All horror movie reviews this time, of some things I've been watching recently. Since it's October I'm trying to limit myself to just horror movies. Got a few really sick 'uns here, kids, so gird your loins with vigor!
Centipede Horror (C, 1984) aka Wu Gong Zhou, Centipede Curse, Centipede Sorcerer. Hong Kong horror with a freakshow approach to special effects, having the actors cough up mouthfuls of live centipedes. A girl who wanders into a wooded area for a second is stung by a couple of hundred centipedes and ends up in the hospital with big rotting sores all over her. Her brother comes and seeks a cure, but begins to think black magic may be involved, especially when she dies and centipedes come crawling out of her wounds. With the help of a female classmate he investigates the centipede curse. They witness an exorcism in which a girl with a rotting abdomen vomits scorpions. They find a priest who specializes in curses and he tries to determine the origin of the curse that killed the guy's sister before it can strike him as well. Warring magicians cast curses at each other and thousands of centipedes swarm the brother's house as the good magician resurrects chicken skeletons and snakes bust out of people's heads. Sick and crazy stuff in the tradition of The Devil, Succubare, and the Black Magic films. The DVD's subtitles are burned in and a little tough to read, but bearable, especially since the movie's weird enough to be worth the effort.
Dead Pit, The (C, 1989) A beautiful amnesia victim (who claims she doesn't have amnesia but that her memory was surgically removed -- if that's true it must've been a long time ago because her hair is awesome) is committed to an asylum. She's also having flashes of sixth sense and seeing things others don't, which is dismissed as craziness. But she's detecting things happening in the asylum's basement, where the surgeon who took her memory has recovered from a bullet between the eyes and is carrying on his experiments in raising the dead. People in the asylum are disappearing, and the head doctor (biker movie vet Jeremy Slate) realizes she's in touch with some evil from the past and tries to drug her, but she fakes the medication and tries to investigate the asylum's weirdness on her own. But a hoard of bloody zombie spastics rise from the pit and attack the asylum, pulling people's brains out for reasons unknown. The movie's very cheap, maybe about 20 minutes longer than it ought to be, and the story is hopelessly sloppy, but the zombies are good and the movie is trying so hard you want to work with it, so it comes across as likable and occasionally creepy. Some of the effects work is good, and some is pure 80's glowing-eyed cheese, but the zombies have exposed brains and plenty of blood all over them, and a few of them melt down. Cheryl Lawson is gorgeous and runs around in panties and a cut-off tee shirt a lot, and went on to a career as a stuntwoman. Not bad cheapie.
Fourth Kind, The (C, 2009) As in "Close Encounters of." The Fourth Kind tries to also break the fourth wall, having star Milla Jovovich introduce herself as "actress Milla Jovovich" and explaining that she and all the other actors will be playing real people, whose "real" archival footage will be intercut with the movie's "recreations" which she warns will be very disturbing. More confusing than disturbing, actually, as Jovovich plays a therapist in Alaska who notices similarities between stories her sleep-disturbed patients are telling her. They're all seeing an owl, for instance. After much turmoil with parents going crazy and unsolved disappearances, a connection is discovered to abduction by aliens who seem to be an ancient Sumerian-speaking race that have been involved with mankind since the beginning. Strange things (people levitating while shaking and yelling in foreign languages) happen during therapy sessions and the local cops get pissed off because they can't figure out what's wrong. The audience may get pissed off for the same reason after a while, because the filmmakers don't really know how to handle their own concept; it's clumsy and senseless to "recreate" scenes while showing the "real" clips in split-screen. The "real" clips are never very convincing anyway, even though they try to fill them with static and picture-breakup to "authenticize" them. The acting is also highly annoying, and really looks like it was modeled on two of the worst ideas in the history of filmmaking: the "whispering every line is a way to add gravitas" tactic of M. Night Shyamalan's execrable The Village and Delores Taylor's awkward, timid cadence from the Billy Jack movies. Jovovich seems to be cringing from the very beginning of the film, before anything weird even starts happening, and everyone displays all the emotions of Ben Stein on Quaaludes, maybe to make the yelling scenes stand out in comparison. The dialogue is pretentious shit written by someone whose Neilsen box probably shows a lot of Lifetime and Hallmark Channel time, and the narrative is so clumsy that characters often remark “this isn’t making sense” as if to reassure us that the nonsense is intentional. Everything is made worse by an overbearing music score that struggles to build tension even in quiet scenes. Close your eyes and you might think the Four Horsemen are riding over the horizon as a six-headed beast rises from the sea; open ‘em and Jovovich is just sipping coffee or something. Lots of weepy-whining, clumsy exposition (characters saying “Dad’s not here anymore” - telling each other things they already know as a way of letting us know is just stepping on your dick). The “real footage” use doesn’t work well, and the “abductions” look like somebody on a scary carnival ride, ‘cept you can’t see the ride. Any movie is an agreement between the filmmakers and the audience to believe a lie for 90 minutes or so, but this draws attention to the fact that it’s lying and it flubs it. Here the main lie came in the form of the previews that saturation-bombed the airwaves and made this look like the scariest shit ever when there’s not a chill to be found. It’s like an “Unsolved Mysteries” segment dragged to feature length.
Human Centipede (First Sequence), The (C, 2009) Wow, does this movie have contempt for mankind! A couple of vapid girls vacationing in Germany have a blowout in the middle of nowhere one rainy night and seek shelter in the worst place they could have gone -- the home of a cold-blooded misanthropic surgeon who's obsessed with surgically connecting the digestive tracts of separate animals to form one long multi-legged being. It's unpleasant for all involved but especially for anyone who doesn't get to be the first segment. He's tried this experiment on some dogs before but it didn't work out (not surprising since a diet of shit will kill ya pretty quickly), so he's hoping for better luck (or at least more amusement) with humans. He drugs the two girls and connects them in a daisy-chain behind a kidnapped Japanese businessman. Cutting knee-ligaments and grafting mouths to anuses, he builds his creation and tries to train it/them to act like a dog, heaping abuse and humiliation on it/them the whole time. Naturally infections set in and there are complications, and the desperate conjoined people want to find some way to escape, but hobbled as they are, that's nearly impossible. This is an extremely morbid and dark-natured film, and even though the effects aren't really that graphic gore-wise (there's some, but it could've been worse), the situation alone will prove too disturbing for most. And there's to be a sequel involving a twelve-person centipede that is supposedly a whole lot darker and nastier. The actor playing the mad doctor is extremely intense and keeps the ridiculous premise severe instead of funny, and you have to feel sorry for the centipede actors, who had to spend a couple of weeks crawling around with their faces jammed in someone else's buttcrack. They have diaper-like bandages covering things, and man I hope there was some kind of steel plate in there just to insulate things, because I just can't imagine signing on for that. The ending is bleak as all hell. It's well-made for what it is, but what it is will appeal to few.
Pretty funny parody:
Lake Dead (C, 2007) Neo-slasher film with a group of twenty-somethings taking an RV out to the boonies to look at a hotel some of them have inherited from a grandfather they never met. Once there, they're murdered (seemingly in order of annoyingness) by a couple of inbred Mongoloid twin giants who look like the monster from Night of the Bloody Apes. The monsters, their mother, and their other brother plan to keep the girls who are kin to them for breeding purposes, because they view incest as a way of keeping their family bloodline "pure." Doesn't look like it's working out too well. Luckily for the girls, one of them has a very resourceful boyfriend who's not as big a pushover as the inbred killers had counted on, and he wants to see the family bloodline ended instead of extended. It's familiar territory (particularly if you've seen such films as Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Just Before Dawn, Wrong Turn, or the infamous "banned" Peacock family episode of The X-Files) but it's not badly executed and isn't a bad addition to the tradition, even if the gore's kind of restrained for the most part (an early pole-through-the-Achilles-tendons scene does lead you to believe it's going to be hardcore).
Midnight Meat Train (C, 2008) An ambitious photographer who's desperate to capture scenes of the city at its most primal saves a girl from rapists only to have her show up missing the next day. He sees a big scary man who's wearing a ring that he saw on the hand of a guy letting the girl into a subway car. Intrigued, he starts stalking this man and finds out he works as a butcher in the packing district. What he doesn't know is that this guy also moonlights as a butcher in late-night subway cars, using a huge shiny hammer to shatter their skulls in explosions of gore. Unluckily for the photographer, this killer has ntoiced him and doesn't like being followed. The photographer grows more obsessed with his theories about this butcher and his behavior scares his girlfriend, and when he gets caught by the guy and has a weird symbol carved on him before being released, things get weirder. His girlfriend tries to rescue him from whatever madness fate has in store for him, but this may just land her in Hell with him. The sense of the story eventually gives way to a cage match of splatterific blood and chunks, but that's pretty impressive in its excess, with skulls and severed limbs being used as weapons and blood gushing by the buckets full. Brutal but well made, adapted from Clive Barker's story.
Neighbor (C, 2009) Incredibly and I do mean incredibly gory torture porn with not so much a plot as an excuse. A sadistically-insane girl (known only as The Girl) goes around a neighborhood amusing herself by killing anyone who makes themselves available. Sometimes the killings are fairly bloodless (such as playing nurse to John Waters legend Mink Stole and not giving her her medicine to see how long it'll take her to die of her conditions), but mostly they're slow and brutal, as she basically tries to experiment with what she can subject her victims to and how long they can survive it. After playing with a few random people in the neighborhood she focuses on a guy and the members of his band. As The Girl, America Olivio is slinky, sexy, and utterly bugfuck crazy, smiling and flashing her eyes with glee more and more the more vicious the atrocity she's committing. There's not much to the narrative beyond the torture, so here's some of what she does: powerdrill mangling toes and legs, hacksaw in the mouth, nailing up of eyelids, clawhammer raking meat off of shins, slicing open of arms, dental tool through the cheek, kneecap removal via pizza slicer, fingers cut off with scissors, and - in one of the most over-the-top show-stoppers in gore movie history -- a glass swizzle stick jammed into a guy's urethra and then shattered, shown as graphically as possible. It's amazing that Wal-Mart is selling the uncut version of this because that's hardcore porno graphic. If you thought the penile violence in Make Them Die Slowly was too much, forgeddaboudit. Usually I hate torture porn but this one goes so far it's obvious that it's a satire of the whole movement... and yet it's nuanced a lot so it's not really any kind of comedy. It's not really that intense or scary, because the movie's primarily about the gore and you can't really take it too seriously, even though it's presented as such. There's no pretense here, and America Olivio's having fun with it, obviously. Not bad but definitely not for all tastes, because it's about as extreme as it gets.
Satan's Children (C, 1975) Bobby gets fed up with his fault-finding father and his belittling, cock-teasing stepsister, so when the stepsister narcs on him for a small bag of pot ("What's that brown stuff in your room?") he runs away, telling them to go to "Jesus H. Christ HELLLL!!" He's promptly saved from a "queer" by some guy in a dirty tee-shirt... who then calls up several of his buddies, and they make Bobby the entertainment at a gang-rape party (somehow held in a moving car with five guys in it). A cult of hippie Satanists find Bobby left for dead on the roadside and take him in. The head witch gets a crush on him (why this would happen is unfathomable) , which displeases the head Satanist, who dislikes Bobby because he thinks he's gay and Satan hates homosexuals (the preoccupation with homophobia in this film is very odd). So the witch is buried up to her neck near the world's lowest-traffic anthill and Bobby overcomes his butt-hurt enough to try to escape through the backwoods in his underpants. The devil-worshippers chasing him fall into a pool of quicksand that look like marshmallow cream and is no bigger than a wading pool; it takes great effort to appear to be dying in such a quicksand pit. The whole experience makes a new man out of Bobby! Strangely fascinating no-budget Florida horror that's go no scares or creepiness at all but has inept '70's charm to burn. The complete absurdity of it makes you wonder what other oddities are lurking in film cans out there somewhere...
Kinda bizarre clip but it's the only one I could find...
Satan's Little Helper (C, 2004) Cult horror director Jeff Liberman (Squirm, Just Before Dawn, Blue Sunshine) breaks years of silence with this weird comedic horror film. Little Dougie is an oddball kid who's so obsessed with a video game called "Satan's Little Helper" that he dresses as a devil for Halloween and plans to find Satan so he can join up with him. His beloved sister (who he wants to marry) comes home for a visit, bringing a goober new boyfriend with her, which pisses Dougie off. Meanwhile, an escaped maniac wearing a grinning demonic mask is going around town murdering people and using their corpses as Halloween decorations. Dougie befriends him, thinking he's Satan, and helps him find victims. Since his sister's boyfriend had planned to dress as Satan, Dougie's family thinks the masked maniac is him. The maniac has a ball, stabbing people and running shopping carts over babies and pregnant women and painting with squished cats and hanging crippled old ladies. They go trick-or-treating, which is another killing spree, and then go to a Halloween party and poison the punch with drain cleaner. Once everybody figures out he's a killer, he pulls a few more tricks, then continues his killing spree while dressed as Jesus! Whoever's playing the killer is a helluvan actor; he never says a word and has immobile masks on his face the whole time, but manages to convey a wide range of humor or menace just through body language. Most horror comedies annoy me but this one's black as pitch and cleverly done, definitely worth checking out.
Whole movie:
10.09.2010
10.08.2010
"The Dunwich Horror" by HPL and Alberto Breccia
"The Dunwich Horror" is one of H.P. Lovecraft's best-known short stories, one that highlights the horrific Whateley family tree with illuminating results. A film adaptation starring Dean Stockwell was released in 1969???, but doesn't quite live up to the source material.
Though you gotta love the nod to Aleister Crowley seen here:
Our page's Crowley pic features the same pose (can't see Dean's thumbs, though)! Victorian-era Dr. Venture + the gang shoulda never thrown him outta that Zeppelin...
That being said, though, it is still an entertaining flick, even though the other brother looks like one of those gas-cloud aliens filld with sparkly lights from the original Star Trek series... Visually representing Cthulhu or that other Whateley or Yog-Sothoth is gonna be tough, for sure. HPL certainly roadbumpt his future would-be artistic adaptors, as he tended to use some inventive maddened gibberish to allow the reader to create a mental picture from the rather vivid but bizarre descriptions given by the story's characters, thus ensuring that a concrete image will, by necessity, not live up to the horrors the human mind can craft:
But I think that Alberto Breccia nailed it... His adaptation relies heavily on the stark whites + blacks on the pages. Particularly, the white negative spaces that drape many pages create a bleak storyscape, shit-tons of fog, the horizon + much of the background undiscernable... And the characters, drawn in grayscale, suggesting their human complexities/frailties + highlighting their craggy features are incredible-looking. When we finally meet Wilbur's brother, we get a good look - and the change in panel size creates a 'bum-BUM' kinda moment - but even that panel seems slightly out of focus, maintaining a degree of unknowable otherworldiness. Ver' nice...
So, without much further ado, here is Alberto Breccia's adaptation from 1974, scannd here from the October, 1979 (All HPL!!!) issue of H3-@VY M-3+@7 (just avoiding the sue-bots, y'all, not trying to be web-clever or nothin') of H.P. Lovecraft's incredible "The Dunwich Horror"... :
 |
| "Yogggggg-Sothoth!!!" |
That being said, though, it is still an entertaining flick, even though the other brother looks like one of those gas-cloud aliens filld with sparkly lights from the original Star Trek series... Visually representing Cthulhu or that other Whateley or Yog-Sothoth is gonna be tough, for sure. HPL certainly roadbumpt his future would-be artistic adaptors, as he tended to use some inventive maddened gibberish to allow the reader to create a mental picture from the rather vivid but bizarre descriptions given by the story's characters, thus ensuring that a concrete image will, by necessity, not live up to the horrors the human mind can craft:
"Bigger'n a barn... all made o' squirmin' ropes... hull thing sort o'shaped like a hen's egg bigger'n anything with dozens o' legs like hogsheads that haff shut up when they step... nothin' solid abaout it - all like jelly, an' made o' sep'rit wrigglin' ropes pushed clost together... great bulgin' eyes all over it... ten or twenty maouths or trunks a-stickin' aout all along the sides, big as stovepipes, an' all tossin' an' openin' an' shuttin'... all grey, with kinder blue or purple rings... an' Gawd in Heaven - that haff face on top!..."
-"The Dunwich Horror" by HPL (The crazed babblings of poor ol' Curtis,upon first seeing the other Whateley brother )
But I think that Alberto Breccia nailed it... His adaptation relies heavily on the stark whites + blacks on the pages. Particularly, the white negative spaces that drape many pages create a bleak storyscape, shit-tons of fog, the horizon + much of the background undiscernable... And the characters, drawn in grayscale, suggesting their human complexities/frailties + highlighting their craggy features are incredible-looking. When we finally meet Wilbur's brother, we get a good look - and the change in panel size creates a 'bum-BUM' kinda moment - but even that panel seems slightly out of focus, maintaining a degree of unknowable otherworldiness. Ver' nice...
10.06.2010
Oooo, veddy scary, kids!
The Halloween scanning blitz continues with a sequel to this post, where, admittedly, I probably used up most of my best stuff. Life only gives you so many skeletons with banjos, y'know. But, there's a few gems of ill-advised dreck here that will hopefully cause you to make the wee-wee of amusement, even though some of these are so lame I can't even figure out a way to make fun of 'em.
This first book I don't actually have, but a friend tipped me off to its existence. When I told him I'd done a blog post on stupid horror book covers, he said "Did you get Keeper of the Children in there?" It was the first thing that came to his mind, and when I looked it up I could see why...
A headless teddy bear (with the head making a mean face, hanging its tongue out, and missing an eye) is chopping a rat in half with a hatchet. Exactly the kind of thing that makes me hate "theme night" at the local country buffet.
Looking at this makes me have to re-think the whole concept of marketing. Usually when you're inspired to buy a book by a picture on its cover, you're thinking, "I hope this scene appears in the book!" But in this case, I just don't know... do you really want to read a novel in which a headless teddy bear takes a hatchet to a rat? Wouldn't that make the novel, I dunno, really really really goddamn fucking stupid? Kinda? I can picture someone avidly turning pages, going "Any page now, Teddy Axpin's gonna snuff Mr. Squeakums! That's gone be some scary shit, boyyyyy!" I just don't know what audience they're chasing with that one. Do people read horror novels while they're on shrooms?
And believe it or not, we'll see Mr. Bear's cousin in a while...
But now... bukkake gets out of hand!
I don't know exactly what's going on there, but it looks kinda like someone drowning in an ocean of semen. Kingdom Cum! I thought maybe it was just snow, but look at it - it looks slimy. And it's kind splashing back in jizzy droplets off that one hand there. Actually, this may be an effective book cover after all, because being drowned in spunk would be a pretty horrifying fate.
Or a Thursday for Jenna Jameson.
(I was gonna double-down on the hatefulness and use Kim Kardashian for that terrible joke, but I changed my mind... but, I do have to wonder how Kim feels about her Wikipedia page's claim that "Kim has launched multiple fragrances." Yeah, well, so have I, and you don't see me botherin' people with appearances on Dancing With The Stars!)
God, this post is going downhill fast... I haven't even gotten to the third book and I'm already making celebrity enemies and resorting to fart jokes. This will not end well.
Anyway, how 'bout this one for sheer unmitigated terror?
A girl is holding some rocks.
Aaaaaaaaaaaand... that's all that's happening.
Here we have a little girl, holding some balloons, and on one of the balloons is a SKULL! Like you have in your head but can't see 'til you're dead, or at least really determined! So it's scary, oh yes, scary indeed. She also may be floating off the ground. You can't really tell because they have her in a negative space there, but I guess it'd be creepier if she was floating around, like Mary Poppins, although poppin' better not happen in this case, or wheeeeeeeee down she goes, and kersplat, and then there'll be two skulls.
Anyway, she has balloons, and she's coming to get you. Booooooooga booga. Run. Run as fast as you care to.
Now, let's get topical:
I believe this book is about a cult of ill-informed goons who want to replace the government with theocratic dullards so they'll be helpless against the rich who want to enslave them. I think I caught part of a book review on FOX News.
Y'know, scary faces of crumpled linen can be scary as hell, but you can't really tell it by this cover. And are those crumpets? Crumpets just are not scary! Scones, okay, I'll grant you that scones come with a wee bit of frisson. And I have an absolute horror of teabisquits.
I haven't read it yet, but I'm doubting this book will deliver, because it's written by Charles L. Grant, the most over-rated horror writer in the biz. He likes "quiet horror." Sometimes the volume's so low you never hear it at all. But, I suppose if people are supposed to be scared by a girl holding rocks, or a skull balloon, then there's a place for Charles L. Grant at the table.
Let's get a little louder...
This is why you should let your cheese toast cool down before you eat it!
A bit excessive, ain't it? Looks like somebody tried to use a woodchipper as a pillow. You don't usually see that much gore on these book covers, especially when the victim of the torn-off-face is a little kid. That's harsh. I kinda like it, though. At least it fits the "I hope there's a scene like this in the book" test. I mean, at least it knows it's a horror novel. And it's not nearly as silly as...
THIS! That's the head of a kid (who looks a lot like Ricky Schroeder, star of Silver Spoons) stuck onto the stunted body of a dwarf scarecrow. Must be a shrunken head, too, unless those are some big-ass candles and pins.
Sometimes I like to picture the boardrooms of these book companies, approving these covers. I'd pay money to get a look at the stuff they rejected, because those must really be some seriously hilarious stuff.
"Okay, guys, I think our artists came up with a real winner this time. It's a baby wielding a porkchop! And he's wearing a golf cap! Look at his eyes... that infant means business! That will surely scare the ass off the public! And, look here, we've got a cover with a chicken in pants, waving a flag! And on the flag is a picture of a skull with a candy cane in its mouth! Dare we unleash this nightmare on an unsuspecting public? If we get away with those, we'll move on to our ultimate weapon... DEVIL-FACE BEACH BALL!"
Sometimes they would used actual models instead of paintings, and I would've liked to see this photo shoot...
They're a bit cheesy, but I don't particularly have a problem with the witch and the warlock... but, ummmm, we gotta talk about this "werewolf" thing, or Dee Snider, or whatever it is.
I only know that's supposed to be a werewolf because it's in the title there. But it honestly looks like the book should be titled Rod Serling's Triple W: Witches, Warlocks, and WickedChickenmen. 'Cuz that's much more like were-poultry. Definitely gonna cluck you up. It's like they draped a bathroom rug over him, had a blind man slap some makeup on him in the back of a truck being driven by a drunk on an icy road, and said "Good enough!"
That's a real guy, y'know. Somewhere out there there is a guy who, buried deeeeeeep on his resume, has a claim-to-fame of being the werewolf-whatsis on the cover of this book. It's a story I don't believe he tells his grandchildren. I bet the "Did I ever tell you kids about the time I sucked my cousin's dick?" story comes up more often than the posing-for-the-werewolf-cover one.
I actually like the next cover, but it is silly...
What's great about this picture is... it actually is the creature in the book! Yep, it's a book about a skeleton that goes around killing people. Its goofy but there is a certain spookiness to it. You have to admire the audacity of putting such a thing on a book cover.
This, though...
Now, the book itself is a masterpiece. It's freakin' Lovecraft, son! You can't go wrong with HPL, and "At The Mountains of Madness" is some of his highlight-reel material. But this cover... a guy with a big ol' fakey googly eye and an eyepatch over the other. I have no idea what the thought behind this was, but I have a feeling it might have been the result of brain-damage from a tricycle accident.
Now, dare you confront the horror of... Mommy Rubberface?
Ha ha, mommy funny!
I really don't know what to say about this, but the author apparently had some kind of John Saul thing going with the baby-horror, since he had a previous book called Crib. Cheap horror always seemed to be preoccupied with kids and toys for some reason. Here's a couple more examples of that:
This looks like our old friend from Wait and See, but without the eyeballs and holding a couple of twins who have Village of the Damned eyes. I'm certain this will cause at least as much terror as, say, a boy with a purple skull-cat.
Y'know, like that one. I think this painting touches mankind's primal fears of purple stuffed cats with extremely long tails, and half-skull faces. The kid sure looks spooked enough by it, even as he hugs the horror-cat, Mr. Spookums.
Then there's Toy Cemetery by the World's Worst Writer® William W. Johnstone.
Only in the case of a Johnstone book could this cover be better than the book itself. There's a stuffed-animal clown guy with spinach coming out of the cracks in his face, a lap full of dead roses which are held by a skeleton's hand, and there, on his chest, I believe that's a Cheeto, which is the most eldritch of snack foods. In your colon they dwell... forever!
I'm not sure what they mean by a "toy cemetery." Is it like a doll house, a little cemetery you play with? Or is it a cemetery where they bury dead toys? Were they just so desperate to make readers think of Pet Sematary that they trusted Johnstone's notoriously-laughable "judgement" to come up with a concept? That's probably what happened, and lo, half a bottle of Seagram's later, Johnstone was busy at work hammering out this messterpiece.
(In my defense, notice the clipped corner: that means I only paid a quarter for this thing. I'll buy just about anything for a quarter, even stuff I know will suck.)
And I saved the best for last. This first one I actually just bought specifically for this post, guys and gals. When I saw it in the bookstore I knew you just had to see it. Yes, I love ya'll that much!
Up the irons!
That's gotta be the first draft of those old Metallica "Metal Up Your Ass" tee-shirts, don'tcha think? It's yet another mean Teddy bear, this time with a butcher knife.
"Teddy is tired of sleeping with you, Jimmy. He's sick of your hugs and your neediness. You get on Teddy's nerves, Jimmy, and tonight, he's going to do something about it!"
I actually do hope there's a scene like this in the book. If not, I'm going to complain... probably to random strangers on the street who have no idea what I'm going on and on about, until they lock me away and give me the thorazine that makes the ghosts go away for a time.
Okay, got one more... and it's not quite as great as the skeleton with a banjo, but it's purty goddamn close there, buddy, so you better grab aholt of your urethra just in case before you look at...
...A MAN IN A NURSE'S OUTFIT AND RUBBER GLOVES HOLDING A BABYDOLL!
This is even scarier to me because this guy looks almost exactly like the guy who lives next door to me. 'Cept without the nurse gear and all, I mean. Or at least I've never seen him in such gear, but what he does on his own time, that's his business.
And yes, this does figure in the book. From the back cover:
So, maybe that's actually a scary cover after all...
This first book I don't actually have, but a friend tipped me off to its existence. When I told him I'd done a blog post on stupid horror book covers, he said "Did you get Keeper of the Children in there?" It was the first thing that came to his mind, and when I looked it up I could see why...
A headless teddy bear (with the head making a mean face, hanging its tongue out, and missing an eye) is chopping a rat in half with a hatchet. Exactly the kind of thing that makes me hate "theme night" at the local country buffet.
Looking at this makes me have to re-think the whole concept of marketing. Usually when you're inspired to buy a book by a picture on its cover, you're thinking, "I hope this scene appears in the book!" But in this case, I just don't know... do you really want to read a novel in which a headless teddy bear takes a hatchet to a rat? Wouldn't that make the novel, I dunno, really really really goddamn fucking stupid? Kinda? I can picture someone avidly turning pages, going "Any page now, Teddy Axpin's gonna snuff Mr. Squeakums! That's gone be some scary shit, boyyyyy!" I just don't know what audience they're chasing with that one. Do people read horror novels while they're on shrooms?
And believe it or not, we'll see Mr. Bear's cousin in a while...
But now... bukkake gets out of hand!
I don't know exactly what's going on there, but it looks kinda like someone drowning in an ocean of semen. Kingdom Cum! I thought maybe it was just snow, but look at it - it looks slimy. And it's kind splashing back in jizzy droplets off that one hand there. Actually, this may be an effective book cover after all, because being drowned in spunk would be a pretty horrifying fate.
Or a Thursday for Jenna Jameson.
(I was gonna double-down on the hatefulness and use Kim Kardashian for that terrible joke, but I changed my mind... but, I do have to wonder how Kim feels about her Wikipedia page's claim that "Kim has launched multiple fragrances." Yeah, well, so have I, and you don't see me botherin' people with appearances on Dancing With The Stars!)
God, this post is going downhill fast... I haven't even gotten to the third book and I'm already making celebrity enemies and resorting to fart jokes. This will not end well.
Anyway, how 'bout this one for sheer unmitigated terror?
A girl is holding some rocks.
Aaaaaaaaaaaand... that's all that's happening.
Here we have a little girl, holding some balloons, and on one of the balloons is a SKULL! Like you have in your head but can't see 'til you're dead, or at least really determined! So it's scary, oh yes, scary indeed. She also may be floating off the ground. You can't really tell because they have her in a negative space there, but I guess it'd be creepier if she was floating around, like Mary Poppins, although poppin' better not happen in this case, or wheeeeeeeee down she goes, and kersplat, and then there'll be two skulls.
Anyway, she has balloons, and she's coming to get you. Booooooooga booga. Run. Run as fast as you care to.
Now, let's get topical:
I believe this book is about a cult of ill-informed goons who want to replace the government with theocratic dullards so they'll be helpless against the rich who want to enslave them. I think I caught part of a book review on FOX News.
Y'know, scary faces of crumpled linen can be scary as hell, but you can't really tell it by this cover. And are those crumpets? Crumpets just are not scary! Scones, okay, I'll grant you that scones come with a wee bit of frisson. And I have an absolute horror of teabisquits.
I haven't read it yet, but I'm doubting this book will deliver, because it's written by Charles L. Grant, the most over-rated horror writer in the biz. He likes "quiet horror." Sometimes the volume's so low you never hear it at all. But, I suppose if people are supposed to be scared by a girl holding rocks, or a skull balloon, then there's a place for Charles L. Grant at the table.
Let's get a little louder...
This is why you should let your cheese toast cool down before you eat it!
A bit excessive, ain't it? Looks like somebody tried to use a woodchipper as a pillow. You don't usually see that much gore on these book covers, especially when the victim of the torn-off-face is a little kid. That's harsh. I kinda like it, though. At least it fits the "I hope there's a scene like this in the book" test. I mean, at least it knows it's a horror novel. And it's not nearly as silly as...
THIS! That's the head of a kid (who looks a lot like Ricky Schroeder, star of Silver Spoons) stuck onto the stunted body of a dwarf scarecrow. Must be a shrunken head, too, unless those are some big-ass candles and pins.
Sometimes I like to picture the boardrooms of these book companies, approving these covers. I'd pay money to get a look at the stuff they rejected, because those must really be some seriously hilarious stuff.
"Okay, guys, I think our artists came up with a real winner this time. It's a baby wielding a porkchop! And he's wearing a golf cap! Look at his eyes... that infant means business! That will surely scare the ass off the public! And, look here, we've got a cover with a chicken in pants, waving a flag! And on the flag is a picture of a skull with a candy cane in its mouth! Dare we unleash this nightmare on an unsuspecting public? If we get away with those, we'll move on to our ultimate weapon... DEVIL-FACE BEACH BALL!"
Sometimes they would used actual models instead of paintings, and I would've liked to see this photo shoot...
They're a bit cheesy, but I don't particularly have a problem with the witch and the warlock... but, ummmm, we gotta talk about this "werewolf" thing, or Dee Snider, or whatever it is.
I only know that's supposed to be a werewolf because it's in the title there. But it honestly looks like the book should be titled Rod Serling's Triple W: Witches, Warlocks, and WickedChickenmen. 'Cuz that's much more like were-poultry. Definitely gonna cluck you up. It's like they draped a bathroom rug over him, had a blind man slap some makeup on him in the back of a truck being driven by a drunk on an icy road, and said "Good enough!"
That's a real guy, y'know. Somewhere out there there is a guy who, buried deeeeeeep on his resume, has a claim-to-fame of being the werewolf-whatsis on the cover of this book. It's a story I don't believe he tells his grandchildren. I bet the "Did I ever tell you kids about the time I sucked my cousin's dick?" story comes up more often than the posing-for-the-werewolf-cover one.
I actually like the next cover, but it is silly...
What's great about this picture is... it actually is the creature in the book! Yep, it's a book about a skeleton that goes around killing people. Its goofy but there is a certain spookiness to it. You have to admire the audacity of putting such a thing on a book cover.
This, though...
Now, the book itself is a masterpiece. It's freakin' Lovecraft, son! You can't go wrong with HPL, and "At The Mountains of Madness" is some of his highlight-reel material. But this cover... a guy with a big ol' fakey googly eye and an eyepatch over the other. I have no idea what the thought behind this was, but I have a feeling it might have been the result of brain-damage from a tricycle accident.
Now, dare you confront the horror of... Mommy Rubberface?
Ha ha, mommy funny!
I really don't know what to say about this, but the author apparently had some kind of John Saul thing going with the baby-horror, since he had a previous book called Crib. Cheap horror always seemed to be preoccupied with kids and toys for some reason. Here's a couple more examples of that:
This looks like our old friend from Wait and See, but without the eyeballs and holding a couple of twins who have Village of the Damned eyes. I'm certain this will cause at least as much terror as, say, a boy with a purple skull-cat.
Y'know, like that one. I think this painting touches mankind's primal fears of purple stuffed cats with extremely long tails, and half-skull faces. The kid sure looks spooked enough by it, even as he hugs the horror-cat, Mr. Spookums.
Then there's Toy Cemetery by the World's Worst Writer® William W. Johnstone.
Only in the case of a Johnstone book could this cover be better than the book itself. There's a stuffed-animal clown guy with spinach coming out of the cracks in his face, a lap full of dead roses which are held by a skeleton's hand, and there, on his chest, I believe that's a Cheeto, which is the most eldritch of snack foods. In your colon they dwell... forever!
I'm not sure what they mean by a "toy cemetery." Is it like a doll house, a little cemetery you play with? Or is it a cemetery where they bury dead toys? Were they just so desperate to make readers think of Pet Sematary that they trusted Johnstone's notoriously-laughable "judgement" to come up with a concept? That's probably what happened, and lo, half a bottle of Seagram's later, Johnstone was busy at work hammering out this messterpiece.
(In my defense, notice the clipped corner: that means I only paid a quarter for this thing. I'll buy just about anything for a quarter, even stuff I know will suck.)
And I saved the best for last. This first one I actually just bought specifically for this post, guys and gals. When I saw it in the bookstore I knew you just had to see it. Yes, I love ya'll that much!
Up the irons!
That's gotta be the first draft of those old Metallica "Metal Up Your Ass" tee-shirts, don'tcha think? It's yet another mean Teddy bear, this time with a butcher knife.
"Teddy is tired of sleeping with you, Jimmy. He's sick of your hugs and your neediness. You get on Teddy's nerves, Jimmy, and tonight, he's going to do something about it!"
I actually do hope there's a scene like this in the book. If not, I'm going to complain... probably to random strangers on the street who have no idea what I'm going on and on about, until they lock me away and give me the thorazine that makes the ghosts go away for a time.
Okay, got one more... and it's not quite as great as the skeleton with a banjo, but it's purty goddamn close there, buddy, so you better grab aholt of your urethra just in case before you look at...
...A MAN IN A NURSE'S OUTFIT AND RUBBER GLOVES HOLDING A BABYDOLL!
This is even scarier to me because this guy looks almost exactly like the guy who lives next door to me. 'Cept without the nurse gear and all, I mean. Or at least I've never seen him in such gear, but what he does on his own time, that's his business.
And yes, this does figure in the book. From the back cover:
Mr. Macready was such a nice old man. He liked to watch the children walking home from school, especially the little girls. In fact, Mr. Macready knew all about the children of Granite Heights -- their names, their houses, even the nights their parents were away.
And when he put on his white nurse's uniform and smeared his lips with blood-red lipstick, any child would be happy to let him through the door. Oh, they always stared a bit at his clear plastic gloves. But that was nothing compared to how they stared when he got his hands around their fragile little necks and crooned... ROCKABYE BABY.
So, maybe that's actually a scary cover after all...
10.05.2010
"Poe? Phooey!"
Another short piece (9 pages, in color) by the late, great Alberto Breccia:
And, if my scanner will hold up, I'll soon upload Breccia's adaptation of HPL's classic "The Dunwich Horror!"
So... enjoy til then + 'Yog Sothoth,' y'all!
10.04.2010
Glenn Danzig Buying Kitty Litter.
What jokes shall we make? Am I Feline? Tommy, Can I Go Out and Kill Tonight? "Feline......don't you shit outside the box again..."?
10.03.2010
Notes Scrawled on My Rosters to Help Me Remember Student Names
Yep. That's what this is. And they almost all refer to white dudes, because there's so damn many of them, and so many of them are named Jason or Justin or Matthew or Micah or Caleb, that I need notes to match faces with names.
Caterpillar brows
Sleepy Michelle Obama
Looks smooth
Dave Grohl as a nerd
Michael Cera, black hair
Bill Paxton
Gay Paul Dano
Son of The Edge and Josh Brolin
Steve Nieve
Raising Arizona escapee
Schlump
Swedish
Eye problem
Owen Wilson
Skinny jeans
Dirty Sandra Bullock
Britpop
Gene Wilder
Buzz ruddy
Like Michael Phelps
Casey Affleck
Brad Paisley
Young Dwight Schrute
Dude from gum ad
Carrey’s pal in The Truman Show
Old
Nerd, glasses
Thin blonde Andy Garcia
Farm
Cable Guy
Buzz
Rivers Cuomo + Ben Gibbard
Thin Anthony Edwards
Red
That hair
Nephew Jason
Neck hair
Drunk?
Coal miner
Moby
John Belushi + Artie Lange
Elf
Frat
Big baby
Martin Short + Thom Yorke
Caterpillar brows
Sleepy Michelle Obama
Looks smooth
Dave Grohl as a nerd
Michael Cera, black hair
Bill Paxton
Gay Paul Dano
Son of The Edge and Josh Brolin
Steve Nieve
Raising Arizona escapee
Schlump
Swedish
Eye problem
Owen Wilson
Skinny jeans
Dirty Sandra Bullock
Britpop
Gene Wilder
Buzz ruddy
Like Michael Phelps
Casey Affleck
Brad Paisley
Young Dwight Schrute
Dude from gum ad
Carrey’s pal in The Truman Show
Old
Nerd, glasses
Thin blonde Andy Garcia
Farm
Cable Guy
Buzz
Rivers Cuomo + Ben Gibbard
Thin Anthony Edwards
Red
That hair
Nephew Jason
Neck hair
Drunk?
Coal miner
Moby
John Belushi + Artie Lange
Elf
Frat
Big baby
Martin Short + Thom Yorke
Spam Subject Lines 10-01-10
I've seen a jumpman's nails in
had witnessed his insulting offer of a reward to him f
[Angry for a second.] God stiffen you!
had witnessed his insulting offer of a reward to him f
[Angry for a second.] God stiffen you!
it's called the Monster Mersh
More Halloweeny stuff, this time in the form of the ads scanned in from Famous Monsters of Filmland. Famous Monsters was always cool (not only informative, but just plain formative - a subset whole generation was influenced by this mag, which someone should reprint Marvel Essentials/Showcase Presents style, or at least on a DVD-Rom), and it's amazing how grossed-out we got from "gory" black and white pictures from tame films like Food of the Gods, but the most popular part for my friends and I always seemed to be the last dozen or so pages, where they had all the coolstuff for sale. I actually ordered from 'em once, right before the magazine folded (it took me years to convince my mom that they weren't going to rip me off - comics and monster magazines had a bad rep with parents back then, probably undeserved for the most part unless you tried to buy one of those personal submarines (I found an actual photo), so I got a few EC reprints and books, but I missed out on all the masks and such.
And man, did they have some badass masks (if you click on these they'll get bigger so you'll have a chance at reading the captions and stuff)...
I was always freaked out by the "Erik" one, because I was thinking "Who the hell is Erik?" It took me a while to realize they meant the Phantom of the Opera, because that doesn't look like Lon Chaney's classic design. I still don't know what "B. Garrett Theta" is supposed to mean, but that's one bad-ass zombie mask. And the hands and feet that you can get for them are also great. All this stuff was damn pricey, though - over $30 in 1978 dollars? Jeez. Okay, a paperback book back then would cost you around a buck fifty, maybe, and paperbacks are $7-8 now, so you do the merch-math and.... yikes.
How come Sargoth The Cobra didn't come with hands? Oh, yeah... I guess you shouldn't even have arms if you wear that. I love the Hydroloid. That's pretty much how I picture the children of Dagon from Lovecraft's "Shadow Over Innsmouth."
I used to love the Mutant, although at the time I didn't know it was from This Island Earth, I just thought it was cool pincher-handed thing. And it's amazing that relatively-obscure monsters like the Mole People actually got masks. That's one creepy looking picture, mostly due to the fact that you can't really see much of the mask... which might make it not that great as an ad, but pretty good just for creepiness.
Then, there were the 8mm films...
This was in the days before videocassettes, much less DVDs or that streaming shit we're supposed to buy into now, so if you wanted to experience a movie on your own time you were limited to "wasn't it cool when" discussions with friends who'd also seen it, reading a movie-tie-in paperback (which were prolific as hell back in those days), or projecting silent five minute condensed versions on a bedsheet in your garage, the hallway of your house, or anyplace else you could make it dark enough. That was pretty much it. Otherwise yo' ass was stuck circling the TV Guide and staying up 'til 3 a.m. to catch a re-run of White Zombie or something. But, hey, that made you appreciate what you did get more, so that wasn't all bad. Looks like FM got a little mixed up on Psycho, there... the ad copy's talking about a book.
Then, the model kits.
I had one of the Dr. Jekyll kits, given to me by a friend at a birthday party. It was cool as hell, glow in the dark and everything. Pieces of it still show up in the clutter when I'm looking for things sometimes... wish I'd kept it in better shape, but, eh, 12 year olds can't be expected to be too responsible, I guess. I always thought the Forgotten Prisoner of Castlemares was badass. You can still find re-creations of these kits for sale around the 'net.
Some more film loops (with a record to play with 'em) and some more model kits. A lot of people who are big fans of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies don't realize it was first popularized by some ultra-cool model kits, featuring pirate skeletons that would do things through "zap action." I saw some of those in a toy store in Florida once but didn't have the funds to buy any of 'em. Next to it you can see other Disney horror franchise model kits, also featuring zap action. I did get one of those, but it's not pictured in the ad... it was a mummy leaping out of a pipe organ. What a mummy was doing in a pipe organ, I don't know, but, that's what it was. I was too young to build it myself so I had to get my dad to glue it together for me, and after dealing with the glue and complicated "zap" mechanism for an hour or so he told me I wasn't buying any more of those until I could build 'em myself. He was a little old to be a monster kid...
Then, there were record albums:
Actual LP's, the big black plastic things that a lot of the IPOD kids - some of whom may not have even seen a CD - probably aren't terribly familiar with unless they're real audiophiles or DJs or something. That Nightwatch album has maybe the best album cover ever created.
Anyway, more stuff later as I get around to it...
And man, did they have some badass masks (if you click on these they'll get bigger so you'll have a chance at reading the captions and stuff)...
I was always freaked out by the "Erik" one, because I was thinking "Who the hell is Erik?" It took me a while to realize they meant the Phantom of the Opera, because that doesn't look like Lon Chaney's classic design. I still don't know what "B. Garrett Theta" is supposed to mean, but that's one bad-ass zombie mask. And the hands and feet that you can get for them are also great. All this stuff was damn pricey, though - over $30 in 1978 dollars? Jeez. Okay, a paperback book back then would cost you around a buck fifty, maybe, and paperbacks are $7-8 now, so you do the merch-math and.... yikes.
How come Sargoth The Cobra didn't come with hands? Oh, yeah... I guess you shouldn't even have arms if you wear that. I love the Hydroloid. That's pretty much how I picture the children of Dagon from Lovecraft's "Shadow Over Innsmouth."
I used to love the Mutant, although at the time I didn't know it was from This Island Earth, I just thought it was cool pincher-handed thing. And it's amazing that relatively-obscure monsters like the Mole People actually got masks. That's one creepy looking picture, mostly due to the fact that you can't really see much of the mask... which might make it not that great as an ad, but pretty good just for creepiness.
Then, there were the 8mm films...
This was in the days before videocassettes, much less DVDs or that streaming shit we're supposed to buy into now, so if you wanted to experience a movie on your own time you were limited to "wasn't it cool when" discussions with friends who'd also seen it, reading a movie-tie-in paperback (which were prolific as hell back in those days), or projecting silent five minute condensed versions on a bedsheet in your garage, the hallway of your house, or anyplace else you could make it dark enough. That was pretty much it. Otherwise yo' ass was stuck circling the TV Guide and staying up 'til 3 a.m. to catch a re-run of White Zombie or something. But, hey, that made you appreciate what you did get more, so that wasn't all bad. Looks like FM got a little mixed up on Psycho, there... the ad copy's talking about a book.
Then, the model kits.
I had one of the Dr. Jekyll kits, given to me by a friend at a birthday party. It was cool as hell, glow in the dark and everything. Pieces of it still show up in the clutter when I'm looking for things sometimes... wish I'd kept it in better shape, but, eh, 12 year olds can't be expected to be too responsible, I guess. I always thought the Forgotten Prisoner of Castlemares was badass. You can still find re-creations of these kits for sale around the 'net.
Some more film loops (with a record to play with 'em) and some more model kits. A lot of people who are big fans of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies don't realize it was first popularized by some ultra-cool model kits, featuring pirate skeletons that would do things through "zap action." I saw some of those in a toy store in Florida once but didn't have the funds to buy any of 'em. Next to it you can see other Disney horror franchise model kits, also featuring zap action. I did get one of those, but it's not pictured in the ad... it was a mummy leaping out of a pipe organ. What a mummy was doing in a pipe organ, I don't know, but, that's what it was. I was too young to build it myself so I had to get my dad to glue it together for me, and after dealing with the glue and complicated "zap" mechanism for an hour or so he told me I wasn't buying any more of those until I could build 'em myself. He was a little old to be a monster kid...
Then, there were record albums:
Actual LP's, the big black plastic things that a lot of the IPOD kids - some of whom may not have even seen a CD - probably aren't terribly familiar with unless they're real audiophiles or DJs or something. That Nightwatch album has maybe the best album cover ever created.
Anyway, more stuff later as I get around to it...
Like a Chicken with Its Head Cut Off...
Everything seems to've been made soooo safe + sanitized for Halloween nowadays. There was a certain sense of danger back in the 1970s, what with LSD-laced temporary tattoos + razor-blade-filled apples... ringing the doorbell at the 'crazy old man' house (and, karmically, in my neighborhood, my house is the 'crazy old man' house + I am evidently the 'crazy old man'...)
So, straight from the crazy old man, here's some candy that'll lacerate the roof of your mouth + make your belly-sack weep red tears:
Uruguayan author Horacio Quiroga's classic 1925 short story, 'La Gallina Degollada,' adapted in 1978 for the comics page by the classic Argentine writer + artist team of Carlos Trillo + Alberto Breccia... (published in English as "The Decapitated Chicken" or, as we find here, "The Slaughtered Chicken")...
More to come if anybody shows any interest...
So, straight from the crazy old man, here's some candy that'll lacerate the roof of your mouth + make your belly-sack weep red tears:
Uruguayan author Horacio Quiroga's classic 1925 short story, 'La Gallina Degollada,' adapted in 1978 for the comics page by the classic Argentine writer + artist team of Carlos Trillo + Alberto Breccia... (published in English as "The Decapitated Chicken" or, as we find here, "The Slaughtered Chicken")...
_______________________
_______________________
_______________________
More to come if anybody shows any interest...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
