Pressbooks (Horror, Sci Fi, Fantasy)

Castle of Evil has a disintegrator chamber, a robotic clone, creepy castle with lots of secrets, a ray gun, and an old dark house styled setup with people brought to the place to off them one by one. Tossing together every tried and true pulp magazine ingredient into a cheap dish that was filmed in fourteen days (back to back with Destination Inner Space), you will either get drunk after seeing it to sober up or love it for the cheesy spread of a film it is. Blood Beast From Outer Space (which is the American title, of course), named the more sedate Night Caller From Outer Space in the UK, has aliens abducting pretty girls for breeding assistance to save their dying planet. The aliens method of entrapment? They place and advertisement in Bikini Girl magazine. It would be fun to see a remake today, given our social media environment. Not sure if dating apps are still a thing, though.

It has John Saxon in it, his first sci fil movie. Being properly British, the movie devotes some time to its cinematography and script, giving a noir-ish tone with a moody philosophical (aka thoughtful thriller) runtime. Something most American audiences couldn’t quite wrap their head around since there wasn’t enough of the action or terror they expected from the Blood Beast title. Some idiot decided to colorize the carefully filmed black and white composition around 2011, so if you do want to see it, go with the original version. The poster art for both movies is rather awfully cheap looking, but in that attention-grabbing awfully cheap way, so it kind of works well.

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Castle of Evil and
Blood Beast From Outer Space
Double Bill PressbookRead More »

You can tell a Tarzan movie with Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan was a big deal by this showmanship pressbook. It’s huge: sixteen colorful, large format, pages of merchandising and theater promotion, printed on cardstock. Check out the cool Ballyhoo! float, the coloring pages, tie ups (that Remotrol game is so period), ice cream cups, giant vampire bats theater marquee (somebody PLEASE have a photograph of that in situ), streamers, standees, hangars (they were double-sided mobiles), tire covers(!), Tarzan Bread(?), and tons more stuff to promote the movie and sell merchandise. Sadly, the giant vampire bats scene was cut because audiences found it too scary. Imagine that!

The original version of this film, titled The Capture of Tarzan, was shown to preview audiences in 1935 and was heavily criticized for scenes of gruesome violence.  The most notorious scene was one involving a giant bat attack in a swamp. Hollywood legend has it that, at the preview showing, the sight of these giant creatures carrying off panic-stricken porters sent kids screaming from the theatre.  So strong was the negative reaction from parents, critics and media, that the studio ordered much of the film re-shot. MGM replaced the original director, James McKay, with a series of directors with the final credit given to Richard Thorpe. (ERBzine)

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Tarzan Escapes (1936) Showmanship
PressbookRead More »

I posted the Anglo Amalgamated pressbook back in 2019. Here’s the American Releasing Corporation’s campaign manual for Day the World Ended and The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues. Day the World Ended cost around $96,000 to produce, but raked in a nifty $400,000 at the box office. The highlight of the movie is the mutated monster (lovingly known as Marty) created by Paul Blaisdell. Due to the foam rubber construction, getting it wet caused near drowning for Paul, who liked to play what he created in spite of the challenges. While the movie is a cheapie done in 10 days, it is now a classic B terror because of its cold war fear, good and simple story, the necessarily tight scene framing on a budget (using the Bronson Caverns and the Sportsman’s Lodge restaurant’s pond at Ventura Boulevard in San Fernando Valley), and monster Marty, looking somewhat goofy if you’re an adult, but very terrifying if you’re not. Corman and his crew had to end shooting at the pond by the time the restaurant opened for dinner.

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Double Shock Show!
From American Releasing CorporationRead More »

I’m not sure why The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T is “the greatest merchandising picture.” Oh, wait a minute…yeah, okay.  With the “greatest merchandising campaign ever prepared” it does have a lot of merch and tie-ins going for it. I would say, though, that I lean more toward Star Wars being the greatest merchandising picture, given the amount of toys, clothing, decorations–you name it–that it has generated over the years. One thing: merchandising for pictures didn’t start with Star Wars; SW certainly took it to a whole new level, but product placements and merchandising off a film have been part of the movie business for many years. Still, this one is impressive.

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The Dr. T Theatre KitRead More »

“One of Disney’s four “Package Films”. During World War II the studio lost a lot of manpower and resources, which left it with countless unfinished ideas too long for shorts and too short for features. So, inventive as Disney was, it stuck short ideas together into feature-length movies” (IMDb). Combining two shorts, The Wind in the Willows and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow into a feature-length movie, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad had alternate titles, Two Fabulous Characters and Ichabod and Mr. Toad. This would be the last package film by Disney, who returned to single-feature in 1950 with Cinderella. While costs were kept low by reusing previous animation work, the Headless Horseman sequence is memorable today and scary enough for the kiddies to enjoy (after being terrorized, of course). The Wind in the Willows segment was narrated by Basil Rathbone.

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The Adventures of Ichabod
and Mr. Toad
1949 PressbookRead More »

Here is the 1945 re-release by RKO for Pinocchio. Walt Disney did it best. And who knew he could be such a fright-monger. First he goes all supernatural evil with Snow White, then gives us a strong taste of unexpected body horror in Pinocchio. When I first saw those boys turning into donkeys, wow! Now that was scary. And he left them that way! Double wow.

The evolution of Pinocchio’s character through illustration is a fascinating read. At first the thought was to depict him as a wooden puppet, but after months going back and forth, Milt Kahl took an approach that Disney preferred: namely, animating Pinocchio as a little boy first, then moving him toward visual reminders of his wooden nature second; this changed Collodi’s “skinny, brash, cocky piece of cherry wood” (Frank Thomas) into a more innocent, passive character learning the ropes of life the hard way. This, of course, made him more endearing to audiences and created a stronger emotional connection between both, a Disney necessity with all its characters.

The movie itself broke new ground in animation and the use of the multiplane camera for depth, shifting the usual vertical position to a horizontal one. Multiple glass layers of artwork would be moved past the camera a varying speeds, creating water movement, flickering lights, and parallax. At 2.6 million dollars, a small army of animators, and two years of production, the movie didn’t do well at the box office (perhaps mainly due to the loss of overseas markets because of Word War II), but remains a classic today, even with the reimagining we’ve had to suffer through in later stabs at the story.

For Disney’s purposes, Collodi’s impudent protagonist was, in contrast to the characters in Snow White, all too distinct. “One difficulty in Pinocchio,” as Disney said on 3 December 1937, in one of his first meetings with the film’s writers, “is that people know the story, but they don’t like the character.” (Michael Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age.)

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Pinocchio (1940) Re-release PressbookRead More »

Extend your arm and open your hand, and imagine this tabloid-sized herald being distributed in theaters to promote the movie and you are about to take one. Now we have popcorn and drink container promos to hype today’s movies. Yes, I do collect them too! I was bummed to not get the Beetlejuice shrunken head drink container (sold out), but I still enjoyed the movie. But these paper heralds were free and, frankly, awesome. Now, that is. I’m sure no one back then was thinking about posterity and collecting such giveaway fare with an eye toward the future.

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Tarzan Escapes Tabloid HeraldRead More »

What the movie lacks in special effects and storyline, this sales brochure for Konga makes up for with exciting graphic style. I love the synopsis on the second page, which includes “Sandra falls into some mysterious man-eating plants.” The first page is a die-cut showing only Konga’s eyes, a nice pricey printing touch. There was a fascination with apes, as primal terror or comic relief, to scare and cheer audiences from the early days of Hollywood, beginning with 1918’s Tarzan of the Apes, up until the 1970s. Of course, the usual primate sidekick did still appear, here and there, in movies. Monkeys could be pretty scary too, but apes have the size and bulk more suitable for being visually menacing; and, let’s face it, look funnier dressed in human clothing.

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Konga Sales BrochureRead More »

Here’s the exciting pressbook for The Lodger (1944) with Laird Cregar. It’s almost as big as he was. As David J. Hogan in his Film Noir FAQ notes, while some consider this a remake of Hitchcock’s The Lodger (1927), only the name and the Jack the Ripper storyline match to the previous film. Both, however, are based on the 1913 novel of the same name by Marie Belloc Lowndes. In this one, Cregar uses his immense stage presence (both figuratively and literally), and his piercing eyes, to create a multi-dimensional character that vacillates between sinister and innocuous, innocent and guilty, with a definitely male-gaze problem toward women and his dead brother. The last minutes of the chase through the catwalks of a theater provide a thrilling noir backdrop and pace. The fog-bound streets, darkly lit byways, and confined spaces filmed entirely on the Fox backlot give this noir a classic status. Unfortunately, Cregar’s body size kept him from being a leading man and he died from trying to lose enough weight to open up those roles for him. He was 31.

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The Lodger (1944) PressbookRead More »