SANTO AND BLUE DEMON vs. DRACULA AND THE WOLFMAN (Santo y Blue Demon vs Drácula y el Hombre Lobo)

1973/ Director: Miguel M. Delgado/Writer: Alfredo Salazar

Cast: Santo, Blue Demon, Aldo Monti, Augustín Martínez Solares, Nubia Martí, María Eugenia San Martín, Wally Barron

A while back I got in a bunch of Santo and general Mexican horror films from Cinemageddon. I used up much of my precious ratio there to appropriate about a couple dozen films only to find out later more than half were not even dubbed or subtitled. I learned to read the little review section better after this. My ratio still has not recovered and I am sort of burned out with that place and how hard it is to maintain a good ratio. But they do have a great selection of Santos films and I even went back and got a few titles from the first batch over again and was careful to get them dubbed or subbed this time. One of the films I got in was the really great Santo and Blue Demon vs. Dracula and the Wolfman. Blue Demon is Santo’s wrestling buddy and sometimes opponent in the ring, but always friend and equal in crime fighting and saving the world outside the ring. Both actors (who go by their wrestling names) are in their fifties in this 1973 film directed by Miguel M. Delgado and written by luchadora and Mexican horror veteren Alfredo Salazar. The version I have looks nice. It is shot in color but for some reason the later color Santo adventures look cheesier than the atmospheric ones from the 60’s. The old sets were reminiscent of early Universal horror films. Well with this film the fascination with Universal monsters has returned as Santo and Blue Demon face off against none other than Count Dracula (Aldo Monti who battled Santo in Santo and the Treasure of Dracula ) himself and his nefarious sidekick the Wolfman (Augustín Martínez Solares who also played the beast in Night of the Bloody Apes). Delgado would go on to direct the Santo and Blue Demon vs Frankenstein but I have not seen that one yet and not even sure if I have it. If I don’t I will have to get it (damn my CG ratio) and hope that it is as fun as this one was.

MORE SANTO AND BLUE DEMON WRESTLING WITH DRACULA AND THE WOLFMAN HERE >>

HORRORS OF MALFORMED MENK (Kyôfu Kikei Ningen)

1969/Director: Teruo Ishii/Writers: Teruo Ishii, Masahiro Kakefuda

Cast: Teruo Yoshida, Yukie Kagawa, Teruko Yumi, Mitsuko Aoi

I have been delving back into Japanese cinema of the 60’s and 70’s and focusing on the Pinky Violence variety as well as the b/w noir style films by people like Seijun Suzuki. I have a few films here by director Teru Iishi but had yet to get around to watching one all the way through. I mean I tend to skim over these things for quality assurance purposes before burning them a disk then deleting the files from my hard-drive. I think I have Blind Beast vs. Killer Dwarf, Female Yakuza Tale, Blind Woman’s curse and the focus of this review The Horrors of Malformed Men. I will have to confess something here. I often have no clue as to the history of many of these before I download or that the above films were even all by the same director until I began doing some research for this review. I may download a film simply because I like the title or the poster art and screen captures. I will skim over the review to get some idea of when it was made and what other work the director was involved with then decide whether to use up my bandwidth and hard-drive space with the download. Usually any Japanese film made from the late 50’t to mid 70’s has a better than 50/50 chance of getting downloaded in the first place. So when I saw the review snippets about the Horrors of Malformed Men and how it was banned in its own country for some forty years and never released on VHS I was thoroughly enticed.  My first thought was how freaky could the film be in order to be banned in Japan of all places. Well the lure of a film made in 1969 Japan being banned for so long is something I personally cannot resist but there is actually a slight catch to the banned aspect of this film.

MORE OF THE HORRORS OF MALFORMED MEN HERE >>

THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY (Il Buono, il Brutto, il Cattivo)

1966/Director: Sergio Leone/Writers: Luciano Vincenzoni, Sergio Leone

Cast/ Eli Wallach, Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, Aldo Giuffrè, Luigi Pistilli, Rada Rassimov, Enzo Petito

I was living in San Antonio Texas where my dad was stationed at Lackland Air Force Base when The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was released. We all packed ourselves in his Valiant station wagon and went to the Valley-Hi Drive to see the film and it left an impression on me that was to linger for the rest of my life. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a film that falls into a very narrow category for me. Films that I feel are not only great films but films worthy of deeper introspection and multiple viewings and each viewing seems as fresh as the first one. It is a film I am not even comfortable commenting on here. There are a few others as well that would make me shudder to do a post here at my humble site about: Apocalypse Now, The Last Picture Show, Dr. Zhivago, Lord Jim and even Blade Runner and other films of the same caliber that have left such a lasting impact on me that I simply feel unworthy to expound on them in any fashion. And is another reason and that is that films like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Apocalypse Now have been critiqued and reviewed to death on the net. I usually try to select more obscure and little viewed films of an often trashier variety here at the Café to pander. Also I try not to be too pretentious with my comments and speculations. I will leave all that to the experts. Certainly many films deserve deeper philosophical reflection but I am not the sort of person to publicly delve into all that sort of thing. In simple terms I like to proceed with my foot as much out of my mouth as possible. But when I watch a film like this one I am usually transported to another world all together. So with that as an introduction let’s take a look at this western masterpiece by maestro Sergio Leone.

MORE OF THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY HERE >>

I am posting two versions for now of my newest Uranium Café Beatcast which I have given the working title of No One Has Ever Returned which is a line from the Mario Bava film Hercules in the Underworld. Presented here is the song in its music only version, without the movie samples. I am a little proud of this one and it is my most ambitious beatcast to date in terms of getting it as right as I can. It is the longest one I have done in terms of duration and also has the most loops placed all over it. I am not happy with the Hercules samples and no doubt the song will reappear someday with a new movie as the source for the sampled dialog. But I think it might be cool to hear the two versions side by side. The second version, with Hercules samples, is a short edit since I got frustrated with the results and stopped working on it.

I also put up a couple screen captures of the software I use with shots of the work in progress. The first program is Sony Acid 6 and it the program that puts everything together and extracts the samples from films. A bit of a learning curve with this one but I can do basically what I want to do with it for my needs. It is what I do my podcasts on as well. The second piece of software is the more user friendly Audacity and I use it for some final editing processes such as ‘normalizing’ the entire recording and in the case of my podcast taking out areas where I do ‘uh’ or stutter.  Eventually expect some version of this song but I just wanted to get it up as I am pleased with the results overall.

NO ONE HAS EVER RETURNED

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NO ONE HAS EVER RETURNED-EDIT WITH HERCULES SAMPLES

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GLI AMORI DI ERCOLE (THE LOVES OF HERCULES or HERCULES vs THE HYDRA)

1960/Director: Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia/Writers: Sandro Continenza, Luciano Doria

Cast: Mickey Hargitay, Jayne Mansfield, Massimo Serato, René Dary, Moira Orfei, Gil Vidal

AKA:
Hercules and the Hydra
Les amours d’Hercule (France)

This film has the dubious honor of having remained in my draft folder the longest of any post draft ever. I would have to double check the date but I am sure it goes back to June or July. In fact the post was the last post I had made before my site was hacked back then and a three week nightmare began. I still have the PDFs and pics in a folder on my hard drive and tried to put the post back together and after I had finished this and a couple other posts lost during the hacker period I sort of forgot about them. The others have been completed and this is the last of the old posts that have been locked up in my draft folder since summer time. Another problem here is that I cannot find the movie file. It is burned on a DVD disc somewhere but I have so many I gave up looking for it for now. Typically I would prefer to fast forward through a film I have not seen in a while to refresh my memory before reviewing but in this case that will not happen. I will refer to the PDF files I made of reviews and my memory of the film, since it did leave and impression. In fact, I want to see it again as it is a fine camp classic and Mickey Hargitay’s beardless Hercules is one of the more unique Peplum/Sword and Sandal performances in the history of the genre. Couple that wit the fact that his co-star in the film is none other than Mrs. Mickey Hargitay herself, Janyne Mansfield, and how can a person go wrong if his inclination is to spend a lazy night on the sofa watching some fine Italian made cheese.

MORE OF MICKEY HARGITAY AND JAYNE MANSFIELD IN THE LOVES OF HERCULES HERE >>

Hot on the heels of my first rare Robert Fripp interview is this second tasty little morsel. Fripp is young and intense here, looking like he did from the time of his Exposure album. He is in good spirits as he chats with the two fanboy hosts with enviable connections at the Boffomondo Show. Not sure what that is but it looks like some type of public access thing back when some of those shows were cool.  There is some info on the show at the link I posted. Seems these guys (sort of a couple Wayne’s World type  lads) really dug prog rock (as I do) and somehow got some big names to appear on their LA based cable show. Other than Fripp some people they had include Adrian Bellew, John Wetton, Phil Collins, and fusion guitarist Al Di Meola. and  I can’t remember where I got this but it looks like it may have come from Youtube as it was in four short sections which I joined together and uploaded to my Viddler account. Lots of talk about King Crimson and its break up after the Red album.  Not much more to say about this one except that it is not to be missed by Fripp and King Crimson devotees. Will have my Fripp article back up soon I hope after I get the audio file hosting sorted out. Enjoy.

ROBERT FRIPP INTERVIEW 02 HERE >>

If you do not care much for Robert Fripp then this post and the next one will not interest you much. If you like the man and his contributions to music as both a musician and as a producer then you will may want to check these out. I forget where I got them from but this interview and the next one are pretty short but worth watching. Fripp does not seem to do a lot of interviews in any format and so these video interviews I came across are of special interest to Fripp enthusiasts. Both are ripped from fair quality VHS tapes and on this one Fripp performs some music as well (laden with Frippertronics and ambience) in a place called The Reverberation Chamber at the Acoustic Research Lab. The next interview, coming in the next post or two, shows a more hyper and manic, and there more entertaining, Fripp while this one has the King Crimson mentor a little more laid back but none the less cynical at times about the state of modern music as when he discusses appearing live in public (“we are all turkeys”) and watching music videos. And this was a few decades ago when ‘modern’ music didn’t reek as bad as it does now in the 21st century. If you’re curious I also have a Brian Eno interview I may need to edit a bit before uploading it somewhere, but it is pretty cool too. If you like Eno that is. Some people do like this sort of stuff I realize. I, on the other hand, admire both Fripp and Eno and actually owned their collaborative album No Pussyfooting album on vinyl at one time. Have it on digital MP3 nown along with their other collaborations,  and still give it a listen now and then. I will eventually get back up my post of five albums by Fripp that I stuck back in my draft folder after having issues with the audio files being disabled by the hosting service. I will be hosting those files at my own account soon and that post will be back up in a month or so I hope. For now enjoy this little look into the great mind of one of progressive rock’s most creative and hardest working individuals.

ROBERT FRIPP INTERVIEW 01 HERE >>

I am not optimistic about the state of affairs regarding my audio files at edublogs.tv. I feel like they will all be disabled, or remain disabled. I will not let that deter me too much from at least posting my beatcasts and podcasts, which I host locally at my Maiahost.com service. I cannot reasonably host all audio files there. I can wait and see what happens over time but I think the days of my audio hosting songs and movie clips may be over. At least as far as songs and albums go for the most part. I have enough space but the process may be too daunting, or I may just feel that way tonight and that may change in a couple days. If the situation at edublogs.tv  gets cleared up then no problem. But if it goes down hill that will be the end of most it I think I will will go back into my archives  and simply remove all the nonworking Flash Players from edublogs.tv. But in the meantime here is a remix of an early beatcast called That’s All I Need, with samples taken from I Was A teenage Werewolf, with Michael Landon. This one is about the same length as the original but I tightened it all up a bit. I think this was my second beatcast exeriment and I like the remix here more than the first version. Lets hope all things get worked out.

THAT’S ALL I NEED -REMIX 03

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Sorry,  I do not have any real information or trivia on these posters from Thailand to share at this time.  Normally I like to add some researched information to a post but I am a little tired right now and may have to get back with some of that later if I can find out anything. Many of the posters here you may recognize as they are American horror movies staples like An American Werewolf in London and the Evil Dead films by Sam Rami.  Others appear to be some films out of Hong Kong. Others I am not to sure about. Not really sure whcih ones may be actual Thai films to be honest. I could have researched it a bit more but, like I said, I am really tired lately and a bit burned out with blogging. Do hate blogging, just need a breather. Need to just put up an easy post here and get back to something more involved later. I have a big collection of these so expect some more eventually.

MORE THAI MOVIE POSTERS HERE >>