From Zombos Closet

Book Review: Creatures of the Night
That We Loved So Well

/ Horror Hosts / Leave a Comment

8741448f59df4ba18a2a025f77f6f45d9515e677Zombos Says: Good

James M. Fetters' Creatures of the Night That We Loved So Well: TV Horror Hosts of Southern California is an important and entertaining book, which makes it all the more disappointing to wade through its poor text-formatting and lazy page layout.

When I received my "Perfect Paperback" $24.95 copy from Amazon, my heart sunk when I saw the misprinted cover cutting off the title; it was a foreshadowing of the poor publishing standards overhwelming this book's otherwise welcomed contents. I recommend you don't buy the paperback version as it appears to be a print-on-demand book with no proofing to accomodate fixed page lengths or any common print sense for that matter. The sloppiness includes quotes appearing ad nauseum in italics, double-spaced paragraph blocks, and Fetters' overused exclamation marks! Photographs, full script pages and show production sheets, and newspaper clip advertisements are either improperly sized, or reproduced so faintly they're hard to read, a shame because they provide a wealth of information for the diehard horror host fan. Captions are out of alignment with photographs, and interviews are not properly referenced and vaguely introduced with a they can explain it better than me  so here you go attitude, so I'm not sure how they were conducted or when.

Ignore all this amateurish presentation and you'll find worthwhile reading that, when paired with Elena M. Watson's Television Horror Movie Hosts: 68 Vampires, Mad Scientists and Other Denizens of the Late-Night Airwaves Examined and Interviewed, satisfyingly fills in the background for horror hosts Watson only briefly mentions. Fetter's meticulously provides show and channel information for each host, a superb timeline chart comparing national hosts to Southern California hosts, and he even lists what movies were shown, show by show; although the listing is unecessarily repeated in back of the book. More unnecessary page-filling is accomplished by providing capsule summaries for every Shock! and Son of Shock! movie, information easily found elsewhere.

What's really good here are the interviews, included scripts, and coverage for hosts like Ghoulita (Lietta Harvey) , Moona Lisa (Lisa Clark), Sinister Seymour (Larry Vincent), Grimsley (Robert Foster), and The Old Lady (Ottola Nesmith), who was sued by Mae Clark (Frankenstein) for wrongful impersonation. Grimsley takes you on a wild acid trip as he answers questions–I think those were answers, my head is still reeling–about his show, Moona Lisa's  own scripting ("Lisa wrote all of her scripts usually around 5 a.m.") is enlightening, and Sinister Seymour is vividly recollected by Douglas McEwan, who provides his complete, but unproduced, Octaman script for Sinister Seymour's Fright Night. While much of the reminiscenses are nostalgic, the ego-intrigue between Moona Lisa's appearance with Sinister Seymour (he was very ill with cancer at the time) at the Knott's Berry Farm Halloween Haunt provides a rare glimpse into the politics of hosting. 

The Famous Morris (Don Sherman) chapter provided a pleasant surprise for me. Back in the 1970s I was holed up in a motel room, flipping channels until I came across a horror movie. I was shocked (more like wow, this is neat, really, I was young) to see breasts bared. Now I know who's show it happened on, even if I don't remember the actual movie shown. This is one real "Urban Legend" I still remember. Famous Morris also explains how he became Andy the Bartender in the Rocky movies. 

Clarification in the lineage for Jeepers' Creepers Theatre (Jeepers, Ghoulita, Jeepers' Keeper, and The Creeper) cleared up the cobwebs for me regarding the hosting for this long running show. What's clear after reading Fetters' book is how much fun and work went into producing a horror host show, and how clearly American the phenomenon was and still is. We do love our schlocky horror hosts with our horror: they made the bad movies palatable and the good ones even better. 

Magazines: Monsterpalooza 1

/ Magazine Morgue / Leave a Comment

monsterpalooza magazineZombos Says: Very Good

There's a smorgasbord of well-written articles to be found in this first issue of Monsterpalooza, although a little too varied to bring focus to the magazine's tagline "The Art of Monsters." The cheeky editorial doesn't help much either to provide a clear mission statement; it repeats Jack Torrance's dictum about dull work and no play, but doesn't give insight into why another horror magazine is vying for my torch-wielding enthusiasm and yours.

The coverage is both old and new movies and monsters, makeup, a fun little Halloween pop culture insert for this issue, a Vincentennial report, and interviews delivered in a snappy layout filled with photos and welcomed three-column text. David Gerrold's State of the Art (continuing column?) on summer movies is the usual harangue over movie quality for the massess, but it's well written and totally off target for that art of monsters thing. Maybe if he focused the article on specific summer horror/sci fi movies, I'd appreciate it more. 

The reading gem for me is Jeff Baham's The Happiest Haunt On Earth, which for Jeff, me, and many others I'm sure, would be Walt Disney's Haunted Mansion. Baham outlines the history, the influences–an early version called Bloodmere Manor was definitely not so happy–and explains how Walt's originally planned walk-through ride became the Doom Buggie journey we love today. A sidebar relates how some foolish mortals even go so far as to spread cremated remains of die-hard fans along the spooky hallways. But now that he mentions it….

However, one film that did have a lasting impact on the WED designers was the fictional house in Robert Wise's 1963 film 'The Haunting." In Wise's film, the house itself becomes a living, breathing character, which is an idea that resonated with the Imagineers. (Jeff Baham, The Happiest Haunt On Earth)

More treasures to plunder here are Dan Rhodes Dracula at 80, Pierre Fournier's Dare You See It, and Frank Dietz' Bob Burn's Burbank Spooktaculars. Rhodes basically repeats his argument from his lengthier article in Monsters From the Vault (volume 16, #29), but here he summarizes the critical importance of Dracula, a movie many older horror fans love to bash. If you like what he says here, I recommend you read his exhaustive analysis in MFTV.

For a more substantial read, Fournier delves deep in Dare You See It as he examines the research, and the newspaper clippings of the day, to track the evolution of Frankenstein as it bounced from actor to actor, director to director, and screenplay to screenplay. "Through spring and summer of '31, in a Thirties version of viral marketing, Universal's publicity department fed news items to gossip columnists, planting highly speculative and often contradictory articles, building interest." You can sense the feeling of anticipation and excitement potential audiences must have felt here, building up to the premier as the movie progresses from fancy to fact. 

On a lighter note, Dietz brings us personally closer to the out-of-this-Halloween spooktacular with The Thing From Another World, put on by Bob Burns in 2002 with a lot of help from his friends, all for a 4-minute live performance, repeated a heck of a lot for trick or treaters and diehard fans. It's amazing how concise and well-executed these events were, and this one in particular was written by Star Trek's D. C. Fontana, an "old friend of Bob and Kathy." 

There's more, like Ted Newsom's I Was Just Earning Me Wages, giving us a closer look at the career of Jimmy Sangster, and how he switched from producer to script writer with his first job, X the Unknown, and Mark Redfield's article Karloff and the Creation of the Screen Actors Guild. Given the wealth of talent in this issue, I hope the next one sustains it, and also defines more clearly the art of monsters, both present and past.

They're certainly off to a good start.

Mexican Lobby Card: The Face of Fu Manchu

/ Azteca/Mexican Lobby Cards / Leave a Comment

I'd bet if you took a tally of the weapon seen most often in a lobby card, it would be a knife. The Sax Rohmer series may be politically incorrect these days, but Christopher Lee is so sinister, and so evil in this Hammer screen series, it's still fun to watch his machinations for world conquest. And can't you just dig this groovy pyschedelic illo, man?

El Rostro De Fu Manchu Mexican Lobby Card

Nightmare in Wax (1969)
Mexican Lobby Card

/ Azteca/Mexican Lobby Cards / Leave a Comment

What's not to love about this over the top Mexican lobby card for Nightmare in Wax? The maniacal predator; the dripping blood; the victim's head reflecting the terror (I assume the rest of her is in the box); and an action shot filled with menace (though not sure for whom). Yup. A definite keeper. Usually, the more distasteful the advertising, the more tepid the movie. But at least we have the poster art to keep us happy with fright.


El Museo De La Muerte Mexican Lobby Card