July, 2024 - From Zombos' Closet

The Killer Shrews (1959)
Radio Spots

I was working in The Crypt the other day, cleaning and dusting and making room for new material. Suddenly, my phone rang and I answered it.

“Granny! This is Portia! The Killer Shrews is on TV tonight!” She exclaimed.

‘What? I said. Where? When?”

“On Channel 13 tonight on The Early Late Show! At nine o’clock!” she said.

“Well, come on over,” I said. We’ll watch it.”

Portia is my rather excitable niece, my brother Ambrose’s youngest daughter. Having her over was going to be an experience to say the least. I knew that The Killer Shrews is one of her favorite movies, as is mine, so it ought to be a hoot, two fans absorbing every minute of this “B movie” classic.

She arrived about 8:30 PM and together we cooked up some popcorn and got our drinks together. At nine I fired up the old Sylvania 19” black-and-white TV and we settled in. We had a ball! …

The Killer Shrews (1959)
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Prehistoric Women (1950) Pressbook

July 2, 2024 / Pressbooks (Horror, Sci Fi, Fantasy) / Leave a Comment

Jul 2 2024

Not to be confused with the Hammer produced Prehistoric Women (1967), this 1950 oddity is notable for its sexploitation angle that’s light on sex but heavy on the cheesecake. Here’s what I suppose the pitch might have been. “We get a bunch of beautiful women together, dress them in furs and go heavy on the makeup and hairstyling, toss in some clubs for them to use to find primitive men as husbands, add the usual battle of the sexes but make sure the guys show their superiority in the end, and, oh…save the budget by leaving out the dinosaurs. That stop-motion stuff gets expensive. And the sets will be dirt cheap, mainly because they are dirt, with some rocks for good measure. It is the stone-age right?”

And thus was born Prehistoric Women. What’s more dumbfoundingly mesmerizing than this movie (which, really, if shown during a midnight show would be perfect) is the 8-page, oversized pressbook that shows more creativity than the production itself. I’m guessing the creatives behind this held their tongues firmly in cheekiness, especially with the narrator lending the fake-science documentary flair that was a pompous addition to some movies in the early 1950s.

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