From Zombos Closet

Bela Lugosi Meets Alfred Hitchcock

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Sadly, Bela Lugosi and Alfred Hitchcock really don't meet; but here's some vinyl from Professor Kinema's archive where they lend their vocal talents to two old radio dramas. The first is Lugosi in The Doctor Prescribed Death, and the second has Hitchcock hosting Once Upon a Midnight. The recording of The Doctor Prescribed Death comes from Relic Radio, where you can find many OTR dramas, including horror. (I'll have the Hitchcock radio drama up shortly.)

Bela in The Doctor Prescribed Death

Hitchcock in Once Upon a Midnight

bela lugosi meets alfred hitchcock

 

bela lugosi meets alfred hitchcock

Underworld Awakening (2012)
Should Have Slept More

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Zombos Says: Fair

Too Loud, with murkiness obliterating screen detail, with laughable post-production 3D, with lazy art direction, Underworld: Awakening is a disappointing sequel to Underworld: Evolution.

Kate Beckinsale’s Selene is on autopilot as she evades humans and lycans, kills humans and lycans, and evades them some more. In a script rework off of Resident Evil: Apocalypse, Selene is put on ice, experimented on, thawed out, and royally pissed because David (Theo James) is missing in action. Replace clones with one offspring named Eve (India Eisley)–no, really, she’s named Eve– and add nefarious Andigen Corp run by evil, and near comatose, Dr. Jacob Lane (Stephen Rea) hatching a dark plan just as nefarious as Resident Evil‘s Umbrella Corp, then see Selene run, kick high, land gracefully, and run some more. With her seemingly inexhaustible automatic handguns firing away at everything in motion, I began to wonder just how stupid those lycans were as they jumped, howling in rage, into her hail of bullets again and again.

Lost in this iteration of the Underworld series is just that, the gothically moody underworld. Much of the action takes place above ground at Andigen, or on the dark city streets, where lycans chase Selene, car-hopping their way closer and closer to her van, close enough so she can shoot their brains out. Again.

While she’s not pointing those handguns–now they spit out a gazillion bullets per second–she’s pouting, waiting for the story to catch up with her. The open montage–two actually–at the beginning, rushes the backstory to bring us up to speed, then rushes us by the pre-story, where Andigen and Dr. Lane purge the world of vampires and lycans. Or are they?

Directors Mans Marlind and Bjorn Stein must have watched too many video games, trying to emulate their exhiliration by steam-rolling the opener and much of the movie with monster-fighting-monster scenes.  Had they actually played those games, then maybe we’d get more drama and suspense in the breathing spaces between all that huffing and puffing. Too many directors and too many writers (more than a handful) add up to a rote actioner that never forgets its CGI. Huge lycan towering over Selene? Its here. Two-fisted gun fire to blow out the bottom of a descending elevator? It’s here. Thin Selina piroueting and gliding in tight leather, looking sleak and sexy as she deals death and destruction in rapid motion to screeching music and loud booms? It’s here.

Selene’s discovery of a vampire coven provides the only visually interesting moment when a call to action brings the immense, wrought iron, candle-dripped candelabra down from the ceiling to retrieve their weapons cached within. This moment of gothic surprise is brief, and not even the coven lair’s dripping stonework sustains enough fashion sense reminiscent of the earlier Underworld movies.

Given the vapid approach taken with Underworld: Awakening, I recommend they slap Twilight and Underworld together with a cat fight between Selene and Bella, otherwise this series is kaput.

Book Review: Fright Night On Channel 9

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Fright_night_on_channel_9

Zombos Says: Excellent

For me, and many like me, the impact of Fright Night has not lessened over time, but the generation that I am part of, the one that can truly appreciate this era, is rapidly aging. It's not difficult to imagine a point in the not too distant future where Fright Night, and all the programs like it, may be lost to fading memories and a society no longer interested in such antiquities. (James Arena)

I'm not as big a fan as James Arena is, but his passion for Fright Night, a horror-hostless, near midnight showcase of the good, the bad, and the ugly in fantastic cinema, that ran on New York's WOR-TV from 1973 to 1987, is well shared in Fright Night on Channel 9 from McFarland Press.

I don't often read McFarland titles because they're awfully expensive and not all of them are well-written or carefully researched. Being a Brooklyn boy growing up watching Channel 11 and Channel 9's sumptuous telecasts of horror and science fiction movies, both foreign and domestic, I couldn't resist Arena's book. If you're familiar with Fright Night, or just love to read about television in the days before anyone could see just about anything they fancied anytime they chose,  this book is a gem of interviews, anecdotal nostalgia, and glimpses into how the biz worked to bring packages of movies to affiliate stations on a regular basis. We're talking pre-video and pre-digital here, when stations ran 16 and 35mm prints, spliced up the film reels frame by frame for commercials, and did a little editing to run in allotted times and–more or less–to remove the occassional booby show, or overly nastiness, not fit for young eyes.

Within the two parts of Fright Night on Channel 9, Arena recalls the ritual of watching Fright Night regularly at the late-night hour as well as capturing that unique feeling of excitement of finally getting to see that movie you had heard was so awesome or so awful you just had to see it. Part One: The Story of Fright Night provides the history of the show, enriched by the interviews and the wheeling and dealing work involved to acquire "product" like Universal's horror pictures, Hemisphere's Block of Shock package of movies, and  Samuel M. Sherman's Independent-International Pictures Corp. and his Euro-horror movies for the show's run. Part Two: The Films of Fright Night lists all the movies that were shown with airdates. Arena goes further than simply regurgitating plot synopses by adding his personal observations to the various entries, making this part enjoyable reading as well as informative.

Hanging onto the movies once they were contracted for play wasn't always easy. The highlight of the book for me is  Samuel M. Sherman's  recounting of a run-in with a bankrupt processing lab holding his 16mm prints of his Exorcism at Midnight and House of Doom. The WOR contract stipulated delivery of a specified number of movies and couldn't be fulfilled while the lab held onto them. Elements of the shyster lawyer, the payola-or-kiss-your-prints-goodbye scenario, and the eventual showdown, to strong arm the prints from the lab, is a wild and wooly story. 

I read Fright Night on Channel 9 in one night. Half of my effort was made because I remembered the unique experience of watching the show, and others like it, which has shaped my horror habit of today, but the other half is because James Arena kept me up late with his vivid remembrance of a culturally significant "antiquity" that shouldn't be forgotten, nor the people who made it so.

Comic Book Review: Deadlands, Black Water
One Shot

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Deadlands black water

Zombos Says: Fair

There are times I scratch my head wondering if I'm not getting something; you know, in the sense of not understanding the story because I'm either missing important information I should have known before reading, or maybe I'm just lazy-eyeing it and I'm overlooking the obvious.

Then there are those times I read comics like Deadlands: Black Water and opine the sad fate often befalling the One Shot: not enough space to tell the story fully, no followup issues to spell out the obtuse into clarity. That irks me a lot, especially when the artwork is appealing, and the ghost of a story's there to haunt you just a little bit, but not enough to warrant the effort of turning a page.

I get the fact this is a one shot comic based on an RPG adventure. So what? I shouldn't have to know the game's intricacies to enjoy the story, although it would've probably helped me fill in some gaps in getting from the first to last pages. What Mariotte, Turner, and Sellner fail to accomplish is fortifying their story with enough sensible motivations and character actions beyond the perfunctory. I like weird westerns. I also like getting more explanation and better rationale for the weirdness. I know, it's a pet peeve I can't shake.

A portly man driven by a mysterious vision of a woman forces him to travel into dangerous territory with his bodyguard. They hook up with Lyle Crumbfine, tour guide through the dangers they need to circumvent to reach their destination. Expendable victims are provided; roll the dice.

The gun blast that blows a man's brains out at the end doesn't have a plausible explanation and it isn't rational given the story's context leading up to it (however, possibly plausible if you allow for Crumbfine's game hindrance, which is Grim Servant o'Death). And I'll reckon the fast walk-through, of we-don't-have-the-pages-to-show-you-this-stuff-so-just-take-our-word-for-it, kills whatever death at every page turn suspense those Deadlands should be providing. Black Water is shallow as weird western mayhem goes, and disappointing when you consider the artwork provides the only supernatural energy, of which the cover's the most exciting page in the whole book because it implies all the intrigue you won't find inside.

Not helping is the secondary 5-pager, The Kid in "Outlaw," which falls under Dime Store Backup: Part 4 of 4. Okay, I'll bite: tell me how it makes commercial and artistic sense to take much needed, flesh-out, pages away from  the main story in a ONE SHOT?

This is one shot that misses its target.

Comic Book Review: ’68 Hardship One Shot

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Zombos Says: Very Good

Zombie wars are hell, but there are worse ones. Teddy’s still fighting the Viet Cong in Hitchcock County, Nebraska, only it’s not 1968 anymore and zombies, and a twister, are gearing up to stress him out even more. He can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys, living or dead, so the potential for messing up his chances at survival is high, and the pressure keeps mounting.

I remember the Vietnam War and how I was a stone’s throw away from being drafted and shipped out. I remember how close I was to peeing in my pants when I sat down in front of a big, noisy typewriter, answering questions asked by a disinterested administrative type who typed the answers onto my draft card.  I remember holding the 4A draft card and thinking I’m so f*cked. Even my dad, who fought in World War II, said we’d move to Canada before he saw me fight Charlie and company. It wasn’t a good time for anyone. The guys I knew who came back from Nam never stopped fighting it in their nightmares or their memories.

Teddy fought that war, got a Section 8, and wound up still fighting the war years after. Not a good thing when you need all your wits to combat the walking dead. Mark Kidwell, Jeff Zornow, and Jay Fotos provide the essential spilled entrails and bloody gore, but it’s not only the zombies messing up the landscape, and that’s where ’68 Hardship moves to higher ground. It’s vivid, it’s sadly realistic, it’s never dull. If you like seeing zombies sliced and diced by a threshing machine, this is for you. If you like zombie stories with more bite beyond the usual us against them, this one’s for you, too. For Teddy, it’s all about us against them, only he can’t pinpoint exactly who “them” should be.

There was a television series in the 1960’s called Combat! starring Vic Morrow. Although it was about soldiers in World War II, Image Comics captures a lot of the show’s grim and gritty and realistic face of war in their ’68 series. The more realism in zombie stories, the better they are for it by bringing the zombies closer to home, even if they, like wars, don’t seem to change much.