K.T. Katzmann's Blog: They're Here...., page 3

Rats, Slime, Punks, and Alice Cooper: Horror Movie Music Videos

I once got into a debate with my friend at a Halloween party. I never got too heated; we were too stuffed full of candy. Still, he took issue with my choice of soundtrack.

"Halloween music doesn't have lyrics," he said.

Now, I admit, this is the guy who went with me to Resident Evil and asked as the trailers ended, "Is this a horror movie?

Ask Mila Jovovich's career.

That might be why my friend assumed all Halloween music sounds like the waiting room at the Haunted Mansion. Aside from his ignorance of the Misfits, he'd never been exposed to the weirdness of horror movie theme songs.

Like the debate student I say speak of the space program who shocked his opponent by opening with remarks on the Bolivian space agency, I'll define my terms. A horror movie theme song, for our purposes, is a song with lyrics about the movie. Mostly, it tells you how screwed you are.

Let's say you're watching a movie about a mutated cafeteria lady who's now made of mystery meat. You'd get one verse about the terrible radioactive mayonnaise accident that created her. The middle verse is a love letter to the devastation she's causing, almost contractually obligated to include the words "Watch out!" Horror movie themes are a lot like Ronnie James  Dio songs, actually. Finally, the song ends reminding everyone that, no matter how devastating her ending in the unavoidable exploding gymnasium, she is coming to personally murder every listener for dubious reasons. Now we're got a kitsch classic on our hands.

The Ur-example I could find was Burt Bacharach's "The Blob," a quirky tune about a mindless thing that disolves your flesh. Man, I wish they did a punk version for the 80's remake.

Moving forward, we hit a funky tune for the opening of the Japanese pregenitor to Alien, 1968's The Green Slime. Have to admit, I still keep this one on my mp3 players.

This has a Criterion Collection DVD, by the way. You really should catch it. Let me tell you, those one-eyed tentacle beasts made quite an impression on my eight-year-old self when Grandpa Munster showed it on Super Scary Saturday, in-between Godzilla flicks.

Four years later, the genre advanced to the big time when Michael Jackson sang a touching love song about a rodent mastermind. A more mellow song than the genre usually gets I must admit.

You'd think that would be the biggest a horror theme could reasonably reach, wouldn't you? I mean, what spectacular songwriting did we have to look forward to next?

You'd have been excused for assuming the genre had hit it's peak, but 1984 proved that wrong.

Yeah, this entire column is basically an exercise in getting things stuck in your head. Ghostbusters is by far the most recognizable entry on our list, and I think we're all a little scared about what kind of cover we'll get for the upcoming sequel. Speaking of, don't forget the wonderfully nihilistic Key & Peale sketch about this; I really want to hear the Big Trouble in Little China song.

Let me warn you; don't expect too many other Academy Award nominees on these lists. We will get Alice Cooper's bizarre parenting skills in his ode to Jason Voorhees.

These, I am convinced, are the greatest kind of music video: the one where all metatextual boundaries break down and actors run from film scenes to movie clips to band performances. Frankly, if you're going to sing a song about a mentally-challenged mass murderer, you might as well embrace the fun side.

On the other side of the partisan line, Freddy also got his chance to fight 80's hair metal musicians. Did you think the Power Glove was Krueger's weirdest moment?

There's still some quality left during the 80's. After all, watching the Ramones wander around looking sedated while singing about Stephen King is fun.

Incidentally, if you haven;t heard the Backyard Babies version, you really should.

Next time, I present more recent songs and some deep apologies. Let me tell you, rap music proved just as effective as cheesy power ballads for giving the genre respectability. Also, we'll get to the one magnificent earworm of a song that convinced me to write this article in the first place.

The Visit: Let's Twist Again?

This, dear friends, is a minefield of a blog post.

Adorable film auteur M. Night Shyamalan has brought the world much joy and more gnashing of teeth. He's put million of butts into theater seats, and encompasses most of my Rifftrax purchases. The man is more polarizing than the ceiling lights of J.J. Abrams' Enterprise.

This should be an easy review filled with low-hanging fruit, right?

Well... no.

Admittedly, there's a lot of standard jokes to draw upon. The M. Night Shyamalan review nearly writes itself, regardless of the actual content of the movie. And make no mistake, many of you are reading this for one specific content-related question.

So, is there a twist?

Is there a beautiful, obvious in hindsight twist like The Sixth Sense? I mean, I heard it was good. It was spoiler for teenage K.T. By a jerk working the same Burger King shift as me.

Is there a deft, hidden mythology with a dramatic twist made even better by the deleted scenes like Unbreakable?

Is there no twist, like Lady in the Water or Devil? Is there a twist we will never stop laughing about, like Signs? Could it be a twist worthy of a second-tier Twilight Zone episode like The Village, a movie I was entertained by even if I felt suckered? Do we have a truly horrifying twist, like a Caucasian Eskimo boomerang wielder who can't pronounce his own name right?

http://dejakob.deviantart.com/art/The... nails it.

In short, do we have a twist, and is it like any of the previous movies?

Here's the problem, folks...

If I say there's a twist, let alone what kind, you'll be on hyper-alert. Guessing an M. Night Shyamalan twist, good or bad, is pure geek cred. If there's no twist, people might watch it with less excitement, knowing the mysteries over.

I've had arguments with my friends over spoiler levels. One of my buds was absolutely unrepentant, claiming that surprise in fiction was overrated. I, raised in the utterly-predictable sitcom eighties, hungered for any surprise I couldn't foresee, and violently disagreed with him dropping gems like “Richie dies, but it's halfway through the movie.”

Grrr...

Here's what I'm going to tell you. The Visit is good. Precocious kids head to their isolated grandparents house and film a home movie for their mother. It's a good found footage piece, the creepiness is progressively dark, and the audience in my theater tended to laugh from uncomfortable nerves. There may be just a teensy too much rap, but all is forgiven by the end.

And the ending... is earned. Twist or not, it is a thing of beauty when it came together. I laughed and applauded at least once.

So, let yourself be surprised, even if it's just at a lack of surprise. I ain't telling if there's a trademark twist. I'll say that the movie is well worth watching. After fifteen years of the real M. Night being in locked in the closet, someone finally killed his clone and let him out. Out of gratitude, he made us The Visit.

There's a new M. Night Shyamalan movie out, and it's good. That's the twist. Go enjoy it.

Grief Counseling with the Babadook

This one was a tough one to write.

The saying goes that dying is easy and comedy is hard. On that scale, honesty may be a little harder for me than comedy. I’ve seen a lot of cool monster movies lately that you’ll eventually hear about, films that are funny, surprising, and scary. I also hit upon a monster movie that actually helped me through a crisis, a film so on-the-nose that I showed it to my Mom. She brought my Mom-in-law and Dad.

Yes, we watched The Babadook as a family.

A scene just slightly less uncomfortable than the time I watched the Evil Dead scene about the Angry Molesting Tree with my grandmother.

Firstly, I think it’s an amazing movie. If you haven’t seen it, do it now. First, I’m going to summarize and try to sell you on it. I’m going to drop a hell of a lot of spoilers.

Don’t look shocked later; I warned you.

The Babadook is about a damaged family; Amelia is a single mother, still grieving over the loss of her husband years earlier. Her son, Oskar, is a precocious genus who loves magic tricks and builds monster-fighting gear.

I wish the younger me had owned a copy of “50 Chekov’s Guns to Build on a Saturday”

Their lives change one night at story time, when a mysterious storybook call The Babadook appears on their shelf. We get all the wonderful expected shivers of beautiful, disturbing pictures and creepy rhymes. Of course, once you read the book, you've clicked “Accept” on the monster’s terms of service…

Haha! I installed Google Toolbar!

Okay. Past this point, I’m completely spoiling an excellent movie. You’ve been warned.

Seriously.

Seriously, Spoiler Territory Ahead.

I've quoted Stephen King's saying that horror movies are society’s nightmares. This movie is a nightmare that my family and I are still going through. The Babadook is fundamentally about grief over the loss of a loved one, and this month marks the one year anniversary of my brother’s death.

Maybe a year ago, I wouldn't have got the metaphor. In the meantime, I went through the experience of telling my brother to get to an emergency room on Friday, worrying on Saturday, and getting called to examine his body on Monday.

This is heavy. Here’s a Blaculed picture of Bigfoot ripping a guy’s penis off to keep you going.

So, here’s why I applauded the movie at the end from my living room couch.

1) The Basement is Symbolism 101

That’s right. It’s a little simplistic, but we have to start somewhere. XX is nowhere near emotional closure for her husband’s death. Because of this, a creature rises out of the basement. Come on, people. You know that this represents the grief coming out of her subconscious, right?

See? I have a citation from the text, teacher!

2) You can’t get rid of the Babadook

This isn't a normal western ghost story. Yeah, in the east, you have the yurei, and those guys are the Terminator of spooks. Here, we usually expected some way to put the creature to rest. Nope. The Babadook, avatar of grief, will never go away once it enters your life. Things can’t even return to the pre-Babadook status quo.

3) The Grief Starts Tearing the Family Apart

The Babadook doesn't use telekinesis, write on the walls in blood, or spend eighty minutes boring the snot out of me by manipulating a pool cleaner. It crawls inside you and turns you an one another. Believe me, a family death creates regular angry screaming sessions about the strangest of things.

4) No, Seriously, You Really Can’t Get Rid of the Babadook

At the end of the movie, there’s a massive confrontation where Amelia goes full Mama Bear by declaring that the Babadook will not destroy here family. The Babadook retreats to the safety of the basement. It isn't dead, and it certainly isn't permanently gone. It's beaten for the moment, yes, but it’s always going to be down there.

Once it’s down there, it still needs to be regularly grappled with. The family feeds it worms, visits it in the basement, and talk with each other about how it’s doing from day to day. Once the Babadook is somewhat dealt with, our would-be magician can finally produce a white dove; Symbolism 101 has reminded us that peace has returned to the family.

Is this place dusty? It must be… dust in my eye. Yeah.

So, I watched this with my family.

My mother-in-law said that she didn't get it at all. That’s okay; her age is combining with the decades of guerrilla pharmaceuticals during Grateful Dead tours to do weird things to her thought processes. Seriously, I love her, but never try to teach her computer stuff. She won’t remember. My father shrugged and blew out a breath. He’s never been much of a metaphor guy.

My mother, during the credits, reached over with tears in her eyes and grabbed my hand. She finally saw her own Babadook.

So, when I realize my Marvel fan brother never got to see Winter Solider or Guardians of the Galaxy, or when I’m looking through his old Tolkien bestiary, I always think about this movie. This smart little horror film, aside from being that, is also a mental subroutine I can run and reflect on when I need to. I can see the Babadook; the Katzmann clan has one, and we’re not alone.

This is why I’m ecstatic to have ordered the massive, expensive, beautiful physical reproduction of the Babadook book. Every time I look through it, I’m going to remember the way my family pulled together in the most awful time imaginable by normal people (I’m a writer, I can do worse) and survived using a horror movie.

Thanks, everyone. You've been a great audience. Here’s a picture of a zombie eating a shark whose eating a zombie.

Just I hope they let each other know how they feel.

Watch The Purge. Live The Purge. Eat Ice Cream.

Not fifteen minutes after finishing The Purge on DVD, I was skulking through a darkened house with a wooden sword in hand.

I should explain. It might be Horror Block's fault.

The shirt made me do it, officer.

Having gotten a Purge shirt in my Horror Block, I snagged both movies out of the library to decide if I wanted to advertise them in public. My wife and I had just finished the first part and were kibitzing about the details when I get a call from a friend.

"Hey. I, uh, don't have time to explain, but you you help me check if my parents house was robbed?"

Shortly after, I climb into his car, worried that he'll make a crack about the combination of my "Survive the Night" T-shirt and wooden practice katana.

"Good idea," he says approvingly."

"Thanks. Being a child of the 80's, I brought you nunchucks and a flashlight."

Not the best role models, perhaps.

Over the later drive, I am regaled with the tale of a desperate relative for whom a cripplig Yu-Gi-Oh card addiction lead to more nefarious things I should've known the damn things were a gateway drug to actual drugs; I sold them once, after all. Ever try to explain to a parent how a kid could spend sixty bucks of birthday money on three pieces of paper?

"How old is he? Twelve?"

"Twenty-two."

He had made noises about stopping by the house of vacationing relatives, and it was now our job to make sure he was about and stealing things. This was stupid, on the face of it. Grown adults should not decide to play live-action ninja turtles for keeps. Maybe I went along because it just fit into the theme of the night.

As we crossed a street to approach the house, a car passed by me and undoubtedly saw a crazy with a samurai sword walking down the darkened street. It's a wonder the cops didn't come and add to the hilarity.

Ninja weapons in hand, we enter the moderately lit house, which is basically two houses connected with a fenced-in pool. Thus, we begin a tense search, weapons in hand, scanning every shadow for a possible Trap Card.

I was a Yu-Gi-Oh tournament director. I'd rather go through a real Purge than do that 

Not gonna lie; we found jack. I had a fudgesicle. I figured I was owed that, at least.

As we headed out, I had to wonder how much the DVD and shirt affected my behavior. If I had instead popped in one of my other library DVDs, like It Follows or Housebound, would I have been in the mindset to do something downright stupid? I have no idea. How much did pop culture make my brain turn off? I don't know. Some studies suggest a link between pop culture and aggression, but I'm a grown-up, not a kid binging Ninja Turtles. I admit, I haymakered my brother once because I saw Batman do it in a comic, but I also set a toaster on fire and blew up a light bulb with milk. Kids just do stupid things. At the end of the night, I can't link my bizarre and irresponsible behavior to a somewhat goofy movie too much.

But at least I got ice cream.

What is Your Pleasure, Sir? My June Horror Block!

'... but there was one box which I found exceedingly puzzling, and which I felt much averse from showing to other eyes."

-H.P.Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

 

I admit it. I'm a total freak for Lovecraft. I slipped an invocation to Cthulhu into my Bar Mitzvah prayers. I tried to get my middle school music class to sing the campy mythos songs in the back of the Call of Cthulhu RPG 3rd Edtion, much to the confusion of the teacher. So when I hear Horror Block is doing a month with Cthulhu, how could I possibly keep ahold of my money?

Horror Block is a subsidiary of Nerd Block, where the idea is to send you about $60 in random stuff each month for $20 plus shipping; in my case, about $30. With money to burn from the gift certificates students threw at me as the school year ended, how can I refuse? I mean, sure, I could have wisely used them like a responsible adult.

So I ordered the June Horror Block!

The green paper? Yeah, not giving clues to where I live. I saw how that worked out for Piers Anthony.

The box looks very attractive, which I suppose is a drawback if you have a mail service that leaves parcels on your front door. 

Only a strip of packing tape prevented me from beholding the true alien horrors of the universe. Eh. I've seen worse security on sources of evil and destruction.

Yeah, hobo Alice Cooper with scissors could totally unleash this evil.

Hoping for something labeled "CTHULHU CULT," I cast open the box!

What do we have? Initially, we have a hashtag (Hi, Horror Block!), a shirt, and...

...behold, the tiniest plush Cthulhu ever. Seriously, I have three of the smaller ones, and they're all bigger than this. He's certainly cute, though.

No one really gets the number of eyes right..

It was my wife who spoke up and brought me untapped joy. She passed her Idea Roll, and recognized what I could not.

Those twin pools of adorable cosmic indifference were embroidered, not glued on.

I had found baby's first Cthulhu! A snip of the tag, and my kidlet had lost her first 1d6 sanity points!

The company that makes this toy must be really new. The day I opened my box, their website only contained one image of their plush toys and more "Under Construction" labels then a 90's Geocities site.

Then we have the shirt, which... I didn't recognize. I Googled the slogan, but only got links to that Five Nights at Freddy's song that can get stuck in my head for up to 10 hours at a time. A little more research identified it as a Purge: Anarchy shirt... which I hadn't seen yet. I immediately ordered it from the library, not wanting to be like the 7th graders at my school who wear Misfits T-Shirts without having even heard of Glenn Danzig or Michale Graves.

Not about to relive that year of college where every laundry day, I had to wear that Earth: Final Conflict shirt...

Then we have an Alien ice tray.

I don't care if it rarely looks as good frozen, my Han Solo in carbonite tray proves I'm a sucker for these things. Pretty sure I could've got one with the Alien's head, but I like this one.

A Scream retro figure. I like this toy series, although I wish I'd gotten Sam from my yearly Halloween movie staple Trick R' Treat. Not being very actiony, he'll go on the DVD shelf.

I had my friends come over recently with their five-year-old. He asked "Who's the ghost?" I calmly explained that he was just a guy in a mask who murders people, to which his mom replied, "Oh, he's a guy in a mask!" She then waved her arms at me and mouthed "No murder! No murder!" Apparently, I had broken the No Murder Rule; better wear my Purge T-Shirt.

Cover accurately depicts what happens if you mess up his scene. Not safe for any work, including Christian's.

Wrap that up with an issue of Rue Morgue magazine. I suspect they're a staple of the box, considering they've offered 10% off codes for the service. Honestly, it's not a bad way to keep up a subscription.

All in all, not bad. The Cthulhu was a new kind I didn't have. The properties were all recognizable, except for The Purge, which is my fault since That Is A Thing. It is, right? Also, there was a cheat card included in case I truly failed my Cthulhu Mythos and Library Use rolls. My main worry was that I would get a Funko figure of "Human Guy Who Was in The Walking Dead for Like FIve Minutes." Overall, not a bad use of thirty bucks. Once my budget goes away from self-publishing, I might subscribe.

After all, even the box is useful.

After all, even I can only carry so many Monsters in My Pocket at a time...

Zombie Versus Shark! Asylum Films, Eat Your Heart Out!

I've heard about this one for years, having been given a hoodie with the famous worm-eye zombie on it from the man who released Metallica's first album(a weird tale for another time). What I got was a wonderful goulash of ingredients with a fairly weird history.

I invoked Asylum films before, the mockbuster company made rich by making the movies you accidentally grabbed at the video store when you weren't paying attention. Their catalog included titles such as I am Omega, Transmorphers, and Alien Versus Hunter.

[image error]

Also, the stirring Debbie Gibson "SCIENCE!" scene from Mega Shark Vs. Two Hours of My Life I'll Never Get Back.

Zombi 2 has a similar history involving a cinematic cash grab. Dawn of the Dead was reworked by giallo legend Dario Argento as Zombi for release in Italy. To cash in on Zombi's success, this movie was released as Zombi 2, with extra scenes cut to make it look like a prequel to the Romero movie.

Our ghoulish plot begins...

..and immediately annouces, "Yes, someone's gonna get crap shoved in their eye."

After a shadowed man shoots a tied-up zombie, we're treated to  a nicely suspenseful scene of a sail boat wandering into New York Harbor, drifting like the Demeter from Dracula, only with more synth pop. The boat's nearly clipped by the Staten Island Ferry, making me wonder if Fulci arranged that with the city first or just scared the bejeezus out of some poor ferryboat driver.

So far, the movie was already winning me over. I love 80's synth horror music, having spent years using Dario Argento soundtracks in my tabletop RPG games. This film's score feels properly like Goblin, and the more you invoke Argento's Phenomenon, the more on board I am.

Speaking of on board, the harbor patrol boards the boat...

Aw, they're so happy. Like kids on Christmas!

...finds signs of some past horror, including some creepy crawlies who refuse to play chopsticks...

...and some zombies. One of them gets on deck and looks yearningly at the skyline, realizing that if he make it here, he can make it anywhere, before the poor member of the flesh-eating, maggot-infested huddled masses yearning to be free is shot and falls overboard.

He never reppears in the movie, although later developments clearly show that he's not gone. Fun fact: the actor spent his break that day going to a punk rock bar in full zombie make-up and didn't even draw a comment.

Fast forward to the inevitable investigation. The daughter of the sailboat owner...

[image error]

Putting the "eye" into "ingenue."

...teams up with a reporter dubbed by someone who sounds like the exposition protagonist in every 70's Godzilla film. Here's a fun Zombi 2 game: figure out who's actually speaking English,  who's dubbed over with English, and who's speaking English and still dubbed. They break onto the boat to gather clues, drawing police attention. Fortunately, they pretend to just be getting nookie and avoid arrest.

Have I mentioned yet that I loved this film?

The clues lead them to search for a remote island. Two friendly tourists offer to take them on a three hour tour, so our heroes team up with Beardo the viking and Nipple-Woman. 

Seriously, I did a double-take at her, as throughout the scene her mammaries stand at attention more than Captain America at a Fourth of July parade. I mean, you'd think she'd throw on a jacket if strangers sudden walked up to her in that state. Considering her shirt is wet, I wonder if Fulci threw ice water on her just before the camera rolled in order to get that particular effect. Shrugging, I moved on, not realizing that the movie was just lulling me into a false sense of security; this was just the tip of exhibitionist iceberg.

For you see, she likes to scuba dive topless.

Don't you think William Marshall as Blacula adds a little touch of class to everything?

Seriously though, I went coral snorkeling on my honeymoon and that would've been terrifying naked. Those damn things are sharp! I can't fathom the idea of waving your soft, wobbly bits at all the knife rocks, bitey fish, and crawling clawed things. I may be misinformed, dear readers. Is topless scuba a thing?

Of course, all of this gratuitous nudity is a set up for one of the most beautiful scenes in cinema history: SHARK VERSUS ZOMBIE.

Nipplor the Diver (a He-Man figure if ever I heard one) soon gets chased by a shark into even bigger trouble. In proper World War Z style, there's a dead guy just hanging around on the sea bottom. She successful fends him off by waving flimsy coral in his face.

And I thought no monster repellent could be less intimidating than the pizza from Monster Squad.

Soon, the shark and zombie begin to fight over the diver's exposed flesh. This is a situation a wetsuit would've clearly been useful for.

The zombie challenges the shark to a dance off, but the shark is clearly having none of it. We are thus supremely fortunate in being able to view a diver in zombie make-up fighting a stoned shark that's been shoved full of Quaaludes.

Seriously, he looks so high that these two should be making a White Castle run rather then fighting. The zombie grapples and bites the shark, making you realize HOLY CRAP THAT GUY IS REALLY PUTTING HIS MOUTH ON A SHARK.

And the shark, clearly not wanting the zombie to hash his buzz, grabs some munchies before he leaves. Fulci apparently hated the entire fight, but it's existence enriches us all.

The part where the shark grabs the chair from out of the ring stunned us, ladies and gentlemen.

Nipplor learns no lessons from this, as she later accompanies Beardo into the water to check and repair the boat while completely naked. Seriously, girl, at least he wears swim trunks to check on a propeller! What I wouldn't give to have seen what the actress' facial expressions were upon first reading the script.

Our castaways continue onto the mysterious island, where they meet an angry doctor who has the worst survival instincts of anyone on a zombie choked island, ever.

Apparently the best behavior during an undead apocalypse is to keep calm and waste away in Margaritaville. His wife rationally wants to get the Fulci off the island, not giving a damn for his lost shaker of salt. Unfortunately, she only lives long enough to provide the film with two things. First  is, hands-down, the most meticulously crafted exploitation shot I've ever seen in a film. I cannot imagine what it was like for the poor woman to stand there while the cameraman adjusted his angles.

Literally every part of her body is exposed at once. One actress, seven Blaculas. I doubt this blog will ever hit a higher woman-to-Blacula ratio again.

Gaze upon it, dear readers. This is the goddamn Mona Lisa of nude shots. Fulci was not satisfied by a single shot of a naked woman; he had have it all simultaneously, an artistic accomplishment for the grind house of the ages.

To capture this nugget of cinematic gold, I went through 23 screenshot files. My wife looked over with concerned curiosity as I kept rewinding the scene and jamming the Print Scr button like a video game quick time event. I assured her, it was all for literary criticism.

I was, while getting screenshots, also spray cleaning a giant pink baby toy and listening to a podcast on the Russian Revolution. If someone had filmed me doing this and showed this in a film class, cinema students would spend decades have written whole treatises on the deep underlying meanings of the scene.

The second thing she provides is the lovingly shot eye destruction scene that is the hallmark of Fulci's technique. Shortly after, we're treated to a rip-roaring traditional zombie apocalypse. I will only of the later scenes say that the movie makes Molotov cocktails look surprisingly ineffective at setting anything on fire. 

In the end, this is a fun gore movie with a good build-up and great atmospheric music. Don't expert deep characters: each person is defined by their simple motivation, with no other personality traits left to plumb. Still, I was smiling  through most of it at the alternating levels of cinematography and audacity.

All in all, I give Zombie 2 four out of five plastic gargoyles.

It's not a bad way to spend 91 minutes, but watch out: the versions that float around Youtube are usually missing scenes.

I'm indebted to Ross Payton of "Zombies of the World" for his entry on the Italian Zombie, which makes so much more hilarious sense now. Shout-out also goes to the Horror Honeys, who's Jaws 3-D live-tweet and subsequent Aquaman vs. Jaws conversation reminded me of the famous shark scene.

Blacula: I'm Gonna Drink You, Sucka!

With my only exposure being brief, incredulous mentions in monster books, I expected a vampire movie starring the King of Cartoons to be ridiculous, like Undercover Brother with vampires. Simple blaxploitation comedy was my prediction. That was overturned constantly... until I watched the trailer. We'll get to that.

The fact that this film kept surprising me not is owed directly to Shakespearian actor William Marshall, the aforementioned King. In a great essay in Draculas, Vampires,and Other Undead Forms, researchers Lehman and Browning reveal the initial concept was something closer to the cast of Good Times wandering into Transylvania and becoming soul food. Luckily for us, Marshall demanded a story that wouldn't make him pull his fangs out.

Marshall portrays the African Prince Mamuwalde of the Eboni tribe (see what they did there?). Go on, say it: Mamuwalde. It rolls off the tongue like warm syrup. Anyway, Mamuwalde travels to Transylvania to eloquently aruge that Dracula should take a stand as a European aristocrat against slavery.

[image error]Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula, surprisingly. Mamuwalde is released in the modern day, finds the reincarnation of his beloved wife, and acts absolutely charming to the audience at all times.





[image error]

"Works every time."

Blacula (who never calls himself that for obvious reasons) doesn't act like a stereotypical Lugosi knock-off. First of all, while he drains people, he never once gives the idea that he's using the other vampires as servant. It makes total sense that that a vampiric abolitionist isn't going to be into enslaving people as minions. Never do we see Mamuwalde order his fellows around.

To be fair...

...he doesn't keep them on a short leash, either.

Also breaking from cliche, he gets his beloved alone, reveals himself to here, and attempts to woo her inside of just going for the Mina Harker route. There's no thrist for mere possession of the woman; Marshall brings across real joy at the reunification and respect for his time-lost love. 

I used the word charming earlier because I found myself generally rooting for Mamuwalde as cursed hero the entire time. There's a wonderful scene where our hero and Dr. Gordon (our modern Van Helsing) and talk in a nightclub. Mamuwalde plays with him the entire time they discuss the occult, reminding me of all the scenes in Tod Browning's Dracula where the count pretends to be alive.

There's other nifty things. I'm a sucker for songs in the background reflecting the plot, and all three nightclub songs are the performers pulling a Greek chorus and talking about Mamuwalde. The camera shots do get a bit uncomfortable, though.

The end becomes a cat-and-mouse game with the police, as the uncontrolled vampires spread infection geometrically. They're not bad at hiding, either. I think this is the earliest film I've seen that uses Joss Whedon's idea of a "game face," where vampires have a normal visage that "vamps out" when they're about to get their suck on.

So the police roll in, and Blacula rolls up his dukes. As soon as the cops are on alert, on of them spots Mamuwalde, draws his gun, and chases him into an alley. This got me thinking: How does he know Mamuwalde is the vampire? The movie goes out of its way to show that Mamuwalde doesn't show up on film, so he hadn't seen him before. Then I get a sneaking suspicion.

I remember that I'm watching a white cop chasing a running black man down an alley, guns drawn, in a movie intended for urban black audiences in the 70's.

Instantly, I wonder if I'm adding subtext that's not there. I'm not an African American, and I don't want to whitesplain things. The good guys do seem genuinely disturbed at the death of a policeman. That cop may have started the chase for good reasons, but it nagged at the back of my brain. Still, it might've coded very differently to the audience of the day. Then movie doesn't seem to revel in the cop's death, but I wonder how people reacted in the theaters.

I decided to check the DVD trailer. How did the movie present itself to the intended audience?

"Blacula..."

"...The Black Avenger..."

"...Dracula's soul brother..."

We get forty seconds of Mamuwalde beating on cops.

Yeah. Okay. The trailer does use "black vampire fighting cops" as the main selling point. Honestly, knowing the times, and the fact that this is only six years after Martin Luther King Jr. was shot? I can't blame the filmmakers. Considering the politics of the age, I totally understand how a disadvantaged and disenfranchised minority want a supernatural protector against the symbols they associate with their oppressors. I'm Jewish; I can recognize what's going on right away.

Blacula is the Golem of Harlem.

[image error]

"Solid!"

Philosophizing aside, it's a great movie. Marshall sells the end scene, and it's better written than most of Christopher Lee's. Whereas Sir Lee acted the hell out of often subpar Dracula scripts, Marshall is given an ending thats positively Shakespearean.

There's still some problematic stuff. There's an interracial gay couple, quite possibly a cinema first considering that All in the Family was just debuting gay characters on television for the first time. No one, not even our heroic Dr. Gordon, ever refers to them by any polite term. Aside from that and an n-word usage, this would otherwise be a great kid's monster movie. 

In short, it's a great vampire movie and a fascinating look at 70's politics. This one needs more love.

Let the sequels begin!

Baby's First Beowulf

Some monsters have a pretty stable look. Ask ten people to describe Jason Voorhees and things will stay in the same blood-splattered ballpark. Other creatures have a more varied image. Take Bigfoot, for example. Whether you first saw a gentle giant in a children's book or the menacing fuzzy hand come through the bathroom window in The Legend of Boggy Creek, that initial impressions colors your imagination forever.

I just found where my Grendel came from, and he's got quite the pedigree.

I had a book series called Childcraft as a kid. I got introduced to a lot of things in there, from Flatland to A Wizard of Earthsea. And, having recently rediscovered my copy of The Magic of Words volume, I found this inside...

That vaguely Native American bad-ass with the thousand-yard stare brought back memories. He was the psychopath I pictured while reading John Gardner's Beowulf in high school. I suddenly remembered the amazing image waiting on the next page, and gently turned it as if I had discovered the missing chapter from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. What awaited me did not disappoint.

That's it! That's him! That was the image I'd always had of Grendel in my head, the archetype for all my giants and ogres burned into my cerebellum.

And Childcraft knew better than to illustrate the full end of the tale.

Naked Angelina Jolie would wait for volume two.

I kept flipping through, and was stunned to suffer one of those moments where the world becomes smaller. The illustrator was Brian Froud, who did the visual designs for Jim Henson's Labyrinth. 

I'd been a huge fan of Labyrinth since high school, once spending a weekend ding nothing but re-watching the VHS and playing X-Com: Terror From the Deep, forever cementing together in my head killer shellfish, fiery death, and David Bowie's mystical expanding groin.

[image error]

"You remind me of the babe.""What babe?""The babe with the butter."

It's weird to realize exactly who's had an effect on you when you're young. Thank you, Mister Froud. You gave me more monsters than I had realized.

If anyone else has realized that something from your childhood had an unexpected pedigree, leave it in the comments.

Equinox: Frog-Kissing Fossil of Evil!

I saw this on the library shelf and remembered vaguely some Youtube clips I had seen of old school monsters. Then I was hit by the revelation that the packaging must inspire in most people: So, why does a bizarre cult monster flick get a Criterion Collections release?

If the director/writer/special effects guru on your film later wins nine special effects Oscars, you just might have genuine film history.

Equinox is the baby of Dennis Muren, a special effects wunderkind who went from this film to a career at Industrial Light and Magic. In itself, this movie is a weird nexus of the entertainment industry. It has one foot in the past, with scavenged pieces from places like  The Outer Limits and the original King Kong. The people who made it went on to shape SFX history in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Jurassic Park, and Star Wars. It gives an incredible advantage to anyone trying to win the Stages of Kevin Bacon separation game, almost as powerful as the film they used to show with Kevin Bacon in the Empire State Building. I mean, mix Kevin with Trek's Scotty and you're basically playing on easy mode. But I digress...

You know something has the historical badge of fame when its got an introduction by Forrest J. Ackman. Forry a.k.a.the Ackermonster a.k.a. Dr. Acula ran the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland. It was basically the Internet for young horror fans once upon a time, a place to connect and store cool pictures and weird trivia.

Muren calls this film a fossil, and that's not a bad comparison. It's a transitional one at that, showing the ancestor of many of the teenagers-in-a-cabin movies of the future. It's got swarming clouds...

...and an evil book that flies at the screen...

 

...which summons demons to a cabin. Anybody heard this one before? Yes, the special effects wizard of the Evil Dead series admits to seeing Equinox twice in the theater.

We start in the thick of things, with an explosion leading to a screaming man getting hit by a possessed car. Then begins the perfect opening for a Call of Cthulhu adventure as a reporter goes to an insane asylum to here the story of a daemonophobic screaming man. Once the flashbacks start, we're in familiar territory.

I'm not going to run down the plot, because:

A) It's familiar to any horror fan.

and

B) We're here for the monster highlights.

There's plenty of weird dialogue worth making fun of. The absolute best line of dialogue overall is definitely "I've seen dead bodies before," a statement idly uttered by a character and never explained. I wonder what kind of social circle the characters have where no one bats an eye at that verbal bomb drop.

The monsters include a a green thing that's a lot like the Ymir from Twenty Million Miles to Earth....

...a giant that's surprisingly well-integrated with the smaller human characters...

 

and THE DEVIL!

Now, the creepy park ranger is secretly the devil...

...which is totally not a spoiler, considering he's called Asmodeus. That's the subtlety you find in a second grader's creative writing story.

Ranger Not-The-Devil performs the goofiest gratuitous sexual assault ever, trying to kiss a fallen woman while trying to imitate a frog that just accidentally tasted something foul.

There's a second DVD that's crammed with special effects features, stills, and shorts.  I absolutely geeked out on these, because they reminded me of the fond hours I spent as a kid pouring over the special effects photos in Daniel Cohen books and the Crestwood House Monster series, two things I must blog about someday.

If your Dungeon Master puts this down on the table, you'll all going to die.

One hilarious gem is an 8 minute student film, Zorgon, the H- Bomb Beast from Hell.

The overacting in Zorgon is on display wonderfully in the first thirty seconds, and honestly, why not?

If your goal is to make a B-movie homage with the goal of making your film class laugh, Zorgon hits all the right notes. The silent part is a bonus, making it perfect to throw on while your friends are over for a homemade Rifftrax.

The movie's fun, and I'd probably show it to my kid if I quickly skip over the weirdo ­Satanic fondle assault part. I don't want her getting weird ideas about what a French kiss is and having an embarrassing prom night. I do adore scary monsters, with my DVD shelf boasting such favorites as Splinter, Rogue, and Carpenter's The Thing. Still, instead of scary, monsters can also be fun in the way that magic tricks are. I like watching older movies and thinking about how they were made.

This DVD won't scare anyone except young children, but I had a blast watching it. Equinox is a neat fossil that should occupy a proud place in horror's evolutionary tree. 

 

Why I Write Monsters

The Pishtaco, from Eden Studios' excellent Atlas of the Walking Dead.

There’s a gentlemen down in South America who’s been wandering through people’s imagination for centuries. He’s called the pishtaco. Picture a pale fellow with a coat and a knife. What does he do with the knife? Simple, really. A pishtaco performs guerrilla liposuction to get his dinner; he likes a fatty menu without the middle step of cooking anything. He may be a multiple murderer, but he's not a pig; he doesn't eat all of the fat he harvests.

What to do with the leftovers? Ah, there’s the really interesting question. 

It depends when you’re asking, you see. One thing that most people have always agreed on is that he doesn't save for later; there’s no fridge out there that you really don’t want to open. No, our monster is the entrepreneurial type: he sells the fat to people. One wonders how far the Craigslist rabbit hole you have to go to find a pishtaco listing, but we’ll put that to the side for now. Any fantasy will blow away like cobwebs if you look too closely.

Pishtacos are brilliant economists; they vary their markets like no one’s business. Currently, they sell to pharmaceutical companies. You won’t find that on any corporate manifesto or the pages of the Wall Street Journal, of course. These are just the cold, hard facts bandied around the schoolyard and bonfire. Go back a little in time and you’ll see the diversification of the pishtaco portfolio. He'll sell his product as airplane fuel, or peddle it for machinery oil. Heck, the conquistadors themselves bought it to oil their church bells back in the day. Whatever best represents the local fear of outsiders, that’s the preferred market of the pishtaco.

I bet no one deliberately changed the business model. Every so often, I’d expect, you’d get a really keen storyteller. As they amused the rest of the schoolyard audience or their terrified grandkids, every so often one gifted tale-teller would improvise something. They’d have the pishtaco rolling around in their heard, squeezing out of their mouth into the ears of the listeners, and the host would just suddenly say, “And you know how those new airplanes the Europeans have really take off? Pishtaco fat in the engine! True story.” Everybody would squeal and shiver, and decades from then would find one of the audience would make a spark of their own, connecting other cultural woes to the pishtaco killer.

Stephen King, as usually, put it best. In Danse Macabre, a book I have lectured out of more than once, he says that “if movies are the dreams of the mass culture… then horror movies are the nightmares.” Of course you can apply that to more than movies, considering King himself pulls the Victorian obsession about sex out of a few paragraphs from Dracula. That’s why my favorite subject is the cavalcade of imaginary creatures we've dreamed up. I write about monsters because many of them are crystallized chunks of our brain walking around exhibition-style.

From pointing out the folly of man...

Sometimes we tame them. A three-hundred foot tall reptilian metaphor for our atomic nightmare can, through familiarity, become a friend to all children (although that slogan more properly belongs to his flying turtle rival). Even the most recent Godzilla had the big G rise out of the ocean to save us, pulling out all stops except having people on the beach scream, “Look, in the water! It’s a seagull! It’s a seaplane! It’s Godzilla!” Monsters can bounce back from domestication; Freddy Krueger was becoming more and more cartoonish until the under-discussed New Nightmare resharpened his claws. Every wild animal kept as a  pet has the instincts to maul you buried in its DNA, and monsters in our mind are no different. They break their leashes.

... to kicking cockroaches for your freedom.

I love ‘em all, though.

So, hey there! I’m K. T Katzmann. I wrote an upcoming mystery novel about a Jewish vampire who falls in love with a Bigfoot, and I’ll be blogging here. Come back here for movie and book reviews and pontifications on the shapes that shamble out of our nightmares. At some point over the summer, I intend to watch and blog about what it’s like to watch nine Puppet Master movies in a row. I have no idea if I’ll enjoy that, but I’m willing to rip my heart out for you people.

After all, I’ll keep writing about monsters as long as you’re willing to read about it.