John Rozum's Blog, page 10

31 Days of Halloween - Day 26 - Movie

While Diving, Matt Farrell (John Ashley) is abducted by a scientist (Charles Macauley) who wants to use him in one of his experiments combining humans with animals in order to create a super race of beastmen. The scientist's daughter (Pat Woodell) has a change of heart and helps Farrell and some of thye beast people escape. A sadistic henchman (Jan Merlin) and his team set out across the island to hunt them down. The Twilight People (1972) is a low budget Filipino-American film directed by Eddie Romero that is essentially The Island of Dr. Moreau combined with The Most Dangerous Game which is not necessarily a bad thing. This is the kind of movie that you used to kind on tv on Saturday afternoons, or late at night and is perfectly entertaining if not exceptional viewing. While the make-up on the animal people is crude, it's still pretty effective. The actors also try to give their animal characters defining characterustics, such as the antelope man who tends to defend himself with backward kicks. The creatures are also a ittle more ambitious than the straight-up adaptations of H.G. Wells' novel. Here we are even given a flying batman. This movie is probably best known for featuring Pam Grier as the panther woman.

#1 Days of Halloween - Day 26 - Book

Midnight Movie Monographs: The Brood by Stephen R. Bissette. PS Publishing 2020.

The Brood, is arguably one of David Cronenberg's best movies and is certainly his most personal born out of his own divorce. Stephen R. Bissette shines a magnificent 670 page spotlight on the movie, its origins, impact, and numerous asides into the history of Canadian production, tax shelter laws, censorship madness, literary and cinematic thematic precursors, Cronenberg's own films leading to and through this one, and many, many other threads and connections that give the most exhaustive overview and dissection of a single cinematic work as you can imagine.

Bissette is to be commended not only for his research and insightfulness, but for bing able to weave so many threads through this work without any tangles, or knots. It's scope is matched by the clarity of its content. It should be an important example of what can be done in dissecting a cinematic work, and I hope more cinema scholars follow his lead.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 26

Here's my latest cut paper Halloween piece. It will be available for sale at John Rozum Art.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 25 - Movie

The Stuff (1985) is a new dessert food that is sweeping the nation, and leads the ice cream companies to hire an industrial spy (Michael Moriarty) to uncover just what it's made of. It turns out its all natural ingredients come in the form of a living organism which is actually doing the consuming.

Larry Cohen has made a number of offbeat, satirical, genre movies from It's Alive (1974)  to Q (1972), all of them wildly inventive and wildly uneven. The Stuff is no exception. I first saw this in a New York City movie theater during the middle of a hurricane, and really enjoyed it. I even own a prop carton of The Stuff from the movie. Tonight is the first time that I've seen it in over thirty years. It's a bit dated now, and it's low budget really shows, but it's satire of consumerism still hits home, and while the tone of the film wobbled too much on the side of comedy and not enough on horror, it was still entertaining. Michael Moriarty gives an outstanding, inspired, and oddball performance in this movie which makes it worth seeing for that alone.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 25 - Book

Monsters in Print Researched and Compiled by Adam Benedict. Independentally published. 2019.


This book is a collection of transcribed newspaper articles published between 1820 and 1924 presented in chronological order. Each article is a report of a sighting, or encounter with some strange unknown animal, or monster, typically in the United States. There are over 170 such articles contained in this book and no corresponding illustrations which may have appeared with the original articles. There's also a small section at the end covering strange airship sightings at the beginning of the 20th century, which may all be the same strange craft.

This book contains the usual problems with self published books; the need for a proofreader. While the spelling errors are less frequent here than is usual for a self published book, their elimination would have fixed some areas where the typos make the information confusing. Benedict states he simply transcribed the articles as they were with no corrections, or alterations, but I doubt the typos are as originally presented, and if so. they should have been fixed anyway.

As for the book itself, if you have an interest in cryptozoology, as I do, this book will be fascinating, and a bit frustrating. With only one or two exceptions, there is no cross coverage, or follow-ups presented on any of the creatures covered here. I don't know if that's from Benedict deciding he didn't need to include five articles from one town on their weird sighting, or if the newspapers didn't publish follow-up articles, or if they simply didn't crop up in Benedict's research. Many of the creatures are described in a very similar manner to one another, particularly some of the sea/river/lake monsters and some land animals that sure sound like Bigfoot, even though that term, nor sasquatch was being bandied about yet.

One interesting aspect of this book is that, while horrible that in the time period covered the sole reaction to these creatures was to kill them, or at least try, there are numerous mentions of specimens planned to be sent to specific museums. It might be worthwhile to contact some of those institutions to see if anything was ever sent to them, and what became of those specimens.

Like a lot of cryptozoology books which tend to be lists of eyewitness reports and other reported incidents, this isn't really a book meant to be read straight through (which is what I did). You'll want to dip into it and read a handful of articles at a time. Each article is pretty short. I think the longest was about six pages, but most are in the two to three page range, so it's easy to pick up and read a couple when you have a few spare minutes.

This is a welcome addition to my cryptozoology library, and I recommend it to anyone with an interest in that area.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 25

Early this month I shared some rcipes by Vincent Price in case anyone wanted a horror movie star to host their Halloween party in spirit. He's not the only cinematic fiend with recipes. There's also Boris Karloff's guacamole as seen above. At the blog Silver Screen Suppers, you can not only find two more recipes by Boris Karloff, but recipes by Lon Chaney, Jr., Peter Lorre, Basil Rathbone, Alfred Hitchcock, John Carradine, Peter Cushing, nearly 200 more recipes by Vincent Price, as well as other actors who have appeared in horror movies and general cinema. Best of all, the bloggers have actually tested all of these recipes and you can see the results with each entry.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 24 - Movie

An asbestos removal team is hired to clean up the interior of the long closed, and infamous, Danvers State Mental Hospital. Their interpersonal conflicts and the stress of the job are exasperated when one of the men goes missing and others start acting strangely, leading to tragedy and violence.

Session 9 (2001) is a movie I've wanted to see since it came out, but only finally gotten to now. I always anticipated spotting the Danvers facility when I was a kid and my family drove to New Hampshire, and it could be seen from the highway. It looked haunted and back then, such facilities had less politically correct names attached to them, so my imagination, fed by years of regular horror movie viewing and comic book reading,  ran wild with the possibilities of what was inside that place. At the time it was still functioning as a mental hospital.

Part of the appeal to me about Session 9 was that it was actually filmed within the building (which in high school, not long after it closed, I admittedly made an illegal night time exploration of ) and on its grounds. The movie turned out to be very different from what i was expecting. There are no ghosts, the facility filmed mostly in bright daylight is no more menacing than any other abandoned building, and while there is physical violence introduced into the film, most of the menace is of the psychological variety, and even that is very moderate.

Is it even a horror movie? Not really. It's not even really a crime thriller. There aren't really any scares. I found the movie to be completely engaging if a little disappointing. If you're someone who is familiar with the Danvers facility, and the notoreity is has obtained since it closed, it's worth a look because you really get to see a lot of the building. But, if you are looking for something creepy with scares, you'll be disappointed.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 24 - Book

Short Things edited by John Gregory Betancourt. Wild side Press. 2019.

This book was created as an added incentive to the successful Kickstarter campaign to publish the recently discovered Frozen Hell, John W. Campbell's novel length version of his influential short story, "Who Goes There?" which was the source material for movies The Thing from Another World (1951), The Thing (1982) and The Thing (2011). It contains thirteen short stories inspired by "Who Goes There?". You can see a list of the authors in the image of the cover above. Marc Hempel, Allen Koszowski, Rainy Virnicid, and Mark Wheatley provided illustrations for the stories, but with the exception of one story which credits Hempel, unless you are familiar with their work, or are lucky to find a signature in the art, you'll have no way of knowing who drew what. Dan Bremerton did the nice cover art.

This short story collection was more of mixed bag than a lot of of anthologies. There were only a couple of stories that were really good. some of them were interesting reads, but ultimately forgettable, and some were just blah. In the end it felt like no one really tried to run with the premise, and most of them felt like predictable variations on theme. One story did go so far outside the box that it felt more like the author had an unpublished story that involved aliens that they said could be used because they didn't have the time to write a new one. I was surprised by how disappointed I was in this given the quality of some of the writers involved, and the source material they had to work from.

The book also suffers from a lot of typos. This seems to be a more and more frequent problem with books, especially from smaller presses. A proofreader was definitely something this book could use.

You can get a story by story breakdown of this book at SF Magazines.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 24

My own history of dreesing up for Halloween is pretty sad. As a kid I did wear a costume every Halloween, including the annual Halloween parade where all the kids gotb to start from school in their costumes, and march down Main Street, which was always a highlight of the season. Photos of me in my costumes must all be tucked away in a series of slide carousels somewhere in my parents house. Costumes I remember having; The Collegeville Casper the Friendly Ghost costume, the Ben Cooper Spidermana and Planet of the Apes costume (we also had the Dr. Zaius one which makes me wonder if my brother wors that one year. This weird Frankenstein mask which I wanted because it somehow reminded my of War of the Gargantuas, a homemande werewolf costume where I had my mother cut the ends of my pants into jagged triangles, and my final costume, probabbly 5th of 6th grade, of a Jawa from Star Wars which was also homemade. As an adult I almost never dressed up. My Halloween tradition, which remains true, has always been marathons of horror movies. In college I once dressed up as Kyle MacLachlan from Blue Velvet, which was simple since that's who I looked like in real life right down to the wardrobe. In my trenties, I put together a few literal last minute costumes.My most ambitious, which to be fair was probably more of a last day costume, was of the Fly. My girlfriend at the time dressed as Cruella De Vil. My true last minute costume where people were on there way to pick me up and I had nothing, was to throw on a cape and strap two bananas to my head with rubber bands. This was my devil costume, and I still rather like it. After that I only recall really dressing up once or twice. My final time was when my kids were young and I took them trick or treating dressed as Teenage Frankenstein. Wearing glasses and a latex mask doesn't work out so well, otherwise I'd use every year as an excuse to collect great new monster masks. Instead I've always gone out of my way to dress up the yeard for trick or treaters.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 23 - Movie

After her father fails to return home after a trip out of town to buy her a birthday present, Carol and her boyfriend Mike try to find him. The discover his wrecked truck, then thinking he may have taken shelter in a  nearby cave, look there too. They find his desiccated corpse, and the reason behind it when they fall into a giant spider web. They escape just before the spider can reach them. Bringing the authorities and a lot of DDT, the spider is killed, then transported to the high school gym, where it will be taken away by university scientists. Before that happens, the spider revives and wreaks havoc on the town before heading back to the cave where Carol and Mike, once again find themselves trapped.

Bert I. Gordon has made a lot of movies about out of scale humans and animals (The Amazing Colossal Man, King Dinosaur, Empire of the Ants, Village of the Giants, The Food of the Gods, etc.), where he not only produced and directed the films but created the special effects. The Spider / Earth vs the Spider (1958)  is among the best of these films and one of the best of the giant insect films, right up there with Them! (1954) and Tarantula (1955). The story is involving, and actually provides a believable reason for the two teens to wind up in the spider's cave twice. The special effects are solid and use a combination of real tarantuala matted into full size scenery, humans matted into cave scenery and som e oversized spider appendages created by Paul Blaisdell. What truly gives this film an eerie edge over other giant bug movies is the sound effects for the giant spider, which  were obviously made by a human being. They are effectively unsettling.

This was always one of my favorite movies to catch on television, and I enjoy it to this day.