From Zombos Closet

Graphic Book Review: Criminal Macabre
The Eyes of Frankenstein

/ Books (Graphic) / Leave a Comment

The eyes of frankensteinZombos Says: Very Good

Too many cigarettes, an itchy trigger finger, ghoul’s blood, and a vexing inability to get a day off, ever, makes Cal McDonald more surly than usual. Shooting up Mo’Locks gift on wheels wasn’t too smart, either. But let’s face it, it’s McDonald’s too-nervous energy and paranoia that keeps us coming back for more dead and deader occult shenanigans. And Steve Niles and Christopher Mitten in The Eyes of Frankenstein do their best to shake them up for McDonald.

In-between chain smoking–how can he afford all those packs of cigarettes?–McDonald’s called into the middle of something bad happening to the ghouls. They’re dying, for real this time. Tag teaming his attention is Adam, also known as the Frankenstein Monster to those who didn’t read the book but did catch the movies. Adam’s going blind. Being a heavy reader, that makes him a very angry and destructive monster.

McDonald’s quick fix for Adam is a pair of store-bought eye-glasses. With them, Adam can count the number of aspirin McDonald hasn’t chewed on yet. But the bigger solution, the one that will tie Adam’s failing eyes and the ghouls sudden dying together, requires a lot more effort, and bullets, than McDonald’s in the mood for. But he persists in spite of vomiting up the aspirin and alcohol that’s not working much for his headaches and annoying tingly sensations. The patented quips and mannerisms are all here as McDonald sucks it up and keeps on going, and the dry wit of Mo’Loch playing against them is drier than ever.

Not so cut and dried is Jason Hemlock’s involvement. Hemlock’s the supernatural expert McDonald couldn’t care less for, although he’s reluctantly teaming up with him for Adam’s sake. Which agenda Hemlock eventually puts into play is the question, and McDonald will need to not only find an answer, but also keep breathing at the same time.

Mitten’s art vexes me and entertains me. He’s quirky, minimalist in panel details and depth, but he gets away with it by keeping the emotion flowing between ghouls, monsters, and one very sore detective with a bad smoking habit. Niles is a minimalist, too, but he keeps the dialog to the point and McDonald able to change direction on a dime once he realizes he’s heading the wrong way. If Niles could blast past the 4-issue mark for his usual story arcs, maybe McDonald could work in some much needed vacation as the terrors mount up waiting for him. Or maybe not, given his run of luck. He does have a bad habit of stepping in it both shoes deep even when standing still. Now that takes a certain knack, and Niles and Mitten capture it for us here.

Graphic Book Review: The Wraith

/ Books (Graphic) / Leave a Comment

The-wraithZombos Says: Excellent

It's ironic that the real monsters of our world often defy explanation, yet in fiction we often demand and often relish knowing their histories. Those histories are always filled with poignant experiences, traumatic events, and possibilities never achieved. Told well, you find yourself fearing and hating the monster while feeling sorry for it. Or him.  

In Joe Hill's The Wraith, the history of Charlie Manx and the origin of his evil is told well, serving as the prequel to his novel NOS4A2. The 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith is here, so is Christmasland and the "private roads of thought, where emotions are weather, blowing across the landscapes of your imagination." Manx calls these landscapes inscapes, and with a scared child listening in the backseat of his Wraith, he tells her all the sordid events of his life, beginning with his father who died in the arms of a fat lady named Sally Grapefruits.

Manx's mother blames him for everything bad in her life, of course, calling him names, treating him poorly. He never had a Christmas where Santa brought him a present so he bought a sled for himself called the fantom. Racing it down the slopes he notices the landscape changes and another world pushes itself through. A horrible event makes that world very angry and murderous, leaving 13-year old Manx free of his former, unsavory, surroundings.

Life perks up for him, briefly. He falls in love and gets married. He is wealthy. He is finally happy. He loses it all. His wife and children are left with nothing. Their carefree happiness turns to drudgery. His wife turns into his mother, calling him names, blaming him for, well, it doesn't matter really, since he's heard it all before.

What little cash he's managed to save is given to a traveling salesman selling dreams; and a place called Christmasland. He buys into the dream hook, line, and sinker. He even buys the Rolls-Royce Wraith to visit the amusement park for opening day. The Wraith comes cheaply, its former owner committed suicide in it, even if it was lightly used. A road trip to Christmasland with his kids and wife in the back seat turns ugly. The landscape he's known before opens up around him, swallowing them whole. The children lose their baby teeth.

But that was in the past. The story picks up again in 1989. Escaped convicts put in a call to Manx, now the go-to guy for making people disappear. He takes them to Christmasland to play with the kids, who welcome them, standing in front of a foreboding Christmas tree hung with ghoulish ornaments. And the kids are holding sharp, dangerous things, smiling in anticipation. I'll mention a balloon filled with delirium 101 is critical to survival for some, and you may catch a glimpse of the Bumble in all the mayhem, and leave it at that. Except for the payback, of course, there's always payback.

Joe Hill does more with his words than most writers of horror fiction today, which is why he can sell you, like Charlie Manx was sold, such a tall story that's part nightmare, part dreamscape, and mostly horrifying. His characters have befores, middles, and endings, and those endings can be very unpleasant, but their histories are ones you will relish. There may be a better artist to capture the glory and gory of Christmasland than Charles Wilson, but no one else comes to mind. Especially when he's "painted pretty" by Jay Fotos. The narrative and the art capture the murderous delights of Christmasland very well, while leaving enough room for emotions stretching beyond the necessary artifices of the story.

What we don't learn is what Christmas did to Joe Hill to make him want to turn its holiday of cheer into a holiday of drear.

The Creature from
the Black Lagoon (1954)

/ Universal Monsters / Leave a Comment

Behind the scenes of “Creature From the Black Lagoon”, 1954 (2)My article, The Creature from the Black Lagoon Still Holds Us Captive,  first appeared in the British magazine We Belong Dead, issue number 13. I highly recommend you pick up a copy. WBD is the best fan written magazine available today covering classic horror. This issue in particular is a tribute to the Creature from the Black Lagoon movie series.

 

Where is Universal Orlando’s Creature from the Black Lagoon ride?

Since 1954, when Universal Studios grabbed on to the tail-end of the 3-D cinema craze with their tropical-locale beauty and the beast story, and ever since Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch instinctively empathized with the Creature’s need to be loved (or at least not shot at) , and after all these years of fond memories and undying merchandizing for this beloved “beastie” (as director Jack Arnold called the Creature), I want to know why there’s no ride, no tourist attraction to beguile us. Given the best they could do was Creature from the Black Lagoon: The Musical, which played from 2009 to 2010 at the theme park, I’m not that hopeful.

They did a ride for Jaws, loved it, but there’s none for the last great Universal Monster, the one whose box office success leveraged Universal-International’s entry into the 1950s science fiction atomica and alien-invasion cycle, where big and bigger monsters, and they were quite unlovable ones at that, weren’t as mesmerizing as this low budget, process shots galore, jungle adventure set in the mysterious isolated lagoon.

Imagine a boat ride, which would be akin to Disney World’s Jungle Cruise. Wouldn’t you get a thrill standing on the deck of the tramp steamer Rita, helmed by its crusty and resourceful captain, Lucas (Nestor Paiva), as it enters the mysterious lagoon no tourist has set foot in? Wouldn’t you get a chill encountering the Gill Man as his curiosity gets the better of him and he dares to come aboard looking for companionship, for understanding, for a soul mate after all those years of being alone? After all, the Devonian period he hails from goes back a few hundred million years.

With Creature from the Black Lagoon borrowing thematic elements from King Kong and Frankenstein, we already know how well his search for companionship and understanding will go; and that would be not well at all. Like Kong, he becomes infatuated with a woman, and like Frankenstein’s Monster he’s mistreated on sight, making him retaliate in kind. His mistreatment involves fire, too, but unlike the Frankenstein Monster, the Creature has to also dodge harpoons and cope with rotenone, a piscicide–yes, it’s a real chemical used to catch fish. The desperate scientists drop it into the lagoon to knockout the Creature after they’ve riled him up.

Here is where sustained tension and subtextual motivations come into play, making Creature from the Black Lagoon a more intelligent and prescient script than many critics (Bill Warren among them) have given it credit for. While subsequent 1950s science fiction movie fare focused on the more horrific aspects of the aftermath of scientific meddling and hubris (all those big spiders, bugs, and dinosaurs chomping and stomping) the subtleties here center on conservation versus exploitation and research versus trophy-hunting. But the Creature is not the only prize being hunted and that opens another thematic element centered around the prima fascie movie gender roles of the 1950s that dictate male scientists are take-charge characters and decision-makers, and female scientists are always pretty, always think about romance, and always scream a lot when not making coffee or patching up those battered, take-charge males.

The beauty and potential trophy wife role is filled by Kay (Julie Adams), a research scientist who, in turn, draws much studious attention from her pushy boss, Mark (Richard Denning), who thinks he’s a better catch for her than her more reserved but earnest fiancé, David (Richard Carlson). Mogambo-minded Mark, seeing dollar signs and newspaper headlines, finances the expedition to the Amazon when a fossilized hand with webbed fingers is found in a geological dig by Dr. Maia (Antonio Moreno). It takes David’s enthusiastically delivered speech, part science-justification, part science lesson (fashionable for all 1950s science fiction movies) to lend gravitas to the expedition’s intentions. David is, surprisingly, the environmentalist and conservationist. He wants to study nature, not wrap it around his will. It takes Mark’s aggressive posturing directed toward Kay and the Creature to generate the sparks above and below the waterline. The action moves between David, Mark, and the Creature butting heads and gills over Kay and the interplay between them as each asserts his intentions over her and the outcome of the expedition.

It takes Bud Westmore’s makeup team to builld our feelings for the Creature while scaring our wits at the same time with his unique mix of piscine and humanoid features. Fess up now, it’s the Creature Aurora model kit you always preferred to build and paint, right? Commercial artist and part-time actress Milicent Patrick is now credited with designing the Creature’s iconic head, with Chris Mueller doing the sculpting. Jack Kevan created the airtight molded sponge bodysuits worn by Ricou Browning (doing the underwater scenes) and the larger Ben Chapman (doing the above water scenes). The original design called for a less fishy, more Oscar statuette looking Gill Man (a smooth-skinned humanoid) due to one studio executive’s preferences (I wonder if he was related to Irwin Allen?), but that didn’t prove scary enough on camera. More scales and gills were added, giving us the Creature we know and love today. Bud Westmore appeared to have taken offence at Milicent Patrick and her successful publicity touring for the movie, claiming she took too much credit for creating the Creature. He threatened to never use her talents again and followed through on his threat. She was good, having designed the alien in It Came from Outer Space and also that wonderful pants-wearing Metaluna Mutant. The consensus now is that Bud Westmore was the one actually in love with the limelight and taking too much credit in the first place for what his team had accomplished.

Behind the scenes of “Creature From the Black Lagoon”, 1954 (11)

Another person who possibly received more credit than he truly earned is the underwater scenes director, James C. Havens. According to Tom Weaver, Havens didn’t bother to don scuba gear to join Ricou Browning, Scotty Welbourne (who worked the 3-D cameras), and the stunt doubles under the water to direct them in situ. Instead, Havens floated on top, looking down from above to direct the action taking place farther below. Quite a trick when you consider a 3-D movie like this relies on key coming-at-you moments and spatial-blocking to sell those three-dimensions within the frame; how could you gauge the effectiveness of these moments when you’re not looking at them the way you intend your audience to see them?

While Havens easily breathed air while directing his scenes, Ricou Browning, who could hold his breath a lot longer than you or I ever could, relied on air hoses kept close, but out of camera range, on either side of him during shooting. He already had experience with how to breathe from an air hose while underwater, and that came in handy when attempts to supply him with a self-contained air supply failed to work as too many bubbles were showing and there wasn’t enough room in his suit to accommodate the tanks easily. Although breathing that way may have been second nature to him, the limitations of the Creature’s headpiece made clear sight difficult for both him and Chapman. During the filming of the climactic scene where the Gill Man is carrying an unconscious Kay through his grotto, Chapman guestimated wrongly and bonked her head against one of the grotto’s fake rocky walls. Luckily, Julie Adams was not actually rendered unconscious from that mishap, but the publicity department played up her head scrape for all it was worth, including a snapshot of Adams receiving serious medical attention: a Band-Aid applied by a nurse.

Heavy publicity during production and through the release of the movie was a new marketing slant undertaken by Universal-International Studios. That effort, combined with the use of the Moropticon single-projector 3D system instead of the cumbersome and expensive dual-projector system the majority of theaters still couldn’t afford, made possible the wide-release of Creature in 3-D to more urban theaters than usual, although many smaller neighborhood theaters still showed the movie flat (in 2-D). The Moropticon system allowed a standard 35mm projector to be “converted to 3-D in minutes by attaching the Moropticon prism lens to the front of the unit.” The installation of the system only cost the theater a hundred dollars, provided the theater agreed to purchase twenty-five hundred pairs of viewing glasses per month for twelve months. Then, as is the case today, those glasses generate a lot of money. The underwater scenes take full advantage of 3-D with harpoons whizzing by, retonone fizzing and clouding up the water in our direction, and a shimmering spatial dimensionality enhanced by careful choreography of the action moving toward and away from the viewer.

Jack Arnold, who personally storyboarded his movies, envisioned the most memorable scene, whether viewed in 3-D or flat: the alternatingly sexual and playful swim between Kay, gliding on the surface (not Julie Adams but her stunt double), and the Creature gliding through the water below her, entranced by her leggy aquatic form. He cautiously reaches out to her, draws back, then reaches out again. It’s a beautifully realized interplay that can be interpreted in various ways with varying levels of innocence and maturity, such as Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan’s frisky swim in 1934’s Tarzan and His Mate. Here, however, the censors had much less to worry about.

The Creature’s moment of bliss is fleeting. Hunted, captured, shot at, harpooned twice, and made groggy from being doped up repeatedly with retonone, he manages to elude Mark’s best efforts to stuff and mount him and Kay’s best screams to deter his ardor. The final confrontation in the grotto leads to two more sequels and a mystery: just what are those three columns seen in the grotto’s background? Is the implication that the Gill Man’s parentage is not as Devonian as we think but alien? Or was a matte painting from a previous movie not moved in time and to save money they kept on shooting?

Even more problematic: why does Kay, a research scientist who should know better, carelessly throw her cigarette butt into the pristine lagoon she couldn’t wait to swim in? Maybe that’s what really pissed off the Creature?

Note: Sources used in the writing of this article include Tom Weaver’s audio commentary for the disc releases of The Creature from the Black Lagoon; the Wikipedia article on CFTBL; Ghouls, Gimmicks, and Gold: Horror Films and the American Movie Business, 1953-1968 by Kevin Heffernan; the documentary Back to the Black Lagoon written and narrated by David J. Skal; and Bill Warren’s love/hate relationship written up as Keep Watching the Skies! Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties. The use of the term “rad,” which is short for “radical,” comes from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. No common ancestry between them and the Gill-Man is implied.

Pictures used in this article are from http://www.vintag.es/2013/04/behind-scenes-of-creature-from-black.html.

Graphic Book Review: Dead Boy Detectives
Volume 1: Schoolboy Terrors

/ Books (Graphic) / Leave a Comment

Dead boy detectives 1Zombos Says: Very Good

A smidgen of whimsy, a modicum of mystical, and a dollop of the cheeky-odd surround Dead Boy Detectives Edwin and Charles as they float–or sqwoosh when they're in a rush, although doing so makes Charles sick–through their meager caseload of mysteries to solve. You may feel a little light-headed meeting this pale duo cold, without a little warming up first by reading their previous adventures, starting with The Sandman #25, but stick to it; the stories are spread along like a taste of marmalade's bitter and sweet on burnt toast. You may find you like it and want more. Or not.

 

"You do not really mean to say that, do you?" asked Zombos, leaning over my shoulder, studiously reading as I typed.

"Yes, I do, and why not? And stop snooping and come over so I can see you without getting a crick in my neck."

I pushed my chair out a little, waiting for the debate to commence. The day was warmer than I liked, a higher humidity than I cared for, and so, yes, comenzara el debate; I was ready for him and any zingers he could lob my way.

"Oh, well then, carry on," he said, and walked away. I was dumbfounded. I wasn't ready for that at all. I sipped at my iced mocha latte, loudly, in frustration. Now where was I? Oh, yes…I was going to give some background information on Edwin and Charles to help warm you up before you plunge into reading Dead Boy Detectives Volume 1: Schoolboy Terrors.

 

Edwin Paine died by murder in 1916 at his boarding school, after insufferable fagging by the senior boys, a lousy lot of ruffians who reveled in doling out humiliation. Adding insult to his death, he found himself not only dead as a doorknob but sent off to meander around hell for years, stalked by a nameless terror. Neil Gaiman, Dead Boy Detectives' instigating author, is like that sometimes. Must be a British thing. Charles  Rowland died by murder in 1990, same boarding school, Saint Hilarion's School of Impending Doom and Fagging Studies (okay, yes, I made up that last part), although Edwin did try to help Charles avoid the terminus. Death happened along to collect the two, but both boys decided to hang around awhile and go into business doing detective work for fellow spirits and the living. Boning up on their intended trade by watching old detective movies, and eventually acquiring their private detectives certificate from the Apex Novelty College, they split their time between hanging out in their abandoned treehouse and conducting investigations.

In Volume 1, Schoolboy Terrors, the boys first sqwoosh (or squoosh; the spelling depends on which period of comics you're reading) to the Isle of Dogs to find Twinkle the ghostly cat, but a psychopathic schoolmaster who keeps class in session, forever, runs the boys ragged as they try to escape and end the semester for good. Worse things are waiting for them, with one of those being a return to St. Hilarion's, which has gone completely to hell in their absence (or more completely than originally, that is). This time, however, they're accompanied by a breathing, spirited girl named Crystal Palace, who is determined to unravel the mystery of their deaths while trying to avoid her own.

Crystal's parents are two world-trotting performance artists who love their daughter, kind of, and spend much time away from her, mostly, to pursue their artistic endeavors. Her mom even tattooed her at birth in a fit of creative license. It washed off, so not much harm done, but the paparazzi ate it up and it was a publicity success. Their latest performance sends Crystal to the hospital, where her near-death experience hooks her up with the boys. Soon she's off to St.Hilarion's to tangle with the mysteries surrounding the boys' quietuses, play Yonda with a newfound friend, and survive a power struggle between demons. The spirits of the homicidal seniors who made Edwin's life short and unpleasant pepper the heated action with cutlery and evil determination. The finale involves fire, a mirror, philosophizing cats you really shouldn't follow, a touchingly sad predicament that began in 1888 that leads to an uncomfortable and embarrassing position to be stuck in, and many big words Edwin would use more often if Charles could only understand them.

Toby Litt and Mark Buckingham imbue all these weird situations and magical characters with a young-adult-refusing-to-grow-up attitude, and it's a wonder in itself to watch how different finishers (or inkers to the less comic-geeky among you) bring Buckingham's pencils and layouts to life. Victor Santos is all crisp and tart with his ink pen, while Gary Erskine goes lighter with his lines, allowing colors to lighten scenes. Erskine in tandem with Andrew Pepoy maintains the lightness, but with more accentuation in shadowing, making faces especially reflective of their characters' evil or good intentions. And Russ Braun has that DC Comics house style that harkens back to Silver Age, but with a contemporary overtone. 

Any way you slice it, though, Dead Boy Detectives Volume 1: Schoolboy Terrors is a filling treat to savor.

A courtesy copy for review was provided by DC Comics.