From Zombos Closet

The Cute But Terribly Bad Case of
Night of the Lepus (1972)

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Night of the Lepus 1972 shot with DeForest Kelly and Stuart Whitman

Taken from the case files of the League of Reluctant Reviewers comes this bizarre tale of giant cute and cuddly bunny rabbits running amok and eating more than carrots. 

“Good evening Mr. Bolton. It has been a while. He will see you in the library.”

Yes, it had been quite some time since I last visited the old brownstone on 999 Transient Street. When I joined the League of Reluctant Reviewers I didn’t know what I was getting myself in to. I needed a break. Now I was back.

I handed my coat to Chalmers, the butler, and took the stairs to the library on the second floor. It was not that I hated visiting the old man, but every visit brought something unpleasant. The pay was good, do not get me wrong, but sometimes money just is not enough. I gathered my sangfroid as I opened the door to the library.

“Welcome, come in, come in,” said the unmistakable voice coming from the Chippendale wing chair facing the fireplace. “It has been a while. Come. Sit. This one is not so bad this time.” A hand flashed from the right side of the chair, pointing to the Camelback settee where my usual drink was waiting. I walked over and sat down and took a sip of my Tom and Jerry, then leaned back and made myself comfortable. While I waited I stared at the carvings in the walnut coffee table. They seemed to change on every visit. Odd.

The old man rang for Chalmers, who brought him the DVD. “I think this one will prove less daunting and dispiriting than the last ones, so you may find it an easy, if somewhat unnecessary, time waster. Zombos will not touch it. And that good for nothing butler he has will not bother, either. So they will pay handsomely for your review.”

He tossed it over to me. It was the Blu-ray for Night of the Lepus, also known as Rabbits. I finished my Tom and Jerry, nodded to Chalmers, and followed him out of the library, down the stairs, and into my coat and out the door. At least the old man was right: it was an unnecessary time waster; but giant cuddly rabbits standing in for ravenous monsters was lame enough for me to be able to coast on this one. …

The Cute But Terribly Bad Case of
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Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Radio Spots

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Invasion of the Body Snatchers 1978 behind the scenes photo
Donald Sutherland is beside himself in Invasion of the Body Snatchers 1978

Welcome, all lovers of remakes (are there any?)! Welcome to my Radio Spot Reliquary.

Remakes! Sequels! Is there anything new?

I hear and read it all the time: People are sick of going to the movies and seeing the same things over and over again, or hearing about a new reworking of an old standard. Is there not anything new coming out of Hollywood? Is all new creativity lost? Is it all about finances and the belief that redoing a former blockbuster hit will once again generate the same amount of revenue?

Successful remakes are hard to find. Usually remakes are made of older movies with the idea of modernizing them to appeal to a fresh audience. Some are redone to highlight improved technology. Some work, some don’t. The ones that work have one thing in common: they are remade by fans of the original and want to do it in homage.
With all that said, two remakes stand out to me and definitely work: John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), and 1978’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It is this latter movie I want to feature today.

The first version, filmed in 1955 and released in 1956, was well received and has achieved classic status. Its black and white photography gave it a Film Noir look which helped with the sense of paranoia and fear. It is played with all seriousness and the danger builds quickly as more and more residents of the small town of Santa Mira report that their closest family members are somehow different – changed with no emotions. Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter play the hapless couple who slowly sees their circle of friends and the townspeople they love change to become alien visitors who want to capture them and turn them into “pod people.”

Since it was so successful, filmmaker fans in the late 1970s decided to re-envision it, setting it in a large city – San Francisco – and producing it in color. Reviewers liked it and gave credit for its new approach. However, it lost its small town charm and tragedy with events now taking place within a city of countless, nameless individuals being taken over in large numbers. Close friends are changed, so the lack of trust and paranoia are still present, only the threat now exists on a much larger scale. The practical special effects are more advanced than the original, and the sound of the hatching pods is much more organic and alien. The newer version goes into more depth about the origin of the space seeds and the assimilation process, and, to its credit, fixes the original’s flaw in the lover’s reveal at the end. They are two different-looking movies and I enjoy both of them. In fact, they complement each other.

Which do you prefer?

Here are six spots for the 1978 release…three mono spots and three spots in stereo. The stereo spots are basically the same with minor differences, but the mixing is a little sharper and the background effects are more pronounced. Spots for the 1956 version are harder to find than an unopened seed pod. Granny Creech and I are both looking. Maybe someday…

Space seeds! Pods! Pod people! Don’t go to sleep! No emotions! Leonard Nimoy! Invasion of the Body Snatchers!

If you have radio spots you would like to share or talk about with Gary (the Radio Spots Guy), you can reach him at [email protected].

ZC Update: Zombos’ pod-person has been found and destroyed after Gary noticed that he mistakenly said Elliot Gould instead of Donald Sutherland in the photo caption. 

 

The Perplexing Case of Shrooms (2006)

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Shrooms 2006 poster showing a skull outline made with mushroomsOnce more, the League of Reluctant Reviewers brings you the unfathomable, the unbelievable, and the never to be forgotten oddities all around us to be found in movies.

Down a forgotten street somewhere in New York City there stands a used-up, ashlar-surfaced office building waiting to be torn down. Should you enter through its bell archway, walk towards the solitary elevator that’s seldom used, and turn right, you would find yourself in a narrow hallway.

In its heyday, you could find the finest business agencies rubbing elbows, hustling and bustling, here, along with the home away from home, cubbyhole, sanctuary, and hideout for the New York Globe reporters. But that was in its heyday. Now all the hustle and bustle is done digitally, behind flickering screens and piled up cups of coffee. Most of the tenants are now tech-related. How boring.

If you walk past those frosted-glass doors now, with their chipped and peeling lettering looking like the worn names on tombstones, and continue all the way to the end, you would come to a frosted-glass door whose lettering still shines. That’s my office and my home away from home: the New York Globe’s old hangout.

My name is Artemis Greensleeves. Since my regular business has been slow of late, I decided to pick up some extra cash by working for the League of Reluctant Reviewers. I didn’t realize how busy I’d be. I prefer the peace of quiet here, though, so they send me what I need when they need to. …

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The Legend of Hell House (1973)

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The Legend of Hell House publicity still

Zombos Says: This movie and The Haunting (1963) are required viewing for any horror fan.

I first watched The Legend of Hell House at a drive-in in 1973. Unfortunately, the fog started rolling in, obscuring the screen, just when it was getting good and nasty. It took some years to finally watch it again, to the end, and fully appreciate the depth of both the screenplay and the camera work. The onscreen timestamp, counting down the one week given for the investigation conducted by physicist Lionel Barrett (Clive Revill), spiritual medium Florence Tanner (Pamela Franklin), and the sole survivor of a previous but failed investigation, Ben Fischer (Roddy McDowall), adds a documentary tone around the growing tension, both psychological and supernatural. …

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Fearless, Lust, Twins
and a Circus
Oh, My!
Radio Spots

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Welcome, all lovers of things that go bump in the night! Welcome to my Radio Spot Reliquary. To follow up on my post, Dracula, Yorga, and Frankenstein Oh, My!, here are more vampires than you can shake a stake at.

Lust for a Vampire movie scene
Barbara Jefford and Mike Raven in Lust for a Vampire

Twins of Evil

Vampire Circus and Countess Dracula

Lust for a Vampire

The Fearless Vampire Killers

The Vampire Lovers

The Velvet Vampire and Scream of the Demon Lover

 

Vampire Circus Lobby Card

Halloween 1,2,3 Radio Spots
To Light Your Pumpkin

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Halloween 3, Season of the Witch publicity still showing three masked trick or treaters

Welcome, all lovers of things that go bump in the night! Welcome to my Radio Spot Reliquary.

Listen…it’s that time of year again for crunching leaves, cool, howling winds, and the sound of spooks and monsters of all kinds.

Take a deep breath: Do you smell it? That unmistakable smell of burning pumpkin, caused by the candle flame licking the base of carved-out lids of eerily illuminated jack-o-lanterns sitting ominously on the porches of households eagerly awaiting the arrival of dozens of ghastly apparitions demanding treats of various kinds.
Can you taste it? The sweet taste of hauntingly delicious goodies, from chocolate to peppermint, and everything in between.

Can you feel it? The apprehension of not knowing what is coming to visit your house. Who or what is behind that mask you see staring into your eyes, into your soul? Is it friend…or foe?

Fear! Terror! Horror! Trick or Treat! Tricks with no treat! Nowhere to run! The night ‘he’ came home! The night no one came home! Halloween….One, Two and Three!!!

Halloween

Halloween II

Halloween III: Season of the Witch

 

Actor Nick Castle holding up Michael Myers mask
Nick Castle holding up his inner monster, Michael Myers

If you have radio spots you would like to share or talk about with Gary (the Radio Spots Guy), you can reach him at [email protected].

Rawhead Rex (1986)

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rawhead rex 1986 still

Zombos’ Says: So bad it’s good.

“What the hell, Paul?” I said to Paul Holstenwall.

We had just finished his latest dreck of choice, Rawhead Rex, from 1986. I sipped my pumpkin spiced latte, seeking comfort after watching it. He studied the Blu-ray box liner, took a sip of his latte, and looked at me with all innocence and surprise.

“What? You didn’t like it?

I swallowed another sip of my latte and gave him the look of death. My perfectly fine cool October day was ruined by his biking over to the mansion with this stinker while Zombos made a run for it, knowing full well from past experience how Paul’s tastes in horror could swing like Poe’s pendulum. And yet, there he sat, looking like a thinner Quentin Tarantino, dressed in faded blue jeans and a Fright Rags hoodie. I imagined him having worked in a video store too, doling out questionable movie advice to susceptible customers, while making too many runs through the beaded curtain in the back to the schlock and X’ers. So here I sat, trapped like Andre Delambre in The Fly. …

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Dracula, Yorga, and Frankenstein, Oh My!
Radio Spots

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Dracula Versus Frankenstein 1971 movie

Welcome, all lovers of vampires and monsters! Welcome to my Radio Spot Reliquary.

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so I guess it comes as no surprise that the makers of horror movies would capitalize on the tried and true names of horror to seek box office success.

As I was clearing out some of my radio spot files I saw that the vampire and monster-making genres still had some energy left after the great Hammer films had run their courses. Feature vampire lovelies and gruesomely-made monsters and the audiences were sure to come, right? Evidently.

Count Yorga vampire movie headshot

I have come up with eighteen titles of screen shockers that took the Dracula and Frankenstein legends to new directions, many with increasing doses of gore and female nudity. As the 1970s unfolded, the screen became more exploitative. Many of these films lacked quality, but some were adequate. Liberties were taken with the original canon legends, and stories were created to make use of the screen’s new-found freedoms.

So, here are the spots. Most are quite good…some are overly screamed. See how many of these bring back memories…and nightmares.

Blood! Fangs! Crosses! Corpses! Beautiful, and sometimes nude, women in peril! Cadavers! Body parts! Mad labs! Monsters! Dracula and Frankenstein movies continue!

Count Dracula and His Bride

Count Yorga Vampire

Dracula (Frank Langella)

Dracula vs. Frankenstein

Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror

Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks

Guess What Happened to Count Dracula

Lady Frankenstein

The Return of Count Yorga

 

Frankenstein's Bloody Terror lobby card

AI and the Writer

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There’s an east wind coming, Watson. All the same, such as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind nonetheless, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.” His Last Bow, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1917.

Ink sketch of cloud writing on a wallThe east wind that Sherlock Holmes told Watson about alludes to the east wind mentioned in the Bible, beginning with Moses. It is a powerful, destructive, but potentially beneficial or malevolent element of nature or divine intervention, take your pick. Artificial intelligence is our east wind for the ages, and whether it proves beneficial or not, it certainly will be powerful and destructive and oddly beneficial too. But for whom remains to be seen. It is the closest we have come, so far, to realizing science into magic. With the ongoing technologies in robotics and quantum computing, that magic can become either white or black depending on who wields it and, more concerning, who can make money from it.

But here we are. You and me and everyone else are like that unseen character in Zork, suddenly standing in an open field, given a few hints and hoping to make the right decisions to figure which way to go. AI is the white house with the small mailbox, but the front door is wide open. You must go through that door, willingly or not. That east wind of AI is too strong now and it is pushing all of us in the same direction. Frankly, it is a coin flip whether AI will eventually work well for all of us. Or not. But for right now, you can use it as your assistant to benefit your writing and anything else you care to.

I say now because we are still in the first level of AI, the generative stage. It means we prompt AI–provide input–and hopefully it generates good responses as outputs. The next stage is general AI. That is when robotics merges seamlessly (one can hope, right?) with AI, when prompting is no longer needed by us. Instead, AI does the thinking and takes actions or provides outputs based on what it learns (just like us). All those science fiction movies where room-sized computers took over the world or tried to, well, that’s general AI. So you can breathe a little easier as my guess is we still have some years before that kicks in. Once we have self-determining humanoid robots that can do lots of varied jobs people do, that techno-cat’s clawing out of the bag pronto. …

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Haunt (2019)

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Haunt 2019 movie still

Zombos Says: Makes me stay away from creepy-looking haunts on dead roads for sure.

Four girls (Harper, Bailey, Angela, and Mallory) and two guys (Nathan and Evan ) leave the safety of a bar-party on Halloween night looking for a little more fun and excitement.  That was the goal anyway. Instead, they find an extreme haunt attraction that has maybe three cars in the lot, down a lonely road that sees more activity with roadkill than cars, with a really creepy clown (okay, yeah, when aren’t they creepy?) silently ushering them into the warehouse (though the set was filmed in the closed A.J. Jolly Memorial School in California, Kentucky). The fact he takes their cell phones doesn’t phase them. Top this off with an opening credits during which ominous scenes of the haunt setup sell the terror to come and you have a tidy Halloween horror just begging for victims and you to watch.

Scott Beck and Bryan Woods build the eerie vibe and suspense until the group realizes it’s all real and then the movie switches everyone into survival and escape mode. Good luck with that. Soon the group does the de rigueur divide and conquer when they come to a fork in the maze. Before this, they witness a tableau vivant where a person in a witch mask does something nasty to an earlier guest — who definitely got her money’s worth of terror for the evening. They shrug it off. We, of course, know what’s coming. We also soon realize, as they do, the haunt is run by a band of psychos who have a mask fixation.

Bailey (Lauryn McClain), Nathan (Will Brittain), and Angela (Shazi Raja) go one way, and Mallory (Schuyler Helford), Harper (Katie Stevens), and Evan (Andrew Lewis Caldwell) go the other way. Evan, the Uber guy, you just know he’s heading for a nasty fall. Pretty early on you know who the final girl will be too because she gets the backstory. For the rest, well, let the haunt — I mean hunt — begin. I admit I’m not a serious haunt kind of guy; crawl spaces, dark spaces, foreboding orifices, and silent scare actors make my skin shrink and my mouth dry and they are par for this movie. Unfortunately, for this group, the scare actors, better called death actors here, play their part very well. The kills are gruesome but quick and the pacing and tension, with perfectly timed silences and music, make the view to a kill a treat for us, a desperate struggle for them.

Sam (Samuel Hunt), Harper’s ex with the hand trouble, tracks them down to the haunt and steps into it too. Short step, though. Bit by bit, the men behind the masks reveal themselves, providing for a cool prequel if that ever happens. As for Harper, she needs to overcome a troubled childhood while avoiding pitchforks, shotguns, and other sharp and blunt objects, while the camera goes wide than close, stays still, and then moves around. The makeup and practical effects really set a gritty mood and the tone is sans humor. The movie comes close to generating a video nasties coating but, dare I say it, with more of a modern indie horror movie’s mechanics. It received limited release when it first hit theaters, but you can catch it on Shudder.

The Dark Corner (1946) Pressbook

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An engrossing noir, 20th Century Fox’s The Dark Corner has Lucille Ball, making it even more entertaining to watch. Pretty much a Queen of the Bs before her I Love Lucy (six years) and Desilu Studios days, she was always notable in every movie she played in. Star Trek fans know full well how her taking over the management of Desilu led, among other things, to spending the money for two pilots and providing a hefty budget — all while ignoring her board’s desire to cancel it — to put the science fiction Wagon Train in space television series on the air. You can thank her for promoting and backing Mission Impossible too. In The Dark Corner, she fights for her man, played by Mark Stevens, who never seemed comfortable while acting. Clifton Webb, who played Waldo Lydecker, the snobby, stern-faced, would-be lover in Laura, plays a Waldo Lydecker here too, only with the name changed to Cathcart. William Bendix is always a delight to watch in action. He was the go-to for blue collar toughness and earthiness, and made the perfect street-tough character. He gained notoriety through The Life of Riley (on radio and television). He also played Babe Ruth in The Babe Ruth Story. He actually was a bat boy for the New York Yankees, but was fired after getting Babe Ruth sick before a game by bringing him hot dogs and sodas. The Babe had a habit of eating large. Bendix appeared in other noir movies, including The Blue Dahlia (1946) and The Glass Key (1942). At twenty pages, this pressbook certainly goes all out to sell the movie.

The Dark Corner movie pressbook …

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Hollow’s Grove (2014)

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Hollows Grove movie posterZombos Says: Good when the horror kicks in.

Once you get past the irritatingly sophomoric and time-wasting improv at the beginning, we follow S.P.I.T (Spirit Paranormal Investigation Team) as they prepare for an episode of their show that will film at Hollows Grove, a derelict orphanage and hospital. This collected-footage narrative of their would-be fake investigation turns into a screamer with some good chills.

Lance Henriksen provides a cameo at the beginning as the special effects guy who sets up the fake scares for every episode. Only this time around the scares are on him and the rest of the crew as they are suddenly faced with malevolent occupants who like to play; and by this time, are probably very bored at not having anyone living to slay with for a long time.

Probably the worst evil monsters you can write about in horror are kids gone bad and this orphanage has a lot of them. The backstory has the children dying from disease and cremated in the basement. I know a lot of the usual horror outlets downgraded this movie when it first hit digital in 2014, but they’re wrong: there is a lot to like here, with most of it coming from a really downbeat  mood — that always important constant dread — permeating every scene the minute these bozos realize it’s all real. Films like the recent Until Dawn may have more graphic kills, but the tradeoff is no mood, leading to a rote checklist of you die this way, you die that way. The fun in watching Hollows Grove is seeing everyone on the team suddenly step knee deep into it and realizing that they are knee deep into it, while still falling for the old divide and bicker and die alone formula. Given their earlier goofiness I enjoyed this even more. With Until Dawn, I kept looking at my watch and wondering when a gritty and emotionally pummeling story was going to kick in. Hint: it never did. Towards the last quarter of Hollows Grove, the manic panic is well executed, along with the team.

The wrap around contrivance isn’t the most stellar. An FBI agent sets up the disturbing collected footage to watch, but the actor is really bad at being an FBI agent, so it lands with a thud; especially when given the weird (not in a good way weird) epilogue where agents supposedly captured some evidence. The frantically paced ending before that deserved better.

Of course, every good horror story usually has an idiot leading the way to doom. In this one it’s Tim (Matt Doherty). Ignoring the grounds keeper Hector’s warnings (Eddie Perez), they blow past him and enter the building after he removes the thick chains on the front door. Setting up the cameras and beginning their walk-through of the premises, the first and best reason to not continue pops up in the kitchen. It’s a sudden blunt statement of get out now or else, clearly punctuated with a splash of blood. For the horror movie to continue though, they ignore it and keep going. Go team.

Interesting use of two cameras to provide the footage is a novelty: Chad (Val Morrison) handles the closeups with his camera, though rather clumsily and we never really see his footage, while Harrold (Matthew Carey) tags along with his camera, capturing the team and Chad filming them. The rest of the team includes Julie, who handles the logistics, and Roger, who handles the EMF gadget.

Camera batteries dying, weird noises, bad smells, a cold spot, and things moving by themselves are par for the investigation. At one point both Chad and Julie (Bresha Webb) are left alone in the staging room on the first floor. He turns on his damaged camera to see if it is still working and captures the best scene in the movie. It’s all downhill for the rest of them from there. The next best scene is when Harrold screams for Tim to close the damn door, for good reason.

Pretty soon the lights are going off and the No Exit signs are lit. Watch this one late at night. And feel a little pity for Harrold. The poor schlub just needed the job to perk up his career. He should have stuck to comedy.