Here’s a terrible thing to contemplate: for the past eight years, the B-Masters Cabal has sat silent and unprotesting as a blatant act of discrimination was committed in its midst. For eight years, one of our number – there’s no need to mention names – has devoted one month a year to the Undead….but not just any Undead, ohhhhh no: zombies only need apply. No welcome at the country club for you, Mr Vampire! No seat on the bus for you, Ms Mummy! Well, it’s past time that we balanced the ledger; and that’s why the next Roundtable will be—
Month Of The ALTERNATIVE Living Dead
Join us all through November as the B-Masters pay belated tribute to – the other dead meat!
Unintentionally, I again came up with two movies for the final installment of Month of the Living Dead that share an additional theme. This time, it’s “Movies that can only be compared to Troma.”
I imagine that Lovecraft’s tendency to devote more words to telling his reader how scared he or she should be than to describing the thing to be feared posed a problem to those filmmakers initially assigned the task of bringing his work to the screen. After all, until the advent of modern J-Horror — whose sensibility is pretty much right in line with Lovecraft’s — the common wisdom would have been that you were supposed to scare your audience by showing them something scary, rather than by just showing them a bunch of people being scared, or, even worse, showing a bunch of people talking about how potentially scary some vaguely defined thing might be if it it actually existed. Furthermore, such filmmakers might understandably conclude that a film whose every character was in a constant state of near-wordless cowering for no clear reason might quickly forfeit audience interest.
This week we venture to far-flung Hong Kong, where Romereoesque zombies gather some local flair in 
In 1960, AIP’s go-to director for cheap, quickly produced science fiction and horror double bills convinced the powers that be to gamble on letting him make a stand-alone film, in color, with double the production time and more money. Granted that, compared to other studios, this still meant an incredibly lean budget and an incredibly short production schedule. The result was Roger Corman’s Fall of the House of Usher, a landmark film in the history of American horror and one of the best Gothic horror films from any country. With the runaway success of House of Usher, Corman found himself free to direct a rapid succession of follow-up films that all relied on the same basic formula. In 1963, flush with success and probably more than entitled to do so, Corman asked if he could do something just a little bit different.