Novak

Coming To A Screen Near You

Yes, the truth must be told.... somehow. Dig, if you will, the picture: an elderly gent sits in warm chair, cold drink beside him, flipping channels. He finds an old movie, and it is remotely interesting. It's a Western, say.... nothing spectacular or special. No big stars. Starring someone like John Payne, for instance, or someone like him. The gunfighter wrestles the bad man to the ground. Indian aims his Winchester with deliberate stillness. The Mexican comic-relief is drunk again as gringos chuckle knowingly. The lawman's horse outsmarts the incredulous Negro stablehand. The blonde virgin swoons into the hero's fatherly embrace. The elderly gent gently laughs as he sips his cold gin.

Such are the simple and insidious joys of Fascist Cinema, your North American version. Not your sturm und drang Triumph of the Will Facsism, shiny, crisp, black, and aesthesticized like a campy drag ball. It's a bit homelier than that Hitler shit, not so skull and crossbones and hell-bent for leather. It's Fascism, if not with a human face, then one you wouldn't mind having a beer with. Fascism you can shoot the shit with, trade recipes and baseball cards with. Fascism that will buy you drinks and nod approvingly as you eye the comely young lady by the billiards table. Fascism that laughs at your stupid racist jokes.

It's a friendly kind of cinema, but not one that you would generally want to be friends with, if you catch my drift. New Fascist Cinema is not really new, and not outwardly fascist either. Lots of happy endings in New Fascist Cinema. Lots of crowd pleasing effects and circus-style laughs. Essentially, it's Hollywood without soul or even body (body would signify a certain heft, yes?). It's light and thin as a nasty crepe and it's 98 percent of what's produced nowadays. Probably your favorite movie of all time is fascist, but you don't even know it.

More to come, maybe....

A Man Dies While Watching Horror Film

There is a story that an old man paid admission to the old Royal Theater in Laredo, TX, just to get out of the diabolical heat. Thisfine film was apparently playing. He sat in the back of the theater, took off his shoes and socks and wriggled his tired and hot toes as he lit up a Raleigh (smoking was illegal in theaters, but the owners of the Royal looked the other way).
 

This man, in his seventies, had never seen a horror film in his life. At first, he thought the story was a classic charro film, but the suspense and terror began to overwhelm him. He began to pant and groan. Never had he experienced such fright! He started grabbing his chest and initiated an eerie moaning. But he could not turn his face away. Children (the main audience for this type of movie) thought the man was acting clownish and began to laugh. The kids didn't particularly care for "El Charro de las Calaveras" and thought the horror hackneyed and dull. Watching the old man writhing in apoplexy was much more entertaining. As the "Lobo Humano" appeared on the screen and battled the hero, the old man cried out plaintively and lost total control of his bodily functions. The kids laughed even harder as he pissed himself. Then with a sudden arching of his back, the old man's body stiffened almost upright and then fell back to his wet seat with a violent heaviness. He had finally succumbed to cardiac arrest and died.  The kids, now totally uninterested in the movie, began throwing popcorn and soda at his  still corpse, laughing like little hyenas.

Hours passed and other features played, and other patrons came and went. Most thought the dead old man was sleeping off a drunk, a very common occurrence in Laredo. At closing time, when the theater manager finally and grudgingly checked on the old man after the last show of the evening, the old man's face, frozen in a grimace of abject fear, was sticky and littered with candy and greasy salty popcorn. The manager felt his pulse, and feeling nothing, walked to the main office and called the police. The manager was surprised by how nonplussed he was by the entire incident. This was the first time anyone had ever died in his theater and he thought he would at least be a little more emotional about it. Instead he just smoked and sent one of the kids for a couple of six-packs of beer. Might as well relax while he waited for the cops.

The police finally came, checked the old man out and called for the morgue wagon. It made the Laredo Times the next day, but no one ever claimed the man's body. No one ever knew who the old man was.

Way of the Dragon

It's not often that I link to National Review Online (in fact, I've never had), but this piece by John Derbyshire about his short stint as an uncredited thug in Bruce Lee's The Way of the Dragon (or Return of the Dragon) is really quite fascinating. This cranky reactionary, who once opined that "Pop Culture is Filth", is more than respectful when recounting the pure star frisson and charisma of Bruce Lee in Hong Kong, and gives us a rare look into the slap-dash world of HK moviemaking in the early 70s. You can see clips of Lee kicking Derbyshire in the face here (Derbyshire looks sort of like James Taylor in Two-Lane Blacktop). Interestingly, The Way of the Dragon was the only film written and directed by Lee. You can see some of his cinematic handiwork here in his climactic battle with a very young and hairy Chuck Norris here (Lee was not immune to the overuse of the zoom lens either like many a low-budget filmmaker of that epoch). Like the music? You can download the soundtrack at The Manchester Morgue

Ad Mats!

A lost art form (if I may be permitted the stretch the definition of "art form"), the trashy newspaper ad mat found in the backpages of your local fishwrap probably figured in more last minute movie decisions than marquees or four-color posters, at least in the smaller towns and rural areas especially serviced by drive-ins. Excellent examples of these can be found at the ad mat collection of the The Deuce. More vintage newspaper movie ads (albeit not so trashy) can be found at Emulsion Compulsion (including one for Birth of a Nation. Of course, ad mats are not a strictly American phenomenon. AV Maniacs has a series of Argentine exploitation ads from the mid 80s.

Who are you?

Nightmare fodder for many a 70s child (spoiled by USA, of course), usually first glimpsed on late nite TV, maybe a local spot on Carson, the CBS Late Movie, or ABC's Wide World of Entertainment. Featuring Juliet Mills, star of the 60s family sitcom Nanny and the Professor, Beyond the Door was an Italo-horror sort of blatant Exorcist ripoff, this time with the mama and not the kiddo possessed by demons. The name of the film in Italy was Chi Sei?, which, translates to the TV preview's skin-tingling catchphrase, "Who are you?", which probably rendered many sleepless, shadowy nights back in 1974.

The Glory that was VHS

The halcyon days of VHS! -- who knew that we would be nostalgic for those glorious hours spent in the mom-and-pop video store, with the oversized boxes, faded from constant plate-glass sunlight... and the boxes, empty and cellophane wrapped (the tapes shelved safely behind the counter), lighter than air almost, would tumble like hollow dominoes with the merest brush of an elbow. And the forbidden pleasures and horrors the box's artwork would promise-- as if you would never see a movie bloodier and and more debasing than Dr. Butcher, M.D. (Medical Deviant), until you run across a tattered box for Bloodsucking Freaks, and then, one step beyond, the non plus ultra of home video depravity, Faces of Death, where real people actually died on screen! What a world!

See glorious examples of VHS box-art with Critical Condition's A Visual History of Video Companies in the 80s, a series that begins with examples of Paragon's releases, and will update with examples of other video producers like Midnight Video, Gorgon Video, Media Home Entertainment and Wizard Video. 2 day rentals only $2.50! Free popcorn!

Royale (w/ cheese)

Found on YouTube-- See it before the powers that be take it away. A video mashup with the title sequence of the new Casino Royale (very nice in its own right) set to the original Burt Bacharach penned Casino Royale theme from the 1967 spoof. Not earth shattering, but prety cool to watch.

Robert Altman

R.I.P. Robert Altman... American Patriot, Filmmaker, Crazy Coot, Great Unique Talent, Dog Tattooist...

GA: ...Is it true that in the forties you used to tattoo dogs?

RA: Absolutely.

GA: Can you explain?

RA: Well, in the forties, I tattooed dogs.

Right after the war I got a dog for myself, a personal dog. I don't know why, it was a terrible Bull Terrier. The guy I bought it from had this thing called an identicode, which he would tattoo on to dogs for identification. I thought this was a terrific idea. Before I got out of the shop with my Bull Terrier, I was the vice-president of this company.

So, I became the tattooist. We would take the dog, and inside the groin, by the right-hind leg, we would shave and put on the antiseptic fluid and then with the tattooing machine I would do letters, and I got pretty good at it, and we'd put the number of that dog that was registered. We thought we were off to be millionaires. It turned out that I just got a few dog bites.

GA: I also heard that you tattooed President Truman's dog.

RA: Yes, I did. We tattooed Harry Truman's dog in Washington. That was a publicity stunt. Although the dog was actually tattooed. I also tattooed a waiter.

He was bringing drinks up to a hotel and he said, 'What are you guys doing.' We told him we tattooed and he said, 'I always wanted to have that!' So, we were a little drunken, I remember this guy took his shoe off and I tattooed on the bottom of his foot his army serial number and his name. His name was D W Stiles. I don't remember his number.

GA: Do you regret having given that up for film-making?

RA: Well...they're both about the same.

Hitchcock as Commodity

While we may marvel at Hitchcock's artistry and crafty cinema, I've always been fascinated by Hitchcock the huckster, the self-promoter. I've often wondered when Hitchcock was first pushed as a selling point for his productions. In his his early days in Britain, he was touted as a "boy genius", and, with his series of thrillers in the 30s, he was starting to wear the sobriquet of a "master of suspense". But when exactly was the image of Hitchcock, the droll fat man in funereal black suit as we know him today and as we knew him forever, used to sell a picture? Was it this sort of ugly looking caricature on this poster for his 1942 movie Suspicion. And not to think that this is too much of an anomaly, here's another poster for the very same film, now featuring a much more stylized impression of Mr. Hitchcock (and much more flattering to boot!). His distinctive physical appearance was one that Hitchcock used to separate himself from his peers. One can't imagine seeing a picture of an eyepatch wearing Ford chewing on a handkerchief pushing Gideon of Scotland Yard or slim, gray Hawks pushing Man's Favorite Sport? Of course, his sense of cinema was distinctive enough to set him apart as well.

Yes, this is a very modest and pissant addition to the Hitchcock blog-o-thon!

Gods... I Like Gods...

Raise a tall glass, wherever you are, to the memory of Jack Palance, issue of Ukrainian-Pennsylvanian coal mining folk, former prize fighter, American film star. As distinctive as his face (sharp, flat, angular, cubistalmost) was his voice (also sharp, flat, angular, probably not cubist though). While his looks made him a movie heavy, his voice, velvety smooth and sharp and cruel made him an actor that transcended the lot of your usual 1950s badguys like Jack Elam, Lee Van Cleef and Neville Brand (although I'm very fond of those guys as well). While his face scored some very memorable moments in film (like his his scarifying death grimace at the end of Aldrich's Attack, a spectacular film!), it was his voice that created exquisite moments of cinema for me.He didn't write the lines he spoke, but by all rights, we should claim ownership. Here are a couple.

"Pick up the gun..." from Shane, as appropriated by Bill Hicks...

"Gods. I like gods. I like them very much. I know exactly how they feel. Exactly." Godard cast Palance as the vulgar American movie producer Jeremy Prokosch for his Contempt. Palance was reportedly very miserable while making the film as Godard refused to listen to any of his ideas for the role, giving him the most menial physical instructions: walk three steps, hit the mark, look to the left and smile... They squabbled throughout the shoot and Palance phoned his agent everyday to get him off the production. Afterwards, Palance referred to Contempt, a film one critic called the "greatest work of art produced in post-war Europe", as a picture he made with "some French director". The tensions made for great cinema, though, and Palance's bestial performance is crucial to the film.

But Palance had little regard for most of his film work. "Most of the stuff I do is garbage," he said. He also had nothing but disdain for his directors, "Most of them shouldn't even be directing traffic."

One of those directors he disdained was probably that Spanish iconoclast, the visionary/hack (or hack/visionary) Jesus Franco, who directed him in Justine, an adaptation of a Marquis de Sade piece, where Palance chews the scenery like Matter Eater Lad (on acid!). Don't believe me? See highlights of his performance here.

You wouldn't want to hear Palance upset either! But if you do, listen here (mp3).

Also, he recorded an album in the late 60s, a Lee Hazelwood influenced country-ish effort. Here's a song he wrote and sang, "The Meanest Man Who Ever Lived".

El Topo Crazy

One of these days a legit version of El Topo's going to be released in North America, maybe soon (here's a site for Abcko Films, who are going to release three of Jodorowsky's films, in theaters and on DVD, one of these days --check out the nifty video!-- Jodorowsky is such a delightful blowhard). In the meantime, let's go crazy with some El Topo links, shall we? First, crazy stills from the movie... from Subterranean Cinema, the complete text (with images) from El Topo: A Book of the Film (the script, actually)... also, from subcin, the complete soundtrack (in mp3) from the El Topo soundtrack (released by Apple Records!)... if that's not enough, there's a motherlode of links on Jodorowsky here (the guy does not lack for fans), including this really interesting essay on Mexican experimental cinema (Jodo wasn't the only one)... Also, if you're lucky, you may see the entire film here on Google Video (I saw a little bit of it a week ago; now the site states that the "video is currently not available -- Please try again later".

Jodo Update!: The wonderful WorldWeird Cinema blog offers the latest news on recent Jodoworsky screenings. Check it out!

Girl on a Motorcycle (1968)

Poster of the Week! -- is that Marianne's torso? Here's a sexy leather and zipper version of the the ad artwork for Jack Cardiff's Girl on a Motorcycle, suitable for your computer desktop. More about the movie here, here and here (it was known as Naked Under Leather in the US). More info on the film's star Marianne Faithfull here (her official site), and here (nice pics but website plays a midi version of "As Tears Go By")and here. Extra bonus: here's a video for her great late 70s record "Broken English", directed by Derek Jarman.

Found on YouTube - Some Castle Films

Found on YouTube: One way for movie fans to collect their favorite films back in the days before home video was to get digest versions in a home movie format, either 8mm or 16mm. Now, you can see some of these truncated versions, complete with sound. See 8 minute versions of Universal monster classics like The Mummy, The Wolfman, Frankenstein, and Dracula (dare I say, the edited version is an improvement, all of the hits, none of Browning's languorous misses and near-misses). See them for yourself. For more info on Castle Films' monster movie abridgements, go here.

Dr. No (1962)

Note: This is an oldish piece I wrote and posted on this site a good long while ago (4 years ago, sort of). The original page it was on is no longer linked to on this site (although it may still be googled), so I've decided to post it as a blog post just so it could be more accesible. Besides, with Casino Royale in theaters in a few weeks, it's not a bad idea to see how the whole Bond phenomenon started more than 40 years ago.
“Attention, This Man… Agent 007 Carries a License to Kill”, reads the Italian blurb to this poster promoting the original release of Dr. No, a rather odd proclamation to draw attention to a supposedly secret agent. In 1962, years before James Bond became “Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” and an international phenomenon, some publicists were probably at a loss on how to promote the film. Instead of images of swizzle sticks, long legs, silvery cars, the lean and long barreled pistol and Connery’s cold smirk that became pop fodder in the mid-sixties, the marketers of the first James Bond adventure, a modestly budgeted film adaptation of one of a moderately successful series of espionage thrillers, had to rely on maybe viewing the final film (most probably not, as this was not a normal procedure of the time), a few production stills, and, quite possibly, their wits and imagination.

Worldwide, most of the posters advertising Dr. No featured Sean Connery with a gun and Ursula Andress in a bikini, but this Italian ad seems to be the only one that featured Bond in a homburg. We usually think of Bond as a hatless creature, but he always wore one during the opening gun barrel sequences during the '60s (even George Lazenby sported one in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the last one that did, actually), and Bond's tossing of his hat on the hat rack in Moneypenny’s office is one of the miniature hallmarks of the early films. Kids weaned on the jokey and bombastic interpretations of Moore and Brosnan would be astounded, perhaps disappointed (if not bored restless) by the relatively staid and lusterless action of Dr. No, which probably seems as positively Paleolithic as Birth of a Nation or a black and white cartoon. Coming as it did on the tail end of that post-war golden age John Cheever celebrated as a “long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light... when almost everybody wore a hat,” Dr. No is a transitional piece of sorts, a last gasp of gray flannel cool and booze soaked insouciance before the world turned day-glo and hatless heads grew their hair long and jerked and swayed to the sounds of swinging London. The Bond of Dr. No was the Organization Man turned Danger Man, a bit impetuous perhaps with a weakness for vices of which his superiors may disapprove, but ultimately one whose primary function is to serve the company. “When do you sleep, 007?” asks M after Bond is summoned to his office from a wee hour casino jaunt. “Never on the firm’s time, sir,” answers Bond, matter-of-factly.

Some of the more unpleasant vestiges of British imperialism crack through the movie’s cool veneer. The Jamaica of Dr. No is not the Jamaica we recognize from The Harder They Come, but a colonial version of white men in starched white Bermudas and a game of bridge in the afternoon while brown-skinned men serve gin and tonics. One of the more egregious examples of this sense of colonial privilege is when Bond instructs Quarrel, his Cayman Island lackey, to “fetch my shoes”. The filmmakers themselves were not above such soft-boiled racism, as in their portrayal of Quarrel as a superstitious native, blubbering about “dragons” with a pop-eyed abandon not seen since Mantan Moreland. These colonial attitudes stem from the Ian Fleming original, which probably was as embarrassingly politically incorrect in 1958 when it was first published as it does now (check Fleming’s description of “Chigroes”, the half-Chinese half-black islanders who were in league with Dr. No: "The Chigroes have all the venality of the Chinaman and all the brutishness of the Negro.”). Dr. No’s ethnicity was not touched upon in the movie, but in the book he’s another example of the Yellow Peril as exemplified in Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu stories, although, in this case, he’s half-Chinese half-German (Fleming had a big bugaboo about miscegenation).

At least seen in this light, the movie does seem dreadfully old-fashioned, a time-yellowed relic of a time we won’t (and probably don’t want to) see again. But when Dr. No was released to theaters in late ’62 –early ’63, it was something entirely exciting, brash and new. It introduced Sean Connery as a model for a new kind of hero, amoral, brave, yet capable of cold-blooded brutality (“That’s a Smith & Wesson, and you’ve already had your six”: Dent’s killing was the single most cold-blooded act in any Bond film, never to be equaled, even in more permissible times). We had to wait until Clint Eastwood starred in Sergio Leone’s westerns before we would encounter a movie hero as nonplussed about life and death. Many critics have commented on the science fiction aspects of Dr. No, but the subplot dealing with radio beams throwing off the gyroscopes of “Cape Canaveral rockets” (a MacGuffin actually) is not so much science fiction but a mirror of the science fact that figured prominently in the headlines of the day. This was, after all, the dawn of the space age. These scientific elements were woven into the fabric of the story in such a nonchalant and cavalier manner, that the audience took it as a matter of fact, without needing to suspend disbelief, a requisite in later Bond features. Indeed, one of the winning points of Dr. No is its very nonchalance and casualness, its easy sexiness, the effortless way Connery glides through Ken Adam’s sets, the breezy pace of the narrative, the fast cutting and quick action which blurred plot holes and contrivances enough so they became inconsequential.

The film, of course, was a worldwide success. Whatever innovations Dr. No may have introduced, these were not preludes to more daring filmmaking in the series to come (some may say “franchise”), but, instead, were immovable elements in the Bond formula, from which there can be no deviation. Although there are more than a few good Bond movies, the first three Connery Bonds (Dr. No, From Russia with Love, and Goldfinger) are the canonical standard, where the formula was perfected and honed to a fine shiny edge. Bond became a cash cow, still to this day, forty years later. Who could have predicted this back in 1962? Who could have foreseen that this tight little thriller would have spawned close to thirty new editions (one cannot properly call them “sequels”)? Like the colored pushpins denoting a franchise location in some grand corporate map, each Bond film pricks a point in our pop culture atlas, some deeper than others perhaps, but each providing a consistent value of entertainment, sex, and adventure, much as an order of McDonald® fries purchased anywhere in the world provides the same consistent value of crispiness, saltiness, and starchy caloric content. Admittedly, this is a very simplistic analogy, as there is some artfulness involved in the Bond movies, some of it quite brilliant (Maurice Binder’s title sequences, John Barry’s music, Ken Adam’s sets, Connery’s iconic performances), but the salient point remains that even the most artful elements of the Bond series became a crucial part of the formula, so much so then even when these creators stopped working in the Bond films, it seemed necessary for Danjaq, S.A. to recreate them with artful replicators (such as David Arnold for John Barry, and Daniel Kleinman for Maurice Binder). Thus, the formula became as familiar as comfort food, and just as reassuring for consumers. One cannot create forty years of uninterrupted box office success with stark originality each and every time, or at least, that’s the conventional wisdom. At least, we can see a glimpse of the time before James Bond became a formula, back in 1962, when the company man wore a hat.

---

More Info...
Red Grant's The Art of James Bond is an extraordinary compendium of visuals dealing with the Bond phenomenon, from book covers (including those cool Signet paperbacks my dad used to read and which I devoured during my adolescence), movie posters, album covers, ad mats, concept art, and a whole lot more. Dig on the 'sixties style! Groove on the Thunderball concept art! Or you can check out the concept art for A View To A Kill featuring a half naked Grace Jones. There are tons of Bond sites out there, but this one is one of the best.
Another good Bond site is Her Majesty's Secret Servant run by Paul Baack and Tom Zielinski, a couple of Bond obsessives. Of special interest is Richard Taulke-Johnson's essay exploring the semiotics of Bond (by way of Umberto Eco). Good stuff.
By the way, click on the poster for a larger image. 205K

Bollywood Babylon

More weird crap for your bleeding eyeballs. Dig this crazy collection of Bollywood hand-painted movie posters.

Dracula, Has Risen from the Grave (1968), Pt. 2

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

Dracula, Has Risen from the Grave (1968)

Poster of the Week -Halloween Edition!-- After a long, long, unexplainable and wicked hiatus, the poster returns with a vampire cape spinning flourish. Dracula Has Risen From the Grave was the third Hammer Dracula released (not counting Brides of Dracula, in which Dracula and Christopher Lee did not appear), made a full ten years after Horror of Dracula. This really surprised me. I had always thought there were a lot more, oddly enough. Anyway, it's a fun movie of its type, where Dracula is resurrected, kills some people, and is then killed himself, impaled on a giant golden cross, only to be resurrected again in the next movie. Nothing spectacular, to say the least, but these Hammer films were a mainstay on Halloween TV when I was younger, and an intrinsic part of the season as the Charlie Brown Christmas was/is during that holiday's televisual festival. Check out the heavy-duty staking scene from DHRFTG (as the fans like to dub it) here. Read and see more of lead actress Veronica Carlson here. And you've never seen Dracula in such a rage as in this film's UK poster art, which you can see in a larger image by clicking on the image on the left. 184K

Vampire A-Go-Go!

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.

The Peter Cushing Film Poster Site

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.