Pressbooks (Horror, Sci Fi, Fantasy)

The pressbook for Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks is only four pages, 11 by 17 inches, but the illustrations are really pretty good and they help sell a movie that needed more visual and script goodness devoted to it. As it stands, assuming you don’t poke your eyes out half-way through, it is a fun romp with a little alcohol consumption to loosen up your critical faculties. It falls into the category of it’s really bad, but cheeky enough to make it worthwhile to see. If you can see it with friends, even better. Make a party of it, pour the wine but hold the cheeses. The movie has enough of them. How you can put Michael Dunn and Rossano Brazzi together and come away with this weird tale is a self-study course in what bad movies are all about. Even the director, Dick Randall, is questionable. No one really knows who directed it. Dick’s a fake (now I’m thinking how many times I can say Dick in this article and get away with it, all legit like).

So what if it’s “one of the trashiest horror movies produced in Italy in the 1970s” (Roberto Curti, Italian Gothic Horror Films, 1970-1979), trash can still be fun. What does Roberto know that we don’t? Well, yeah, he’s an expert film historian and all that. But anyway, what’s very interesting is the stapled, typed notice on the cover. There’s some questionable moments in the movie that are definitely not PG, so not sure who went to lunch during the ratings screening, but the note is a tad off.

Ook, the giant running amok killing people, is Salvatore Baccaro, but they gave him the name Boris Lugosi in the credits. Now that’s a movie I’d love to see: someone cloning Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi and a tragic lab accident renders them one-half each of the same body. Wild, right? I got dibs on the screenplay.

This La Isla de la Muerte Mexican lobby card is big, coming in at 17 by 24.5 inches. I have a fondness for Mexican lobby cards that have an illustration mimicked in the inset photo (or is it vice versa?).  Baron von Weser (I’d pronounce it vun-weeeeeezer for dramatic effect) keeps people-eating plants on his island in this Allied Artists Pictures production. AAP was a subsidiary of Monogram Pictures. Cameron Mitchell played the baron. Mel Welles (another name that trips off the tongue) directed. He also did Little Shoppe of Horrors and Lady Frankenstein. Mitchell’s voice was dubbed for the English version. Go figure.

The third entry into the Mad Max franchise, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome boasts a good soundtrack ,Tina Turner, and a chart-topping song, We Don’t Need Another Hero. It also boasts one of the rare times that critic Roger Ebert awarded four stars to a science fiction post-apocalyptic actioner. Like he said, “the fight between Mad Max and Master-Blaster is one of the great creative action scenes in the movies.” This Columbia-EMI-Warner British pressbook isn’t too shabby either. You wouldn’t think a movie like this would get promotional items like a crossword, maze, word search, and spot the difference newspaper competitions, but there you go. At a $10,000,000 cost, the movie netted $36,000,000 at the box office, though less money than its two predecessors. Its effect on popular culture in general, and the apocalyptic, dystopian, and wild hairdos in future movies? Priceless.

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Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)
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An intriguing movie from the cold war era (or rather, the first one), The 27th Day involves an alien from a dying planet giving five persons the ability to destroy human life on a massive scale. Is it a test? Is it a trick? Directed by William Asher, who did a lot of television-episode directing for I love Lucy and Bewitched, and a screenplay by John Mantley (author of the novel), who went on to write for Gunsmoke, The Wild Wild West, and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, the story has themes of global destruction, communism, and political tensions that are still relevant today. William Asher also directed the AIP beach party films of the 1960s and a forgotten slasher called Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker 1981 (check out Moria for more information). The one shot of the alien spaceship interior is taken from Earth vs. The Flying Saucers (both that movie and this one were produced by Columbia).

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The 27th Day (1957) PressbookRead More »

If ever a movie needed a horror host, it would Reptilicus, a Danish import distributed by AIP. Bill Warren in his Keep Watching the Skies! American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties (okay, so it wasn’t American or the 1950s but…), unloaded both barrels in his usual stye. “Reptilicus has the dubious distinction of being a movie so bad American International almost refused to distribute it.” The monster twist here is that if any part of Reptilicus survives it regenerates the rest. As in The Giant Claw, the monster is a puppet, with “the body…dragged around by the head.” He goes on to mention that Reptilicus flew in the European prints of the film, but they were cut for the American release. Some suing went on between AIP and Sid Pink (he wrote the story and co-directed) over the originally delivered movie, and then some suing went on between Sid Pink and AIP and Monarch Books after the novelization hit the bookshelves. Apparently the novelization was rather racy containing “lewd, lascivious and wanton desire…” Of course, none of that was in the movie, unfortunately. You be the judge! I think a double bill viewing with this and The Giant Claw should be mandatory.

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Reptilicus (1961) PressbookRead More »

Tarzan contributes to the war effort in Tarzan Triumphs, but fights Nazis only with the help of Cheetah and Boy (Johnny Sheffield), but not Jane (Maureen O’Sullivan). She is tending to her sick mom back in England. But really, O’Sullivan was under contract with MGM, not RKO, Tarzan’s new studio-jungle home, so enter Francis Gifford playing the princess Zandra of Palandrya, another Hollywoody idyllic land of white in the dark jungle (and lots of pretty women), taken over by the Nazis. For a guy who has no job, has a very limited vocabulary, and has only one piece of clothing, he sure attracts women an awful lot. His “jungle people fight to live, civilized people live to fight” sure hit the nail on the head for his time, and any other time for that matter. My favorites from the Exploitation department: Design a costume for Zandra (at least she knows how to dress for company) and the costume contest for the best dressed woman as Zandra. The poster art is pretty good too. Click each image to expand it–you will need a BIG screen–or right-click the expanded image to download it.) And you don’t have to read the signs to find more pressbooks, just rummage through our categories.

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Tarzan Triumphs (1943) PressbookRead More »

A lot of very good horror movies came out in 1936: Dracula’s Daughter, Fahrmann Maria, Devil Doll, The Walking Dead, to name a few. Revolt of the Zombies didn’t make the list. In this follow-up to cash in on the success of White Zombie, not much happens with a great premise: raising an army of the dead. Christopher Workman and Troy Howarth, in their wonderful book, Tome of Terror, Horror Films of the 1930s, point out Dean Jagger’s nuanced performance and two striking scenes, but also the dearth of atmosphere, budget-creativity, and good plotting to generate anything remotely as effective as the poster art for this movie. The pressbook is a big meh, also. To make things worse, Revolt of the Zombies was sued to stop its screen play time, being released during a re-release of White Zombie, out of fear having two zombie movies running at the same time was unfair competition for the re-release. Later horror movies like Overlord would capitalize on the military zombie theme. Victor Halperin directed both White Zombie and this movie, and Bela Lugosi’s hypnotic eye close-ups from White Zombie were clipped and used here too. To really make this a bad call all around, the zombies aren’t even zombies: they’re just people drugged into a zombie state of invincibility. Bummer.

Download the zipped images: Revolt of the Zombies pressbook

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Revolt of the Zombies (1936) PressbookRead More »