Before Warren Publishing realized the importance of advertising merchandise on their back covers, early issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland promoted the magazine with simple yet striking black and white pictures and text instead. From Professor Kinema's FM collection comes this visually effective promo using big Tor Johnson and big letters to ask the question…
I believe this is the first advertisement that appeared on the back cover of Famous Monsters of Filmland to promote the Frankenstein Monster and Dracula posters. I dare you to name one FM fan who doesn't regret not hanging on to these posters. Dracula was my favorite. I hung him on my bedroom door. Frankie hung around on the closet door. Both were awesome to behold. Would love to see these reissued, along with the Mummy and the Wolf Man and the Creature From the Black Lagoon. Be great they could keep the price to a dollar a piece, too. Just sayin'. (Scan courtesy of Professor Kinema)
Zombos Says: Fair
It’s stupefying how movies can deviate so much from their original sources of inspiration. Dylan Dog: Dead of Night is a good example. The screaming doorbell, the Groucho character (I can understand dropping the Groucho character), and the London locale of the comic book series this movie is based on are gone. Replacing them is a New Orleans sticky gumshoe who looks amazingly like Brandon Routh, but acts like a cardboard standee of him, a threadbare plot that rolls up very much like True Blood and all that slick vampire jazz, and Marcus (Being Human‘s Sam Huntington), a lively sidekick turned lively zombie oozing all over the place for comic relief.
Even if the source material wasn’t ignored as much, the movie would still flatline. The story reeks of too many writers huddled around cups of warm coffee and piles of stale Danish, and director Kevin Munroe plays it straight and doughy. The quirkiness, the differential feel of weird sliding along zany, and Dylan Dog’s anti-establishment leaning is missing in action. This ‘nightmare investigator’ is plain as day, although he still dresses smartly in a red shirt and black jacket. He carries bigger guns, too.
At 250.00 dollars a day plus expenses, Dylan’s settled for taking photographs of cheating spouses. He lives in a cruddy office, drives a two-miles-from-the-dump Volkswagon Beetle, and wants to forget the lost love of his life, but can’t. He’s Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe rolled into one–Routh even provides unnecessary noir-appropriate voiceover–but without that chippy dialog or trenchcoat style to match it.
He’s shaken out of his career stupor by the daughter of a man mauled to death by an intruder in the Ryan Mansion. She got his “No pulse, no problem” business card from a priest, but Dylan brushes her off, telling her he’s out of that business. She insists, he resists, until his buddy Marcus is mauled to death by an intruder. A quick change of clothes into the red and black, and he’s back chasing monsters. And explaining ad nauseum about his paranormal business without cracking any inflectives. He explains New Orleans is chock full of vampires, werewolves, and zombies, and before he started chasing bedsheet bingo players he was the chief investigator appointed by the netherworld to maintain the peace. I would have liked to have seen that movie.
Now hot on the trail of the monster mauler, Dylan visits Vargus (Scott Leo Diggs) at the vampire nightclub Corpus, where the love of his life was murdered. He also visits the meat packing plant where the werewolves hang out. In between visits, he’s helping Marcus get used to his new zombie lifestyle that includes eating maggots served fresh on a bun (no pickles), and regular visits to Big Al’s Body Shop for replacement body parts.
Huntington plays his Being Human self, which I enjoy watching because it matches his physical presence well, but without enough writer support his zombie-angst filled interludes–including a zombie support-group meeting–stretch thin. There’s one good line. It comes just after Marcus wakes up undead, when he’s told “Good thing about being the living dead, no more jogging.”
While it’s no Maltese Falcon, the artifact at the center of the mayhem is the Heart of Belial. The owner of it gets to bring back a demon who will destroy everyone the owner doesn’t like. Or so the legend says. No one ever reads the fine print.
There is one good thing here, but it comes after seeing the movie, when you can read the Dylan Dog Italian comic book series by Tiziana Sclavi. Better yet, I’d recommend doing that instead of seeing this movie.
It's confusing: this lobby card is for Voodoo Woman (1957), but the title on the card reads The Gold Idol. Go figure. Speaking of figures, the usual scared female victim scantilly dressed and spear-waving natives, framed with that frightful monster face lighting up the background, tones this lobby card perfectly. Not tastefully, mind you, but in that B-movie-trashy-bad-it's-good way. Paul Blaisdell created, and played, the monster.
The Boogens pressbook is one large paper sheet, folded to create 16 pages, with each a little under 11×17 inches in size. It's more exciting than the movie, which drags on and on and on and…
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From Professor Kinema:
I had a very brief encounter with Dolores Fuller. On camera, during the lensing of a Professor Kinema show, I felt one of the angora sweaters she's worn and passed it around for all to touch. I snapped these two photos of her at a Chiller Convention (shown here and below).
On the table in front of her is a print of a nude photo that Ed Wood himself snapped of her. Conrad Brooks gave me a copy of the photo.
ZC Note: PK was kind enough to send the photo to me, but it's too risque to show here.
Bride of the Monster group shot is inscribed by Paul Marco (standing on her right).
I have not seen this 1973 satire by John Landis. Not sure I want to. The television promo spots for Wilfred jogged my memory about it. Not sure I'd see Wilfred either. But the pressbook is impressive, so I just might catch Schlock.
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Zombos Says: Very Good
The premise of Zombie Economics: A Guide to Personal Finance is simple: "every skill required to survive an economic disaster mirrors a skill required to survive the zombie apocalypse." To authors Lisa Desjardins and Rick Emerson, those skills include knowing where the zombies are (your bills and other expenditures), and making sure you stock up on ammo (your savings) to keep them from putting the bite on you (your financial doom). This lively personal economics survival 101 course covers the essentials, with a continuing fictional storyline across chapters to remind you it's you against them at all times. No one's coming to your rescue (unless you live on Wall Street).
Worksheets abound to help you identify where all the weapons are (itemizing your cash flow and where it all goes), and why walking into a graveyard during a zombie apocalypse could be suicide (leaving your job when you cant' afford to).
But in case you are foolish enough to do so–or get unwillingly tossed into it by circumstance –they've included a chapter to help you "not eat your own brain" during unemployment. I was out of work for seven months during the lesser recession before this great recession, and I can tell you eating your own brain isn't tasty, but when you're out of work and getting desperate, you'll be sorely tempted to do so. If you're still out job hunting during this wonderful-for-Wall-Street rebound you know what I mean.
Any one of the chapters in Zombie Economics could be fleshed out more, but Desjardins and Emerson's goal is to provide a firm footing for your monetary survival, especially for the young person facing a future of potential terrors from voracious credit card debt and lumbering bills that refuse to die. The zombie paradigm provides an entertaining way to get this important information across.
Before it's too late.
The following Invasion of the Body Snatchers' photographs are from Professor Kinema's archive…
by Professor Kinema
If I were to choose a personal patron saint of sorts, it would definitely be French early Cinema pioneer, George Méliès. A subject of my MALS degree thesis (along with contemporary cinema pioneers Alice Guy Blaché and brothers Louis and August Lumiére), this truly creative man will always be considered the premier cinema autéur. He was the originator of the narrative film, the father of film special effects, and the innovator of lé Cinéma Fantastique.
He was born into a family of successful shoe manufacturers on December 8, 1861. Subsequently trained in engineering and machinery, he was expected to work in the family business. Instead, he chose to pursue an education in le beaux arts, which resulted in his becoming an accomplished artist, stage magician and all around grand showman.
In the winter of 1895, in the company of many other fascinated Parisians, Méliès witnessed his first moving pictures. The Lumiére Brothers, Louis and August, had rented the back part of the Café Indiénne on the Blvd des Capucines and were offering the first screenings to a paying audience. The price for a showing was one franc. After this initial experience, Méliès approached Louis Lumiére and offered to purchase one of their Cinématographes (a reconstructed Edison Kinematograph). The (ultimately ironic) response was, “I’m sorry Monsiéur Méliès, but the Cinématographe is not for sale, it has no commercial future.”
But le Grand Showman thought differently. Being an accomplished artist he made sketches of the apparatus and contacted inventor RW Paul in England–Paul was experimenting with creating ‘pictures that move’–for the necessary parts to construct his own. With his own custom Cinematographe in hand, Méliès original conception was to record his and his associates’ acts of magic and present them throughout his popular stage shows in his Theatre of Magic: the Théatre Robert-Houdin on the Blvd des Italiens.
Soon he decided to take his camera out into the streets of Paris and capture daily life. While photographing the traffic in front of the Opera house it jammed. After several minutes he fixed the problem and continued to record images. When he developed and printed this sequence he was astounded at what was accidently caught on film. The camera stayed in one place while the jamming and eventual clearing action created the world’s first ‘jump cut.’ A bus had magically been transformed into a hearse. His revelation was, ‘Not only can the Cinématographe be used to capture acts of magic, but rather, magic can be created within the camera itself.’ The fantastique entity of cinematic special effects was born.
Méliès’ output of magical films lasted from 1895 to 1912. He set a high cinematic standard right at the beginning. However, he didn’t grow with the industry. By 1912 others had been influenced by him and surpassed him in content and technical expertise. At the onset of World War 1 the French government was seizing materials needed for the war effort. Many prints and negatives of his films were confiscated. They were melted down to recover the celluloid, to be used for boot heels for French soldiers. In the grandest of ironies, this was the fate of the truly magical products of an exceptionally creative and innovative artist–the autéur–who’s family background was the business of manufacturing shoes.
By the 1920s Méliès had fallen on hard times. He and his 2nd wife, Jeanne D’Alcy (who appeared as a performer in many of his fantastic films), were operating a newspaper kiosk in the Gare Montparnasse of the Paris Métro. They were recognized. Declared a true cinematic pioneer, a renewed interest was instilled in his work. In 1931 a Legion of Honor medal was bestowed upon him, and he and his wife were awarded a rent-free apartment for the rest of their lives.
His closing act came on January 21, 1938. Along with several members of his family, he occupies a gravesite in the celebrated Paris cemetery; Père Lachaise. A lifelike bust of him adorns his final resting place. During each visit to Paris, I make it a point to pay a brief visit and pay spiritual homage to Maéstro Méliès.
Not far from the Cinématèque, in the Bercy section of Paris, are many streets and a few small parks named after notable French Cinema innovators. One such park is named after Monsieur Méliès.
During one of my occasional get-togethers with ‘Unkka’ Forry Ackerman, he was telling me of yet another magazine (of several doomed projects) that he was involved with titled Monsterama (published 1991-92). A feature from the original FM entitled “Wanted, more readers like…” was to be included. I asked if my photo at Méliès gravesite would be considered. He cheerfully said, “Sure, send a copy of the photo to me in Horrorwood, Karloffornia.”
Monsterama lasted two issues, but, the photo magically made its way to page 100 of the ‘new incarnation’ of Famous Monsters, issue # 200 ( May, 1993).
PK/JK
From Professor Kinema…"I dug deep into my cave and unearthed these photos I took of her a few years ago at a Monster Bash. The first is her signing autographs, the second is the cake they prepared for her, and the third is of her displaying the Playboy centerfold she autographed to me.
"Quel dommage! In the very brief moments I had with her we had a very pleasant talk. She was a sweet person."
If only the movie was as exciting as this pressbook layout. Good and alien evil battle in this story from H.P. Lovecraft, which is higly unusual because HPL ignored such dynamics in his other work. The Cthulhu Mythos is all about us against them and they're winning, with no cavalry on the way.
You won't see terms like "half-witted girl" used in mainstream movie poster art anymore, although its use here, with the lurid graphic, solidifies the presence of an unclean, deviant evil.
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