If you were wondering how Stanley Kubrick and his production team could have imagined some of those brilliant special effects in 2001 A Space Odyssey, wonder no more. Der Weg Zu Den Sternen showed a space station wheel years before 2001, and some scenes could be twins between both movies, according to sources cited in the Wikipedia article on this movie. This pocket-sized pressbook caught my attention with its stylized graphics.
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This French pressbook for Le Fantome De La Rue Morgue opens to a long montage centerfold (split across the center two pages shown here). How can you not love two gorilla hands reaching ominously for a terrified woman (or man, for that matter)?
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Phantom of the Rue Morgue (1954)
French Movie PressbookRead More »
Non-English pressbooks usually aren't very large or filled with pages like the American pressbooks, but they still pack a neat promotional wallop in a small package. Here's the French pressbook for the film noir, Conflict (1945).
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Thanksgiving Day, 1927 — If I told you there was this guy, Urbain Ledoux (I know, the papers liked Urban instead of Urbain), who gave up a business career to help the homeless and foster humanity among his fellows, who wanted to be a priest but got turned off by seeing very unpriestly misconduct, and who worked hard to awaken the slumbering conscience of the people to help those less fortunate and less news-sensationalized than the bombastic morons parading as intelligentsia today, you'd say I was crazy. I'm not, he was, and we all should be just as crazy as him.
With nefarious and icky one-eyed aliens, the Navy's new strategic weaponry of atomic powered submarines, and a budget take on alien encounters, pacifism versus fighting, and somewhat passable underwater staging, The Atomic Submarine launched before Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea's Seaview and the underwater warship Atragon. And I built the Revell atomic sub model, too!
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One of Vincent Price's less than stellar efforts. From Wikipedia:
Filming began in November 1966. Knowing that local censors would prohibit filming, Towers gave them a copy of Abe Lincoln in Illinois and hired an actor to walk around the set dressed like Abraham Lincoln in case the censors dropped by.
According to Price in a 1984 interview, he had been signed on to the project without full knowledge of what the film would be about. After his scenes were shot, "Martha Hyer and I were led off…so we went to visit on the set and we found that they were remaking all of the scenes we'd been in, but a pornographic version of it." He added, "I never got to see it."
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A big 28 page pressbook for a little girl. But what a little girl. The Bad Seed seemed pretty daring for the 1950s: making a kid a serial killer (and the daughter of a serial killer to imply a genetic bond). Of course the movie twists around the ending from the novel to appease the Motion Picture Production Code (and also to make it more sellable to the adult theater audience). There's an interesting filler article on page 24 that states Alfred Hitchcock wanted a walk-on part in the movie. Sounds like a smart piece of promotion more than the truth, but check it out.
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Here's the pressbook for Devil Goddess, the last film in the Jungle Jim series by Columbia Pictures.
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This Howco movie pressbook for Mesa of Lost Women doesn't do this opus of inanity justice, so read my movie review to get a better sense of the senselessness this movie brings to 1950s bottom-basement wonders.
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Who knows the effects of the deadly gamma rays? The mysteries of space provided a fertile ground for destructive rays and destructive aliens in the 1950s and 1960s as well as for heroic and conflicted comic book heroes. The Fantastic Four would blast into space and be enveloped by cosmic rays in 1961, Bruce Banner would be mutated into the Incredible Hulk in 1962 by gamma rays, and space rays would have a positive influence on DC's Negative Man in 1963. But First Man into Space in 1959 blasted off first to ignite the radiation mania in popular culture.
Take a gander at the inside ad in this issue 5, volume 4, of Horror Tales. So, is YOUR hair growing or going? Did the advertiser think aging and balding adults (such as myself) were buying this issue way back in 1972? Around that time I was a much younger version of myself who could care less. Now I'm an adult paying extortion prices on eBay to recapture that glorious time when I had more hair on my head than in my ears, and a newstand filled with 60 cent magazines. Did I pay any attention to ads like this back then? Certainly not. Which is why it's so irksome to me now. It's like some cosmic deity was giving me a hint of my future.
At least this issue has some hair raising thrills for you. Voodoo's Queen of Witchcraft will stimulate those winnowing hair follicles while Deadly Fangs toys with you, and the Ghost Writer tells a tale of Zombie Vengeance, which should bring the writers among us a certain unpleasant sense of familiarity.
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from Professor Kinema
At one Monster Bash several years ago Charles Herbert was sharing a table with B-movie/schlock producer/director Bert I. Gordon and his daughter, Susan. He was very fan-friendly and we had one brief chat. I bought a few items, he autographed a few items and, with Susan, posed for a few photos.
Like a lot of juvenile performers, his best (albeit only) years were as a child in films and TV. Mostly uncredited, his earliest appearances date back to 1953. On TV he appeared in such classic shows as Screen Directors Playhouse, Celebrity Playhouse, and Playhouse 90. The few (of many) TV shows and feature films of interest to Monster Bash attendees include Science Fiction Theater, One Step Beyond, Men Into Space, The Outer Limits, and one episode of Twilight Zone based on Ray Bradbury's story I Sing the Body Electric.
A genuine cult status was achieved with his appearances in such feature films as The Monster That Challenged the World, as the little boy fighting over a found sailor's cap; The Colossus of New York, as the son of the Colossus; The Fly, he shows Vincent Price that funny looking fly caught in the spider web and about to be the fly's dinner; and appearing with Susan Gordon in the Bert I. Gordon directed The Boy and the Pirates. His only top billing in what would essentially be his final film appearance came as Buck in William Castle's 13 Ghosts.
By 1968 his film and TV career was over.
Susan Gordon, Professor Kinema, and Charles Herbert