From Zombos' Closet

On the Set of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein

Faces of Boris Karloff

From the Professor Kinema Archives...

Movie Review: Hobo With a Shotgun (2011)

Zombos Says: Good (for gore and Trash Cinema fans, that is)

We were in the cinematorium discussing what the hell Hobo With a Shotgun was about. I love Rutger Hauer, and he's perfect in the role of Hobo, with his craggy face and sparkly eyes under all that grizzle, but really, what the hell?

"Hey, where'd Zombos go?" he asked.

"He left during the busload of children fricasseed by flamethrower interlude," I said.

Trash cinema isn't Zombos' usual thing anyway, especially when it concerns fricasseeing kids. Come to think of it, it isn't mine either.

While not as sexually outrageous and bizarre as Tokyo Gore Police or as repulsive as Street Trash, Jason Eisener and writers do a wild job that comes close, saturating this golden turkey with over the rainbow colors, plotting an absurd predicament even Albert Camus would find mind-numbing, and serving up a heapful of over the top—and under the bottom—caricatures. There's a golden-hearted hooker (Molly Dunsworth), a hobo with a dream of owning a lawn mower (to start a lawn mowing business, of course), and The Drake (Brian Downey), a criminal boss crushing the heart and soul out of Hope Town to create his own Scum Town. It's silly, stupid, insulting, crazy, trashy, exploitative, and quite aware of all these things. Not to be taken seriously, it is seriously grindhouse as the blood flows, heads roll, and blacklight poster situations increasingly take on the look and feel of a psychedelic-fueled withdrawal.

"So, what did you think?" asked Paul, running his hands through his long black hair. His blue eyes beamed at me expectantly.

I took a deep breath. "I have conflicted feelings about it. Hobo With a Shotgun is like passing a bong around, with each toke building to a highpoint of intoxication only to eventually downslide into nausea."

"Exactly! That's the beauty of it. It's mired in dirty realism and transgressive angst," beamed Paul.

Maybe to a Charles Bukowski fan, I thought, but didn't voice my assumption. My impression pretty much formed when Abby, the heart-of-gold hooker with a bear fetish, gets her hand mowed off, then uses the boney stump to stab The Drake again and again. I admit there's a sense of poetic justice tucked away in there somewhere, but it's buried under the gore and screams.

Irony and sardonic mawkishness go ozone when Hobo walks into the Pawn Til Dawn pawn shop and sees his heart's desire, a lawn mower for $49.99. There's nothing that says ‘home’ more than a freshly mowed lawn. To get the money he lets a sleaze-ball (Pasha Ebrahimi) with lots of cash and a video camera tape him getting his teeth knocked out by another bum. Money in hand, just when he's about to pay for the mower, schizo-robbers come in and threaten a mom and her baby.

The shotgun hanging on the wall in back of the counter is also $49.99. He makes the tough choice all trash cinema heroes must eventually make. So instead of mowing grass he mows down bad guys, cleaning up the streets one shell at a time.

In-between the hospital hangings, the manhole cover necklaces, the mobs turning against hobos, and the Plague Twins showdown—motorcycle creepizoids dressed in Boilerplate—Abby, the hooker and hobo's only friend, spends a lot of time with blood on her face, and hobo finds out if he can solve the world's problems with a shotgun bought at $49.99, shells gratis.

Of course, if this movie was called Hobo With a Lawn Mower, things might have been different.

Famous Monsters Back Cover: Don't Be Fooled By Look-Alikes!

Professor Kinema sends along more nifty magazine promotion from the back covers of Famous Monsters of Filmland. These indicate Warren's attention to the FM imitators sprouting up. The quote from Ray Bradbury is priceless. And how can you not groan at the cheeky wordplay "If the answer to any of the fivegoing questions (that's one more than foregoing) is no...?"

Famous Monsters Back Cover: What Will He Find?

Before Warren Publishing realized the importance of advertising merchandise on their back covers, early issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland promoted the magazine with simple yet striking black and white pictures and text instead. From Professor Kinema's FM collection comes this visually effective promo using big Tor Johnson and big letters to ask the question...

Famous Monsters Frankenstein and Dracula Posters

I believe this is the first advertisement that appeared on the back cover of Famous Monsters of Filmland to promote the Frankenstein Monster and Dracula posters. I dare you to name one FM fan who doesn't regret not hanging on to these posters. Dracula was my favorite. I hung him on my bedroom door. Frankie hung around on the closet door. Both were awesome to behold. Would love to see these reissued, along with the Mummy and the Wolf Man and the Creature From the Black Lagoon. Be great they could keep the price to a dollar a piece, too. Just sayin'. (Scan courtesy of Professor Kinema)

Movie Review: Dylan Dog, Dead of Night (2010) No Bark or Bite

Listen to the Movie Review

 Zombos Says: Fair

It's stupefying how movies can deviate so much from their original sources of inspiration. Dylan Dog: Dead of Night is a good example. The screaming doorbell, the Groucho character (I can understand dropping the Groucho character), and the London locale of the comic book series this movie is based on are gone. Replacing them is a New Orleans sticky gumshoe who looks amazingly like Brandon Routh, but acts like a cardboard standee of him, a threadbare plot that rolls up very much like True Blood and all that slick vampire jazz, and Marcus (Being Human's Sam Huntington), a lively sidekick turned lively zombie oozing all over the place for comic relief.

Even if the source material wasn't ignored as much, the movie would still flatline. The story reeks of too many writers huddled around cups of warm coffee and piles of stale Danish, and director Kevin Munroe plays it straight and doughy. The quirkiness, the differential feel of weird sliding along zany, and Dylan Dog's anti-establishment leaning is missing in action. This 'nightmare investigator' is plain as day, although he still dresses smartly in a red shirt and black jacket. He carries bigger guns, too.

At 250.00 dollars a day plus expenses, Dylan's settled for taking photographs of cheating spouses. He lives in a cruddy office, drives a two-miles-from-the-dump Volkswagon Beetle, and wants to forget the lost love of his life, but can't. He's Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe rolled into one--Routh even provides unnecessary noir-appropriate voiceover--but without that chippy dialog or trenchcoat style to match it.

He's shaken out of his career stupor by the daughter of a man mauled to death by an intruder in the Ryan Mansion. She got his "No pulse, no problem" business card from a priest, but Dylan brushes her off, telling her he's out of that business. She insists, he resists, until his buddy Marcus is mauled to death by an intruder. A quick change of clothes into the red and black, and he's back chasing monsters. And explaining ad nauseum about his paranormal business without cracking any inflectives. He explains New Orleans is chock full of vampires, werewolves, and zombies, and before he started chasing bedsheet bingo players he was the chief investigator appointed by the netherworld to maintain the peace. I would have liked to have seen that movie.

Now hot on the trail of the monster mauler, Dylan visits Vargus (Scott Leo Diggs) at the vampire nightclub Corpus, where the love of his life was murdered. He also visits the meat packing plant where the werewolves hang out. In between visits, he's helping Marcus get used to his new zombie lifestyle that includes eating maggots served fresh on a bun (no pickles), and regular visits to Big Al's Body Shop for replacement body parts.

Huntington plays his Being Human self, which I enjoy watching because it matches his physical presence well, but without enough writer support his zombie-angst filled interludes--including a zombie support-group meeting--stretch thin. There's one good line. It comes just after Marcus wakes up undead, when he's told "Good thing about being the living dead, no more jogging."

While it's no Maltese Falcon, the artifact at the center of the mayhem is the Heart of Belial. The owner of it gets to bring back a demon who will destroy everyone the owner doesn't like. Or so the legend says. No one ever reads the fine print.

There is one good thing here, but it comes after seeing the movie, when you can read the Dylan Dog Italian comic book series by Tiziana Sclavi. Better yet, I'd recommend doing that instead of seeing this movie.

Mexican Lobby Card: Voodoo Woman

It's confusing: this lobby card is for Voodoo Woman (1957), but the title on the card reads The Gold Idol. Go figure. Speaking of figures, the usual scared female victim scantilly dressed and spear-waving natives, framed with that frightful monster face lighting up the background, tones this lobby card perfectly. Not tastefully, mind you, but in that B-movie-trashy-bad-it's-good way. Paul Blaisdell created, and played, the monster.

The Boogens (1981) Pressbook

The Boogens pressbook is one large paper sheet, folded to create 16 pages, with each a little under 11x17 inches in size. It's more exciting than the movie, which drags on and on and on and...

 

 

Glen or Glenda's Dolores Fuller

From Professor Kinema:

I had a very brief encounter with Dolores Fuller. On camera, during the lensing of a Professor Kinema show, I felt one of the angora sweaters she's worn and passed it around for all to touch. I snapped these two photos of her at a Chiller Convention (shown here and below).

On the table in front of her is a print of a nude photo that Ed Wood himself snapped of her. Conrad Brooks gave me a copy of the photo.

 ZC Note: PK was kind enough to send the photo to me, but it's too risque to show here. 

Bride of the Monster group shot is inscribed by Paul Marco (standing on her right).

 

 

Schlock (1973) Pressbook

I have not seen this 1973 satire by John Landis. Not sure I want to. The television promo spots for Wilfred jogged my memory about it. Not sure I'd see Wilfred either. But the pressbook is impressive, so I just might catch Schlock.

 

 

Book Review: Zombie Economics Financial Survival Is Up To You

Zombos Says: Very Good

The premise of Zombie Economics: A Guide to Personal Finance is simple: "every skill required to survive an economic disaster mirrors a skill required to survive the zombie apocalypse." To authors Lisa Desjardins and Rick Emerson, those skills include knowing where the zombies are (your bills and other expenditures), and making sure you stock up on ammo (your savings) to keep them from putting the bite on you (your financial doom). This lively personal economics survival 101 course covers the essentials, with a continuing fictional storyline across chapters to remind you it's you against them at all times. No one's coming to your rescue (unless you live on Wall Street). 

Worksheets abound to help you identify where all the weapons are (itemizing your cash flow and where it all goes), and why walking into a graveyard during a zombie apocalypse could be suicide (leaving your job when you cant' afford to).

But in case you are foolish enough to do so--or get unwillingly tossed into it by circumstance --they've included a chapter to help you "not eat your own brain" during unemployment. I was out of work for seven months during the lesser recession before this great recession, and I can tell you eating your own brain isn't tasty, but when you're out of work and getting desperate, you'll be sorely tempted to do so. If you're still out job hunting during this wonderful-for-Wall-Street rebound you know what I mean.

Any one of the chapters in Zombie Economics could be fleshed out more, but Desjardins and Emerson's goal is to provide a firm footing for your monetary survival, especially for the young person facing a future of potential terrors from voracious credit card debt and lumbering bills that refuse to die.  The zombie paradigm provides an entertaining way to get this important information across. 

Before it's too late.