Pressbooks (Horror, Sci Fi, Fantasy)

One of the best parts about my growing up was watching Abbott and Costello movies every Sunday on WPIX Channel 11 in New York City. That was back in the 1970s. I miss the 70s. It was a wonderful time for pop culture fans, with conventions and the rediscovery of movie serials, meeting with comic greats, and participating in a growing fandom. You could say it was our low-tech methods for streaming and social media. Interesting items in this pressbook include the tie-ins to poultry and the glamazon hunt. While I didn’t realize it at the time, women in many movies back then seemed to only be there for eye-candy. Pressbooks would hype their fashions, their makeup, and their bodies, but not much else regarding their talent or character development in the story (though with exceptions, of course). Film noirs deviated somewhat from that mold when it came to storyline characters, but just about everything else was guy-focused with a helping of woman in distress, woman in need (of a man, usually), woman clinging on a guy’s arm, woman fainting, tripping, screaming, or arguing, woman watching guy(s) get beat up, woman being manhandled, woman doing the manhandling, and bunch of woman doing any of the previous stuff. Fee fie fo fun, indeed.

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Abbott and Costello
Jack and the Beanstalk (1952) PressbookRead More »

Ah, the good old days when Hollywood idealized, feminized, exoticified, and basically fronted eye-candy appeal stories for pretty women. Such women spent countless hours making themselves attractive to men and simply lounged around until a man came along to get the story moving. And of course they were surrounded by other pretty women, making all men swoon and lust after them. Here's the front cover to the pressbook for Cobra Woman (1944). Maria Montez plays the exotic woman and her twin  sister (points for twins!). I wish I had the whole pressbook, but this cover will have to do for now. Leonard Maltin called it a camp classic. You may call it something else. Of course, what's a pretty woman without a tropical locale? Here it's Cobra Island. Along with the prettiness you have Sabu and the not so pretty Lon Chaney Jr. What more can you ask for in a camp classic?

Get your bobby socks on. It's a double bill of shock and horror! Just when you escape the juke box jungle the tarantula grows on you (in a bad way). This double bill promotion insert fell out of the Running Wild pressbook I was thumbing through. I'm thinking this made a neat date night movie or drive-in snuggle. I'd think the date night would get more traction at the drive in, but the balcony might do in a pinch. I miss theater balconies. They were filled with mystery along with the sticky floors. Thanks to Trailers from Hell (Joe Dante and Charlie Largent) for supplying the Running Wild pressbook and this pleasant surprise contained within.

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Double Shock
Running Wild and Tarantula InsertRead More »

Not until Terry Michitsch sent along these wonderful scans of 20 Million Miles to Earth did I realize William Hopper was playing a lead role in it. Now an ardent Perry Mason fan (the television show with Raymond Burr), Hopper plays Paul Drake, the private detective Mason relies on; so now I need to watch 20 Million Miles again, just to see him in action. TCM’s overview mentions how this movie started filming in Italy because Ray Harryhausen wanted to vacation there. Smart move, combining work and play at the same time, and getting paid for it to boot. Harryhausen’s Ymir is one of his best creations, with a solid personality and superb body design. Given more budget money, and better scripting, this would be an all out classic.

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20 Million Miles to Earth (1957) PressbookRead More »

Terror in the Haunted House, also known as My World Dies Screaming, was the first movie lensed using Psychorama. If you’ve seen The Exorcist, you know what psychorama is: think of those brief flashes of the demon face popping up. In this movie, flashes of a skull were used to subliminally convey terror to the audience, along with other images to convey other emotions. Or so they hoped.

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My World Dies Screaming (1958) PressbookRead More »

Here’s the rerelease, 1949, pressbook for Undersea Kingdom. This and Phantom Empire are on my top favorites list for movie serials (Mystery Science Theater 3000 be damned!). Watching guys running around in their shorts must have been pretty thrilling for audiences back then. I still want a few Volkites and definitely a Juggernaut to drive them around in. Interesting that the Reflector Plate gizmo showed up on Star Trek’s Mirror, Mirror episode, but with a more deadly function. The Volkite robot became the go to automaton for Republic as it showed up in later serials. Wikipedia has an unusually extensive article on Undersea Kingdom, listing the re-shot cheats used in the movie. Cheats were cliffhangers that often fudged what happened at the end of the last episode with new shots of the “previous” action that changes what the audience had seen. Pretty cheeky if you ask me. So is the use of technology like rayguns and robots, while still using swords and catapults to fight with. One of the pleasures of watching these fantastic serials is to see how creative the wardrobe and prop departments were with a tight budget.

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Undersea Kingdom (1936)
Rerelease PressbookRead More »

I know of two movie heralds made available for Forbidden Planet. Both feature Robby the Robot.  The theater would add its information on the last page.

Christopher Lee may have disliked how his famous count was being treated by Hammer, but each movie was always a treat for me to catch in the local movie theater. The 1970s were a great time for horror movies and conventions. Hammer, and especially Lee’s Count Dracula, were still the icing on the fandom cake. While Scars suffered from a lack of attention and commitment, it’s still a fun, bloody romp.

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Scars of Dracula (1970) British PressbookRead More »

You can read a review of this Victory Pictures serial over at The Files of Jerry Blake. Unfortunately, looks like the pressbook is more exciting than the serial or movie versions. Seems a small budget and less creativity kept the pacing and action to a minimum. Bela Lugosi, as always, deserved better.

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Shadow of Chinatown (1936) PressbookRead More »

John Stanley, in his Creature Features Strikes Again movie guide, wrote: “Fuzzy, unadjusted Bela Lugosi whodunit in which two brothers…are involved with development of TV. There’s also a death ray…” Death rays were all the rage in the 1930s. Television must have been very mysterious and wondrous back then. Now, you can watch “television” on your cell phone, which kind of kills the wondrous aspect of it as we’re so over-saturated with streaming content. We’re spoiled rotten. Now, if my cell phone had a death ray…well, I’d be staring at it in wonder. I don’t think anyone’s written about putting death rays in cell phones yet, so you heard it here first. Then again, what if you pressed the death ray button instead of the camera button? On second thought, death rays on cell phones may prove disastrous for selfies. But I digress. There’s an interesting article in this pressbook, Lugosi Make-Up Filmland Wonder. My guess is it’s a fluff piece someone thought up, but I don’t recall reading about Lugosi’s talents with makeup. Usually, Lon Chaney was the one often mentioned, who puttied around with–oh, look, a pun!–the greasepaint and collodion.

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Murder by Television (1935) PressbookRead More »

The 1950s produced some very thrilling science fiction and some awful oddities. Here's one oddity: Cat-Women of the Moon. The pressbook is equally budget-conscious, but the limited color does make the beatnik-styled ladies a little more vampy. Judging by the lobby card shown below, it's a shame it wasn't shot in color. Green skin always puts the vamp in vampy, I always say. We all remember the dancing Orion slave girl in The Cage, the Star Trek pilot. Well, at least I remember it, anyway. Probably its only dubious importance, Cat-Women managed to usher in other let's-travel-to-another-planet-to-find-weird-women movies, as if there was a real audience-need for them. 

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Cat-Women of the Moon (1953) PressbookRead More »