From Zombos' Closet

Movie Pressbook: The Giant of Marathon (1959)

Here's the giant pressbook for a giant movie. Fans of Steve Reeves and peplum movies will certainly appreciate it. I do.

Mexican Lobby Card: Las Manos Sangrientas

Graphic Book Review: John Constantine, Hellblazer The Family Man

Zombos Says: Very Good

There's a stale air constantly surrounding John Constantine. Maybe it's the smell of cheap cologne (or maybe the need for it) and cheaper cigarettes, or maybe it's the odor of death and the supernatural places he's usually mired in. Then again, it could be all those weird word Britishisms he utters such as "sufti" (it means to take a quick look around), combined with his ruffled,  just rolled out of bed look. With so many writers and artists handling and mishandling him, you'd expect he'd appear a little rough around the edges and surly in his manner at any given moment. Which suits him and us just fine. It helps cover the fact that, for an occult detective, he sure hates to resort to occult things to work out his problems.

Keep in mind this is the older Constantine, pre-52; the guy in the desperately-in-need-of-a-cleaning tan trench coat. The foul-mouthed guy who smoked too much, complained too much, and looked like sh*t too much because he constantly stepped into it--sometimes on purpose, most times not. He's also the Constantine who moved obliquely through his issues with sarcasm and dry wit and a strong sense of doing what's right first off, or making things right after the fact; although it may take him a little time to get it done. In-between those times the stories continued across issues, like loose threads waiting to pulled, then balled up together with one final effort. Only it never seems to end for Constantine does it?

This collection of issues 23, 24, and 28 through 33 spins his world directly, and adjacent to, the Family Man, a serial killing non-occult monster whose backstory crops up as explanation for his insanity, but we really don't care because he's so vile in what he's doing. Constantine unexpectedly crosses paths with him, doesn't realize it, and before he's onto the trail again he's already botched it badly, giving the killer his next full-course blood-letting.

Issue 23 sets up the Family Man's entry, issue 24 reveals how old friends can become new strangers, and the hunt fully begins in issue 28. Issue 23 is one of the oddest ones in the Constant One's aging run (definitely an issue Neil Gaiman would love). It bumps a real character of Constantine's acquaintance, who he's paying a casual visit to, with fictional characters unhappy with how much of a fictional character's traits said acquaintance has appropriated. Winnie the Pooh and his literary compatriots take action. Another pack of cigarettes is desperately needed to handle the situation, and maybe a few drinks wouldn't hurt, but Jamie Delano's dialog and situations get wilder and wilder. Ron Tiner's heavy lines and grainy scenes are hard on the eyes, but fit Constantine's world so darn well. Fu Manchu (looking very much like Christopher Lee) makes a cameo, as does Sherlock Holmes, Peter Pan, and a volume's worth of minor characters in the span of 24 pages, with nary a dull panel throughout.

Tiner receives an assist from Kevin Walker in the middle issues, but his pencils look better without the help, and Steve Pugh, Dean Motter, and Sean Phillips take over the art eventually. The differences are noticeable, but not distracting. Dick Foreman guest writes New Tricks for issue 32, wherein a dog and his master reverse roles in a Junk Yard, leaving a few characters in pieces. Bloody ones. I can't tell if it's Pugh's testy habit or the colorist, Ziuko's, failing, but white highlights and white halos around foreground elements kick this dog's story's panels here and there as only 1990s artsy indiscretions could. The play on words here involving "bulldog" and "Drummond," is a saving grace, however.

By issue 30 Constantine's Family Man dilemma is resolved, but issue 31 relates an after effect of one death that needs to be put to rest, and issue 33 is a tough one to figure out for both Constantine and us. It plays like a fill-in between more important issues, but you never can tell with Hellblazer's John Constantine.

And that's a good thing.

Movie Pressbook: Maryjane (1968)

The shocking facts behind the marijuana controversy!

Mexican Lobby Card: Beneath the 12-mile Sea

Movie Pressbook: Paranoiac! (1963)

The splendidly off-kilter Oliver Reed takes a fun Hammer outing. And let's not forget that "Liliane Brousse introduces a highly attractive hair style in Paranoiac." Not sure if they meant higly attractive to the killer or to the audience, though.

The Evil of Frankenstein (1964) Pressbook

And again, Peter Cushing crushes it as the amoral and somewhat mad Doctor Frankenstein. Some fans hate the Monster's design, but I'm quite fine with it. Just don't call him blockhead and we're good.

Comic reader version: Download Evil of Frankenstein Pressbook

See more pressbooks From Zombos' Closet.

The Sinful Allure of the Mexican Vampire

Although the Spanish version of Dracula would be the first celluloid vampire to terrify Mexico’s moviehouse audiences in 1931, it wasn’t until El Vampiro in 1957 that a home-grown vampire would flutter across the fogbound hacienda. Predating and, in key ways, anticipating the more dynamic blood-thirst in Hammer’s Dracula (released as Horror of Dracula in the United States), El Vampiro shows sharp canine fangs, energetic neck biting with no blood, just tiny puncture wounds, and a prim and virtuous heroine with lots of clothing to protect her feminine virtues. Abel Salazar plays Dr. Enrique, a reluctant believer in the supernatural as well as a decidedly more amour-minded Van Helsing type than Peter Cushing’s vampire slayer. Overt sensuality and ample bosoms would have to wait until Hammer’s horror productions in lurid color.

In El Vampiro, Count Lavud (German Robles) is more interested in acquiring land than Count Dracula’s (Christopher Lee) interest in acquiring more brides. Both noblemen vampires, however, share the same charisma and evening wear that began with Bela Lugosi, but add a stronger machismo and faster pulse for energetic dramatics.

The lobby cards for El Vampiro highlight the vampire’s threat to society’s norms of hacienda and family-motivated romance. Azteca printed (in the United States) and distributed lobbies using an actual photo pasted to the card, depicting a key scene from the movie. They were displayed in American moviehouses that catered to Spanish-speaking audiences. Note the use of the spider’s webbing in the background, radiating from Count Lavud: it’s reminiscent of the spider’s web used in Lugosi’s Dracula poster art and indirectly associates the Universal horror mystique to El Vampiro’s production. Abel Salazar was a fan of Universal’s Gothicism (and its money-making acumen) and copied it here and in his subsequent productions. He added a distinctly native flavor and style in the process. Of course, the vampire-fighting masked luchadores were waiting in the wings to stomp, throw, and slam their way into the genre, but that’s another story, as well as another decade.

An alternative image of Count Lavud holding an unconscious female victim in nightgown, with her neckline opened to show more bosom, than was ever seen in the movie, appeared in the indigenous poster and lobby card artwork. It possibly followed after El Vampiro entered later distribution to second and third-run moviehouses. As the Mexican vampire mythology and its movies rolled out of production and into moviehouses, attitudes and exploitive elements evolved: female victims and female vampires predominated in advertising, unseating the primarily masculine role model of vampiric evil intentions, opening to more suggestive elements to bring in the male audiences with the allure of a naughty (but very sexy) vampire kiss, while also appealing to female audiences with its implications of dominance over men and control of their machismo. Interestingly, there is a slight variation between the poster and lobby card artwork in how much decolletage is shown: in the poster, the right breast is covered by the nightgown; in the lobby card artwork, the right breast is partially revealed.

The sequel to El Vampiro is El Atuad Del Vampiro, 1958 (The Vampire’s Coffin). The lobby card artwork is bloodless and sexless, but still impressive and direct, showing a really big stake driven through Count Lavud’s heart. And its intrusion doesn't ruffle his evening clothes, which are still neatly pressed and unstained. For the Azteca version, the looming threat of the vampire (albeit more in line with spookshow theatrics than real terror) is uppermost in the artwork as he rises from his open coffin as a giant bat-like menace, with Abel Salazar returning to confront the reawakened count and protect Marta, played by Ariadna Welter.

1963’s La Invasion De Los Vampiros (The Invasion of the Vampires), which again pits a doctor against the vampiric menace, shows more provocative and exploitative elements in its lobby card and poster artwork. The sexy allure of a see-through nightgown-dressed female standing against a backdrop of moon and bats and gravestones, with a clock face hinting at the midnight hour, suggests more luridness than shown in the movie’s plot of Count Frankenhausen’s menacing of the local villagers. Due to Hammer’s marketing prowess with its vampire and monster series, Mexican vampire movies, in their poster and lobby card artwork at least, began showing more bodily contours to imply more sexuality, and La Invasion De Los Vampiros’s illustrations alternately made that see-through nightgown more or less revealing across its poster and lobby card iterations. But this freeing up of exploitation advertising was only just beginning.

My article, The Sinful Allure of the Mexican Vampire, first appeared in We Belong Dead No.11.

Mexican Lobby Card: El Secuaz De Lucifer

Particularly lurid, pulp-cover stolen illustrations, with very poor printing quality, make this Mexican lobby card a true gem of cheap exploitation art.

Mexican Lobby Card: El Senor...Tormenta

Graphic Book Review: Ghosted Volume 1: Haunted Heist

Zombos Says: Very Good

A haunted mansion, a team of supernatural investigators, and an odd request join together in Ghosted: Haunted Heist to bring ghostly terrors waiting in the Trask Mansion out of the woodwork . You're familiar with the Trask Family, aren't you? Of course you are. Like any perfectly functioning familial unit filled with serial-killing miscreants, the Trasks have managed to kill, make disappear, and commit enough urban legend trauma on close to a hundred people who never left the mansion after they arrived. Not while alive, anyway.

This five-issue series from Image Comics comprising Joshua Williamson's storyline could have used at least one more issue to lessen the hastily explained revelations he piles on top of each other in issue five. Up to then you will think the story's going one way, but then it goes down another, without much cleverly hidden, but necessary, preparation to ease the transition. It just happens rapidly and it's assumed we will accept it all at face value. Tsk. Tsk.

But this is still a good story, with a classic sense of scares and their timing: how can you not love a haunted mansion with wall to wall ghosts, a rich man who wants to add one of them to his occult collection, an ex-convict (actually, he was never officially released), and an assembled group of talented people who'd fit in nicely on an episode of either television's Ghost Hunters or Oddities.

There's Edzia Rusnak, the psychic and medium who's either really good or really fake; the so-so stage magician, Robby Trick, who has a knack for real magic and stealing occult items;  Oliver King, who mainly detects bullshit, so he's the skeptic in the group (yes, actually there's a reason to have him onboard); the TV ghosthunting team of Jay and Joe Burns, and yes, they do get burned badly here; and let's not forget that ex-convict, Jackson Winters, who's involved because he's experienced a nasty event at a casino heist he orchestrated, where his entire team died, badly, under mysterious circumstances. 

That dying badly part helps to explain why the rich collector of oddities and soon ghosts, Markus, has Anderson Lake (no, he's a she) spring Winters from jail, killing just about every convict and corrections officer in the process. She's a mean mother who dresses in...wait for it...a black jumpsuit. I know. I know. Ever since Emma Peel donned one in television's The Avengers back in the 1960s (and, oh god awfully yes, even in that mess of a movie with the badly miscast Uma Thurman), every dozing writer pulls it out of his flush pile when plain clothes simply won't do for active women of intrigue. 

Then Williamson writes one of the simply funniest three-panel dialog exchanges you will ever see in a comic book, so I won't beat him over the head too much for resorting to black jumpsuit cliches in a pinch. He also has Winters agree to the ghost heist only if Markus provides him with a Sinatra-like blue suit, a Russian hooker with big ones--real or fake don't matter--and a shave. I presume Williamson can shave himself, though, without a Russian accent.

Helping keep Williamson's writing visually appealing is Goran Sudzuka's dark, horror-filled panels. While he's not one for detailed backgrounds, he's stellar at drawing characters, conveying every nuance of their truths, deceits, and fears with aplomb. The colorist, Miroslav Mrva, is a tad heavy-handed, saturating scenes with too much color more often than I'd like, but then surprises by coming up with spot-on tones for an interior bedroom scene at night and a nocturnal voodoo scene. The Trask mansion and its ghosts under Sudzuka's and Mrva's hands come to life in a strong House of Secrets kind of way. 

The storyline provides basic but classic themes for fans of supernatural horror to savor. Each issue provides enough of the story to carry on by itself, but combined here, the entire run is witty, creepy, and well-plotted between scenes of action, exposition, and mounting tensions; perfect for a quiet late evening at home and read with one light on.

Mexican Lobby Card: Los Tigres De Korea (1951)

Here's the Mexican lobby card for Korea Patrol (1951). You can see an alternate version here.