, the old Hollywood studio system is crumbling around him and he must find the humility to beg intercession from a former admirer who has become the hottest young film director in town. It's very clearly about the ironic relationship between Welles himself and Peter Bogdanovich, the difference between them being that Welles refused to play himself. He also initially denied Bogdanovich the opportunity by casting Rich Little in the role of the young successor - ostensibly because he, like Bogdanovich, was known for doing impressions. When that casting failed, Bogdanovich stepped in. One wishes that Welles had been as honest and as brave. His absence from the film (save for a couple of questions his well-known voice addresses from off-screen to Lili Palmer in an interview) prevents the film from achieving supernova as a piece of meta-filmmaking. Huston's not particularly effective in a role that should be larger than life, and his casting underlines Welles' final film as a refusal to admit the obvious, an ironic concession to personal vanity, a backing-down from his last real chance at bat. 

Obviously, without Welles around to offer notes on the final edit it has been given here, this is more of an organization of materials than an actual Welles film, regardless of what the screen credits say. TOSOTW doesn’t have the immediacy of a great Welles film; it’s not really a film of great performances, oddly enough, though it has many great moments; it’s not something you would point to, to introduce someone to Welles as a filmmaker. I’m not even sure I can detect the breath of the living Welles in it. However, his fleeting shadow darts phantom-like between its edits, its bravura, and its paling anger and despair, fed up with the nonsense, the hell of other people that must be endured if one dares to chase the angels.

So much whirling, twirling, crossing the line, such egregious chaos and rule-breaking - the first half hour or so reminds me a lot of the first pages of Vladimir Nabokov’s ADA, where the author’s style is so exaggerated, impenetrable and ogreish that it seems dedicated to evicting all but its most dedicated, passionate, determined readers... but once you get past that, there are numerous pleasures in store, including a rare commodity in new movies, some genuine eroticism. In TOSOTW, the greatest pleasures pop out from the richly hued, widescreen movie-within-the-movie; it's during these passages, the ones most fraught with mystery and danger, that the film eases up, slows down, relaxing and giving the viewer a chance to absorb information at their own pace. What surrounds these astounding chunks of protein in the broth is much like life itself: reckless, free-wheeling, fraught with mistakes, regrets, flashes of humility, arrogance, and poetry.

If Welles had ever seen Dennis Hopper’s THE LAST MOVIE (1971), it might well have taken the wind out of his sails in terms of completing this project, because they are much the same animal - except here the villagers who survive the filming are not constructing cameras out of bamboo, but rather an effigy of Welles himself, who is seen only reflected in the eyes of a devoted cast and crew. Like most of his other features, this film is the story of a betrayal, or at least a perceived betrayal, and its fabric consists of everyone in the business who hadn't yet turned their back on Orson Welles. Perhaps the most loyal of all these individuals and individualists was the late cinematographer Gary Graver, whose arch visual style, as it plays around the hard edits, is not only aggressively Wellesian but occasionally evokes Russ Meyer - even before two characters bounce around in the buff on a set of bare bed springs. Thanks in large part to Graver, the greatest compliment I can give the film on the basis of a single viewing - and I think it's one that would very much please Welles - is that this film is as valid a monument to Oja Kodar as THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI was to Rita Hayworth. She is formidable and unforgettable in it.

Robert Random and Oja Kodar.

Like all Welles films, this is complex wine and a fast review would be well before its time. This will need to be seen numerous times - in all honesty, probably more by students, cultists and devotees than general audiences. It's possible that its legend was more valuable, more magical, than its fact - as was the case with Brian Wilson's long unfinished SMILE - but now that Welles' chimera has been coalesced into one thing, assembled (valiantly, by editor Bob Murawski) into a manageable document or entertainment, its admirers can proceed with the work of posterity, which is to say, taking it apart once again.

(c) 2018 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

For the Love of Toho III: SHIN GODZILLA (2016)

I realized, in the midst of my Toho viewings, that I have been remiss in buying Hideaki Anno's SHIN GODZILLA on Blu-ray. I had seen it once before and liked it, but evidently it was the English version I saw. The Japanese version, which I watched on Funimation's Blu-ray this evening, is a far sharper, more intricate piece of work.

I've told a friend of mine, who knows the film well, that he ought to write an "Annotated SHIN GODZILLA" and he's replied that one already exists - it's the subtitles of the film. This made me laugh, but now that I've seen the version he loves, I understand absolutely what he means.  It would take numerous viewings to grasp and absorb all that is going on, who everyone is, who they are named after, etc. This is a monster spectacle but in the truest sense; Godzilla's scenes inspire awe and constant surprise. He is not here to entertain us. He is like a mysterious, ever-changing spindle around which world events are suddenly obliged to revolve.

The movie has its faults, like the casting of Satomi Ishihara as the slinky Asian-American with her eye on becoming POTUS someday (in live audio Japanese, she is unconvincing as someone raised in America and hardly articulate enough in English to have attained political clout), but its narrative intricacies encompass so much else that such missteps are mere annoyances. Watching its hectic, intricate design speed past, I was reminded - oddly enough - of the movie I saw last night, Orson Welles' THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, which also has crazy, whirling, unstoppable energy and a sly political side, but it tells a far more primitive story and, I would have to say, a more narcissistic one. SHIN GODZILLA has a kaleidoscopic complexion too, but it represents different nations and individuals of all classes while organizing a meticulous, faceted sense of strategy, all to a noble purpose - while at the same time satirizing ossified political structures and an over-informed, media-driven world that basically still doesn't have a clue.

I'm sure I'm not the first person to say this, but SHIN GODZILLA is the DR. STRANGELOVE of the 21st century and one of the most impressive feats of filmmaking in the last two decades. It is also genuinely awesome and frightening and, we realize as the end credits roll, humble.

If Ishirō Honda saw this film, on his best day, I believe he would stand up and applaud.

(c) 2018 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

For the Love of Toho II

GORATH (1962)
In its original Japanese version, Ishirō Honda’s GORATH is a masterpiece. Science fiction, drama, love, unrequited love, sacrifice, tragedy, sentiment - it has it all, but it also seems to me possibly Toho’s top technical achievement. It features some of the finest space effects filmed prior to 2001 (there is evidence in the film that Kubrick used it as reference) as well as spectacular demonstrations of matte painting and miniature set design - combining immense engineering skill and artistry, though much of it onscreen only fleetingly. As a film, it may not be as exploitable as the company’s kaiju eiga (one giant walrus aside), but considering this was made in the same year as KING KONG VS. GODZILLA, it’s clear where the filmmakers’ hearts most resided.

KING KONG VS. GODZILLA (1962)
If you have only ever seen the American version of this movie, you owe it to yourself to find a way of seeing the Japanese version, subtitled or not. Toho obviously went into the film with the intention of producing a blockbuster, and it was, but - as with the original KING KONG (1933) - it includes a critique of the blockbuster mentality. in this case a rather broad one. There is much to commend this film on a technical level, even though it falls somewhat short of the studio's highest standards, but it is plainly not the film it should have been and, for some of us who saw it at a magical point in childhood, not quite the film we remember. (Of course, the version released in America by Universal was quite different, including American onscreen commentators and a rummage sale of library tracks for replacing Akira Ifukube's epic score, included on the Japanese Blu-ray in its original stereo.)  Godzilla himself (looking more believably reptilian here than in most other films) is kind of a blur throughout the film, not doing much but lumbering around and demonstrating his prowess, and King Kong (a badly made suit, though well acted from inside) is kind of giant gorilla variation of a dad reclining in front of the television and tossing back intoxicating berry juice like so many cans of beer (or bottles of saké, as the case may be). The monsters meet in a few short, unimaginatively choreographed battles and, after dismantling the most elaborate miniature in the picture, tumble into the sea. There is no particular victor, unless the victor in a battle is the one who recognizes its pointlessness and swims away toward more promising vistas. If you are going to watch this film, I've found it vital to do so on the largest screen you can find; this is not something that can be accurately experienced on the average TV screen. Looking at Toho's Region 2 Blu-ray on my 70" screen, I found the movie acquired a whole different feel when I was sitting five feet away from the widescreen, as opposed to my usual ten. With this minor adjustment of seating, suddenly the main titles were as powerful as the opening of ALTERED STATES.

MATANGO (1963)
To watch this movie is to realize how few horror films Ishirō Honda actually made. Everything about this somber picture strikes an atypical note: the slow yet masterful orchestration of its encroaching suspense, the nerve-scraping score, the close combustibility of its action, the eerie details that put us one step ahead of the doomed characters (like the broken mirrors discovered aboard the ghost ship), even the way characters mirror each other as if caught in a psychological prism (the singer who is the mistress of the yachtsman, who also “bought” his skipper by putting him through school, and the passenger who later delights in making him pay exorbitantly for turtle eggs). “There’s nothing money can’t fix,” someone says early on, but the film lays bare the illusion of all that money can buy. In broader terms, however, this adaptation of the William Hope Hodgson story “The Voice in the Night” (1907, acknowledged by a text screen on the BD before the film plays) is Japan’s INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (the shots of the mushrooms swelling and expanding in the rain recalls the effect of the pods in the greenhouse scene of Don Siegel’s film), with its own chilling depiction of the loss of love to a stronger power, as well as an inversion of John W. Campbell Jr.’s “Who Goes There?” (filmed as THE THING) replacing arctic isolation with shipwreck on a humid island, the need for sleep with hunger, alien with radiation-tainted vegetation - while also adding sexual tension to the mix. It all builds to one of the earliest downbeat endings in horror (this was made the same year as Bava’s chilling BLACK SABBATH), as the lone survivor gazes out his asylum window at an elaborate yet patently artificial Tokyo cityscape, and reflects on the hell he escaped, “I might have been happier there.”

(c) 2018 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

RIP James Karen (1923-2018)

James Karen in POLTERGEIST.

Donna and I were very sorry to learn of the death yesterday of that fine actor James Karen, at the age of 94. We met him a little over 10 years ago on the set of Larry Blamire’s Old Dark House comedy DARK AND STORMY NIGHT and got to share a very merry, talkative lunch with him and other cast members. Then we met him twice more at WonderFest. One of those times, he made a sudden appearance with his wife Alba in our hospitality suite. He remembered Donna and I, or kindly said he did, and it was amazing how their presence just lifted the spirits of the entire room. Donna asked what they would like to drink, but they couldn’t stay - it was Friday, the convention hadn't started yet, and they were going to skip out and do some local antiquing. He said it like they were going on safari to quarry the three-eyed, knob-nosed quintocerous. Whenever I've remembered this, I wish I had tagged along. He was the sort of guy who you feel you've known a lifetime on your first meeting, and it would have been nice to talk with him about life outside the movies. For most of today, my Facebook news feed has been filled with variations on that story by people who knew him for decades, and people who knew him only two minutes.

He was a terrific actor in so many things (even a small role in Samuel Beckett's short FILM, starring Buster Keaton), but the one time he really leaped off the screen was in Dan O'Bannon's RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, where he plays the second-in-command at the medical supply place who breaks in the new employee by telling him all the most grotesque secrets of the place, like the fact that George Romero's NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD was based on a true story (!) and the actual zombies are stored in a holding tank downstairs (!!). "You wanna see 'em?" Everything that movie accomplishes does so in the path he so amusingly and winningly paves for it in the first reel. When we saw the movie back in 1985, we saw it at a theater in Kentucky, so the home stretch revelation that its story was set in Louisville was met with uproarious approval by the audience. 

RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD.

So we revisited RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD earlier tonight to honor Mr. Karen's memory, as it were. It's a very 1980s movie, but I was surprised to be reminded of what an anarchic movie it is - viscerally, musically, sexually. It holds up pretty well, and Karen’s final scene in the picture - the cherry on a remarkably physical performance for a man of 61 (an age he hardly seemed) - is a humdinger. Already dead but not yet quite a zombie, he staggers over to the cremation oven, emotionally and hesitantly removes his wedding ring and hangs it on the On/Off switch, makes the sign of the cross to ask divine forgiveness, then crawls inside, drops the gate and, whoosh, ashes to ashes. I'm told that he just had to get in the oven, that he invented everything else. In its own way (and in context), it’s a “Top o’ the world, Ma!” moment, but in the midst of the movie's zany kamikaze fury, he found a moment in which to make his character a bit more than a cartoon. He gave us a glimpse of his marriage, allowing a glimpse of what was meaningful to him, and human in him... once.

(c) 2018 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

For the Love of Toho

Sometimes people ask me why I don't write more about Toho’s kaiju eiga ("monster movies"). I tell them that, yes, it has mostly been a deliberate choice, but it's also true that I've been a fan of these films for almost as long as I can remember. I saw KING KONG VS. GODZILLA on its opening weekend at Cincinnati's Twin Drive-In Theater, and when the Big G hatched out of his glacial burial place, I actually recognized him as Gigantis, the Fire Monster - which I had seen not long before on a local afternoon broadcast of the movie now known as GODZILLA RAIDS AGAIN. I got to see on the big screen virtually all of the Toho films that enjoyed a US release in the 1960s, and as a teenager I bought copies of Greg Shoemaker's fanzine THE JAPANESE FANTASY FILM JOURNAL - facts that place me squarely in the vanguard of this subculture, but it's true that I've shied away from writing too much about them - for the simple reason that so much about these films - the filmmakers, the stars, and much about Japanese history and culture - has always seemed inaccessible to me.

In the 1990s, when I was acquiring some Japanese laserdisc editions of these movies, I couldn't resist reviewing a brace of them at length for VIDEO WATCHDOG's second SPECIAL EDITION. Afterwards, I received a nice letter from future Eiji Tsubaraya biographer August Ragone, who congratulated me on writing one of the most best pieces about the Toho films that he had read in English – and then he directed my attention to a six-page post-script appended to his letter, consisting of additional notes, corrections and clarifications, in case I or my readers might be interested. I was - very much so - but I never printed this document as a letter because a) there never was a third SPECIAL EDITION, b) a six-page document is an article and not a letter, and c) it tended to annotate what I had written for what I did not say, rather than for what I said. 

This caused me to realize that, for anyone undertaking to write about these films in English, they can either do so with the understanding that they working on the surface and only addressing that share of Toho's audience that has never evolved beyond the sheer sensation of the films, or they can presume to dig deeper, to a place that quite possibly has already been mined by someone with a more thorough understanding of these films in all their details than the writer. I respect scholarship, so I respect this. I reserve my right to have and to express an opinion, to read and interpret this material in a hopefully unique way, but I respect - and am somewhat wary of - what lay beyond this line. 

A few nights ago, I found myself suddenly, madly, impossibly restimulated in my interest for Toho productions. I don't want to say anything about the specific cause, because I'm writing a feature article about it for a certain well-known magazine. Suffice to say, Toho is ingenious in its ability to market its goods and keep their loving audience on a hook. A passion for Toto is inevitably costly. Fortunately for sudden revived obsessions like mine, I have been keeping my collection on DVD and Blu-ray mostly up to date, over the years, so there is plenty here for me to binge upon. The last few nights, I've been doing just that, and here are some thoughts on those recent viewings.

RODAN 1956 / 

US release 1957

The original Japanese version is a far more somber affair than the English dub, which has its own unique merits. The muted but still rich color, and the immense varieties of texture, are beautiful, as is director Ishiro Honda's conveyance of the value of human life, respect for science, and awe of the inexplicable and miraculous. I was surprised to hear some of the earliest spoken lines were on the subject of climate change! Fearsome and mysterious here, Rodan would never solely carry another film again, and never receive quite the same respect in its many screen reappearances. Yet even this film doesn't fully indulge Rodan with the stardom this monster deserved. More than half the movie, it seems, is taken up with the discovery of the dragonfly grubs - which, in a Lovecraftian touch, turn out to be the larger monster's food. This nevertheless remains an admirable film.

VARAN THE UNBELIEVABLE 1958

US version 1962

As a late friend of mine once said, "I've seen VARAN, and he's pretty unbelievable." This is not one of Honda's better films, even in its original state, as he himself freely admitted. But the English version, starring an even more unbelievable Myron Healy, is an abomination. It doesn't dub the original film so much as subsume it; the pittance of Japanese footage that is left is presented in Japanese, leaving the bulk of the film to a bare-bones US cast, with Healy - as Commander James Bradley, living in an island hut with compliant wife Tsuruko Kobayashi - swaggering around, acting to camera with his "best side," and issuing world-saving orders to Japanese-American extras. The whole pan&scanned mess runs just over an hour and has the audacity to cut a good deal of actual monster footage, including Varan's flying scenes. (For what it's worth, the monster itself is terrific, with an unusually convincing reptilian demeanor.) What remains is appallingly condescending and patronizing, not only to the Japanese people but audiences in general. I watched this on Amazon Prime, where the price is right at "free."

SPACE AMOEBA 1970

aka YOG, MONSTER FROM SPACE 1971

Though directed by Ishiro Honda, this was the first special effects film produced by Toho following the death of spfx supervisor Eiji Tsubaraya. While it doesn't tell a story that feels particularly new - indeed, it seems to have been written around a list of reliable tropes established by earlier films from the studio - this is not as dispensable as you might think. It is a fairly entertaining piece of pulp entertainment, aimed squarely at pre-teen audiences of the time, and the classic Toho production values are still in evidence, as they would not remain for much longer. The SPACE AMOEBA version, which I also watched on Amazon Prime at no cost, is the complete widescreen Japanese version, presented in its original export English dub, which was evidently recorded in Australia. When American International acquired the film for US release, they snipped a few minutes off the running time and had the film completely redubbed at Titra in New York.  

GODZILLA RAIDS AGAIN 1957

aka GIGANTIS THE FIRE MONSTER 1959

Last night’s trip back to Toho land was courtesy of Classic Media's Media Blasters DVD, which includes both versions of the main feature and an audio commentary by future Ishiro Honda biographer Steve Ryfle and friends. The first Godzilla sequel, this is not an Ishiro Honda title. Directed by Motoyoshi Oda, it’s somewhat unusually constructed, introducing its two monsters (G and an ankylosaur adversary, Anguirus) already in the midst of battle, yet emphasizing its human characters throughout. As a kid, I remember loving Kobayashi (Minoyu Chiaki) and feeling sad when he met his ultimate fate. There is a refreshing, robust air of friendliness, of good fellowship and a humanistic approach to business and duty in this picture that we would do well to learn from. Ryfle's commentary was knowledgeable, a little on the snarky side at times but I can’t say the meddlesome English version was undeserving. It also delves into the interesting pre-history of the US version, which was to have been written by Ib Melchior and called THE VOLCANO MONSTERS. The track also features the input of fellow biographer Ed Godzisziewski, GODZILLA authority Stuart Galbraith, and a Bob Burns cameo in which he recounts the day that he and Paul Blaisdell “met” Godzilla. Worth hearing.

(c) 2018 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD at 50: The Bite Goes On

World Premiere, Pittsburgh 1968

It was 50 years ago today that George A. Romero's NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD had its World Premiere at the Fulton Theater in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It is one of a very small group of movies that can authentically be said to have reinvented its film genre. If DRACULA and FRANKENSTEIN heralded the penetration of horror into sound, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD represented, in a way, the genre's emancipation. After NotLD, the horror genre belonged to anyone with the bravery to pick up a camera and the talent to put a story across. Horror films became more personal, more violent, more sexual, and most importantly, more political. Made by a generation reared on Rod Serling's THE TWILIGHT ZONE, the resulting films often told stark political truths undercover, truths that no other film genre was yet willing to confront head-on. While his contemporaries went on to become absorbed in the Hollywood system, Romero remained resolutely independent, making a shelf of personal films that went their own way even when they acceded to the prevailing tastes of the marketplace. When George Romero died a year ago last July, he had accomplished more than most, yet he could also look back on a career largely spent fighting the system, trying to get his original stories told. He probably had a longer list of films that didn't get made than can be read off his actual filmography.

Of course, the reverberations radiating from NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD's initial impact are still being felt. AMC's THE WALKING DEAD begins its 9th season on Sunday, October 7th. Even though the show's star Andrew Lincoln is bailing out this year, which will likely tempt many viewers to follow his example, AMC has said that they hope to keep the series going for another decade. Provide your own kicking a DEAD horse joke.

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD

Earlier this year, while viewing Criterion's new 4K restoration of the Romero film, I realized that an important part of what is now recognized as the LIVING DEAD mythos is not present in it. Namely, the idea that, once bitten, living victims of the dead become one of the walking dead themselves. Let me clarify: we see victims die and become one of the living dead - as happens to Johnny after he's knocked on the head - but we do not see the consequence of their having merely been bitten. The film is about cannibalism, but not yet about infection. It's true that the little girl Karen (Kyra Schon) has been bitten by someone dead and gradually succumbs to the ensuing fever, dying and then rising up to slay her mother - but the film doesn't make her transformation a result of the infection; it's the condition of death itself that causes the transformation. The living dead that we see are almost entirely made up of people dressed for burial, fresh from fatal accidents, or in hospital gowns. It's only in the later films and spin-offs that the bite alone acquires a legacy of meaning and becomes dreaded in and of itself.

Though not quite present in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, the idea takes form in Romero's sequel, DAWN OF THE DEAD, released more than a decade later in 1979. When Roger (Scott H. Reiniger) is bitten, Romero chronicles his excruciatingly slow death, the brief peace that follows his passing, and the chilling moment of his resurrection. Later in the film, when Stephen a.k.a. "Flyboy" (David Emge) is attacked in the elevator, he is messily infected and - due to an edit away from the action - he returns to the story fully transformed. It would seem that the matter of infection was truly added to the mythos on the basis of that edit. Thereafter, the bite of the living dead made one the living dead - an idea that actually goes back to another wing of the genre, to DRACULA.

I was reminded of all this by a recent viewing of Gordon Hessler's THE OBLONG BOX, first released in 1969, the year following NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. Spoiler ahead, but in the climax of this film, the horribly disfigured Sir Edward Markham (Alister Williamson) - wrongly infected by a voodoo curse intended for his brother Julian (Vincent Price), and locked away in a tower room of the family estate and passed off as dead  - is shot by his brother to end his reign of murderous terror. Edward then uses his last energies to crawl to Julian, to take his hand, and bite it viciously. As one critic observed, the bite is so deep, it almost appears that Edward leaves his teeth in the wound. In a chilling coda, we find that Julian has been infected by the bite. Turning to his wife's calls as he stands in Edward's old room, he shows his face similarly disfigured on one side as he says, "It's my room now."

THE OBLONG BOX

Though Sir Edward is not literally a living dead, what we have here is not quite the same thing, but it seems a far more pertinent connection to the LIVING DEAD mythos than DRACULA, which proposes a somehow more fanciful monster, one in which we cannot quite fully believe. The way Romero filmed NotLD, with the look of a television news report, its monsters were intended to convey a more documentary vibe; DRACULA originated from folk tales out of Romania, but NotLD originated from evening news reports of the Vietnam war. THE OBLONG BOX may be a horror film, but it too strives to make an authentic point - about what we now call "white male privilege," a subject that Romero would have undoubtedly loved to sink his own teeth into. Very probably, there is nothing in THE OBLONG BOX that couldn't happen, so it seems to me much closer than DRACULA to the kind of story Romero set out to tell. The principal author of THE OBLONG BOX (who was actually more its re-writer) was former film critic Christopher Wicking, a contributor to such magazines as SCREEN, THE MOVIE SCENE and MIDI-MINUIT FANTASTIQUE. I'm sure that he saw NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, but unless he saw it in another country, or on bootleg videotape (more likely), he would have been prevented by BBFC censors, who held the film back from UK release until sometime after THE OBLONG BOX was in the can - and then with six minutes of cuts imposed.

The vital connections here are infection and consequence, which only becomes a point of discussion in THE OBLONG BOX.  Romero's living dead needed this because, without these inherent dangers, they ran the risk of becoming the buffoons they were briefly treated as in DAWN, with the pie-fight sequence. It should also be emphasized that, in DAWN, Romero himself invited into his mythos the necessary subject of Voodoo - the basis of Sir Edward's bite.

This subject may well require a more detailed presentation than I can give it, here and now, but consider it meat for further discussion. Have at it.


(c) 2018 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

Deeper Into Wallace

I have only gotten worse with estimations of time as time has rolled on, but I must have started reading and collecting Edgar Wallace novels about 15 years ago. After reading a few of them, I thought I had sized him up as a practitioner of his genre; I liked his criminal universe, but his style didn't do that much for me. When it came to terror and mystery fiction of his era, I much preferred Gaston Leroux, Sax Rohmer and Maurice Leblanc, not to mention the Fantômas novels of Souvestre-Allain. 

However, in recent weeks, I've found myself returning to Wallace and adding prodigiously to my collection. Lofts and Adley's indispensable THE BRITISH BIBLOGRAPHY OF EDGAR WALLACE has helped me to order my collection, which presents amounts to 99 (!) different hardcovers. (When the mail comes today, it's possible I'll be adding my 100th.) On the day I finally put my collection into some kind of chronology and could see how much remained to be found, how did I celebrate? By reading one of the Wallace books I didn't have - on my Kindle.  

As someone who approached Wallace from the standpoint of someone who loves the German thrillers based on his books, I have always tended to see more than one Wallace. There is the author of the mysteries (THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE FROG, THE SQUEAKER, THE TERROR, THE AVENGER), and then there is the one who writes about the Great War (WRIT IN BARRACKS), about British colonialism (SANDERS OF THE RIVER), about aviation (TAM O' THE SCOOTS) and race horses (GREY TIMOTHY). Does a collector of Wallace need to collect the non-mysteries, if those other subjects don't interest him? 

Of course I had to complicate things by finding out.

As I added to my collection such titles as THE MIND OF MR. REEDER, THE GOLDEN HADES and THE DEVIL MAN, I suddenly found myself feeling curious, for the first time, about his SANDERS books. After all, they were probably his most popular books at the time of their publication; they provoked quite a sensation. These are short story collections centered around Commissioner Sanders, a representative of the British government who is sent to police a territory in Africa - to subjugate native superstitions, to inspire fear and and respect for the law, and loyalty for the cause of civilization, while at the same time being careful to preserve what is unique and special about the country, its language and its heritage. These books - nine of them, published between 1911 and 1923 - tend to be little-read these days because people assume them to be racist. There was a famous filming of one back in the thirties, starring Leslie Banks and Paul Robeson, which Robeson is said to have later regretted making. I haven't seen the film, but as of the wee hours of this morning, I have read SANDERS OF THE RIVER.

I started out expecting not to read much more than the first story, because adventure fiction is not really my thing, and I thought I could imagine - from the mysteries I'd read - what strange cocktail might result with Wallace donning a pith helmet. But the surprise was on me: I think SANDERS may be my favorite Wallace book of the dozen or so I've read; it is better written than those of his mysteries I know. Each story has a fable-like simplicity that is steered, in almost every case, toward complex ironic stalemates. I found myself reading two, three, four stories in a sitting - unusual for me, who usually reads one and sets the book aside. This first collection was published in 1911 and there are instances of racist language, which I was initially disappointed to find... however, I became quite intrigued by what I noticed was the extreme specificity of its use. 

There is one racist remark that is hard to ignore because it is expressed by the author himself, when he observes that "the average black woman is ugly of face, but beautiful of figure" - but Wallace relays this opinion before introducing an African woman of rare and surpassing, indeed bewitching, beauty. The N word is never used in hate or anger in these stories, but rather in contempt of falsity or pretense - it's almost always expressed by an African looking down his nose at a rival from another tribe. It's also used once or twice by Sanders himself, as a reprimand - when one of the Kings or warriors in his territory try to charm or BS him by speaking broken English, because it is his job (besides keeping the peace and discouraging murder) to preserve the African way of life, which extends to encouraging these charges to communicate with him in the full eloquence of their native language. His authority extends to whippings and hangings, but these demonstrations of his lawful authority pale beside the evils he is actively curbing - massacres staged to abduct women for wives, the practicing of juju, cannibalism. What most impressed me about these stories is that there is no sense of caricature in them; all the characters seem profoundly human and distinct - sometimes eccentric, sometimes mysterious and even mystic, sometimes formidable, sometimes inexplicably evil or charming or both. Wallace writes about them, about their vanity, their innocence, their coyness and bravado, about their psychologies and their strange capacity to learn new things telepathically, with remarkable and persuasive acuity. 

Sanders himself is a forerunner of the sort of hero we see a lot today - he's a man with a front row seat to the slow death of the world's last vestiges of innocence as it becomes infected by inevitable exposure to the supposed civilization he at once represents and deeply disdains.

And to my surprise, SANDERS OF THE RIVER actually does encompass some fantastic content. One story is about witchcraft, one is about a voodoo curse, and another is about the way members of a certain tribe seem to "know" things that happen within their tribe, even when they happen many miles away. But all of these subjects are treated in a disarming, down to earth, practical manner, without the usual hyperbole that usually asserts and underscores their strangeness. Here, they are all another bizarre chapter in Sanders' experience. 

In related news, I think I have now finally acquired all six books that Wallace's son, Bryan Edgar Wallace, published - at least in English.  I think it's probably time I read one of those.

(c) 2018 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.