Movie Pressbook: Paranoiac! (1963)
The splendidly off-kilter Oliver Reed takes a fun Hammer outing. And let's not forget that "Liliane Brousse introduces a highly attractive hair style in Paranoiac." Not sure if they meant higly attractive to the killer or to the audience, though.
The Evil of Frankenstein (1964) Pressbook
And again, Peter Cushing crushes it as the amoral and somewhat mad Doctor Frankenstein. Some fans hate the Monster’s design, but I’m quite fine with it. Just don’t call him blockhead and we’re good.
Comic reader version: Download Evil of Frankenstein Pressbook
See more pressbooks From Zombos’ Closet.
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The Sinful Allure of the Mexican Vampire
Although the Spanish version of Dracula would be the first celluloid vampire to terrify Mexico’s moviehouse audiences in 1931, it wasn’t until El Vampiro in 1957 that a home-grown vampire would flutter across the fogbound hacienda. Predating and, in key ways, anticipating the more dynamic blood-thirst in Hammer’s Dracula (released as Horror of Dracula in the United States), El Vampiro shows sharp canine fangs, energetic neck biting with no blood, just tiny puncture wounds, and a prim and virtuous heroine with lots of clothing to protect her feminine virtues. Abel Salazar plays Dr. Enrique, a reluctant believer in the supernatural as well as a decidedly more amour-minded Van Helsing type than Peter Cushing’s vampire slayer. Overt sensuality and ample bosoms would have to wait until Hammer’s horror productions in lurid color.
In El Vampiro, Count Lavud (German Robles) is more interested in acquiring land than Count Dracula’s (Christopher Lee) interest in acquiring more brides. Both noblemen vampires, however, share the same charisma and evening wear that began with Bela Lugosi, but add a stronger machismo and faster pulse for energetic dramatics.
The lobby cards for El Vampiro highlight the vampire’s threat to society’s norms of hacienda and family-motivated romance. Azteca printed (in the United States) and distributed lobbies using an actual photo pasted to the card, depicting a key scene from the movie. They were displayed in American moviehouses that catered to Spanish-speaking audiences. Note the use of the spider’s webbing in the background, radiating from Count Lavud: it’s reminiscent of the spider’s web used in Lugosi’s Dracula poster art and indirectly associates the Universal horror mystique to El Vampiro’s production. Abel Salazar was a fan of Universal’s Gothicism (and its money-making acumen) and copied it here and in his subsequent productions. He added a distinctly native flavor and style in the process. Of course, the vampire-fighting masked luchadores were waiting in the wings to stomp, throw, and slam their way into the genre, but that’s another story, as well as another decade.
An alternative image of Count Lavud holding an unconscious female victim in nightgown, with her neckline opened to show more bosom, than was ever seen in the movie, appeared in the indigenous poster and lobby card artwork. It possibly followed after El Vampiro entered later distribution to second and third-run moviehouses. As the Mexican vampire mythology and its movies rolled out of production and into moviehouses, attitudes and exploitive elements evolved: female victims and female vampires predominated in advertising, unseating the primarily masculine role model of vampiric evil intentions, opening to more suggestive elements to bring in the male audiences with the allure of a naughty (but very sexy) vampire kiss, while also appealing to female audiences with its implications of dominance over men and control of their machismo. Interestingly, there is a slight variation between the poster and lobby card artwork in how much decolletage is shown: in the poster, the right breast is covered by the nightgown; in the lobby card artwork, the right breast is partially revealed.
The sequel to El Vampiro is El Atuad Del Vampiro, 1958 (The Vampire’s Coffin). The lobby card artwork is bloodless and sexless, but still impressive and direct, showing a really big stake driven through Count Lavud’s heart. And its intrusion doesn't ruffle his evening clothes, which are still neatly pressed and unstained. For the Azteca version, the looming threat of the vampire (albeit more in line with spookshow theatrics than real terror) is uppermost in the artwork as he rises from his open coffin as a giant bat-like menace, with Abel Salazar returning to confront the reawakened count and protect Marta, played by Ariadna Welter.
1963’s La Invasion De Los Vampiros (The Invasion of the Vampires), which again pits a doctor against the vampiric menace, shows more provocative and exploitative elements in its lobby card and poster artwork. The sexy allure of a see-through nightgown-dressed female standing against a backdrop of moon and bats and gravestones, with a clock face hinting at the midnight hour, suggests more luridness than shown in the movie’s plot of Count Frankenhausen’s menacing of the local villagers. Due to Hammer’s marketing prowess with its vampire and monster series, Mexican vampire movies, in their poster and lobby card artwork at least, began showing more bodily contours to imply more sexuality, and La Invasion De Los Vampiros’s illustrations alternately made that see-through nightgown more or less revealing across its poster and lobby card iterations. But this freeing up of exploitation advertising was only just beginning.
My article, The Sinful Allure of the Mexican Vampire, first appeared in We Belong Dead No.11.
Mexican Lobby Card: El Secuaz De Lucifer
Particularly lurid, pulp-cover stolen illustrations, with very poor printing quality, make this Mexican lobby card a true gem of cheap exploitation art.
Graphic Book Review:
Ghosted Volume 1: Haunted Heist
Zombos Says: Very Good
A haunted mansion, a team of supernatural investigators, and an odd request join together in Ghosted: Haunted Heist to bring ghostly terrors waiting in the Trask Mansion out of the woodwork . You're familiar with the Trask Family, aren't you? Of course you are. Like any perfectly functioning familial unit filled with serial-killing miscreants, the Trasks have managed to kill, make disappear, and commit enough urban legend trauma on close to a hundred people who never left the mansion after they arrived. Not while alive, anyway.
This five-issue series from Image Comics comprising Joshua Williamson's storyline could have used at least one more issue to lessen the hastily explained revelations he piles on top of each other in issue five. Up to then you will think the story's going one way, but then it goes down another, without much cleverly hidden, but necessary, preparation to ease the transition. It just happens rapidly and it's assumed we will accept it all at face value. Tsk. Tsk.
But this is still a good story, with a classic sense of scares and their timing: how can you not love a haunted mansion with wall to wall ghosts, a rich man who wants to add one of them to his occult collection, an ex-convict (actually, he was never officially released), and an assembled group of talented people who'd fit in nicely on an episode of either television's Ghost Hunters or Oddities.
There's Edzia Rusnak, the psychic and medium who's either really good or really fake; the so-so stage magician, Robby Trick, who has a knack for real magic and stealing occult items; Oliver King, who mainly detects bullshit, so he's the skeptic in the group (yes, actually there's a reason to have him onboard); the TV ghosthunting team of Jay and Joe Burns, and yes, they do get burned badly here; and let's not forget that ex-convict, Jackson Winters, who's involved because he's experienced a nasty event at a casino heist he orchestrated, where his entire team died, badly, under mysterious circumstances.
That dying badly part helps to explain why the rich collector of oddities and soon ghosts, Markus, has Anderson Lake (no, he's a she) spring Winters from jail, killing just about every convict and corrections officer in the process. She's a mean mother who dresses in…wait for it…a black jumpsuit. I know. I know. Ever since Emma Peel donned one in television's The Avengers back in the 1960s (and, oh god awfully yes, even in that mess of a movie with the badly miscast Uma Thurman), every dozing writer pulls it out of his flush pile when plain clothes simply won't do for active women of intrigue.
Then Williamson writes one of the simply funniest three-panel dialog exchanges you will ever see in a comic book, so I won't beat him over the head too much for resorting to black jumpsuit cliches in a pinch. He also has Winters agree to the ghost heist only if Markus provides him with a Sinatra-like blue suit, a Russian hooker with big ones–real or fake don't matter–and a shave. I presume Williamson can shave himself, though, without a Russian accent.
Helping keep Williamson's writing visually appealing is Goran Sudzuka's dark, horror-filled panels. While he's not one for detailed backgrounds, he's stellar at drawing characters, conveying every nuance of their truths, deceits, and fears with aplomb. The colorist, Miroslav Mrva, is a tad heavy-handed, saturating scenes with too much color more often than I'd like, but then surprises by coming up with spot-on tones for an interior bedroom scene at night and a nocturnal voodoo scene. The Trask mansion and its ghosts under Sudzuka's and Mrva's hands come to life in a strong House of Secrets kind of way.
The storyline provides basic but classic themes for fans of supernatural horror to savor. Each issue provides enough of the story to carry on by itself, but combined here, the entire run is witty, creepy, and well-plotted between scenes of action, exposition, and mounting tensions; perfect for a quiet late evening at home and read with one light on.
Mexican Lobby Card:
Los Tigres De Korea (1951)
Here’s the Mexican lobby card for Korea Patrol (1951).
Graphic Book Review:
Helheim Vol. 1: The Witch War
Zombos Says: Fair to Good
The draugr of Norse mythology takes center stage here with a nod to the Golem's protector modus operandi and Frankenstein's Monster's patchwork quilting of stitched body parts. Only here, Cullen Bunn and Joelle Jones's draugr is a giant pawn caught between two warring witches and their demon-play to best each other.
No reason is given as to why Bera, the beautiful witch, and Groa, the ugly hag of a witch (note how ugly witches always have names that imply ugliness, too), are feuding and decimating the countryside in the process. From the level of despair and desolation shown it's been going on for a long while.
The story places us in the middle of the conflict at the start, with a hunting party being hunted as they quickly return to their village with the wildmen in pursuit. An opening salvo of bloodshed and hacked limbs within their village gates reveals the ferocity and supernatural nature of their adversaries. When the handsome, brawny, Rikard is killed, Bera reveals her true talent by bringing him back to life. Larger and smellier than before and able to swing a mean axe, Rikard is now a hulking dead creature under her control. She sends him after Groa and her demon minions.
A puzzling question arises early on: why does each witch have a village of her own to fight for her, especially after all the constant turmoil and lack of food this incessant animosity is causing? Either Bunn is riffing off the historically important village idiot role (and one still prevalent today in politics, by the way) by twisting it around to one of a village witch role (which would be closest to the village savant role I'd surmise), or perhaps he's presuming we won't notice. Or maybe he's cleverly turned this whole village idiot role into a plural endeavor, implying that each villager is stupid enough to stick around, waiting to get killed in the crossfire, rendering an idiot village in effect?
Other plot-convenient assumptions let him jump through the issues of this collected series without applying effort toward providing explanation or illustration: for instance, Rikard has amassed an army of men, a hundred or so, to fight along with him by issue four, but in issue three he's alone, needs the help of a little girl to stitch his head back into one piece, and he still smells badly. How he amasses an army of men to follow him is anyone's guess, but he instantly has one by issue four.
Helheim: The Witch War has a Van Helsing vibe to it. If you just accept it and don't ask questions, or don't bother to think too deeply as to whys and wherefores, it's an entertaining horror story that makes less sense than it ought to, but still provides some good scenes and moments. But if you're pigheaded and need more flesh to the motivation-backbone of your storytelling, just remember the good thing is this is only volume one. Assume that volume two will flesh it all out better and you'll be fine.
If you can wait for volume two, that is.
Graphic Book Review: Half Past Danger
Zombos Says: Good
Once again, the Nazis are up to no good in Half Past Danger. This time around they’ve got dinosaurs and a deadly secret, with Stephen Mooney and a very good period-toned coloration from Jordie Bellair tying it all together into a neat package wrapped around with colorful main players.
There’s a Samurai-wielding Japanese Naval Landing Forces ex-soldier; a super GI soldier–but he doesn’t carry around a shield; an Irish soldier who carries around a bottle or two that’s either half-empty or half-full at any given moment; a femme fatale with long black hair and a fetish for long black jumpsuits who carries the mission’s intrigue; and the German Officer they’re up against, who carries the usual supercilious attitude and Aryan-inspired confidence of cool determination we’ve come to expect from our movie and comic book German Officer nemeses.
Much grease gun and fiery mayhem explodes across this collected six issues’ worth of vibrant, retro-storied pages, which hints a little The Lost World: Jurassic Park, a little multi-chaptered Republic Serial, and with Bellair’s appropriate earth tones, military tones, Nazi tones, submarine interior tones, and jungle campfire at night tones, smoothing Mooney’s heavy lines (that are too heavy at times, obliterating facial nuances), it all moves breezily and 1943’s-ish through hold-on-to-your-ass military exploits, haul-your-ass dinosaur-stomped jungles, torpedo shooting submarines, dastardly deeds, and well-timed revelations. Mooney draws and quarters his story evenly across six issues with minimal loss of melodramatic pacing while maintaining his characters’ dynamics (sure, they may all be stereotypes, but they’re still well-executed stereotypes), making his story an entertaining read from start to finish within each issue.
And watching people get eaten by dinosaurs, especially nasty Nazi people, is always a pleasure for horror fans to see, of course. And watching samurai swords slice through impossible things, with maybe a neck or two in the way, is fun to see, too.
Mexican Lobby Card:
La Destruccion De La Atlantida
This Mexican lobby card appears to be for Republic Pictures' serial, Undersea Kingdom (1936), with Ray "Crash" Corrigan and Lon Chaney, Jr. But…spacemen…in outer space? And, yes, the story is about Atlantis, but the Mount Vesuvius-like volcano looks apropos of Pompeii, not the earth-quake centered plot of this serial.