When last we left our hero, he was apparently in a car that fell over a cliff. You’ll never guess how he escaped. Anyway, you may have no fear of Lucifer’s Label Maker, and laugh when confronted with Satan’s Stationary, but are you prepared to face The Devil’s Dictaphone?
Nov 3
The sorta/kinda Edgar Wallace hijinx continue as we look at the second chapter of the 19940 Columbia serial The Green Archer. I think you will honestly be amazed when you learn the real secret behind The Fact at the Window.
The Green Archer, one of Edgar Wallace’s more famous novels, was adapted several times. Right now we’re looking at the 1940 Columbia serial version. Join us in the month ahead as we ‘archly’ (get it?) examine each episode.Tonight we begin with Chapter 1. I don’t know, that just seemed like a good idea.
And yes, I am weirded out by getting the first roundtable segment up instead of the last one. Don’t worry, I’m sure it will never happen again.
Nov 1
| Cobweb draped secret passages. Shadowy churchyards. Decrepit mansions. Hooded killers. Mod girls in mini-skirts. And most terrifying of all, lurking around every corner and behind every false bookcase…Klaus Kinski. The works of mystery writer Edgar Wallace conjured up a netherworld of insane criminal masterminds being pursued by dogged Scotland Yard inspectors that struck a chord with, well, Germans in the 1920s. Perhaps recognizing something of Weimar-era decadence and doom in the stories, Germany voraciously devoured Wallace’s works up until they were declared verboten by the ascending Nazi party.Germany produced a couple Wallace adaptations before the war, and the author’s own England made several adaptations during 1930s. Wallace’s stories even made their way to US screens, though admittedly he was better known in the US for some obscure movie about a largish gorilla climbing buildings in New York.
Years later, in 1959, Danish film studio Rialto decided to see if there was bankable nostalgia for the Wallace mysteries of old. Their first production, The Fellowship of the Frog, sparked a trend that resulted in dozens of new Wallace adaptations, as well as plenty of imitators — including companies adapting the work of Edgar’s mimic son, Bryan. This month, the B-Masters pay tribute the sinister, strange, and often surreal blend of serial adventure, old dark house mysteries, and swingin’ sixties pop-art spy films that became known collectively as “krimi.” Look out! The man walking toward you could be Klaus Kinski in a skull mask! |
 |
It’s been a busy second half of October for Teleport City.
| EATERS Back in the late 1970s, when we had our first huge zombie movie glut, it was thanks in large part to the Italian exploitation machine latching onto the concept and cranking them out. Sadly, that machine, once mighty and seeming insatiable, petered out and died during the 1990s. When the microbudget horror revolution started to bloom in the 2000s, a lot of budding horror filmmakers turned to the zombie movie. It was an almost entirely American affair, though, with Japan chiming in with slightly higher budget zombie fare from time to time. Eventually, thanks most likely to 28 Days Later, other countries started getting in on the undead fun. Before we knew it, the zombie outbreak had gone international. But something just didn’t seem right. There were still no Italians. |
 |
|
Neraka Lembah Tengkorak The world presented in Neraka Lembah Tengkorak (English translation: Hell Skull Valley) is similar to the Martial World of Chinese fiction, complete with various feuding clans and schools, as well as every chance meeting between strangers resulting in a brief fight before anyone bothers to figure out whether they have a beef or not. This is, at least, what seems to be happening during the first half of the movie. We spend a good deal of time watching as the members of one particular school fend off challenges from whatever random lone fighters shows up at their doorstep. Thanks to their advanced martial arts skills, they don’t appear to have much trouble doing this — until, of course, the real villains of the piece make their entrance. |
 |
| Soulless So I decided that I might as well take the plunge. Or maybe not a plunge, but at least wade slowly into the waters of modern horror writing. But still, I couldn’t quite bring myself to buy one of the many books with a sword-wielding witch girl in skinny jeans and a crop top on the cover. I’m not a man who is especially prone to shying away from things “not meant for men,” but if I was going to test the waters of horror, I was going to do so via a setting more suited to my particular tastes. In other words, something with waistcoats and cravats. Some random poking around lead me to think that Gail Carriger’s Soulless – a thoroughly modern take on traditional Victorian England — might be just the thing for which I was looking. |
 |
| F.E.A.R.: First Encounter Assault Recon With it being October and all, I was in the mood for a decent horror video game that fulfills my basic requirements for a game — that it be old enough so everyone else has lost interest in it, thus driving the price down to an affordable ten bucks or so. Of the many recommendations I got, I decided to go with F.E.A.R.: First Encounter Assault Recon, because I thought the blend of supernatural horror with a SWAT type first person shooter would be interesting. Plus, I’d been told the game was genuinely scary in many places. Seemed like the perfect late-night indulgence. And for portions of the game, it was. It’s a fast paced shooter that does indeed boast some incredibly effective spooky material. But it’s also too repetitive, and the horror often gets forgotten in favor of room after room of shooting it out with basically identical opponents gussied up in the same sort of assault team gear your own character is wearing. |
 |
| Creature with the Blue Hand The movie begins with a frantic Dave Emerson (Klaus Kinski) being convicted of murder despite frantically pleading his own innocence. He is committed to a sanitarium run by the slightly shady Dr. Mangrove (Carl Lange) while his family — including twin brother Richard (also Kinski) bemoans the sorry state to which Dave has fallen. But all is not as it seems, which becomes evident when Dave escapes — with suspicious ease — and suddenly people are finding themselves ont he deadly end of the blue metal claw. Is Richard really Dave, or is Dave Richard? Is Dave pretending to be Richard pretending to be Dave? Man, as if krimi weren’t convoluted enough, this one goes and throws twin Kinskis — Twinskis, if you will — into the mix. |
 |
And finally, our impressions regarding this year’s New York Comic Con are being posted here.
Oct 26
In Top Secret, when the world is threatened by nuclear terrorists, The Powers That Be know that the super spy to put on the case is… Bill Cosby? That’s just one reason why the movie is as exciting as a slowly melting pudding pop.
Don’t blame me, blame the people who think that a shoddily-packaged horror DVD is more likely to score a few more sales to shoppers with low standards at Halloween than at any other time.
First up is Lust For Vengeance, which trumpets itself as the “Tenth Anniversary Explicit Version.” None of that decade-long period was spent brushing up on PhotoShop skills. (Comic Sans AND Papyrus? Bold move, sir!)
The next up is Hidden, which answers the pressing question, “What do you do when the only production photos anyone thought to grab and unimpressive, and the wrong dimensions to boot?” Answer: SSTTRREETTCCHH.
For the designer of the “10th Anniversary Special Edition” DVD of The Resurrection Game, the normal trick of compositing multiple headshots with different light sources simply wasn’t enough of a challenge. No, the hurdle he set himself was this: How many different saturations and hues can those photos be in? Extra points for including both monochrome and hand-tinted!
Because House of the Damned comes to us from the same self-distributing auteur as Lust For Vengeance, it is therefore no surprise to us that he thought Comic Sanes was entirely appropriate for cover copy meant to be taken seriously.
What can I say? Life gets dull when your house is 80% uninhabitable. Plus, I managed to knock out nearly a third of my increasingly unmanageable screener pile.
Banshee!!! (2008), in which I don’t know what the hell that thing really is, but it certainly isn’t a banshee…
Colony (1995), in which cheating on a brilliant genetic scientist is a really bad idea…
Gold (1968), which has almost as little to do with gold as Banshee!!! does with banshees…
Hostel, Part II (2007), in which you should seriously just go to the frigging beach or something…
Joy (1983), in which someone finally made a daddy-issues movie that doesn’t totally suck…
Mondo Trasho (1969), in which getting run over by a transvestite in a Cadillac is merely the start of the adventure…
Reflections of Light (1988), which I guess doesn’t totally suck, either…
Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1988), in which there are even weirder things than robot cancer…
and…
Valley of the Zombies (1946), in which both valleys and zombies apparently cost too much money.
I know that you — all of you! — love my occasional entries in the “Gives Me Chills” post series, and wish they could be more frequent. Hey, I’m with you, but there are only so many DVD covers produced without the benefit of design competence.
There’s not such a scarcity in books, though. With the groundswell in self-publishing via Kindle and CreateSpace, there are scads and oodles of authors who think that just because they’re competent to string words together in a sentence (itself often a self-assessed competency), they can design their own book covers. Or hire their friend to do it — a friend who promptly subcontracts the task to his teenage daughter because she’s really better at that there PhotoShop thing.
It is thus with mingled horror and glee that I announce Horrendous Book Covers, a tumblog slapdashedly thrown together by little ol’ me to showcase the underwhelming excesses of DIY cover designers. So far I’ve mostly restrained myself from snide commentary — the covers speak for themselves, really — but my self-control on that front could easily slip in the days ahead.
I leave you with one final thought:
There. Consider yourself warned.
Oct 12
Take a dash of Universal Soldier, add a few tablespoons of Blade Runner, and several cups of The Terminator, and you get T-Force, a derivative but fun exercise that delivers the minimum requirements you have for a B movie of this nature.