pieces of tattered celluloid
Extra Poster of the Week! --A double shot of Dracula Has Risen From the Grave, a more pop art campier late '60s version from the USA. While the Brits were focused on Dracula's rage, US distributors pushed the flick with jokes and semi-clever bon mots: "You can't keep a good man down..." or "Dracula has risen from the grave... obviously". Well, not great jokesters... obviously, but the poster has a pretty nifty modular scheme. Of course, click on the image for a larger version. 204K
There's a Vampire Blog-a-thon going on (instigated by the Film Experience Blog), and I wanna play too. And to expand on a vampiric metaphor (metaphor?-- maybe a cliche), let us prey and suck on the fat and prodigious bandwidth of a Google enabled YouTube, as yet still unbloodied by copyright fights to come or starved skinny by a toll on a muti-tiered info-turnpike. We're talking vampire movie trailers, nothing from anything made after 1979, so no Lost Boys, Hunger, Fright Night, or Coppola's own Stoker Ace, kids. Nothing but gold here...
Requiem Pour Une Vampire --"...dans le chateau des orgies". Jean Rollin may not be everyone's cup of blood (and I'm not really sure he's mine), but his pictures have a poetic sensibility all their own, although paced with the languor of a laudanum high.
Planet of the Vampires --"...harboring a form of life worse than death". Bava goes Gothic in outer space and goes nuts with the color filters.
The Werewolf vs. The Vampire Woman --"...your blood will boil and your flesh will crawl..." A favorite from wayback. See it with someone you hate.
Mark of the Vampire --"Watch out! They may be hovering over you! Or you! Or YOU!" This one goes wayback to 1935. Nice central role for Lugosi in this trailer, and he camps it up nicely.
The Vampire Lovers"...sample, if you dare, the deadly passion of the Vampire Lovers!" Some early 70s Hammer, trying to sex up their gothic horrors with varying levels of success. It's better than most, if that doesn't seem to be damning with faint praise.
Lady Vampire (Onna Kyuketsuki) --Never heard of this one until I ran across the trailer on YouTube. I had no idea the Japanese were making gothic horrors in the 1950s. The trailer's completely in Japanese, so I'm taking guesses as far as the movie's plot goes. The lead vampire (not a lady, by the way, nor a gentleman for that matter) wears a classic Dracula style cape and walks around in cool shades. And he's pretty vicious when he attacks, with really large canines. If you're only going to see one of these trailers, check this one out!
Blacula --"...the black avenger, rising from his tomb to fill the night with horror!" Sure, it's ludicrous, but Blacula's still one of my favorite vampire films from the 70s. William Marshall is fantastic in it (what a voice!). Great soundtrack by Gene Page.
Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell (Kyuketsuki Gokemidoro) --Another Japanese vampire spectacular, and this one's really good. Not really a gothic take, although the filmmakers take some of the gothic conventions and play hardball with them. Vampirism (of a sort) explained through a colorful and crazed science fiction prism. This one needs to be available on DVD Region 1.
Orgy of the Living Dead Triple Feature --"This man's name is John Austin Fraser. He lived in Chicago, Illinois. He now resides in the state mental hospital." Not a great example of a vampire movie trailer, but an excellent example of classic American movie ballyhoo. The trailer's a better piece of cinema than any of those three features. I think one of the features is a vampire film, Fangs of the Living Dead, sometimes known as Malenka.
Nosferatu The Vampyre --"A film unlike any Dracula film you've ever seen...." Werner Herzog's version, of course. It's the best version of Dracula on film and it's the best vampire movie ever. Yeah, I said it.
All right, one more... Blood-o-Rama Shock Festival --"Are you ready for more than four hours of blood drenched, chill crammed terror?" Another trailer for a entire program of films. I like the act they use the term "festival" to give it an air of sophistication. I believe all the films come from the Philippines.
As a companion piece to the previous newspaper ad post and the scuzzy woman-hating ad for Corruption, here's a site devoted to the film posters of the star of that film,The Peter Cushing Film Poster Site. It's more interesting to see some of the artwork for Cushing's lesser known (and mostly unseen) films, like Cone of Silence or Cash on Demand, although there are some cool, rarely seen international examples of hits like The Curse of Frankenstein and Brides of Dracula.
SNIPPETS! The image on the left has absolutely nothing to do with this post. Just an image cut out of an old comic book, just eye candy to fill up space in a woefully updated weblog (although, as an aside, vis a vis the term "eye candy", one can imagine an early 70s DC Comics character, quite possibly the Green Arrow, using the term "vein candy" to describe heroin-- or "skezag" as it's known in the DC Universe). In any case, here are some some (sort of) randomlinks to waste some time with:
An early draft of the script for Son of Frankenstein
Bond smells a rat -- The James Bond Music Library
Juha's Buster Keaton Page
Derek and Clive
The Pagans
Break My Face
Lightning Bolt
RIP, Renato Polselli
More Polselli
Back when, more than a few years ago when I wore a younger man's socks, I graduated from the creaky puns (Hollyweird, Karloffornia... You Axed for It!), the monster-kid hagiographies (King Karloff! Lord Lugosi! Prince Price! Saint Peter Cushing!)and the crummy cheap B&W newsprint of Forrest Ackerman's Famous Monsters of Filmland to the slicker, harder, more colorful Fangoria. What I remember most of this transition of horror fandom was Fangoria's decidedly more grown-up look at horror. Gone were the puns... now there were cuss words! And the pictures... Good God! Gone were the rare behind the scenes shots of Lugosi on the set of The Return of Chandu or of Peter Lorre conferring with Basil Rathbone on the set of A Comedy of Terrors.In their stead were bloody, torn latex corpses, gutters strewn with entrails, brains splattered on cinder block walls while technicians laugh and pose with a skinned skull. Fangoria even had a centerfold of sorts; a kind of pull-out picture to hang in one's wall. One of the first I remember was a garishly oversaturated shot of a young fellow with an arrow jabbed his eye (as a matter of a fact, here's the issue in question; dig the rest of that issue's grue). The rest of the photos were as equally grisly, with an almost pornographic attention to detail.
That pornographic attention to detail is fully evident in this collection of Maxim's Best Horror Movie Deaths. Maxim's easily one of the most idiotic magazines on newstands today, a Playboy without the sophistication (even the faux sophistication Playboy used to bandy about, especially back in the 60s and 70s when they used to interview people like Nabokov and Bertram Russell), or even properly nude women. Their list of deaths is not a bad one by any means, even with all of them coming after 1979; and even with the insipid laddish commentary ("Mr. Drill, meet Mr. Head. Mr. Head, meet Mr. Drill. Now you guys make yourself comfortable and we'll bring in some punch and snacks"). Besides, you'll see Jason X's only scene of note (and that's noy saying much). Certainly not for the squeamish, and, be warned, the video starts as soon as the link opens. Horror's best money shots. Dig it.
Found on YouTube: Cyd Charisse, she's not. She's sort of gangly and awkward as she traipses between the billiard tables and the dumbly indifferent men. Nana's exhuberance is infectious though, even if we do see it as her desperate buffer against the emotional pricks and jabs her mess of a life now sadly accords. Her sauntering legkicks and broad smiles belie her darkly cornered state, even as she attempts to elicit the simplest of grins or at least one bare nod of scknowledgement from the impassive men around her; men who ultimately, as any viewer of Vivre Se Vie can attest, would be her undoing. At the end of the dance, Nana spirals into exhaustion. Is it a surrender? As one of Godard's subtitles for this one of twelve tableaux reads: "- there's no gaiety in happiness-". The actress in the scene is, of course, the sublime Anna Karina. The scene is from Vivre Sa Vie (My Life to Live), only Jean-Luc Godard's fourth film; also his saddest and most human. Watch the clip here, or click on the image.
Oftentimes, when grazing through a thorough and extensive database such as the fantastic Toho Kingdom, the ultimate end-all for all things relating to releases from Japan's Toho Studios, riffling through the familiar (Ikuru, Rodan,Yojimbo, or even Submersion of Japan (Tidal Wave)) does not satisfy as much as plucking out the colorful unknowns like Young Guy vs. Blue Guy, Operation Crazy Mexico, Age of Homicide Mania, or Japan's Number One Sycophant Man, and ultimately becoming fodder for clueless conjecture or another round of a game of your guess is as good as mine. If only Hollywood's product looked a quarter as interesting... Check out Toho's lost projects and original concept art (particularly for The Mysterions).
Quintessentially Japanese, the yakuza movie has only recently been recognized in the West, primarily through Seijun Suzuki and Kinji Fukasaku's work. If you're like me and you don't know much about the genre aside from the work of the aforementioned directors, you can find a good intro here. You can find a very nice collection of yakuza movie posters here (by the way, the site has an embedded loop of the sound of ocean waves). If you're an American kid of the '70s like me, you were probably introduced to the mythos of the yakuza through Leonard and Paul Schrader's, Robert Towne's and Sydney Pollack's The Yakuza starring Robert Mitchum.
