UZUMAKI

2000/Director: Higuchinsky/Writers: Junji Ito (manga), Kengo Kaji (supervising screenwriter)

Cast: Eriko Hatsune, Fhi Fan, Hinako Saeki, Eun-Kyung Shin, Keiko Takahashi, Ren Osugi

I think I have mentioned in a few previous posts about my ambivalence towards more modern Japanese  horror films(and Asian in general, though I consider Japan to be yardstick by which the rest of Asian cultures is measured, for better or worse), or cinema in general. With rare exceptions I find most of it  all wanting and repetitive and I much prefer the Japanese cinema prior to about 1970. Uzumaki is for me one  of the exceptions. I had long put off watching this movie for one reason or another, but it was on my list of films to see before I died so I finally popped it in the DVD player and was morbidly pleased with the results, though it is a far from a perfect horror film. I got the BT from demonnoid.com and was surprised to the find the entire manga comic series by Junji Ito included. I included, free of charge, a few pages for readers to check out. To honest I had no ideas this was based on a comic book unit I opened the folder. But like the film I was pleased with the story and art which I glanced over. I tend to not like the goofy looking fairy like characters that adorn the majority of manga comics and I felt the pen and ink drawing sin Junji Ito’s story to look more like the b/w independent stuff coming out of the US from places like Fantagraphic books, which to me are better drawings.

The story takes place in the small Japanese city of Kurouzu which has come under the curse of evil spirals (or vortexs as they are called in the translation). It is not clear why the town is cursed but soon schoolgirl Kirie and her childhood boyfriend Shuichi are at the center of the escalating nightmare. Kirie finds Shuichi’s father absorbed in filming the spiral patterns on a snail’s back one day on the way home from school. Soon there is a suicide at the school when a boy leaps from the top of a very high spiral staircase, landing at the bottom with blood and brains splattered everywhere. Things get more and more out of control as Shuichi’s father loses his mind under the influence of the vortex curse, one night almost losing control when there are no more spiral patterned naturo fish rolls in his miso soup. That makes me pissed off too. He convinces Kirie’s father, a pottery maker, that the vortex is the highest form of art and asks him to design a vortex patterned plate. Soon Kirie’s father is pulled into the curse and distintigrates menatlly and physically. The home situations not the only concerns since at school students are turning into snails and having their hair grow out into elaborate spiral like designs the size of trees. The spiral (vortexes… it really bothers me how these films are translated at times. The term spiral is never once used though sometimes it is the better word to use. We do not say a “votex staircase”) motif appears all over the film, though not as frequently as in the comic book story. Eventually even the dark clouds in the sky assume a menacing spiral pattern.

Shuichi’s father eventually decides he wants to become a vortex himself. What better way to achieve this than to crawl into the washing machine and click it on. His mother winds up in the hospital in despair and she soon clips off all her hair as to eliminate any spiral designs. Soon she realizes her finger prints are spirals and…well… you can guess the rest right? She kills herself after a centipede tries to slither down her ear and soon her dead husband is calling to her from the other side, where there are perfect vortexes. Shuichi himself gets all tied in knots, literally, and in the last scenes we see the towns people all under the effects of the vortex curse, except for Kirie and we do not know what becoems of her. One memorable scene has her stalker admirer throwing himself under a moving car so she will always remember him and he gets all twisted around the wheel and rim. The film ends with unanswered questions but most movies like this do. The comic book seemed to go off into other directions, such as many of the town’s folk turning into dangerous zombie like creatures. While some people in the film appear “zombiefied” they never collect together and terrorize Kirie as they do in the manga story. The film is shot using a greenish hue and it looks eerie. The music score is good and the acting above average. There are no gratuitous school girl panty shots and no sex, which is actually a relief and gives this Japanese shocker a boost in the credibility department. So many newer Japanese horror films are of the Pinku Eiga style, which is simply softcore porn with a few mutilations thrown in to balance things out. Nothing like seeing a young naked Japanese school girl in one scene and then a disemboweled, blood drenched one in the next to push all the borderline personalities watching right over the edge. I thought the film was creepy and well made and the effects and photography are pretty good for this style of movie. Get the comic book if you can, if that is your bag, as I think it is actually a better story.

SAMPLES FROM JUNJI ITO’S MASTERFUL MANGA COMIC UZUMAKI

VIDEO TRAILER FOR UZUMAKI

Shortly after Creepy magazine hit the newsstands in 1964 publisher James Warren put out the anti-war themed quarterly Blazing Combat. The magazine was heavily influenced by the war stories found in the EC titles edited by Harvy Kurtzman, such as Two Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat. EC artists such as Wally Wood, Russ Heath, Alex Toth  and John Severin would contribute to the short lived Blazing Combat. The title only lasted four issues from October 1965 to July 1966. There seems to be little speculation as to why this finely written (all but one story was written by Archie Goodwin) and drawn comic magazine went under. It was released during a period of escalation in the Vietnam War and its anti-war themes did not go over well with distributors and wholesalers. The American Legion initiated a boycott against the book chiefly because of one story called Landscape which takes place in Vietnam and ends with the senseless death of a simple rice farmer by American troops on a vengeance raid of the village. Earlier in the story the village is also razed by the Viet Cong. The hostility from distributors caused to magazine to lose more money than Warren was willing to settle for. As well other Warren magazine titles became threatened and after a mere four issues what is considered some of the greatest war comics ever ended with a whimper and not a bang.

The stories were not in the vain of most men’s action magazines of the time that, while not necessarily glorifying combat, exploited it and sensationalized it with lurid adventures. Blazing Combat focused more on the loss and tragedy of war. I will say this as an objection to what is seen as most “anti-war” books and films (are there really any pro-war movies or comics ?) and that is that they overly focus on the misdeeds of the evil empire, the United States while showing a needless sympathy for the enemy, as is shown in the story below called Souvenir illustrated by great war/western artist John Severin. I have all the Blazing Combat and I am not aware of one story  that focuses on the brutality of the Japanese on the Bataan Death March. Many books and films of today show the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and portray the Americans in a dim light at best, but few explore the long chain of events that led to the bomb being dropped at all. I would like to see a Hollywood film that focuses on the events inside Unit 731 in North east China where the Imperial Army, among other things, tested the bubonic plague on Chinese prisoners. I think such a film would be more interested the amnesty granted the scientist there by the occupying powers (i.e. the USA) in exchange for research data. And quickly, I do not think the two Iwo Jima films by Clint Eastwood do much to explain why American were on some desolate, volcanic island making morally ambivalent decisions in the first place. It focuses on the negative actions of the States and yes, the Japanese military as well, though I feel the presentations were lopsided. For example when the American soldier is killed when he lands inside Sarabachi the Japanese are portrayed as being driven by the incessant bombing to kill him. Later when the reformed and now saintly Kempeitai officer is held by two Americans he is shot in cold blood by a faceless G.I.. Anyway, I digress, those are films and this is a comic book post.

Well, war is never pretty and Blazing Combat did not try to fluff it up at all, even if the de-fluffing came at the expense of the American side of the story. The story below called Give and Take, drawn by the masterful Russ Heath, simply shows how a allied soldier in Italy risks his life (and loses it) simply for a fine bottle of wine, or for something that reminds him of his old life and of the more pleasant things in the world he is now deprived of. The story is superbly illustrated by the man who would later do such fine, detailed work on the Sgt Rock stories for D.C.. His work on the series would, in my opinion, over shadow the great renderings by Joe Kubert.

And of course how can anyone ignore those unbelievable covers by Frank Frazetta. I wish he had done more stuff like this along with his fantasy style paintings. I would love to have seen a battle of Britain style painting by the master for this series, or a pen and ink drawn interior story. The paintings contain more of a pro America message than the interior work does and has classic, heroic themes done in Frazetta style. Issue 3’s cover reminds me of the Lancer paperback cover for Conan the Adventurer, where a mighty Conan stands on top of a pile of his brutally slain enemy.  For some reason I enjoy the site of an American G.I. standing over a pile of slain Viet Cong. All in all just breath taking work.

Maybe the fact the series only lasted four issues adds to their mythic proportions in the history of comic books. I have all the stories here and expect to see more over time.

GIVE AND TAKE DRAWN BY RUSS HEATH

SOUVENIRS DRAWN BY JOHN SEVERIN

Here are two links that give a little history of Warren Magazines. The first one is a rare interview with James Warren himself in 1998. the second one focuses on a series of legal battles between Warren and Harris Comics about the Vampirella character.

The James Warren Interview

The Harris Comics Custody Battle

Dark metal progenitor Glenn Danzig hails from Lodi New Jersey. His screaming Elvis meets Jim Morrison at Anton Levey’s Satanic church styled voice came in into the music scene with his first band The Misfits in the latter 70’s and they as were raw and viscous as anything else that was punk and east coast at the time. What set The Misfits apart was not their musicianship but Danzig’s unique howl and his penchant for building catchy hooks around B-Movie themes, such as Astro Zombies, Return of the Fly and Night of the Living Dead. The band’s onstage appearance was spooky and their garb and make-up seems to predate both Goth fashion and even the Black Metal look that would come out of Scandinavia with bands like Mayhem and Emperor. I am familiar with this band through a couple anthologies I have and the music is stripped down and played pretty fast. The songs are loaded with dark humor and inferences to old sci-fi and horror films. The band’s label was even called Plan 9 records after the Ed Wood Jr. cult movie classic Plan 9 from Outer Space.

The Misfits were a hard rocking outfit and their brief moment on the punk scene proved to be more of an influence on later bands and trends than Danzig would have ever cared to admit. He mostly dismisses his time with the band now but says it was a fun time. It served as a suitable vehicle to release his dark vision with a theatrical flare he become adept at. There is some sort of band now called The Misfits that I know little about except that they dress up the same way and play sounds about midnight movies.  I have heard a couple songs even and they do not sound that bad but do not be confused, this is not the same Misfits that penned such immortal lines as:

I’ve got something to say, I killed your baby today.
An’ it doesn’t matter much to me as long as it’s dead.
An’ I’ve got somethng to say. I raped your mother today.
An it doesn’t matter much to me as long as she’s spread.

The Misfits spilt up after prolonged disputes in 1983 and Danzig went on to form Samhain. Everyone probably knows that is the original Celtic word for what has come to be known as Halloween during the good ol’ pagan days. Samhain is the lesser known period of Danzig’s career. It is the bridge period between the now legendary Misfits and the later to come Danzig period. There are a few significant changes in the musical approach that challenge the criticisms that Samhain was just the Misfits with out the punk. The music did slow down and became heavier and brooding, and that seems be to Danzig’s liking since ultimately that is where his sound would evolve. The lyrics became less about midnight movies and more about dark and demonic themes. Danzig appears to take his occult matters seriously at times (and tongue in cheek at others)and he seems as if he comes from some dark castle in Norway rather than Bruce Springsteen’s backyard. Another element is that the music and production is simply better than The Misfits. I have Intium and the EP Unholy Passion. Unholy has some really dark guitar by Pete Damien. I have not explored the other albums too much although I do own them all.

During the live shows Danzig would appear on stage covered in fake blood (I assume) wearing a leather cowl and S&M looking garb and was known to make use of his sizable biceps by actually leaping into the audience and pulverizing ungracious fans. Again internal strife signaled time for change and Danzig formed a long lasting partnership with Def American Record’s Rick Rubin and with bassist Eerie Von dropped the Samhain band name and formed what is now known in one incarnation or another as Danzig. I do have a special note concerning Danzig the band before going further. Pete Damien was canned (Danzig is notorious for firing band members and the line up list is exhausting to look at) and replaced him with heavy blues based guitarist John Christ (nice last name for a Satanic metal band’s guitarist wouldn’t you say?) who is from Baltimore Maryland and was school mates with my old cult movie pal in Seattle Matt Gehringer who shared some small school stories of John before he filled in on guitar for some of Danzig’s finest moments before he too was sacked after a couple fantastic albums.

Essentially Samhain and Danzig were pretty much the same entity at one time and some Samhain projects were even finished a couple years after albums were being produced under the Danzig name. A Samhain reunion tour happened in 1999 but Danzig has since said there would never be another. There is bad blood between him and Eerie Von and Peter Damien and Danzig does not seem like one to waste time trying to rekindle long dead fires. He is a work horse it seems and has plenty of other activities to keep him busy.

The first three Danzig albums, the eponymous Danzig, Lucifuge and How the God’s Kill are considered to be some of the best stuff Danzig has ever produced. They were followed by a live EP Thrall Demon’s Sweat Live that contained the live version of the FM hit Mother and the not too bad Danzig 4. But the first albums showed a marked departure from what he had been doing in The Misfits and Samhain, which despite his seriousness sometimes were simply campy and comical and at other times just poorly played and produced. On Lucifuge his voice was just so astonishing that it is really beyond belief. And not only his voice but the direction of the band had become clearer aswell and John Christ’s simple but heavy and tight guitar work was something sorely needed for Danzig’s soaring vocals. The band left the indiscipline of punk behind and moved into more polished metal territory. The vision of the music became more centered around typical metal themes and were even a tad epic in their scope at times. The Lucifuge album is one of my favorite albums really and if you are curious about Danzig but not familiar I would recommend you start with this one. Simply because his voice is so powerful and the guitar work is clear, professional and heavy.

As the 90’s decade advanced there were the obligatory numerous firings and line up changes. The list is long my friend but the outfits tended to be pretty tight and heavy in a dark aspect. However in the mid 90’s Danzig took it upon himself to release a strange album called Black Aria, which is an instrumental album of drone sounds and strings. It is Wagnerian in its intent but rock stars should not dabble in Wagner. I listened to a few minutes of it once and turned it off and never listened to it again. It was not want I wanted from Danzig I guess. Call me narrow minded. I can listen to the Bach Cello Suites if I want this type of thing, but who knows, I still have the music here somewhere and maybe I will give it a try again. Sometimes you can put something away for years and return to it and see it from a different angle.

But even stranger is the next album called Blackacidevil which I always tried to give him the benefit of the doubt on because he was so attacked by fans and critics but finally have to admit I do not like it too much myself. It seems to be an attempt at a heavt metal techno sound and there seems to be drum machines and all that industrial banging stuff which is great by bands like Ministry and Nine Inch Nails but not so endurable here.

In any case Danzig returned with a some decent heavy albums in the late 90’s and early 21st century such as Satan’s Child 6.66, I Luciferi and Circle of Snakes. I listened to I Luciferi for a month a while back and felt it was a return to the sound he had done during the early Danzig albums. Yes, some bands can branch out and experiment and do a variety of things and still pull it off. Other bands need to stay close to what it is they do best, or they might wind up like Metallica.

Danzig ultimatley did not wind up in some experimental abyss and though his material is sometimes weak, as is any performers, it is very strong at others and even on his worst albums his voice is dynamic and driven. It is a dark world his lyrics and music creates but not one full of angst and morbid, suicidal gloom. It is more like an atmospheric horror movie. Some songs are like 50’s rock roll played for an audience of demons in Hades (such as Blood and Tears on Lucifuge). All in all good stuff. But the Danzig legacy does not end with gothic metal music. Nay, there is but but one more chapter in Glenn’s creative universe we should peek into before we close the book.

Verotik Comics is Glenn Danzig’s foray into the field of comic book publishing and writing. The company came about in the 90’s while some of his Danzig projects were floundering a little. His energy was focused, I speculate, into getting his comic book titles off the ground and accepted in the comic book world. The company has been successful but do not expect to run down to the drug store comic book stand and pick these titles up. They are ultra violent and sexual and are found in comic book stores to be sold to persons over 18 only. A couple more popular titles are Santanika an Verotika and his list of talents include among others Frank Frazetta himself who has supported Danzig’s company and its policy of total creative freedom to the writer and artists. Other artists include Simon Bisley (sample from Prophesy included) and the legendary Esteban Maroto who did some of the greatest Warren stories ever, including some very sexy Vampirellas. I will let Danzig express himself in closing on the subject of Verotik comics:

“If an adult’s comics purchases are still limited to Superman and The X-Men, I think he or she needs their head examined. There’s nothing wrong with those titles, but with so many great comics out there that are pushing the envelope of what comics can be, I think people are really missing the boat. My feeling is that if a publisher is not hiring the best possible artist and writer, giving them artistic freedom and backing them with quality production, why bother?”

For further info check out these two Danzig based sites with Satan’s blessings.

http://www.the7thhouse.com/

http://www.danzig-verotik.com/verotik/

THREE SELECTIONS FROM THE MISFITS WITH DANZIG

Attitude

Last Caress

Return of the Fly

THREE SELECTIONS FROM DANZIG’S SECOND SOLO ALBUM LUCIFUGE

Long Way back from Hell

I’m the One

Blood and Tears

JENIFER

2005/Director: Dario Argento/Screenplay: Steven Weber, Story by Bruce Jones

.
Cast: Steven Weber, Carrie Anne Fleming, Brenda James, Harris Allan, Beau Starr, Laurie Brunetti, Kevin Crofton, Julia Arkos, Jasmine Chan

Some people simply worship Dario Argento. For years and years I just figured I was missing something or that I was not enough of a true film fanatic to see the brilliance in his work that his rabid sycophants did. Now I remember my reactions to films like Tenebre ( by the way, the second picture from the left in my banner is a scene from Tenebre I touched up in Photoshop) and Phenomenon and even his “magnum opus” Suspiria and do not feel I was so out of touch by feeling confused and bewildered. They were not really great movies at all in my opinion. Maybe not terrible movies, but Tenebre was so… so… terrible that I do not see what the big deal has always been about that movie. Okay there was a great axe murder scene with a spurting stump, but the rest of the film was so weird and Italian.

A pensive Dario Argento comtemplates taking a night

course in how to direct a sensible narrative.

Often supporters will admit his narrative technique lacks…well… narrative technique and that his story lines are illogical and incohesive and that his true skill lies in his camera work and atmospheric settings. I have even read some people compare his work to Mario Bava’s. There is no comparison and his technical skill and set designs are average at best even in his better work. The last thing I saw before Jenifer was something called Do You Like Hitchcock, and I figured it would have all these slick Hitchcockian references and gags but it had nothing of the sort really, not on any sophisticated level anyway. It was a goofy movie with a typical Argetno ending that was more like the ending to an EC comic book than a good horror/suspense movie. Well, now that I have expressed my general feeling about this “horror genius” let me give you my opinion of a short piece he did for the cable TV series called Masters of Horror (view my insightful comment on Takashi Miike’s ode to to incest and abortion Imprint elsewhere in the Café).

Poor Steven Weber comes home from working all day as actor and scriptwriter for horror megalomaniac Dario Argento and has to settle for cold cuts for dinner again.

Jenifer is a short made for TV film and to be honest, I did not completely dislike it, in the same way I did not dislike another shorter work Argento did in a double-feature called Two Evil Eyes with George Romero , where he did a graphic and psychotic version of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Black Cat with Harvey Kietel in the lead role. Neither of the episodes were great pieces and hit and miss master Romero absolutely wasted one hour of my life with a Creepshow style “return from the dead and chase the girl ( played by the amply endowed Adrienne Barbeau ) around the house” story, but the shortness of the pieces made them endurable and somewhat enjoyable really. Honestly, I am not expecting Martin Scorcese or David Lean when I watch this stuff. Argento’s narration challenged approaches that undo his longer films were thankfully absent in these two shorter films (each about one hour long) and I found both of them decent little horror bits. Of course in Argento’s hands Jenifer has more than a few problems. Some of these can be excused if you realize the story is from a comic book story by Bruce Jones and illustrated by Bernie Wrightson ( I even found page samples below on the net). So we are not transposing Poe from paper to film here. Jones is a capable writer of suspense and horror comics that typically have a surprise twist at the end in the way older style horror comics did, such as the EC and Warren titles did, as well as the old Marvel and DC titles from the turn of the 70’s period.

Lovely Carrie Anne Fleming before Dario Aregento gave her a make over.

The general story is this: Police detective Frank Spivey (Steve Weber) rescues a girl from being murdered with a meat cleaver by an apparently homeless, deranged man. The man is shot and mutters the girl’s name with his last breath: Jenifer. As it turns out Jenifer is a mentally retarded and grotesquely deformed girl who happens to have a knock out body. For some reason Spivey allows the girl to live in his house where in no time she bites his wife in the face, rips the family cat to bits and is found sucking on its entrails in the bathroom, murders a carnival circus freak collector and chops him up and hides him the frig, then finally murders the innocent, little neighbor girl and does the same to her as the cat (I might add that no police ever appear to question anyone in the disappearance of the child… is this the same country that has the Amber alert?). During all this Spivey allows the slobbering freak to seduce him in bed and does not try to stop his wife and teenage son from leaving. To regain his balance and perspective on life he decides the best thing to do is to quit his career as a police detective and live in a run down , ratty cabin in the woods. Needing a career change he manages to beg a woman into giving him as job as a stock boy in a local grocery store. He lets Jenifer hang out at the cabin all day while he stacks pinto beans and toilet paper but she sneaks into town and sees him chatting with the woman and gets jealous and stalks her teenage son at an outdoor teenage party. Later Spivey finds her chomping on his guts in a tool shed. Needless to say he finally decides enough is enough (most guy’s would have decided that when he bit their wife’s face or ate the house cat and when they took a gander at her mutant face) and takes Jenifer out to kill her with an axe, but is shot by a hunter who rescues Jenifer and no not doubt the cycle starts all over.

Miss Fleming as Jenifer, a girl not concerned with the politics of vegetarianism.

The movie is a no brainer and to try and make anything more of out it is a lost cause. That a man like Spivey, no matter how unhappy, would throw away his family and career and cover up the murder of a child to protect a mentally retarded deformed girl who is “good” in bed is simply too unbelievable. Yes men can be slime, but most would not do this even to protect a Playboy Playmate! The violence is excessive and is simply exploitive gore. Every murder involves intestines and body organs and the scene of the nude little girl being gnawed on is simply bad taste. It the type of trick a no talent film maker would employ, the proverbial hammer on the head, trying to appear controversial because they are incapable of doing anything else. I put a photo of Argento in front of a fire place in this post that typifies the guy in my opinion. He is really trying to be this master of cinematic horror and wants us to be intrigued by his dark mind and black heart but ultimately his work is lacking and directionless and falls back over and over again on outdated shock and gore gimmicks to hold it together. You cannot say the same of Argento’s role model Mario Bava, though Bava did dabble amply in violence and even gore, but at his peak he was a brilliant film maker. While I admit Argento can be engaging and entertaining on one level I simply do not consider him to be in the same league as Bava.  Argento did do much to usher in the revival of the “giallo” style films in the 70’s and his use of color is sometimes interesting, but it is the continual lack of consistency that I find annoying with this guy’s work as a whole. All that being said, reviews on Deep Red, Suspria and Tenebre are coming one day.

THE BLOB

1958/ Director: Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr./ Writers: Kay Linaker (writer, as Kate Philips), Theodore Simonson, Irvine Millgate (story)

Cast: Steve McQueen, Aneta Corsaut, Earl Rowe, Olin Howland, Alden ‘Stephen’ Chase, John Benson, Lee Paton, Vincent Barbi

The Blob is a successful combining of the horror and teenage delinquent film genres. While the teens in the film are not really ‘delinquents” in my opinion they are still teenagers and therefore what they say and do is always suspect to the local adults. The film was a success for the time at the box office, which must have really irked new leading man “Steven” McQueen who opted for a one lump payment of $2,500 to $3,000 (depending where you read) rather than 10% of the profits, which went over $4 million. Also it seems the young McQueen appeared promising enough to be offered a three film contract from the film’s producers, but he was so difficult to work with he was released from the contract. He would of course go on to become a film legend in Hollywood. The movie was made outside Hollywood (shot around Valley Forge Pennsylvania) by an independent film company, Valley Forge Films (formally Good News Productions, a company that made Christian films with director Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr ), and it is nicely shot film in deep colors and pretty well acted for a late 50’s horror film.

First I want to say that this film, along with the next feature, X-The Unknown, were two movies that terrorized me as a boy of about 12 or 13. Both movies are about an amorphous substance that is slimy and oozy and can slither, creep and crawl under things or get though ventilator grills easily. This posed a real problem for me at night trying to sleep and I remember covering the heating vents on my floor with encyclopedias to prevent entry, but knowing in my heart that if the Blob (or X) wanted in there was no way I was going to stop them.

The movie opens up with young Steven Andrews (McQueen) putting the moves on the classic “I’m not that kind of girl”  tease Jane Martin (Aneta Corsaut, who was Andy Griffith’s gal on The Andy Griffith Show) up on the local lover’s lane. While Steven assures her his intentions are honorable and she in not just another girl a meteorite (The movie’s working title were, among others,  The Meteorite Monster and The Molten Meteorite) crashes to earth over the nearby hills. An old man played by veteran actor Olin Howland , in his last role, finds the smoldering space rocks and stars poking at it with a stick and soon has his arm covered with a flesh consuming “blob”. Steven and Jane rush him into to town, to Doc Hallen, who in turn, along with his nurse, are consumed and soon the havoc is on. Of course Steven and his teenage friends must contend with the local, skeptical adults and police who all think kids are up to no good and can’t be trusted to be honest (especially when the said high school student, like McQueen, is actually 28 years old!).

People begin disappearing though we really see about four people get eaten. This is my one real complaint about the film. At one point Lt. Dave (Earl Rowe) estimates maybe forty people have died during the night. The movie would have been more exhilarating if we had seen some of these deaths. Luckily the acting, dialog, nicely photographed scenes and cool looking monster help things move along without the visible death scenes.

After lots of futile attempts at convincing parents and cops the truth is revealed when the patrons of the local theater, who were there to see a horror movie of course, come screaming out onto the streets with the ever growing blob on their tails. Steven and Jane seek shelter in a diner after grabbing Jane’s doofy little brother who in one of the best scenes in the movies hurls his “empty” cap pistol at the creature. The blob surrounds the diner and seeks out the five people inside the diner while the rest of the town stands about fifty feet away and watches in horror. I never understood as a kid  why the blob did not just turn on the crowd and absorb all of them. Well, the weakness (all old movie monsters had one special weakness that the hero had to discover by the last ten or fifteen minutes of the movie) is soon discovered… C02 fire extinguishers. The blob is frozen and sent to the North Pole, never to be heard from again until Larry Hagman revived it in his more comical version Beware the Blob in 1972, with stoned hippies like Robert Walker, rather than hot rodding 28 year old teenagers, on the menu.

The movie is very well made and while it is a B-movie it is not what I would call a bad movie, either in a good sense or bad. The catchy title song (coming in downloadable format along with The Green Slime theme in a post or two) was co-written by Burt Bacharach and was a hit song on the radio at the time. A link to a Blob site is given below and this is a true cult classic. A remake was made in with Kevin Dillon in 1988 where the Blob is the product of yet another secret government/military agency with nothing but security and profit on its always evil agenda. Well, I like the space Blob myself and all the mystery it brought with it. The film just looks rich and nice and one can see that McQueen is a real talent in his first film role. Not to be missed. The next film on our Uranium Café Double Feature presentation is about another amorphous, oozing creature who comes not from outer space, but from the center of the Earth in an early Hammer sci-fi film called X-The Unknown.

http://theblobsite.filmbuffonline.com/

X-THE UNKNOWN

1957/Director: Leslie Norman/ Writers: Jimmy Sangster (story), Jimmy Sangster (screenplay)

Cast: Dean Jagger, Edward Chapman, Leo McKern, Anthony Newley,     Jameson Clark, William Lucas

I was really excited to finally find a copy of this film online. Along with the Blob it is a movie that left me afraid to step out of my bed at night for fear something may be lurking and oozing under it, waiting for me to get up and go to the bathroom. Originally slated to be a sequel to Hammer’s Quatermass Experiment (released as The Creeping Unknown in the States) film but when Quatermass creator/writer Nigel Kneale refused permission for use of his Bernard Quatermass character another film was put together that very much resembles the earlier Quatermass film and TV productions. American actor and Oscar winner (twelve O’clock High) Dean Jagger heads the cast with his unique voice and was apparently an attempt to draw in an American audience. The film was the first writing product for production manager Jimmy Sangster, who would later go on to write some of Hammer’s more memorable films as well as direct a handful. Direction on X was begun by American director Jospesh Losey (see my post on The Servant) who was essentially in exile in England after having been blacklisted as a communist sympathizer. Some of his scenes are supposed to be in the film even, but after a few days he was removed from the position for what was reported to be health reasons. Actually Dean Jagger refused to work for an alleged commie lover and so Leslie Norman took over the job.

The film opens in the bleak bogs of Scotland where a group of soldiers are conducting tests looking for hidden radioactive isotopes. The testing is soon interrupted when a fissure opens up and two soldiers suffer sever radiation burns. The matter is brought to Dr. Royston who has been working in his little hideaway on experiments involving radioactivity. When he inspects the fissure he concludes it very well could be bottomless and the area is sealed off. Later two boys are out on a dare and while creeping into the decrepit lodgings of a local hermit one of them encounters something and suffers lethal radiation burns. A canister of Royston’s radioactive experiment is found there, much to his consternation. There is a lot of talking and scientific explanations between the films genuinely creepy moments. Later a medical Lothario sneaks a very willing young nurse into what appears to be the x-ray room and one of the film’s best moments occurs when the flesh melts off his face after he encounters the thing. The nurse goes into one of the best horror film screams on record, so good the scene earned a place on my site’s banner. There is a lot more talking and explaining of theories but the films moves along well enough. The creature is not revealed until the last part of the film and it is not bad really. This is a couple years before the blob and the movie was obviously pinched in the budget department. But when your monster is a pile of radioactive mud you are not worried too much. The thing oozes around and over things in believable fashion and I suppose I wish we had seen more of the mass. The beast is done in of course by a quick scientific method that makes little sense but in all these old movies science is both the monster and savior.

One of the film’s more eerie moments come when a team member is lowered slowly down into the crevasse to look for signs of the creature. There he finds the remains of one of two soldiers who the creature killed earlier. The scene is dark and atmospheric and as a kid it freaked me out even though the soldier made it out alive.

The film is bleak overall and done in a pretty serious tone. Even the obligatory comic relief provided by two soldiers (one played by Cockneyesque singer/comedian-and husband of sexy shrew Joan Collins- Anthony Newley) is eliminated  when they are consumed by the pile of slithering radioactive mud. It is a movie typical of the times in most ways and the evil was something in part man made and in part unknowable. The thing is basically unstoppable, but like the Blob there was a way to destroy it if you only thought hard enough and could hang on until the last fifteen minutes of the film.

Hammer of course will always be remembered primarily for their lushly staged and designed horror films, but they did some other things as well and I think X the Unknown is one of their truly hidden gems. Hidden in a pile of radioactive sludge. A really good movie in my humble opinion and I think most regular readers of the Café will not be disappointed.

AN IMMORTAL SCREAM BY A SUPER CUTE LITTLE BRITISH NURSE

TRAILER FOR X-THE UNKNOWN

TRAILER FOR THE BLOB

Creepy number hit the stands way back in 1964, if you can believe that, and cost a mere 35 cents for 48 pages (the page content would increase soon enough) of finely drawn and written horror stories. Publisher James Warren had had some success with comics and especially with his magazine sized publication called Famous Monsters of Filmland edited by the legendary Forrest J. Ackerman. The idea Warren had for his Creepy and Eerie magazine (and later Vampirella) was to circumvent the restrictions of the comic code authority by publishing “magazines” rather than comic books. The books were to be displayed and sold in the magazine section rather than the old style rotating comic book racks one rarely sees any longer.

By today’s standards the content of the Warren line is all pretty tame but at the time it caused a small stir, and especially his Blazing Combat series, which I will do a post on later. The first Creepy ssue had some good stories drawn by greats like Reed Crandall and Al Williamson but the best one to me was the one called Werewolf drawn by Frank Frazetta . By this time Frazetta was beginning to draw less and less interior work and was turning towards doing all cover art paintings in lush color. It was written by Larry Ivie and Frazetta’s pen and ink with light wash work is simply thrilling to look at and study. My only complain about Creepy #1 would have to be the sort of out of place cover by EC and Mad Magazine great Jack Davis. I love Jack Davis but the cover does not fit and by issue #2 Frazetta would begin doing a series of immortal covers. Those will be posted here eventually in a single post gallery. My understanding is editor Russ Jones was rushed and pressured by publisher Warren for a magazine and it all came together quickly and hapzardly, with the cover art preceeding the actual title of the book, which Jones created hurriedly during a phone conversation with Warren while glancing at words balloons from a Graham Ingels comic book cover.

I remember at one time thinking how Neil Adams was the cat’s meow. Along with a few other comic books artists of the 70’s like Barry Smith, Gil Kane, Jim Steranko, Bernie Wrightson and other such stylists I regularly spent the couple dollars a week I saved from my school lunch money at the various little convenient stores and markets to see what these and other true masters were up to currently. I used to just devour the artwork visually.  Adams had a special place for me with his super realist style and unique poses that no other artist seemed to be doing at the time, but that every other would be emulating soon enough. His work on The Avengers (with Tom Palmer doing amazing inks), Batman and The Green Lantern are just immortal comic book works even to this day.

I also like the slightly more adult stuff to be found in the b/w magazines of the period such as Savage Sword of Conan and all the Warren titles. No one to this day can draw like Jose Gonzales, Rich Corben or Estaban Morato. I picked up a copy of Creep # 75 with my lunch quarters and found in there this surprisingly graphic story by Adams and written by Jim Stenstrum. Not to say Adams had not other such material before and he had drawn stories for Warren already. But Adams came to be remembered for his well drawn superheros, and not his horror material (or his Western material such as El Diablo, which appeared in the back of some DC Western comic called Weird West or something, all I remember is his fine story in the back). He would drop out of comics for the world of advertising art, as well has having had it with comic industry politics. He was trying at one time to unionize comic book creators and I am not sure how all that worked out. Info on him on the net now is about him supporting some weird theory about evolution or the beginning of the Universe or something.

Thrill Kill is a sniper story and finely drawn and written.  When stories like this stopped happening I stopped buying comics (and when my mom stopped giving me lunch money to horde). I just have so little interest in what is happening anymore, plus I live in China where foreign comics are all but banned and there is no such thing as Chinese comic books and if there were they would probably suck. I found this story on the net complete and sharpened it up and wanted to share this with anyone who is interested. I am searching for a  werewolf story by Frazetta  he did for Warren in my collection of files. I have the thing somewhere and when I find that gem I will put it up too.