There is a sideshow barker feel to this Mexican lobby card for La Pasion Mas Extrana Del Mundo (The Ape Woman). The evocative ghostly face (beauty), the hairy snarling ape (brutism), the alluringly sensuous–and hairy–female silhouette (taboo sexuality), the whipcracking man (sadism and exploitation), and the pièce de résistance, the movie scene (clean-shaven man opposite bearded woman). Glorious. How can you resist seeing this movie now?
Although nothing of fantasy can be made from images of houses being torn apart from the high winds of Hurricane Sandy, one cannot help but imagine something out of The Wizard of Oz.
Instead of an entire house being picked up into the middle of a twister (and safely landing on top of a bad witch in a fantastic place), images of mass destruction have been filling the airwaves during the past month’s newscasts. One story which struck a chord was of the damage done to Brooklyn’s Green-wood Cemetery.
Interred at historic Green-wood is one of the principle players of the classic 1939 film version of The Wizard of Oz: Frank Morgan, the Wizard himself.
Hmm, thought I, the prominent citizen of the Emerald City, originally from New York City, whose final rest is in a place named Greenwood. He shares the gravesite with other members of his family, originally named Wupperman. His brother, and fellow actor, Ralph is there also.
Being originally from the New York area, specifically upstate Chittenango, Madison County, author L. Frank Baum wrote several classic tales about the fantastic place called Oz. One story of how he was inspired tells how he noticed a box of files labelled “O to Z.'” Another, that twirls around in a twister of it’s own, is that the two letters that make up the name of his fantasy megalopolis are each just one letter back from the letters N and Y. Hence, Oz is the city of New York.
Whichever the case, it’s interesting to note that many who were involved with the film production have come to their final rest in and around the New York area. However, Baum’s final resting place is in Forest Lawn, Glendale, California.
In Union Field Cemetery, Ridgewood, Queens is The Cowardly Lion, Bert Lahr. Lahr was also originally from New York City. In Upstate New York’s Ferncliff Cemetery rests Dorothy herself, Judy Garland, as well as Harold Arlen, creator of the film’s musical score.
In Amenia, scattered over property she owned, are the ashes of the Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton). Glinda, the Good Witch (Billie Burke) lies in Kensico Cemetery, Valhalla, New York.
The rest of the Wizard of Oz principles, director Victor Fleming, Tin Man–Ray Bolger, Scarecrow– Jack Haley, Auntie Em– Clara Blandick, and Uncle Henry– Charlie Grapewin, all rest in Hollywood cemeteries.
There’s even a memorial site in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery for Terry, the little dog who portrayed Toto.
Courtesy of Tony Rivers, this bare bones 4-page pressbook from Realart for The Mummy's Ghost does contain something interesting: "Make a Prop Mummy" in the Showmanship section.
This 11×17 inches pressbook is four pages and hypes the presence of "the Horror King" Bela Lugosi. Cheap picture, big horror stars: Bela Lugosi, George Zucco, and John Carradine. I can watch any movie with Lugosi in it; he never budgeted his acting for any role.
Bold coloration and an actual photo highlight this Azteca-styled Mexican lobby card for Los Vampiros De Coyoacan grab attention. The masked luchador here is Superzan. Azteca (or "Spanish") lobby cards differ from the standard Mexican cards in two notable ways: the movie still is an actual photograph pasted onto the card and these lobby cards are printed in the U.S.A for use in Spanish-speaking movie houses. Azteca cards are 11 x 14 inches in size and printed on thicker paper than Mexican cards.
Zombos Says: Excellent
I worry about Glenn Kay. Putting together a guide like this can be pretty exhausting, let alone having to watch so many good, bad, and stunningly ugly movies about the walking dead. Unless he's got his own television to hog, you can imagine the frays he gets into with the family. "What, isn't there anything else we can watch?" "Watching all this tripe will rot your brain. Are you listening to me?" "Daddy, I don't want to see more people being eaten. It's too yucky!"
You have to wonder what it's like to meet him at parties, or when he's going out to dinner with friends, and those times he needs to while away the dead hours in-between updates to his Zombie Movies: The Ultimate Guide.
Most horror fans would understand, though, and there but for the grace of God (or George Romero) goes Kay, summarizing, bashing, or praising the legion of celluloid undead that have eaten up our viewing time since Bela Lugosi's White Zombie. What's truly frightening is that given all the movies he covers within his guide's 400-plus pages, there's hundreds more he doesn't, either because they're too esoteric or out of reach or so godawful to watch even he's not that crazy.
The dead are laid out by decade, giving a bird's eye view of how zombie movies rotted out our sensibilities by taking ever more liberties with their nastiness–the more evocatively eerie voodoo zombies slowly evolving into our generation's screamingly terrifying, but beloved, flesh-eating variety. Not sure why the 1990s zombies took a nose-dive at the box office? This may shed some light on the subject for you. Did the social media boom of the 2000s speed up zombie locomotion? Kay has some thoughts on the subject (although decaying, fast-moving zombies are nonsensical to my mind).
Are you a Naschy or Jess Franco fan? Their zombie movies are here. Kay is not that keen on them (but neither am I). Are you a fan of hopping zombies, like those in Return of the Chinese Boxer (1975), or so bad it's funny zombie fare like Garden of the Dead (1974)? They are in here, too, either alluded to with a nod or a longer musing that takes into account the camera movements, effective effects (or not so much), and the exemplary or shoddy or giddily, stupidly, funny scripts. If you're a zombie fan you will be alternately pleased, annoyed, and maybe not so sure with your prized movies' standing as rated by Kay. He and I seem to jive on most accounts, although he's a bit enthusiastic on titles I'd rate a single thumb's up. This is an informative reference work to dog-ear and crimple often.
What makes this an entertaining and necessary volume for any horror fan's bookshelf is the mix of television and theatrical movies and series episodes that contain outright zombie elements–or close enough–to warrant their inclusion (although you may feel Kay stretching in some instances if you're a diehard zombie purist). And if realizing there are movies you haven't seen yet like Chopper Chicks in Zombie Town (1991) isn't satisfying for you, Kay's interviews with Greg Nicotero, Tom Savini, Stuart Conran (who gives the scoop on the blood mix used for Dead Alive, 1992) and others will seal the deal. Colin Geddes even explains why those Chinese vampires hop!
The only downside is it's only 400 or so pages.
Here's the petite 6.5 x 13.5 inch British pressbook for The Incredible Shrinking Man.
Here are the exploitation pages from the Tarzan and the Lost Safari pressbook. Are you the Tarzan of your neighborhood?
Both Tony Rivers (Teenage Horror Factory) and myself are Tarzan fans. So there. Here’s Tony’s scans for the Tarzan and the Lost Safari pressbook to go bananas over.
Tony Rivers delivers some tana leaves by moonlight, along with Realart's The Mummy's Tomb pressbook…
From the Tony Rivers collection comes this pressbook for Charlie Chan (Roland Winters) in The Sky Dragon. Classic television fans of Superman will also notice Noel Neill’s name is in the credits.
Zombos Says: Good
Unfortunately, I can only give you two reasons to pick up Vertigo's one shot, Ghosts: the unfinished story by Joe Kubert, The Boy and the Old Man, and the Geoff Johns and Jeff Lemire story, Ghost-For-Hire. Reasons for not picking up this anthology would include the remaining stories, although Run Ragged would have been a treat if the whole story was here and not just the first part.
Comic anthologies usually are a mixed bag of trick or treat. Either you get a unified series of stories around a theme, or you get a bunch of stories searching for one; Ghosts lies somewhere in the middle. The stories that fall flat and fail to "terrorize" (or fit uncomfortably) within these nine tales are: Wallflower (beautiful artwork, worn-out storyline); A Bowl of Red (half-baked horror concering a bowl of hellfire hot Chili); The Night After I Took the Data Entry Job I Was Visited by My Own Ghost (artwork matches story mood perfectly, but the "message" story itself has been done to death ); Bride (will someone, anyone tell me what the hell this story's about?); and Treasure Lost, which is lost in this anthology themed around ghosts, although I get the tenuous allusion.
The poignant The Dark Lady fits in with the anthology's theme well, but it is incomplete, a mere slice of a larger storyline. The same problem occurs with Run Ragged, part one of a Dead Boy Detectives tale. Part two will appear in the next anthology. Running a continued story in separate anthologies seems awfully gauche to me.
As for the two reasons to stick around, Kubert's The Boy and the Old Man is more a curiousity piece, and one that doesn't fit well within the ghosts theme. But for fans (like myself) who appreciate seeing his last work, this is worth a look, not so much for the story as for the art. Here you can see Kubert's first draw-through, laying out the action and positioning, which he would later embellish. Ghost-for-Hire is a predictably scripted plot, but the characters keep it humorous while adding depth. This would make for a solid series on its own.
Reading various comic anthologies these days, you may get the haunting sense they were loosely put together with stories that had no clear publishing intentions. Ghosts suffers from this and I expect more sweetness-kick from my Halloween treats than this saccharin anthology provides.
Here's a key take-away: name talent isn't enough to make an anthology; you need to do something consistently worthwhile with it.
A courtesy reviewer copy of Ghosts was provided to me for this review.