The House of Horror Ruled!

The cover artist of (Hammer's) House of Horror #19 is Ramon Sola, and what a stunning piece of work he's produced; it's like a marriage of Boris (Vallejo) and Frazetta (Frank).

The original title of the mag was The House of Hammer. Its primary focus was Hammer Films. Each issue featured a comic adaptation of a Hammer film and a slew of fascinating articles.

When I picked up each issue at the newsagent, I'd flip straight to Tony Crawley's 'Media Macabre' section. Crawley could always be relied on for interesting items on upcoming fright fare from Europe, Britain, and the US.

I was also an avid Famous Monsters collector, but I never read FM for the articles; I liked the stills and 'Captain Company' ads. House of Hammer/House of Horror/Halls of Horror, like Cinefantastique, took the genre pretty seriously, and, also like Cinefantastique, gave equal time to obscure Euro treasures.

In this issue, the comic adaptation is John Gilling's The Reptile, released in '66 by Warner-Pathe in Britain and 20th Century-Fox in the U.S.

These three scans are a sampling of the love and detail afforded these adaptations.

Pre-VHS, this was the only way to "own" Hammer's little classic.

Artist was Brian Lewis, who'd painted a selection of covers for the mag.

This issue featured Part 2 of a Hammer history, focusing on the exciting years '57 and '58, which saw production of the great The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas (with script by Nigel Kneale)...


and Val Guest's truly special The Camp on Blood Island, a WWII drama/actioner that became a huge box office hit -- probably because it depicted the Japanese military as such cold, vicious cunts.
.Love this rare poster art; the British DVD, unfortunately, did not use it, choosing instead to use a cheesy still.

Pre-home video, collecting truncated versions of your favorite films on Super-8 was a passion of many.

I remember visiting a friend of my father's one morning after church many years ago. I discovered a stash of Super-8's in his basement and was encouraged (by him) to check them out. For a period of two hours, I marveled at the sci-fi and horror titles he owned, finding dozens of new ones every time I cleared the ones I'd already seen.

At bottom left (above) is a very rare still from Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre; the article suggests that a 35mm print could be had for around $175.

Most Super-8 versions of genre pics retailed for around $50.

This friend of my father's probably didn't count on me finding his collection of Color Climax Super-8's.

Featuring gloriously lurid covers with titles such as Teenage Sex, Hot For Cock, Fuck My Arse (English spelling), Danish Hard Core and Blue Climax, my Sunday morning, pre-church head was spinning. I'd never seen any hardcore in my life, so this was a mighty awakening, and not an awakening I regretted.

Only years later would I learn that Color Climax Corporation (CCC) was a pioneer in the world of hardcore material, not afraid or ashamed to describe itself as "The Biggest, The Best, and the Most Pornographic!"

It was a company that portrayed sex as fun.

Rear cover of House of Horror # 19 is this magical The Reptile poster. Looks very Jess Franco to me.

In '77, the same publishers launched Starburst, a mag more focused on science fiction in cinema and television. After the demise of Halls of Horror (which was its final title), Starburst did incorporate horror items also; the mag still survives.

It's sad to reflect on the possibility that paper magazines like House of Horror, Famous Monsters, and Fangoria may be tomorrow's dinosaurs.

Pornography is always an accurate indicator of where media is going; pornography usually gets there first. With a few exceptions, all the successful European hardcore magazines such as Color Climax and Private now exist only in on-line form. I fear the non-pornographic may soon follow.

Nature Goes Berserk

It's pretty well accepted that James Herbert started it all; I'm referring to the Nature Gone Berserk (NGB) genre. Of contemporary novelists, he was first with The Rats ('74). Guy N. Smith followed with his crabs (Night of the Crabs, '76), and writers such as Nick Sharman (The Cats), Joseph L. Gilmore (Rattlers), Mark Sonders (Blight) and many others made contributions, too. For mine, all were worth a look.

Pierce Nace, who I've written about already, dished up the ultimate NGB book, Eat Them Alive, in which giant, intelligent prey mantises snack on the entrails, breasts, eyeballs, and associated bits and pieces of humans unlucky enough to have pissed off the book's hero. This stands as one of my favorite books of all times for reasons you'd have to read this entire blog to understand.

Let's not forget that in 1904 H.G. Wells wrote Food of the Gods, a mostly ignored novel in which plants and beasts became large and angry after ingesting a strange, alien substance. The Wells novel is less an NGB work than the Bert I. Gordon film of the same name, but it introduced something fresh and wonderful, nevertheless, to a world craving adventure.

I don't know much about Gregory A. Douglas (real name: Eli Cantor), the author of The Nest, but I do know he's a damn good wordsmith. This New English Library original from 1982 was published in the US first by Zebra Books ('80); that edition sported a much better cover than the NEL effort.

These were the post-Rats years, and NGB tales were leaping off the shelves like giant rodents into strollers. Interestingly, the initial suspects behind the slaughter of a dog in The Nest are rats; one attack features a rather oversized specimen. But it soon becomes apparent that cockroaches -- cockroaches controlled by a strange intelligence -- are responsible for the slaughter on Yarkie, an island off Cape Cod.
Douglas writes well. And though the novel is fairly slow to develop, it's quality pulp that delivers on every count.

The attack sequences are graphic and realistic, as opposed to the attack sequences in Eat Them Alive which are ultra-graphic and ultra-unrealistic (God bless 'em!). Douglas's action/horror writing style comes fairly close to Herbert's in that he zeroes in on specific details of a character before letting the blood fly. A sequence detailing the bloody destruction of a bunch of school children (by cockroaches) is a hair-raising hoot, as is the conclusion in which The Nest is destroyed.

The dramatic set-up is straight from a 50's monster movie, and the lengthy scientific explanations for what is happening hark back to that period also. If I have any criticisms of this work, it's that there's too much science. Sometimes, just a little is more than enough.

Ultimately, The Nest is a winner, and I urge you to seek it out.

In '88, Terence H. Winkless filmed The Nest, and I'm happy to report that the solid source material prevented it from becoming a cheesy, stupid mess.

At seventeen years of age, I read James Montague's Worms. It initially disappointed me because it wasn't a Rats ripoff (I was a shameless gorehound back in those days and I asked for nothing but blood and sleaze). It then surprised me because it opened my eyes to a different form of horror writing. With the exception of Jessica Hamilton's extraordinary Elizabeth, I wasn't too familiar with narrators who were going progressively crazy. I was more at home with narrators like 'Harris' of The Rats, regular blokes with regular problems suddenly thrust into a world gone mad. Anyway, when I was done reading Worms, I was a better man for the experience.

Like the hero in Stephen Gregory's brilliant The Cormorant (see separate blog), the hero of Worms, 'Hildebrand', is shouldering a raft of personal problems, the heaviest of which is his ball-busting wife. Dreaming of making her worm food, he is spurred into action when she belittles him and makes it clear that he'll never get a penny of her inheritance.

When Hildebrand purchases a country mansion with the winnings from his murdered wife's will, his elation is short-lived. The town of Blaney, where he now lives, is cold, rainy, and miserable. Images of the poor sod's dead wife plague him, and sticky, fat-bodied worms are appearing all over the place. It's like they're coming to get him, Barbara.

Matters worsen when a nuclear reactor is built near the town. Although it's felt that the worms will react badly to its presence, they embrace the technology and reproduce accordingly until they're an enemy to be reckoned with. In a sense, Worms finds parallels with Jeff Lieberman's film of Squirm; the Squirm worms were also invigorated by a power source close to their moist, electricity-conducting breeding grounds. Montague does provide a supernatural reason for the behavior of the worms, but it's neither here nor there whether its legitimate.

What truly distinguishes Worms is its Lovecraftian hero, a troubled soul whose insatiable appetite for the dark side is matched only by the worms' appetite for flesh.

3-Day Feature

When opportunity like this knocks, I answer it with reason.
The project:
Four actors.
Three locations.
Minimal dialog.
Hey, I can do that.
Three days to shoot a 75 minute feature.
WHAT?
Yes, three days.
Four actors and three locations. That's very do-able. Minimal dialog? A little more difficult because if you don't have a lot of dialog scenes, you need to shoot a lot of stuff that takes a lot more time to shoot than dialog. Dialog scenes are great time fillers.
I'd never made a feature in three days before.
What the hell!?
Here's the first trailer:

KINDER PLAY from Mark Savage on Vimeo.

A purely creative filmmaking exercise, free of serious financial constraints and expectations, can be incredibly liberting, underlining why we create in the first place.

For me, the key component of success (beyond concept and performances) was striking locations. Although each was a two hour + drive, the visual rewards are obvious.

Camera used was Sony XD-CAM EX I.

Current Sins of Sinema

I didn't like The Book of Eli trailer much; did I need another post-apocalyptic tale set in a familiar looking world already well trodden by Sergio Martino's 2019: After the Fall of New York, I Am Legend, The Road Warrior, The Road, A Boy and His Dog (which the film references directly), and Ravagers (to name a few)?

It's unfair to judge a film by its trailer, right, even though we make decisions based on trailers all the time? It is unfair to filmmakers, but it's not always unfair to ourselves. With so much cinema out there, one has to be somewhat choosy sometimes. Despite that reasoning, I still chose to see this film.

I liked the Hughes Brothers' Menace II Society very much, didn't care for Dead Presidents, was bored with From Hell, and really enjoyed their American Pimp doco; that's one you have to see.

The sincere The Book of Eli, with the ultra-sincere Denzel Washington, started to wash over me about half an hour in. It's been compared to The Road Warrior by critics who either didn't see The Road Warrior or didn't appreciate its many virtues. One major difference between George Miller's masterpiece and this is energy levels. The Road Warrior had energy to burn; Eli sits on its energy supply and never gets up.

It's not a terrible film and it's not without craft, but the desaturated look and cliched bursts of slow motion bury its assets. The action scenes are so self-consciously staged and stale, there's no sense of danger or peril. When a house in the desert is assaulted by gunfire, the camera creeps leisurely towards a spitting Gatling Gun and stops right in front of the exploding barrels, reminding us that this isn't real; if it was, the camera would be destroyed. The lack of freshness is evident in a lengthy fight scene that is lifted directly from Old Boy (I'm sure you know which scene); Washington takes on a gang of desert thugs in a tunnel, triggering fountains of CG blood. Owning up to some of its references, a character whistles Morricone (Once Upon A Time in the West), and a poster of A Boy and his Dog inexplicably hangs on the wall of a decrepit house.

On paper, this probably looked like a post-apocalyptic flick with an edge, that edge being The Book (The Bible) that Eli (Washington) is carrying and how the prospect of it falling into the wrong hands will spell doom for mankind. Well, there's not much Mankind left to doom here, and Eli just gets annoying after a while; he's such a smug cunt. Gary Oldman, playing a slightly toned down version of his 'Stansfield' character in Leon, is merely passable as the man who wants the book that Eli holds. There is an attempt to wedge a female (Mila Kunis) into the proceedings, but it is a contrived, desperate attempt, and it hurts the movie.

A couple of revelations pop up at the end, and one of them is rather ridiculous. The other is acceptable.

Ultimately, Washington's Eli is too much of a Nobody to command our attention. When Eastwood played Nobodies and Men With No Names, he always carried a dry sense of humor and unholstered it when necessary. Washinton's Eli carries no such weapon. He wears oh-so-meaningful sincerity around his neck, and it's dull.

This Jason Reitman film has been the mainstream cause celebre this year, and last night it won the Golden Globe for Best Screenplay, ousting The Hurt Locker, which was my pick.
Up in the Air is a perfectly pleasant film with a perfectly predictable lead performance by George Clooney. I enjoyed the experience of watching it without enjoying anything beyond that. That's why I came away from it feeling nonplussed. I did, however, respect the way the writers chose to wrap things up. Although I saw a particular revelation coming, the concluding pieces of Clooney's character's journey felt natural.

Worth seeing.

Life is compromise. In that spirit, I accompanied my romantic other to this awful pile of shit. Meryl Streep plays a divorcee who was once married to a serial killer/rapist (Alec Baldwin). Baldwin is just out of jail for his life of crime, and decides to get back with Streep in order to get intimate and incestuous with his teenage daughter. Unfortunately for him, Streep is dating Steve Martin, a reformed drug trafficker who's secretly screwing the daughter (who has a killer heroin habit). Can't say I wasn't pleasantly surprised and invigorated by this plot. From a studio?

I must confess that only the first sentence in the above paragraph is true. The rest is where the movie could have headed, but it chose the boring route instead. In truth, the film is about a divorcee (Streep) who has an affair with her cheating (is there any other?) ex-husband (Baldwin). At the same time, Steve Martin (a boring architect with a plastic face) is trying to get into her pants. In fact, everybody is trying to get into Streep's pants in this flick. I'm not sure guys in the audience were quite as keen. We're supposed to find it entertaining that Streep see-saws between Martin and Baldwin and fucks Baldwin a lot while in the process of deciding. After a while, it became excruciating watching her.

The film runs way too long and populates its frames with annoying teenagers and spoilt twentysomethings so boring, I couldn't figure out why Streep didn't post-abort the lot of them.

Where are the more realistic movies where guys leave their wives because their wives are boring?

Recommended if you're undecided.

Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon, which won a major prize at Cannes in 2009, is an intelligent, disturbing, slow paced drama about the genesis of evil (pre-World War I). Its small town setting is a microcosm for Germany, and each character represents a larger social and political group.

To avoid spoilers, the less I say about it the better. It is the first from Haneke since his Funny Games remake and it's it's totally involving, beautifully acted, and shot in stunning black and white.

Let it bleed all over you.

Silly Cycles

When I was ten year's young, the trading card you see above was my Holy Grail.

My brother and I were obsessed with collecting illustrated trading cards. The only condition was they had to feature monsters or freaks.

'Silly Cycles', as they were known in Australia, was a set of 58 cards marrying cool modes of transportation and recreation (motorcycycles and hot rods) with equally cool monsters.

In the US, these were first released as 'Odd Rods' by the Donruss Company, and existed to sell sticks of bubble gum. The Donruss Company executives were convinced that there were many artists behind 'Odd Rods'/'Silly Cycles'. In fact, there was only one artist initially, and his name was B.K. Taylor. He'd sent his illustrations to Donruss and the first of a very successful bubble gum series was born.

The original series of cards was so successful, Donruss commissioned several more sets from Taylor's company, The Outer Limits Corporation (named after the legendary sci-fi TV series).

At the time, my brother and I were not privy to the backstory of 'Silly Cycles'; we just loved the cards. We'd get on our bikes and ride from Milk Bar to Milk Bar for miles, convinced that each Milk Bar sold different sets of 'Silly Cycles'. The truth was, each box contained several sets, but unless you purchased the entire box, you were not assured of complete numbers.

In Australia, the 'Milk Bar' is a disappearing institution. Most have now been replaced by the 7-11 convenience store culture, although a few still survive. They were always independently run, and were situated in both quiet suburban streets and busy street corners. They sold newspapers, lollies (candy), milk, some groceries, and bread. The local postie (mailman) would use them to store his mail during large deliveries, too.

Anyway, back to our mission. For months, we rode and rode on our quest for the elusive "Werewolf Under a Full Moon" card. Entire weekends were spent miles from home pushing our bikes up hills, speeding away from regional bullies, and bugging Milk Bar proprietors to dig deep for cards we didn't have.

Once we purchased the packets, we'd hurry outside and rip them open. We should have been saving the packets (which are now worth a fortune), but our impatience overrode all business sense. At this time, trading cards were never considered collectibles; you collected them because you liked the pictures. As each packet was ripped apart, four or five cards would be revealed. Dusty sticks of flat, powdery bubble gum would accompany the cards. In a word, the gum sucked. It was tasteless and brittle from being in a non-airless packet for too long. It tasted like shit and lost its sugary magic about two minutes after the first chew. After a while, we'd toss away the gum (with the wrappers).

There is no greater disappointment in the world of card collecting equal to to finding dozens of cards you already have combined with the knowledge that the card you want is still out there. We experienced this tragedy many times, and it made pushing those pedals homeward that much more exhausting. When we did finally make it home, our jackets stuffed with "swaps" (cards we'd trade for those we didn't have), the only medicine that cured our ills was hot food, dessert,and the latest episode of Dr. Who.

At a Milk Bar close to home, the Werewolf finally showed his face. We didn't know that we were ripping open the final packet to complete our set because each new packet represented a crapshoot. This was way before the internet, too, so we didn't even know what 'Silly Cycle' #1 looked like. We just knew we didn't have it.

When the unfamiliar face of a werewolf revealed itself, a surge of euphoria bolted through me. It was a beautiful card. A perfect card. The answer to our prayers. We'd ridden two hundred miles for this thing. And it was worth every rotation of our bike pedals.

The card above IS a scan of the card we found that day. Ironically, the other 57 cards (and their hundreds of miserable 'swaps') disappeared somewhere between deepest childhood and exiting the nest. Rumor has it my mother threw 'Silly Cycles' and a dozen other sets away in a fit of rage at our hoarding, boyish ways. It's a rumor only, but it seems plausible to me.

I've never allowed this card, 'Silly Cycle' #1, to ride away from me. I keep the Werewolf close.

Childhood's not too far away, either.

The Other Return of The Living Dead

These two are not the same book. They share the same title, and they're written by the same author, but they're worlds apart in terms of content.

The edition directly above is John Russo's novelization (Arrow Books, '85) of Dan O'Bannon's screenplay of the same movie (also directed by Dan). This was one of the first movies to feature quick-footed zombies.

The original novel directly below is John Russo's literary sequel to George Romero's Night of the Living Dead; the original screenplay for that film was written by Russo and Romero.

In '74, Russo novelized Night. The novel's success gave rise to his horror writing career, a career that has run parallel somewhat with his horror directing career.

Smartly, he avoided forking out for the rights to screenplay source material by producing and/or directing films from his own literary oeuvre. These included Midnight, The Majorettes (directed by Bill Hinzman), and Heartstopper (based on his terrific vampire novel The Awakening).

My favorite (if you can call it that) Russo movie is Midnight. Starring the great Lawrence Tierney, and with bit turns by John Amplas (Martin) and Tom Savini, this aesthetically impoverished flick does have a sleazy, grim vibe. Shot in the Pennsylvanian countryside and boasting some grotesque violence, I first saw Midnight on videocassette in '84.

My imdb review went thus:

John Russo, author of the excellent "The Awakening", "The Majorettes", "Return of The Living Dead" (both unfilmed NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD sequel and novelization of the Dan O'Bannon film) and "Midnight" novel, amongst others, is a better novelist than filmmaker. His THE MAJORETTES, a stupid cheerleader slasher flick, is bottom of the barrel garbage. MIDNIGHT, on the other hand, has a creepy, seedy tone, decent special effects, a great sleaze turn by the late Lawrence Tierney, a sexual abuse subplot and some bizarre twists. The opening, in which a "demon" (a young girl), caught in a metal trap, is beaten to death by a woman and her sons, is a real attention-grabber. Musical score by Paul McCollough is poor. Plot follows the adventures of a young, sexually abused teenager (Melanie Verlin) who runs away from home and hitches a ride with a couple of thieves. The horror rears its head when the trio enter Pittsburgh's hill country. Make-up maestro Tom Savini's special effects are very convincing -- a sudden beheading is a keeper.

It mystifies me why the Return of the Living Dead novel (story is credited to Russo, Russell W. Streiner, and Ricci Valentine) has not been filmed. It is not that it is an overlooked literary masterpiece that blew my socks off. On the contrary, it is written like a piece of dry journalism and it cribs major chunks of Night. However, it features a cast of deviant characters who are far more reprehensible than the flesheaters they're fleeing, and the violence is stomach-churning at times. On top of that, there are some great scenes in which spikes are driven through the skulls of zombies, and a nicely written bus crash opens the book.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not expressing regret that John Russo didn't direct a movie of this novel -- there are far better directors out there more capable of energizing the material. Still, I'd like to see the book filmed. With Romero still turning out Dead flicks, it surprises me that he hasn't tapped this material.

I feel that Russo is a much better novelist than filmmaker, and the subjects he has tackled have vibrated with a great deal more originality.

Bloodsisters ('82), published in the US by Pocket Books, involves a coven of deadly women (thirteen of them!) and has a strong, supernatural slant.

Cover art has been "borrowed" for a great deal of movie poster art.

Living Things is an expansion of themes introduced in Russo's Voodoo Dawn novella, and marries the drug-flooded, crime-ridden Miami of DePalma's Scarface to Haitian voodoo lore. The book is as much a crime thriller as a horror novel, and Russo wisely keeps the undead at bay for a large portion of the story.

The Aldous Huxley quote -- Maybe this world is some other planet's hell -- kicks off the first part.

This New English Library (NEL, '83) edition of Midnight came three years after the American release. The reference on the cover to the Russo film must have puzzled many outside the US because the film had virtually no theatrical releases in foreign territories (especially English speaking ones). I guess the publisher figured that mentioning the film gave the book greater weight.

The Midnight book has a much stronger focus on religion, and, compared to the film, is intelligently structured.

Inhuman (Pocket Books, '86), is one of Russo's best novels (alongside The Awakening), and would make a great movie. It begins as an action novel, and turns into something that is tonally akin to The Hidden, Snakes on a Plane, and, of course, Night of the Living Dead and Umberto Lenzi's Nightmare City.

Excellent cover art is by Lisa Falkenstern.

Dario Argento and Jess Franco would have had fun with this tale of a disfigured ballet dancer who destroys her enemies by ripping them apart -- you guessed it! -- limb to limb.

Not terribly involving, the book is dedicated to "Jutec Kasamon and the Kasamon Ballet Company".

Like most artists, the work of John Russo has been uneven, but I can not fault his dedication to the genre, or his desire to shock for a living.

Imbd lists his next venture as Escape From The Living Dead with Kane Hodder.

The Scream Factory

Edited by Bob Morrish, Peter Enfantino, and John Scoleri, The Scream Factory, a magazine dedicated to old and new horror in fiction, radio, film, and TV, was a mainstay of late 80's/early 90's genre publishing. It was produced by Deadline Press (AZ), but submitters of material were encouraged to forward all correspondence to a California address.

Although there is currently a publisher of comics with the same name, I'm not sure if the two are related.

I was always impressed with the depth of material, and admired the publication's efforts to cover horror from many angles. The mag could be seen as a precursor to Canada's Rue Morgue, a mag that also makes every effort to illuminate the darkest vestibules of the field in all media.

Issue #15 was a Werewolf special, so would not have been out of place today with a Wolfman remake imminent (from Universal) and other lycanthrope-themed projects in holding patterns.

Great to see some focus on Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's The Godforsaken, a really terrific werewolf novel with a strong historical backbone. Yarbro has been a prolific writer of original fiction and a number of great novelizations including Nomads (based on John DIE HARD McTiernan's first film with Adam Ant!) and Dead and Buried.

Anthologist, editor, and scholar Peter Haining, who has recently been the subject of immense interest in Justin Marriott's indispensable Paperback Fanatic, a mag you should not be without, was the subject of an exhaustive article in this issue. He has been responsible for close to a hundred horror and mystery anthologies, and has penned so much non-fiction, it's difficult to catalog it all; thankfully, ace writer Mike Ashley gave it his best shot in this fascinating, lengthy piece.

Most horror/fantasy mags focusing chiefly on horror in literature ignore film at their peril; The Scream Factory avoided peril by hiring Lawrence McCallum to write some capsule reviews. Island of Lost Souls earns well-deserved praise, as does The Bride of Frankenstein and the brilliant The Invisible Man.

Encouraging to see Richard Thorpe's Night Must Fall being awarded three stars, too; easily Robert Montgomery's most memorable, chilling performance.

The small press was incredibly important to the genre when The Scream Factory was a going concern in '94, and they acknowledged that importance with a regular column. Now, the small press is absolutely essential, probably even more crucial to the development of writers than ever with mainstream publishers cutting back on their lists and bookshops being ever so picky about what they stock.

Husband/Wife authors Steve Rasnic and Melanie Tem were interviewed in this issue and contributed 'More Than Should Be Asked', an original piece.

I read Steve's Excavation (Avon; '87) many moons ago and enjoyed it thoroughly. His specialty has always been thew short story.

Melanie's Revenant (Dell/Abyss; '94) is a brilliant novel about losing the ones we love, dealing with the loss, and reconciling the possibility of future losses. A re-release would be welcome. Perhaps coincidentally, the French film, The Revenants ('04), also addressed the complexity of the loss and dealing with the return of those we are grieving.

The author's Prodigal (Dell/Abyss; '91) is a killer read, too.
RIP , The Scream Factory, you are missed.