Dr. K's Halloween Countdown: The Aftermath!

The trick-or-treating has come to an end, and it seems as if our plan was a success. The Other Dr. K and I decided this year that instead of giving out candy to all the little ghouls and goblins, we would hand out containers of Play-Doh (we found special Halloween trick-or-treat packages of Play-Doh at Target). I was a bit worried about this plan, as I envisioned a bunch of disappointed, sugar-starved hellions "doh-ing" our house and cars, so I wanted to have some candy around as a back-up plan in case we started to get some complaints.

However, I needn't have worried. Most of the kids, when seeing what we put in their bags, went tearing across the yard screaming, "I got Play-Doh!!!" We also had many parents come to our door to tell us that they really liked that we gave out Play-Doh instead of candy. And the worst reaction I got from a little boy was one who wanted pink Play-Doh instead of black. I told the kid that I was proud of him for resisting fundamental, essentialized notions of gender, and I gladly made the exchange. Also, two older boys just handed it back to the Other Dr. K, but were polite enough not to throw it at us or our property. I'll keep my fingers crossed that, when I get up in the morning, I won't have a tailpipe stuffed with Doh.

(We have a phenomenon around here where teenagers often go trick-or-treating, but without costumes. This, in my book, violates some fundamental but unwritten contract of Halloween: costumes = trick-or-treating; no costumes = walking up to a house and asking for food. It goes like this: you knock on my door, I answer, you say "Trick or Treat!", I tell you how cute and/or scary you look in your costumes, you get treats. I have to say, though, I did give some of these costumeless kids the candy instead of the Doh.)

All together, we gave away over 100 containers of Play-Doh this year. Next year, I think we'll mix things up a bit by getting both Play-Doh and the small ashcan comics that some companies has started producing over the last couple of years. But, in the meantime, I'm going to sit back and hypocritically enjoy a big bowl of Almond Joys that we didn't give away, as that is my single, all-time favorite candy bar (followed closely by Kit Kats).

Did anyone else have good trick-or-treating experiences this year?

Dr. K's Halloween Countdown Presents: Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween!

Thanks to everyone who joined me in the Halloween Countdown. I hope you all have an awesome Halloween, and that you get lots of candy (but no rocks!).

Dr. K's Halloween Countdown Presents: Favorite Scary Covers!

With Halloween fast approaching, I want to spend today and tomorrow covering some of my favorite horror comics and movies. Today, I'm posting some of my favorite scary covers from horror comics I have owned.

This Wally Wood cover from Eerie 2 is probably my favorite horror comic cover in my collection. This just doesn't look like a good situation.


I've had this issue of Phantom Stranger since I was a kid, and for some reason, this Neal Adams cover gave me nightmares. I think, even then, I had a fear of evil children.


This Jose Luis Garcia Lopez cover for Ghosts 1 meets Chris Sims's criteria for a good horror comic cover by featuring a skeleton where it shouldn't belong.


House of Mystery 201 is a comic I wish I still owned. The cover story, with interior art by the great Jim Aparo, is about a kid who transforms into a violent, demonic persona. In order to control him, his parents arrange a lobotomy, and the last panel shows the boy playing on the lawn in a near-vegetative state. Just substitute Ritalin for the lobotomy, and you've got a story that's still scary and relevant today. If I'm not mistaken, I think this cover is by Mike Kaluta.


Another House of Mystery cover, this one by Berni Wrightson. Wrightson is awesome, and that is all I have to say about that. Also, like the last cover, this one also features a female character reading in a chair while a threat looms behind her. Interesting.


While Wrightson and Adams did some great covers for DC's horror books in the 60s and 70s, I think that Nick Cardy's covers for the same books are quite underrated (and often uncredited, though his style is distinctive enough to spot). This cover has more fantasy elements to it, but it's still nicely done.


Though not a horror title per se, Jim Aparo's Spectre covers for his run on Adventure Comics were really boundary-pushing in the 70s. This one also had an effect on me as a child.


Joe Kubert did the first five covers or so for Weird War Tales, this one being for issue 3. These covers really combined Kubert's talents for both war and horror comics. I also like the adjective "Gut-Grabbing."


Not a scary cover, but I do like cats.


Take the stupid spider with a skull off this Neal Adams cover, and it makes a certain painting by Edvard Munch look like a pile of puke.

Dr. K's Halloween Countdown Presents: House of Frankenstein!

As Universal Studios' monster franchises were winding down during World War II, the studio tried to raise the ante and staunch the draining creativity from the properties by putting out movies that featured almost all of the creatures either teaming up or fighting each other. Three movies at the tail end of the Universal cycle form a nice trilogy: Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), House of Frankenstein (1944), and House of Dracula (1945). While these movies are far from scary, and appear very cheaply made, they are well-paced fun, and I find I get the same enjoyment out of them today that I got when I saw them on the afternoon movie show when I got home from school. My favorite of the three is the Empire Strikes Back of the trilogy: House of Frankenstein.

In a gothic prison, a guard delivers a meal to a cell, only to have a hand reach through the cell door opening and clamp around the guard's throat. The camera pans to reveal Boris Karloff with a Rasputin-like beard demanding, "Now will you give me my chalk?" The guard complies.

Scrawled on the inside of the cell are many formulas and drawings, as Karloff's Dr. Niemann is trying to recreate the brain transplant experiments of Dr. Frankenstein. And he promises Daniel (J. Carrol Naish), his hunchbacked, Igor-ish cell mate, a perfect body if he can only get ahold of Frankenstein's records. As if responding from some divine power, lightning suddenly strikes the prison, leaving a hole through which the prisoners can escape.

As Niemann and Daniel leave the prison, they discover a small carnival wagon train belonging to Professor Lampini's Chamber of Horrors stuck in the mud, and they exchange their assistance for a ride. The Chamber of Horrors happens to feature as its star attraction the skeleton of Dracula, complete with wooden stake through the heart. Niemann decides that Lampini's show will make the perfect cover for his plans to seek revenge on those who had him imprisoned, and he orders Daniel to kill the Professor. All together, Niemann has something like three plans to fulfill: getting revenge, finding Frankenstein's notes, and returning to his lab for his own experiments.

Niemann pretends to be Professor Lampini, and following a show, he removes the stake and revives Count Dracula (John Carradine). The two make a deal: Dracula will do Niemann's bidding, and the doctor will take care of the vampire's coffin home. Carradine is not a great Dracula--he's better at playing mad scientists and wild men. Of course, his Dracula gets much worse in Billy the Kid vs. Dracula, which is among the worst movies ever made. His hypnotic gaze especially over the top.

Dracula enacts one piece of revenge for Niemann, killing a burgermeister who helped send him to prison. Dracula also attempts to seduce the young bride of the burgermeister's son, but he is soon found out and run out of town. However, during an exciting carriage chase, Dracula is killed, as the sun rises before he can return to his coffin. Only thirty minutes into the movie, and Dracula is already dead. In fact, the first half of the movie forms a complete story in itself, giving this movie an episodic feel.

Niemann and Daniel escape the town and head for the next stage. Luckily, the area roadsigns helpfully point out that "Frankenstein" is only 1km away. Along the way, though, the pair stop to watch a gypsy dancer, named Ilonka, perform, and Daniel quickly falls in love. He later rescues her from a thrashing when she won't give all of her earnings to her boss. He then places her unconcious body onto their wagon and takes her with on their journey to Castle Frankenstein.

Or what's left of it. In the previous film, the castle was virtually destroyed in a flood, and both the Frankenstein monster (Glenn Strange) and the Wolf Man (Lon Chaney Jr.) were left frozen in an underground cavern. Niemann finds the notes and the creatures, who will now factor in to his elaborate plans for further revenge. That plan: take the two monsters back to his own laboratory and then transplant the brains of his two remaining enemies into the bodies of the creature and the Wolf Man.

Meanwhile, Ilonka falls in love with Larry Talbot, the human guise of the Wolf Man. It seems, though, that she falls in love with him primarily through process of elimination: he's not a hunchback, nor is he an obsessed mad scientist or creature made of the parts of various corpses. With those choices, she picks the guy who only turns into a murderous monster a few days out of every month.

Together, Ilonka and Larry make a plan of their own: the Wolf Man has recently killed a girl from the village, and if he ever attacks Ilonka, she must be prepared to shoot him through the heart with a silver bullet. On the next full moon that evening, he does attack her, and she shoots him, but not before he gives her a fatal bite wound. Then, in a rapid series of events, Daniel almost kills Niemann, but the creature throws the hunchback out of a window before he can finish the job. Meanwhile, villagers seeking the Wolf Man have noticed the activity at the formerly deserted castle. The creature then carries the incapacitated Niemann out of the castle, past the torch-bearing villagers, and into a handy pool of quicksand. The End.

This movie is nothing if not efficient. It's a lean 71 minutes, and it jams in a lot of plot at a very fast pace. In fact, there isn't a lot of downtime in the movie, and it probably takes longer to summarize it than to watch it. Leonard Maltin's Film Guide describes this movie as "tough to dislike," and I think that sums it up well. It's preposterous and disjointed, but it doesn't slow down long enough for the audience to worry about its deficiencies. At worst, the movie leaves the audience wanting more of the same, and luckily Universal delivered more with House of Dracula, which reunited Carradine, Chaney, and Strange as the holy trinity of movie monsters.

Dr. K's Halloween Countdown Presents: The Brides of Dracula!

I teach Bram Stoker's novel Dracula almost every semester in an introduction to literature course, so I have a certain fondness for vampire films. But, as I tell my students every semester, the "quality-to-crap ratio" is pretty off balance in the genre, and I've given up on seeking out new vampire films unless they have something extraordinary to recommend them. I do, however, frequently extoll to my students the virtues of the Dracula cycle from England's Hammer Studios, despite the presence of many duds in the final years of Hammer productions. The Hammer films were known for kicking up the sex and violence from the Universal horror cycle while also featuring a fine repertory of actors: most notably, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. The series started with Horror of Dracula (1958), a very loose adaptation of the Stoker novel with Cushing as Dr. Van Helsing and Lee as Dracula. Lee wouldn't return to play Dracula for another eight years in Dracula--Prince of Darkness (1966), and even in that film, it takes more than half the movie for Dracula's servant to revive his master from the ashes of his fate in the first film. (The conclusion of that movie also featured one of the worst ways to defeat a vampire: Dracula is frozen in a lake. That doesn't defeat him--it just makes him someone else's problem later.)

In between those two movies, however, Hammer put out a couple of very good vampire movies: Brides of Dracula (1960) and Kiss of the Vampire (1962). Kiss of the Vampire, unfortunately, devolves from an awesome opening scene, where a mysterious, possibly drunk man stumbles into a somber funeral and suddenly thrusts a shovel into the grave and through the casket. When a scream and fountain of blood emit from the casket, several attendants faint and the man walks away. The camera then goes into the grave and through the casket to reveal that the young woman being buried is really a vampire! Unfortunately, the rest of the film does not live up to the opening, though it's still enjoyable.


I really enjoy Brides of Dracula, despite the false advertising of the title. While there are several vampire brides, Dracula is nowhere to be seen. Instead, we have Dracula's apprentice, of sorts: Baron Meinster, played by blond actor David Peel.

Also, the poster claims that the vampire "turns a girls' school into a Chamber of Horrors," but the movie fails to live up to that tantalizing promise as well. However, we do get the return of Peter Cushing as Dr. Van Helsing, putting this film in continuity with the rest of the Dracula cycle. So, minus Christopher Lee, this film has everything I love about the Hammer Dracula films, including the gothic setting and the psychosexual horror elements. The film was also directed by Terence Fisher, who directed most of the great Hammer horror films.

The film opens, as so many of these Hammer films do, with a young woman, Marianne, arriving in a strange village, near an all-girls school where she's about to start work as a teacher. Her carriage stops at an inn along the way, and the villagers start behaving strangely, refusing to serve her and advising her to move along. However, her carriage suddenly leaves without her, and the villagers all clear out of the inn for some mysterious reason. Moments later, thundering hooves can be heard from another carriage, and the Baroness Meinster enters the inn. She begins striking up a conversation wit Marianne despite the protestations of the innkeepers, who seem to know something about the Baroness. Soon, the Baroness has convinced Marianne to spend the night at Castle Meinster before embarking on the last leg of her journey in the morning.

I'm a sucker for this kind of opening--you see it in a lot of Hammer films, as well as movies like Die, Monster, Die!, which I commented on in an earlier post. These villagers have been living with this unspeakable horror their entire lives, and their moral system is so completely tuned to self-preservation that they easily sacrifice a total stranger.

While getting settled in her room at Castle Meinster, Marianne steps out on her balcony and sees a beautiful young man chained up in a room below. When she asks the Baroness about this, she responds that her son is "ill." Later, Marianne again looks out to the balcony to see the young man apparently trying to leap to his death, fearing the worst, she rushes to the room to save him. The young man then explains that he is the Baron Meinster, and his mother keeps him prisoner in the room. Feeling sympathy, Marianne resolves to help him escape.

Throughout these opening scenes, the viewer is in the same position as Marianne, assuming that the mother is the monster here, keeping her innocent son chained in his room. However, once Marianne allows him to escape, we learn that the truth is far worse: he's a deadly vampire, and his mother was the only one keeping him from running amok in the nearby villages. We also learn, though, that the mother has had to make some serious moral compromises to keep her son this way--she frequently would bring him young women to satisfy his hunger, and Marianne was soon to be the next victim.

The mother/son relationship is just one of the elements that make this movie interesting. Once the Baron is free, the first thing he does is transform his own mother into a vampire by biting her neck in a scene that does more than imply incest: "He has taken the blood of his own mother," she explains to Van Helsing as willingly allows herself to be destroyed by him later in the movie.

Van Helsing appears in the village at the behest of the local priest, who is trying to convince villagers that something must be done about the recent deaths of many of their young women. Peter Cushing's Van Helsing is coldly methodical. He's long since dealt with the emotional and moral issues of destroying vampires, and he has little time or patience for those who wish to treat the vampires as if they were still their loved ones.

My favorite part of this movie, though, is the climax, which contains one of the more clever methods of destroying a vampire. Van Helsing tracks a recently turned vampire bride to an old windmill, where The Baron soon arrives with Marianne. In the ensuing fight, the Baron bites Van Helsing and leaves him to his transformation. Van Helsing, however, acts quickly, cauterizing the bite wounds with a hot blacksmith's iron and dousing the burn with holy water. This does the trick, and he returns to the fight. The Baron then attempts to escape by torching the windmill. As the Baron runs away, Van Helsing makes his way to the top of the windmill, jumping on the blades and turning them so that their shadow, when cast across the Baron's path, make the form of a cross. The Baron then collapses dead in the shadow. This may be a bit silly, but it shows some of the inventiveness of these early Hammer horror films.

There are two good Hammer horror DVD boxed sets that I know about. The "Horror Collection" contains six movies all together, including three Dracula films: Horror of Dracula, Dracula Has Risen from the Grave, and Taste the Blood of Dracula. Unfortunately, the set skips Dracula--Prince of Darkness, and therefore confuses the continuity between movies. Brides of Dracula , along with Kiss of the Vampire, can be found on "The Hammer Horror Series," which features eight movies on two disks with no extras.

Dr. K's Halloween Countdown Presents: The End of the Creature Commandos and G. I. Robot!

As a bit of a companion piece to this entry over at the Invincible Super-Blog (as well as a follow-up to this post), here is the final appearance of both the Creature Commandos and G. I. Robot from Weird War Tales 124, also the final issue of that series:


This isn't just the final page, it's the entire story! Apparently, writer Bob Kanigher and artist Fred Carillo were given one entire page in this final issue to wrap up the stories of their creations. Obviously, this didn't sit well with the writer in particular, as he takes the opportunity to make a couple of digs in the story.

Here, the Creature Commandos get screwed in every way possible. First, they are put on trial "For rebelliously displaying signs of humanity," which is a total bullshit charge, and on top of that, they've had thousands of character witnesses speak for them at their trial, but to no avail.

The verdict also comes from a general whose name is exactly the same as the editor of this comic, which leads me to believe that Kanigher is dropping in some behind-the-scenes subtext that reveals his true feelings about the powers-that-be at DC.

However, Lt. Shrieve arrives with some new orders: the Creature Commandos, along with G. I. Robot (who seems to be thrown in for no reason), are "to man an ICBM" to blow up Hitler's Chancellory! Is manning an ICBM really a six-person job?

Turns out it isn't, as the job, like the verdict, is also bullshit, and the rocket heads into outer space rather than to Berlin.

Wait--six-person job? There were only four members of the Creature Commandos, plus G. I. Robot. So, who's the pipe-smoking man in the red jacket? According to the "Passenger List," it's "R. K."--none other than Bob Kanigher himself! Kanigher wrote some crazy-ass stuff, but he even tops himself here by riding off into space with his own creations. That's just got to be a big "screw you" to DC for cancelling the series.

Friday Night Fights: Take That, Halloween!

From Detective Comics 571 (1987), art by Alan Davis and Paul Neary, words by Mike W. Barr:



Batman punches the Scarecrow so hard that the only thing keeping Scarecrow's head on is his mask.

Bahlactus brings the tricks and the treats.

Special thanks to the Other Dr. K for providing the idea and headline for tonight's post.

Dr. K's Halloween Countdown Presents: The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires!

I'm going to make a bold statement here: no film in the history of cinema has a greater "anticipation-to-failure ratio" than The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (aka Dracula and the 7 Golden Vampires, aka 7 Brothers vs. Dracula, aka, 7 Brothers and a Sister vs. Dracula, aka The Seven Brothers Meet Dracula, aka Weekend at Bernie's II).

After all, the poster bills it as "The First Kung Fu Horror Spectacular," and the film is a coproduction of Hammer Studios and the Shaw Brothers Productions, each the masters of their respective genres. Clearly, this should be the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup of cinema: a sweet horror shell surrounding a delicious kung fu center--two genres that go great together. Instead, it's like the pancake reuben of cinema: two things that may be awesome on their own, but the sauerkraut and Russian dressing of kung fu fail to work together in execution with the pancakes of horror ("the pancake reuben" and "the pancakes of horror" tm 2007, Dr. K).

The film's biggest problem is that there is no kung fu for the first 30 minutes, and the film is less than 90 minutes long. Clearly, director Roy Ward Baker, who usually knew what he was doing in his other efforts for Hammer Studios (see the awesome Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde), was overwhelmed with the awesome potential of his material and simply allowed the horror and kung fu to negate themselves. If he knew what he was doing, this movie would consist entirely of martial artists kicking vampires in the head for it's entire running length.

Another problem with the film: Dracula only appears in it for about 5 minutes. This may explain why Christopher Lee does not reprise the role. Rumor has it that he was offered the movie, but turned it down once he read the script. Instead, Dracula is played by John Forbes-Robertson, who is pretty terrible. In the opening scene, taking place in 1804, Kah, the high priest of the 7 golden vampires, visits Dracula in Transylvania, and the Count decides to take on Kah's form and travel to China. Unfortunately, Kah speaks with the voice of Dracula, and the dubbing is terrible. Then, with no explanation, the film shifts to 1904. This makes no sense: if Dracula goes to China in 1804, does he travel back and forth to England in the intervening century? When does he get around to fighting Van Helsing and the others in the main Dracula story?

Despite my disappointment in this movie, the film features one of my favorite concepts in a vampire movie: the Chinese vampires respond to images of Buddha in the same way that Western vampires respond to the Christian cross or crucifix. As Van Helsing describes, "they abhor anything that has a holy significance." It also seems that, in general, rules for killing vampires differ from West to East. Eastern vampires are still susceptible to wooden stakes and silver bullets, but they can also be destroyed by fire.

Peter Cushing does return as Van Helsing, who is now traveling in China giving a lecture tour on Chinese folklore, which includes a poorly received lecture on the eponymous legend of the 7 golden vampires. Van Helsing is also accompanied by his son, Leyland (Robin Stewart), who manages to sit around a lot while others fight.

Van Helsing's lecture is believed by one audience member, Hsi Ching (David Chiang), who, along with six other brothers and a sister, has sworn to protect his ancestral village from the 7 golden vampires. Ching's brothers and sister all have special fighting skills: one is a master of the axe, another the spear, a third can swallow the sea, and a fourth can stretch his legs ... wait--I'm thinking of the 5 Chinese Brothers. Also, these shouldn't be mistaken for the "7 Chinese Brothers" of the REM song, though I don't have any idea of what that song's about, so it very well could be about this movie.

Soon, Van Helsing and Ching are planning an excursion to find this ancestral village, and they are soon joined by Scandinavian heiress Vanessa Buren, played by Julie Ege, perhaps the single worst actress to appear in any Hammer movie. That's no small accomplishment, considering that the primary requirements for casting women in these movies seem to be breast size and the ability to scream (Julie Ege also had a starring role in the sex comedy The Amorous Milkman, a film whose only virtue is its title).

In a rather nice and surprising move, romantic plots play out along inter-racial lines. It looks like, at the beginning, that Vanessa Buren will be hooking up with Leyland, but instead, she sets her eyes on Ching, while Leyland falls in love with the sister, Mai Kwei (a name that Leyland pronounces like "Make Way," which sounds like a rejected Asian Bond girl name). As Leyland says to Mai Kwei after a battle: "You are like a beautiful porcelain kitten, then suddenly you are a fighting tiger." (Coincidentally, I proposed to my wife with that very same line.)

If you are planning on watching this movie at any time, my biggest recommendation is to skip the first 30 minutes all together. It's mostly useless exposition that can be filled in by anyone who has ever seen a vampire movie before. After that, the movie has three fight scenes that are, generally, pretty good. Each of the brothers has his own specialty, and some are fun to watch, especially the axeman, the mace wielder, and the two swordsman who, for some reason, have to fight holding hands. The first fight happens for no apparent reason--the travelers are suddenly attacked in the middle of the desert by some random gang. In the second fight, the travelers seek shelter in a cave, only to be attacked by three of the golden vampires and their zombie army. Here, they learn some of the methods for killing vampires and zombies. Ching, for example, discovers that he can destroy zombies by thrusting his fists through their chests--a move I like to call the "dusty heart strike." When the golden vampires die, however, they look like deflating, dust-filled balloons.

The film's climax, however, does live up to expectations and makes the viewer wish that the rest of the film had more of the same excitement. There are even some genuine surprises, as in this scene, featuring Ching and Vanessa Buren, which you shouldn't watch if you plan on seeing the movie, as it spoils the ending:


In the end, there are many better horror movies and kung fu movies, so I find little to recommend here beyond the curiosity that this movie presents by virtue of its mere existence. By 1974, Hammer was pretty much tapped out creatively. In the next few days, though, I hope to look at some of Hammer's masterpieces, which are among my favorite horror movies.

Dr. K's Halloween Countdown Presents: Vault of Mystery!

Richie Rich Vault of Mystery 2 (1975)

I really don't know what goes on in this comic, but it looks like Richie Rich teams up with the banjo-playing kid from Deliverance to stop the ghosts of Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolfman from lying around in piles of money. What I want to know: why are these the ghosts of Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolfman and not just the regular Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolfman?

And that Richie Rich really needs to do something about those cankles.

I was a fan of Richie Rich comics when I was six, but I always thought the character was a real dick. Why Richie Rich didn't inspire a generation of kids to become Marxists, I'll never understand.

Dr. K's Halloween Countdown Presents: The Tingler!

Warning to the Reader: This post contains a significant amount of sexual innuendo regarding the term "the tingler." Some particularly sensitive readers may experience nausea, frustration, and a growing sense of anger and resentment. Others may experience fits of laughter and screaming. Be aware that such reactions are perfectly natural, and readers may leave the blog at any time that they are too uncomfortable with this discussion of ... The Tingler!

William Castle's The Tingler (1959)is one of my favorite horror movies, not so much because it's scary (though some of its shocks are effective), but because it's an unironic celebration of horror movies and the cinema in general.

William Castle was known for his many gimmicks that he used to promote his own particular brand of horror films, and The Tingler represents one of his most ingenious schemes. In one of his more famous movies, The House on Haunted Hill, the showman used a technique he called "Emergo" (pronounced "emerge-o"), in which a flying skeleton from within the movie would fly out of the screen and over the audience. My dad, in fact, remembers going to see this movie several times in the theater when he was young because the kids would throw popcorn and other stuff at the skeleton when it flew overhead.

For The Tingler, Castle created "Percepto," in which he rigged random seats in theaters showing the film with small electric motors that would deliver a mild shock to those sitting there. The filmmaker also planted audience members at different screening, and their job was to start screaming at certain key moments in the film. At some screenings, Castle also installed a "Coward's Corner," in which audience members too scared by the film could follow a yellow line to a special set of seats.

Before the film begins, Castle appears on screen to issue a warning to the audience. (He did this for several movies. In some movies, he would even appear to interrupt the film, as in Mr. Sardonicus, where he appeared toward the end of the movie to ask the audience if the eponymous villain should be punished. The audience always voted in the affirmative.) The warning states that some audience members with a certain "sensivitity" will experience a strange tingling sensation," and they can get "immediate relief by screaming." His warning concludes: "a scream at the right time may save your life."

I don't know how many audience members bought into this in 1959, but it smacks of a less cynical time, and that's what I love about this movie. Sure, it manipulates the audience, but that manipulation is well-meant and not meanspirited or phoney. Castle seemed to genuinely want audiences to enjoy his movies and to experience something different.

The Tingler stars Vincent Price as Dr. Warren Chapin, a scientist who studies the effects of fear on the human body. He has come up with a radical and unproven theory about fear: something inside the human body causes the spine to stiffen when a person is faced with a fear stimulus, and that stiffening could result in severe physical harm or even death if the fear reaction continues unabated. Warren informs his assistant David (Darryl Hickman) of his theory, naming the theoretical thing "The Tingler." David fails to mention that it might not be a good idea to name their radical, revolutionary scientific discovery after a pocket-sized vibrating device used for the purposes of self-pleasure.

That is just one problem that Warren faces. The other is that he is having difficulty proving this theory. It seems that something always causes the tingling sensation to disappear before its true cause can be detected. Warren makes several attempts to solve this problem, all of which are ethically shaky for a scientist.

Warren's wife, Isabella, is openly having an affair, and Warren seems to only grudgingly confront her with the infidelity. Their banter is incredibly sharp and witty. Warren accuses her of "playing the field, and vice versa." Isabella accuses him of losing contact with other humans: "There's a name for you," she concludes.

"And several for you," he responds.

Despite their unhappiness, Warren needs Isabella because her wealth keeps his scientific research going (clearly, the National Institute of Health is uninterested in funding research on the tingler). These are twisted, ruthless people: Isabella probably killed her own father in order to get her inheritance, and Warren threatens to shoot her and fake her suicide if she doesn't let David marry her sister, Lucy: "this silly pistol can make a hole in you the size of a medium grapefruit," Warren threatens.

Then, much to the audience's surprise, Warren shoots his wife. Before disposing of her body, however, he rigs her to an x-ray machine in hopes of getting some candid shots of her tingler. I think it speaks volumes about their relationship that he has to go to such lengths just to see his own wife's tingler.

It turns out Warren was shooting blanks (probably in more ways than one), and Isabella only fainted, but his experiment is a success, and he gets some x-rays of a long, worm-like creature growing and shrinking on Isabella's spine. His goal now is to try and capture a live tingler.

Warren next gets his assistant David to do whatever it is kids do and get his hands on a supply of LSD. (Though the acronym is never used in the film, Warren is shown reading a pamphlet on the effects of the acid. Film historians have credited this movie as the first representation of an LSD trip.) Warren locks himself in his laboratory, injects himself with a double-dose of LSD, and turns on a reel-to-reel in order to record the trip. Warren begins to feel claustrophobic, and he imagines that his laboratory skeleton is attacking him. However, it isn't long into the trip that he screams and passes out.

The difficulty here is that tinglers are very sensitive to sound, which explains why no one has ever captured a live tingler: people tend to scream before fear overwhelms them, and this causes the tingler to shrink to microscopic size. Warren's only solution would be to find a person who cannot scream and scare that person to death (again, a methodology that doesn't look good on an NIH proposal).

Early in the film, Warren had encountered a man named Ollie Higgins, who runs a silent-movie theater along with his deaf-mute wife. On their first meeting, Warren discovers that she has a particular aversion to blood and a tendency toward hysterics. After his failed self-experiment, Warren goes to visit the Higginses to see how Mrs. Higgins is doing. Ollie informs him that she hasn't left her room or slept in some time, and Warren requests to examine her in private. During the examination, Warren gives her an injection to help her relax.

Mrs. Higgins wakes up to find objects in her apartment moving without any apparent cause. Then, she is attacked by a machete-wielding, deformed killer and a hairy hand with an axe. She rushes into the bathroom and locks the door, only to find things even worse in there. This begins one of the most memorable and masterful horror scenes that Castle produced. The black and white film suddenly gets a shot of color as red blood comes pouring out of the bathroom sink. Mrs. Higgins lurches backwards, only to find the same thing happening in the tub.

Then, to cap it off, something begins to emerge from the tub.

The mute woman tries to scream, but nothing comes out, and soon she is literally scared to death.

After discovering the body, Ollie quickly does what anyone would do in this situation: the loads it into his car and takes it to Warren's house. When Ollie arrives, Warren knows exactly what he's gotten his hands on: the opportunity to capture a live, fully grown tingler.

We see the tingler first emerge from Mrs. Higgins as a shadow on the privacy screen, and this image establishes a motif of shadows on a screen that will become significant later in the movie.

The tingler is really masterfully designed: it's a spine-shaped bug, with feet that look like they fit perfectly between vertebrae.

Tingler's are also amazingly strong, as Warren finds out when it clings to his arm, and he is not able to get it off until someone screams. (That's what she said.)

Later, tired of the facade of her phony marriage and the constant threats to her life, Isabella slips Warren a ruffie and sets the tingler loose on him while he is passed out.


Luckily for Warren, his sister-in-law, Lucy, arrives and screams before it's too late. This leads Warren to conclude that the tingler is too dangerous to have around, and he decides that he needs to return the tingler to Mrs. Higgins before she is taken to the mortuary.

At Ollie's apartment, however, the tingler escapes and makes its way into the movie theater below. The theater is showing the action-packed silent film "Tol'able David," and the camera reveals the audience is caught up in the film's suspense (we also see what appears to be a date rape in progress as well). The tingler moves through the theater, bouncing along with the film's score and attracted to the emotional intensity of the audience.

This climactic scene represents Castle's masterstroke. The screen suddenly goes black, and Vincent Price makes an announcement that the film will begin again shortly. Then, the tingler gets into the projection equipment, and we see it move across the white screen before it goes black again. Price's voice over then announces that the tingler is loose in the theater, and the audience needs to scream in order to subdue it. This is where we should imagine that the "Percepto" technique gets put to use, and audience members would actually feel the tingler move through the theater, and the screaming would start.

The screaming works, and Warren is finally able to capture the tingler in a film canister--a wonderful bit of symbolism.

The movie ends with a twist reminiscent of a 50s EC horror comic, and then a final warning is given to the audience: "If any of you are convinced that you don't have a tingler of your own, the next time you find yourself frightened in the dark, try not to scream."

Oh, I don't doubt the existence of my tingler. Not one bit.

By the way, if the music in this movie seems familiar to you, you're not imagining things. The score that runs over the opening credits was lifted straight from Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, which was only released the year before. (Another Hitchcock connection: Judith Evelyn, who plays Mrs. Higgins, also played "Miss Lonelyheart" in Rear Window, though we never see her close up in that film.)

Castle is often criticized for being a poor-man's Hitchcock, sharing the great director's flair for showmanship but lacking the commensurate talent, but I think such criticism is too harsh. If you look carefully at the movie poster for this film included at the top of this entry, you'll see that the largest element isn't Vincent Price or the movie's title--it's a shot of the audience screaming. This, to me, totally encapsulates the experience of seeing a William Castle film. William Castle's movies, more than any other filmmaker's, are pure celebrations of the movie-going experience, and despite their low budgets and cheesy special effects, I appreciate them in a way that I don't get from other movies. And The Tingler is the perfect representation of the Castle ethos.

Dr. K's Halloween Countdown Presents: The Nightcomers

(Note: this entry is a companion piece of sorts to yesterday's post about The Innocents.)

When I first heard of this movie’s existence, I couldn’t believe that such a film could be made, and after seeing it several times, I still can’t believe it exists. The Nightcomers (1972) is, ostensibly, a prequel to Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw” (or to the film version, The Innocents, covered in a previous post). I can't imagine any studio executive in his or her right mind even taking a pitch on such a concept. Everything that is subtle and imaginative about the novel or the earlier film is made explicit here in ways that run with the craziest possible interpretation of its source(s).(Director Michael Winner claims in the commentary track on The Nightcomers DVD that he never read the novella nor did he care for Jack Clayton's film, The Innocents. I believe he told the truth.)

To make things even crazier, Peter Quint is played by Marlon Brando, in that bleak period just before he would revive his career with The Godfather. During this period, Brando made some bad career choices, and his star was definitely on the decline. When left to his own devices, Brando could be a disaster, making idiosyncratic choices for no purpose than his own entertainment (like demanding to perform an entire role in whiteface while assisted by a dwarf sidekick, as he did in The Island of Dr. Moreau), and here he uses an Irish accent that causes viewers to expect him to ask for Lucky Charms at any moment (an accent he later uses, for no apparent reason, a few years later in The Missouri Breaks).

Stephanie Beacham plays Miss Jessel, who is just hired for the job of governess at the beginning, a move that parallels the beginning of “The Turn of the Screw” and The Innocents. (Vanessa Redgrave was originally supposed to play Jessel, but had to bow out because of last minute scheduling problems. In the realm of what could have been, I don’t know if Redgrave’s presence would have improved the film measurably. It would have made an interesting bit of trivia, however, because Vanessa's father, Michael, appears as the children's uncle in The Innocents.) On one of her first nights at the house, Jessel is alone in bed when Quint comes in and silently pulls down her nightgown and plays with her breast. I guess this is where we get the title from.

Quint teaches the children many useful things, like what happens when you give a frog a cigarette, which isn’t pretty. They go on to treat animals very badly throughout the film, proving what psychologists say about the early childhood of psychopaths. He also teaches them his own brand of metaphysics, especially his own unique notion of an afterlife, which mainly involves ghosts wandering around and meeting up with each other. The children ask him questions like, "The dead people meet each other, but do they love each other?" To which Quint responds, "If you love someone, you'll want to kill them." This will literally come back to haunt him in the end.

What’s worse, we are given no illusions about what exactly Miles has learned from Quint that gets him into trouble at his school in the James story. Quint and Jessel’s relationship ridiculously progresses into bondage and whipping. The sex scenes are pretty graphic in this movie, with Brando getting pretty sweaty and young Miles and Flora witness these scenes. Later, they begin their own roleplaying, with Miles viciously tying Flora up and torturing her.

The movie devolves even further as the children witness the degrading of this relationship and the developing depression of the two adults. In the film’s conclusion, the children take what they’ve learned from their elders and put it all to good use. Flora first drowns Miss Jessel in a sabotaged rowboat, while Flora watches from the shore chanting, "We want you to stay with us." Quint finds Miss Jessel's stiffened corpse after a few days (everyone believes she has left the estate for her home) and proceeds to get really drunk. As Quint stumbles back home from the pub, Miles shoots Quint multiple times with arrows, including one pretty square shot in the head. Miles then disposes of the body in a ditch (which served as the last time in recorded history that only one child could actually move Marlon Brando's body. Even just a few years later, it would take at least ten Tahitian youths to carry Brando around his island home.) The film ends with the new governess arriving at the estate, and the children immediately begin torturing her (This doesn't jibe with either "The Turn of the Screw" or The Innocents, as the new governess arrives before Miles has been kicked out of school.).

In graduate school, I loaned my third-generation videotape copy of this movie to an American Lit professor who specialized in Henry James. He’d never seen the movie before, and when he returned it, he gave a concise assessment: “If Henry James and D. H. Lawrence defied nature and had a baby, this is the horrible, misshapen beast they would have given birth to.” I think that summarizes the film quite well.

Despite being available on a Region 2 DVD for some years now, it was only this summer that the film was released on DVD in the US. Though this is a truly awful movie, it’s worth seeing just for the fact that it shouldn't exist at all, and the DVD has an amazing audio commentary by the director Michael Winner. I say “amazing” because Winner provides several entertaining anecdotes about working with Brando during this time in his career and their subsequent friendship. But I also mean “amazing” in other terms as well. Winner makes several jaw-droppingly inappropriate comments about the quality of Stephanie Beacham’s “bosoms” and young Verna Harvey’s (who plays 12-year old Flora, mind you) ass.

Dr. K's Halloween Countdown Presents: The Innocents

“All I wanted to do was save the children, not destroy them. More than anything, I love the children.”

The great actress Deborah Kerr passed away last Thursday, and among her credits is my favorite horror movie of all time, The Innocents (1961). This is one of many screen adaptations of the Henry James late 19th century novella “The Turn of the Screw,” and it is not only the best of these adaptations, but it also may be one of the best screen adaptations ever done.

It is for this faithfulness to the original source that the film ranks at the top of my list. The James story is an exercise in ambiguity and unreliable narration. The narrator (after a frame story that sets up the main tale) is a newly hired governess charged with the care of young Miles and Flora, two orphans left in the charge of their uncle, who has no time in his busy social schedule to devote to their upbringing. At first, the governess is only taking care of Flora, but a letter from Miles’s school informs her that the young master will be returning home for undisclosed reasons.

The governess discovers that her predecessor, Miss Jessel, had met an untimely end along with her lover, another servant at the house named Quint, and the couple had some mysterious influence on the two children. With so much mystery surrounding the children’s past, the governess believes that the children are being haunted by Jessel and Quint. The novella navigates its ambiguity masterfully, as the reader can just as easily conclude that the ghosts are either real or figments of the governess’s imagination.

The movie’s genius lies in the fact that it manages to duplicate this ambiguity, which is much more difficult to do in film, with its objective camera eye, than in prose, with its expansive possibilities for playing with point of view (not that films can’t play with point of view, but there are greater limitations on film and also certainly far fewer examples of films that do so as novels).

Some elements that are only hinted at in the novella are given more attention in the film, however, often to devious ends in the screenplay by William Archibald and Truman Capote. We never find out exactly why Miles was kicked out of his school, but we do learn that he used some language with the other boys that was not appropriate, and there is a hint that he may have been violent. Whatever language he used, he apparently learned from Quint, and the extent of Quint’s influence on the lad is also left unrevealed. All this ambiguity requires the viewer to fill in the gaps with his or her own imagination, and this makes this even more disturbing.

Miles is played with precocious creepiness by Martin Stephens, who used the same skills in the original Village of the Damned (1960). When Miles and the governess first meet, Miles tells her, “You are far too pretty to be a governess,” and this sets the tone for this relationship, which Archibald and Capote’s screenplay pushes to surprising psychosexual limits. Whenever Miles refers to the governess as “my dear,” it’s simply chilling. Miles could be an undisciplined prankster playing at maturity because he and his sister have been left to their own devices for some time, or he could be an evil man-child unduly influenced by the nefarious Mr. Quint. (There is a scene in the middle of the film, where Miles recites a poem about a dead lord while wearing a crown and carrying a candle, that is as creepy and effective as any scene in any horror film).

This raises yet another reason why this film ranks so high for me—it so refuses to romanticize childhood. So many American movies treat children as either miniature adults or pure innocents, whereas this film shows them in a manner closer to the truth: kids can be meanspirited, sadistic jerks who are entirely capable of tearing each other and their elders down.

But when I think of my favorite scary movies, most involve children to some degree: Night of the Hunter, The Exorcist, Village of the Damned, The Bad Seed, etc. These movies don’t all treat childhood in the same way, but there is something primal about using children as either the victims or perpetrators of horror.

Much is often said about how horror films of the past were more effective than those of the present because older films left much more up to the viewer’s imagination, and The Innocents is certainly a great example of that. But this movie also guides the viewer’s imagination into directions that are truly shocking.

The direction by Jack Clayton and black and white cinematography by Freddie Francis (who was not only one of the great cinematographers of all time, but also an accomplished horror movie director for Hammer Studios) is also responsible for manipulating the viewer’s imagination, moving from sharp realism to surreal imagery whenever the governess’s imagination is in overdrive (or whenever she’s in the presence of the supernatural—whichever interpretation you choose). As everything breaks down in the film’s final moments, the camera whips around the setting in a breathless frenzy. Kerr’s performance is also stellar, as stress builds and more and more evidence contributes to her belief in the ghosts and her desire to protect the children at all costs.

Few horror films have attempted to duplicate this film in terms of style and subtlety. One exception is Alejandro Amenabar’s The Others, a film that owes a lot to The Innocents. In an upcoming post, I’ll be covering a companion film, of sorts, to The Innocents that goes wrong in pretty much every way possible.

In the meantime, here’s Joe Dante’s commentary on the ill-conceived trailer for The Innocents—a trailer that seems more appropriate for an AIP film than this one.

Dr. K's Halloween Countdown Presents: The 13th Page!

In the old House of Mystery series from DC Comics, the thirteenth page of each issue was specially marked in some way. Often, by looking at the page, the reader was promised bad luck for a signficant amount of time: anywhere between 7 and 100 years.

Now, anyone familiar with DC's horror comics in the 60s and 70s knows that, for the most part, they weren't very scary. As a kid, I was scared by just about anything, and even I found these horror comics to be tame. Here's an exception, from the 13th page of House of Mystery 175 (1968)--reprinted in the Showcase Presents: House of Mystery Volume 1 collection--written by Joe Orlando and drawn by Sergio Aragones.

Some of these choices are pretty scary, and I have to wonder who the target audience was for this. Clearly, this was pitched at college-aged readers, with choices like "You are drafted" and "You will be caught in the dormitory," though some of the parent-related choices seem aimed at a younger audience. The "drafted" one is particularly disturbing, considering the time the cartoon was published. In addition, many are downright edgy and subversive. What is it your father found? What is the "truth" your parents found out about? What kind of "trip" are we talking about here?

Friday Night Fights: Taking the Devil to School!

In my British Literature class this week, I've been teaching Christopher Marlowe's play, The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus, which, for those of you who only read texts with pictures, is an Early Modern play where a scholar sells his soul to Lucifer for 24 years of unlimited power. While the play may be considered a "classic" by those who spend their time in ivory towers, I've come to realize that it is lacking in one significant factor:

Wrestling!


So, to satisfy that need and to provide tonight's Friday Night Fights entry, let's have a few more images from Unknown Worlds 30, where professional wrestler Robert Harkness takes the Devil to school.


Satan, it seems, has a potty mouth. Why doesn't that surprise me?


Need more schoolin'? Bahlactus'll take you there!

Dr. K's Halloween Countdown Presents: The Unknown!

I flat out love Lon Chaney movies. I'm a silent movie junkie in general, but I have a particular affection for Chaney's movies, not only for his chameleon-like versatility and physical talents that led to him being designated "The Man of 1,000 Faces," but also more for the choices he made as an actor to play startlingly complex characters capable of extraordinarily awful behavior while still retaining the audience's sympathy. And no performance highlights those qualities more than "Alonzo the Armless" in The Unknown (1927), directed by the great Tod Browning.

Chaney and Browning collaborated on 8 movies all together, and this is my favorite of those that survive (I also really like The Unholy Three and West of Zanzibar. However, the latter film should not be confused with The Road to Zanzibar, a Hope-Cosby road comedy that I always seem to accidentally record when it's on TV, thinking it's the Chaney-Browning film.). It is 50-minutes of wall-to-wall crazy, grand guignol in all of its extremities. The first time I saw it, I was mesmerized--convinced that the movie couldn't get any crazier, and proven wrong with every new scene. When the movie ended, my eyes were wide, my jaw was open, and I couldn't believe that only 50 minutes had passed since the start of the movie. The initial experience of seeing this movie is so amazing, that if you haven't seen it, I would seriously recommend that you stop reading now, get a copy or wait for the TCM screening tomorrow during their Tod Browning marathon, and then come back here and read the rest. I really envy anyone seeing this movie for the first time.

(In fact, I've made a file for myself that is labeled "In Case of Amnesia," which contains a list of things to help myself out if such a circumstance were to arise. Early on the list, before I even reveal my own identity to my amnesiac self, I have the task "Watch The Unknown," just so I don't lose the opportunity to relive that experience.)

Lon Chaney plays Alonzo, an armless knife thrower who works for an Eastern European circus run by Zanzi, whose daughter, Nanon (a young Joan Crawford), serves as Alonzo's female assistant. Alonzo is secretly in love with Nanon, but she has a very strange pathology: she is repulsed by the touch of men's hands. This repulsion, however, gives Alonzo hope, as he has no hands to touch her with, anyway. Nanon, in fact, states very explicitly that she wishes all men would lose their hands. If that isn't an opening for Alonzo, I don't know what is.

Alonzo, however, has a rival for Nanon's affection: the circus strongman, Malabar the Mighty. Malabar even consults Alonzo about the best way to court Nanon, and Alonzo, seeing the opportunity to throw a cockblock, advises him to take her in his arms.

Alonzo's "armless" tricks are pretty amazing. Not only does he throw knives with his feet, but he also pours himself a drink, lights and smokes a cigarette, plays the guitar, and dries his tears with a handkerchief. When I first saw this movie years ago, I had heard that Chaney did many of the leg and feet "stunts" himself. However, according to Chaney biographer Michael Blake, Peter Dismuki, an armless circus performer who bore a striking resemblance to Chaney, doubles for Lon Chaney in many scenes, and it is Dismuki's legs we see whenever Alonzo uses his feet to perform tasks. So, when Alonzo plays guitar, it is Dismuki's foot coming from off screen to strum it, and it is also his feet that light the cigarette, and so on. Dismuki's talents are incredible. Chaney did do a lot of amazing stuff to undergo physical transformations for his movies, like tying his legs back and walking on his knees to play the amputee gangster in The Penalty.

The movie just keeps amping up the craziness as the plot barrels forward. In an early scene where Alonzo's assistant, Cojo (John George), undresses Alonzo, it is revealed that Alonzo is not armless after all, but instead wears a girdle to hide his arms. But before this revelation can really sink in, another comes quickly on its heels: Alonzo has two thumbs on one hand! It turns out that Alonzo and Cojo's circus act is merely a cover for their illegal activities (what those activities are remains somewhat ambiguous, though a bank-robbing scene was cut from the film).

Cojo reminds Alonzo that the reason why Nanon confides in him is a lie, and the revelation of the truth of his "armfulness" is inevitable. This realization leads Alonzo to make a series of historically bad decisions that ultimately lead to his downfall in an amazing and thrilling climax to the movie. However, to Chaney's credit, no matter how repulsive Alonzo becomes through the course of the film, he still manages to maintain the audience's sympathy. Toward the end of the movie, when it is revealed to Alonzo that he has made some tragic mistakes, Alonzo goes through these extremes of hysterical laughter and sobbing that present, in my opinion, the best demonstration of Chaney's acting talent and the level of emotional quality achievable in silent films.

In recent years, Tod Browning has been getting a lot of academic attention, with several scholarly articles and books written about his films, especially his 1932 masterpiece, Freaks. I've long wanted to do some academic writing on The Unknown, especially because it seems to lend itself so easily to certain critical theories regarding psychology, sexuality, anxiety, and the body. Yet I can't get beyond those moments where I find myself writing things like, "Holy Shit! He has two thumbs on one hand!"

Be sure to check this movie out on TCM during tomorrow night's Tod Browning marathon. The film is also available on DVD from TCM, in The Lon Chaney Collection, which also includes Ace of Hearts, Laugh, Clown Laugh, the reconstruction of London After Midnight, and a great documentary on Chaney.

Post updated and revised at 7:40 pm.

Dr. K's Halloween Countdown Presents: The Brain that Wouldn't Die!

The Brain that Wouldn't Die (1959/1962) is one of those 50's era sci-fi movies that gained greater notoriety through the lampooning it received on Mystery Science Theater 3000. In fact, this is one of my favorite MST3K episodes mainly because this movie seems tailor-made for that show. It was also the first MST3K episode in which I was already familiar with the movie, which probably made an impact on my enjoyment of the episode.

Taken on its own terms, though, The Brain that Wouldn't Die is still ridiculous and a load of fun.

It's also incredibly cheap looking, even by B-movie standards. In most scenes that would normally require special effects, the action takes place below frame. Even the car accident scene is done, amazingly, without a car. I firmly believe, with the tools I have at my disposal right now, I could go out and make a shot-for-shot remake of this film in two weeks.

But not this week--I've got too much going on.

The film opens with Dr. Bill Cortner (Herb Evers) and his father performing intense surgery on a patient. The elder Dr. Cortner declares the operation a failure and the patient dead, but young Bill is not ready to give in. "You've already lost your patient--I'm going to save mine!" Bill asserts, as he begins to go to work on the patient's brain while his father starts a heart massage in what is the most bloodless operation in film history.

It's unclear how Bill actually manages to access the brain here: the brain is exposed, and the scalp is peeled back, but the skull is nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he used the "cranial screw-top method," though this film was made years before Dr. Hfuhruhurr invented the procedure. Quickly, however, the patient's hand is moving, and Bill's unorthodox methods lead to the patient's full recovery.

Once the surgery is completed, Bill, like all good doctors, proceeds to have a smoke in the operating room, awaiting the congratulations of his father and his fiance, Jan (Virginia Leith). Bill and Jan are clearly attracted to each other, yet, in the fashion of the day, they refuse to consummate their relationship until they are married. At this point in the movie, the audience's irony detector should be in the red zone.


Before the young lovers can begin their weekend plans, Bill receives a call from his assistant, Kurt, at the family's summer home that doubles as Bill's lab, where he can conduct his experiments in privacy. Kurt is in a panic, and Bill immediately rushes with Jan to find out what's wrong.

Bill races to get to the house, and as the music increases in tempo, we know exactly what's coming: an accident. We actually never see the accident happen, however. Instead, we see Bill roll on the grass as he's apparently thrown from the car, and then he approaches what appears to be the car's wreckage, but all we see in the foreground is a fire, some twisted metal, broken glass, and a hand raised up from below the frame.

Bill sticks his jacket into the burning wreckage and wraps it around an object, which we all can guess is Jan's disembodied head. Then, he begins what ends up being a long and exhausting run to his country estate. At least it seems long and exhausting. It also seems like Bill is taking his sweet time getting Jan's head to his lab. I'm sure he even takes a couple of cigarette breaks along the way.

When Bill makes it to his house, he is greeted by his assistant, Kurt, who, as we see, has a deformed arm. Bill rushes past Kurt to get Jan's head to the lab.

I love the scene in this movie where Bill is working to save the head. In a medium shot, we see Bill surrounded by beakers, test tubes, hoses, and other scientific paraphenalia, but none of it serves any apparent purpose. Instead, whatever Bill is doing takes place below the frame. When he is finished, we get what has to be the greatest image in film history:

Jan in the pan!

(Well, maybe not the greatest image in film history, but it sure beats the shit out of a sled getting tossed into a furnace.)

Jan discovers that her condition is not without benefits: she has developed psychic powers that allow her to communicate with an unseen creature--the victim of Bill's failed experiments--who is kept locked away in the laboratory closet. (Note: there is probably some evidence for this out there somewhere, but it seems likely that Mike Baron and Steve Rude got the idea for the psychically powered "Heads" in the Nexus comic series from this movie.)

As low-quality as this movie is throughout, one of its saving graces is Virginia Leith's near-method-style performance as Jan in the pan. She speaks through clenched teeth, and her voice becomes hoarse, as if her trachea were actually open-ended. This is exactly how I'd imagine someone would talk if he or she were a disembodied head. Her character is also vicious and unrelenting, and she steadfastly refuses to allow her condition to limit her determination to punish Bill for his various crimes.

While Jan plots her revenge, however, Bill is out trolling for her new body. As is only logical, Bill first looks in on a burlesque club called "The Moulin Rouge."

Clearly, he is looking to upgrade. However, Bill is finding it difficult to move his plan forward--he does not want to be the last person seen with a woman before she disappears. The next day, Bill continues his search, driving slowly throughout the town as he stalks various female pedestrians. In these scenes, the women are often framed from the neck down, as if the camera itself is implicating the viewer in Bill's plan and his overall objectification of women. This part of the plan, though, proves too successful when he manages to pick up not one, but two girls. Bill is disappointed in his embarrassment of riches, until one of the girls, Donna (apparently an old girlfriend of Bill's) provides him with an inadvertant solution: she invites him to serve as a judge for the "Miss Body Beautiful" Bathing Suit Contest!

Though this contest doesn't pan out, Donna gives Bill the idea that will move his plan forward when she mentions an old friend of theirs, Doris, who has a great body but doesn't go out much since her "accident."

Bill meets with Doris and manages to convince her that he and his father could help fix her scarred face with some special plastic surgery that they can give her in their private country estate. I can attest that from my own experience, at least in my college days, this pick-up line never actually worked, but it does work for Bill. He gets Doris to his country home, slips her a ruffie, and prepares her for the head transplant.

Meanwhile, Jan has convinced the closeted mutant to rip Kurt's arm off, and Kurt proceeds to die in a lengthy death scene that results in his blood being spread all over the lab. Now, I'm not a medical-type doctor, but I would guess that this would render the lab unsuitable for performing any kind of operation, let alone a head transplant.

Bill covers up Kurt's body and then begins the operation. Jan, however, protests, causing Bill to tape her mouth shut and also to give her a clear sense of what he would expect were they to be married. Jan is still able to use her psychic powers to encourage her mutant companion to break out of his closet and attack the doctor. When the mutant is finally revealed, he is really impressive, and it's clear that the entire budget for the film went into his make-up. This creature is meant to be made up of amputated limbs that Bill stole from his hospital. He kills Bill, sets the lab on fire, and rescues Doris from the inferno, while Jan, in her final moments, hisses, "I told you to let me die."

Atomic Monsters has a hilarious analysis of this movie that serves as a good companion to the MST3K episode.

Important Note: As I reported the other day, TCM is showing this film at 6:00 am on Friday morning. Unfortunately, TCM shows the edited 70-minute version of the film (which, I believe, is the version released in 1962 by AIP), and not the 82-minute version, which contains much more gore, including Kurt's extended death scene when the mutant rips off his arm and a shot of Bill getting his throat ripped out by the mutant's teeth. This version of the film is widely available, though, including on the DVD for the MST3K episode.

Dr. K's Halloween Countdown Presents: The Man Who Couldn't Be Pushed Around!

The cover of Unknown Worlds 30 (1964), by Kurt Schaffenberger, is one of my all-time favorite covers, mainly because it perfectly sums up my own personal philosophy:


The unfortunate thing is, I do get pushed around, all the time, and often by those who are much smaller than me. But it helps to dream.

It's also unfortunate that the story which this cover represents, "The Man Who Couldn't Be Pushed Around," written by Kurato Osaki and drawn by Paul Reinman, does not live up to the promise of the cover. That's surprising for a story that is about a professional wrestler who goes to Hell to wrestle Satan.

In this tale that falsely advertises itself as offering "thrills of mystery," professional wrestler Robert Harkness dies in a train accident and finds himself at the gates of "The Unknown," which is some sort of middle-ground afterlife where--and I'm guessing here--dead babies go. Whatever it is, it's got a lot of people dressed in gray cloaks and a fog machine that would make 70's era KISS jealous.

The Unknown is being threatened for takeover by Satan himself, and when the leaders of the Unknown see that Robert can hold his own against Old Nick, they enlist him to dissuade the Devil from further aggression.

So, Robert goes to Hell and proceeds to wrestle Satan.


In this story, Satan is kind of a wuss, and Robert defeats him easily. When Satan balks at Robert's demands, Robert changes the game and decides to take over Hell by himself. Satan relents, and signs a contract indicating that he will no longer attack the Unknown.


Man, that Satan loves his contracts.

Dr. K's Halloween Countdown Presents: Set Your Tivos!

On Friday, Turner Classic Movies has set the best line-up of horror movies for the month, and it's worth letting the Tivo run for about 20 hours straight, from 6:00 am to 2:00 am.

I'm going to blog more about several of these movies in the next few days, but I wanted to give readers a heads up that this awesome schedule was coming.

The day starts at 6:00 am with The Brain that Wouldn't Die (1962). I'm going to have a longer post on this tomorrow, so I'll save my comments for that.

There are also the pre-requisite Vincent Price films (The Tomb of Ligeia and The Abominable Dr. Phibes) and Dementia 13, a Corman-produced film that is only interesting because it was directed by Francis Ford Coppola.

Also worth recording is Berzerk (1967), starring an aging Joan Crawford as a female ringmaster of a circus, and Scream of Fear (1961) with Susan Strasberg.

One not to miss, though, is Die! Die! My Darling! (1965), featuring Stephanie Powers as a young woman who is held prisoner by her dead fiancee's mother, played with scenery-chewing excess by Tallulah Bankhead, in her final performance. The film also stars a young Donald Sutherland as Tallulah's mentally damaged son. This movie is a pure riot, and I can't recommend it highly enough.

Then, from 8:00 pm - 2:00 am, TCM is running a Tod Browning marathon. Interestingly, Dracula is not included, but that's okay by me, as it is easy to come by. Mark of the Vampire, the first film in the marathon, is a bit disappointing, despite reteaming Browning with Bela Lugosi. That is followed by Freaks, a film everyone should know as Browning's masterpiece. At midnight, TCM's reconstruction of the lost film London After Midnight airs, made up entirely of surviving still photographs and title cards. This may only be interesting to hard core film buffs.

The evening ends at 1:00 am with my single favorite Tod Browning films (and one of my favorite films of all time), The Unknown (1927), starring Lon Chaney. I will do a longer post on this film before Friday, but this movie is jaw-droppingly amazing. The Unknown is 50 minutes of wall-to-wall crazy, with Lon Chaney giving one of the most amazing physical performances you will ever see. Browning and Chaney made several great movies together, including Chaney's only sound film, The Unholy Three. TCM occasionally shows that movie as well, and it's worth keeping an eye out for.

So, this Friday I'm calling in sick, loading up on Doritos and Red Bull, and hunkering down for 20 hours of some of my favorite horror movies. Hold all my calls.

Dr. K's Halloween Countdown Presents: The Black Sleep!

In looking at the cast list for the 1956 film The Black Sleep, one could easily come to the conclusion that this was the greatest horror film of all time. The movie stars Basil Rathbone, Akim Tamiroff, Lon Chaney Jr., Bela Lugosi (in his last film role), John Carradine, and Tor Johnson (or, as I like to call him, "Holy Shit! Tor Fucking Johnson!"). However, that conclusion would be wrong, because The Black Sleep is a terrible movie.

That being said, I would still recommend this movie for one reason: the film's climax is amazing!

The movie takes place in 1872 London, with Rathbone as Dr. Cadman, a Victorian brain surgeon who uses a Middle Eastern drug called "the black sleep" in order to put victims into a zombie-like state and experiment on their exposed brains using electricity. His assistant, Gordon Ramsey (whose name makes me laugh throughout the movie), is a disgraced surgeon who was about to be executed for murder when Cadman rescues him with a timely administration of the black sleep.

The movie spends an enormous amount of time establishing verisimilitude for Cadman's work by having the two doctors talk endlessly about historical neurological and electrical experiments. This drags the pacing down, and the direction by Reginald LeBorg (whose name is French for "The Borg") is particularly leaden, despite a game performance by Rathbone.

The rest of the cast is completely wasted. Lugosi plays Cadman's mute manservant, Casimir. I've read that Lugosi's character was rewritten as a mute because he couldn't remember his lines, but I have a hard time believing that, as the character's muteness is appropriate: he is another of Cadman's failed neurological experiments. Chaney appears as an idiot man-beast named Mungo. Mungo's story, however, provides one of the few interesting moments of the film. Mungo is really Dr. Munroe, a former colleague of Cadman who sought medical help for a slight paralysis on his left side. Cadman operated, curing the paralysis (for the most part), but rendering the former brilliant surgeon a violent, lumbering idiot. Why they changed his name is never explained, though Mungo does seem more fitting for his current state than "Dr. Munroe."

John Carradine and Tor Johnson do not even appear until the finale, but then the movie picks up in an amazing way. Ramsey finds both of them, and a couple of others, held prisoner in Cadman's dungeon--all victims of Cadman's brain experiments that went horribly, horribly wrong (or horribly right for the film's audience). In the film's climax, the prisoners escape and proceed to wreak vengeance on the doctor who harmed them. Carradine, as an insane man who believes he is a biblical prophet, repeatedly cries out "Death to the infidels!" while he swings around a heavy cane. Tor Johnson, playing a blind giant named Curry, gladly follows Carradine's orders, strangling Mungo to death. Tor wasn't in many movies, so it's always exciting to see him at work, even if only for a little bit. And watching Tor Johnson fight Lon Chaney Jr., for horror movie fans, is akin to the Ali-Frazier fight for boxing fans.

The last ten minutes have an energy not seen in the rest of the movie. They also depict a strong visual influence from German Expressionism that seems to come out of a different movie. Even the film's publicity, including the lobby card depicted above, emphasizes John Carradine and Tor Johnson, which seems a bit misleading.

According to the Turner Classic Movies website, this movie is not available on home video. Check out their page on the movie here for a great publicity still of four horror icons goofing off.

DC Comics January Solicitations

Today, DC released their solicitations for comics coming out in January, and there are some quite noteworthy products coming out at the beginning of 2008.

DC is doing something I never thought I'd see: they are actually publishing Bob Haney's final Teen Titans story, which has been in the can for several years. Here is the solicitation copy:

TEEN TITANS: THE LOST ANNUAL
Written by Bob Haney
Art by Jay Stephens & Mike Allred
Cover by Nick Cardy
Don’t miss the TEEN TITANS LOST ANNUAL, featuring the original Teen Titans: Robin, Kid Flash, Wonder Girl, Speedy and Aqualad! Classic Teen Titans writer Bob Haney sends the Titans into space to rescue President John F. Kennedy in this story illustrated by Jay Stephens (The Land of Nod) & Mike Allred (Madman, X-Statix)! Meet new alien races, witness a startling betrayal, and more! It’s a secret space adventure that couldn’t be told…‘til now!
On sale January 9 • 64 pg, FC, $4.99 US

Man, this just sounds completely awesome: JFK in space! Plus, Jay Stephens and Mike Allred have the right artistic sensibilities to pull this off. Even if you don't read comics, you still need to get this.

By the way, I was sitting next to Chris Sims at Heroes Con in Charlotte when he demanded from Dan DiDio that he publish this comic. DiDio's response, and I'm not making this up, was, "Whatever you say, Mr. Sims! You own the internet."

Other things that make me happy in DC's January/February comics:

DIANA PRINCE: WONDER WOMAN VOL. 1 TP
Written by Dennis O’Neil & Mike Sekowsky
Art and cover by Sekowsky & Dick Giordano
In this volume, featuring stories that have never been collected before from issues #178-184 and SUPERMAN’S GIRL FRIEND LOIS LANE #93, Wonder Woman faces Mars, god of war, the murderous Dr. Cyber, and more!
Advance-solicited; on sale February 6 • 176 pg, FC, $19.99 US

These 70s Wonder Woman comics, where she loses her powers, dresses like Diana Rigg, and travels the world with her blind martial artist companion, I Ching, are chock full of crazy. I love these comics, and they are truly hard to find in back issues, so I'm looking forward to this collection like you wouldn't believe.

TIME MASTERS TP
Written by Bob Wayne & Lewis Shiner
Art and cover by Art Thibert & José Marzan Jr.
Collecting the often-requested TIME MASTERS #1-8 and material from SECRET ORIGINS #43, featuring 52’s Rip Hunter! Hunter forges alliances with DC heroes including Cave Carson, Metal Men creator Doctor Will Magnus, Dr. Fate, the Viking Prince, Arion and others to stop the threats of immortal super-villains including Vandal Savage and his Illuminati.
Advance-solicited; on sale February 13 • 224 pg, FC, $19.99 US

I have a lot of fondness for this series, and I've re-read it pretty recently. Parts of it won't hold up very well--especially the way that disaffected teenagers are depicted. Still, Wayne and Shiner did their homework on conspiracy theories about the Illuminati's influence on world history, and they tie it into the DC Universe well. As far as I can tell, though, the rules about time travel they establish here have never been enforced in any story after this one.

THE SPIRIT #14
Written by Sergio Aragones & Mark Evanier
Art by Mike Ploog
Cover by Jordi Bernet
Join the new SPIRIT creative team of writers Sergio Aragones & Mark Evanier (Groo the Wanderer) and Mike Ploog (Abadazad) for a case of murder! A string of killings is plaguing Central City…and the Spirit — with Commissioner Dolan — is on the case!
On sale January 16 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US

I was saddened by the news that Darwyn Cooke would be leaving this series, but the announcement that Sergio Aragones and Mark Evanier would be writing piqued my interest. Now the news comes that Mike Ploog will be drawing it makes this the greatest comic ... of 1974! Seriously, Ploog is a great choice for this job, and I, for one, will be glad to see his art appearing regularly in a comic again. The plot summary here, though, sounds like they could have just written, "Insert generic SPIRIT plot here."


Things that have me nervous:

CATWOMAN #75
Written by Will Pfeifer
Art by David Lopez & Alvaro Lopez
Cover by Adam Hughes
The Joker. The Rogues. The Cheetah. And they’re just the beginning of Catwoman’s problems.
The world’s most violent and dangerous villains have been sent to the Hell Planet from SALVATION RUN, and Catwoman’s just arrived! Selina Kyle’s got skills, cunning and craftiness, but she’s also going to need to make a deal with the devil in order to stay alive!
On sale January 16 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US

I have loved what Will Pfeifer has been doing with this series since the One Year Later jump, but I worry about including her in the Salvation Run storyline. Pfeifer has done a great job of establishing Selina as a new mother, but shipping her off to a prison planet seems to undermine that ongoing storyline. I'm going to trust Pfeifer on this, though.


Oh well:

GREEN ARROW/BLACK CANARY #4
Written by Judd Winick
Art and cover by Cliff Chiang
The second story arc of this hit new series begins with a tragedy for Oliver Queen!
On sale January 9 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US

I have a feeling this solicitation might spoil something. Am I wrong?

Dr. K's Halloween Countdown Presents: Weird War Tales 120

The Halloween Countdown at the 100-Page Super Spectacular continues with a team-up of sorts between two of Bob Kanigher's greatest creations: G. I. Robot and The War that Time Forgot.

A cover with a giant gorilla and a robot, who shoots bullets from his fingers, fighting a pterodactyl should be the greatest work of art ever created, but this cover, by Ross Andru and Klaus Janson, just doesn't work. I think it's a combination of the garish colors and Janson's rough inking (which I normally like) that cause this cover to fail to reach true awesomeness.

On the other hand, the story inside, titled "The Monster Was a Lady," far exceeds any expectations.

G. I Robot is a Bob Kanigher creation that does not get much attention these days, unlike The Metal Men or even The War that Time Forgot, and that is unfortunate. Perhaps it's because the feature did not last very long in Weird War Tales, running just under two years. And in his last appearance, from the final issue of Weird War (124), the robot is loaded with the members of the Creature Commandos onto an ICBM that is shot into space.

G. I. Robot is J.A.K.E., which stands for "Jungle Automated Killer, Experimental" (a name that makes all other acronyms look like crap), who fought during World War II in the South Pacific, along with his robot dog named C.A.P. and an unnamed robot cat. J.A.K.E. never speaks, and much dramatic tension in his stories comes from human soldiers debating about his ability to feel.

The lead story in Weird War Tales 120 (1983), "The Monster Was a Lady," with art by the severely underrated Fred Carillo, opens with J.A.K.E. out surfing with his dog and cat, and if I just stopped there, that should be enough to blow your minds. However, I can promise you that this story only gets better.

While surfing, J.A.K.E. comes under fire from a Japanese fighter, and before he can bring the plane down with his finger-fired guns, his dog takes a shot to the back.

While C.A.P. is undergoing repairs, J.A.K.E. and his human partner, Sgt. Coker, spend some quality time together:

One of the common themes in these stories is not only J.A.K.E.'s ability to feel emotions, but also his heterosexuality. In an earlier story, for example, the Japanese build a female geisha robot "honey trap" to destroy J.A.K.E., and it almost works (and, yes, the robot is refered to as a "honey trap" in the story). Here, J.A.K.E.'s oggling of the Rita Hayworth pin-up serves as foreshadowing of events to come.

Later, J.A.K.E. and Sgt. Coker are given orders to find a Marine unit that was lost on a nearby island. The island, however, happens to be the one inhabited by the dinosaurs and other creatures of The War that Time Forgot, including a giant female gorilla.

Some strange silent communication occurs between G.I. Robot and the gorilla, and Sgt. Coker wonders why the robot didn't automatically attack, as he is programmed to do. Coker's reference to the pin-up gives a not so subtle hint why.

That's right: what ensues in between fights with dinosaurs is a love story between a giant ape and a robot--a romance that fulfills all of James Kochalka's wildest dreams (Please see my earlier post for a discussion of this particular issue).

Is there even a word to describe giant-ape-on-robot action? Would it be something like "macrosimiotechnophilia"?

However, in the final battle with a pack of T. Rexes, the romance proves short-lived.

It's doubly unfortunate that the giant ape doesn't get to play with the T. Rex's broken jawbone the way that King Kong did in a similar situation.

To add to the ambiguity about J.A.K.E.'s "feelings," the sergeant gets word that C.A.P. has recovered from his repairs, and this leads to an interesting final panel open to interpretation:

Can a robot truly cry? And if so, for whom does he shed his tear?

Friday Night Fights: BLUHGG--SPLOOGE!

I know it's a little early to be using a panel from a Christmas comic, but since the stores are already decked out with X-Mas decorations just chomping at the bit for Halloween to move on its merry way, I figured it's not to early to start thinking about the holidays.

Especially when it involves Batgirl kicking Clayface in the head and results in one of the greatest sound effects of all time:

Image from The Batman Adventures Holiday Special (1995), by Paul Dini and Bruce Timm.

Remember to heed the call of Bahlactus.

Dr. K's Halloween Countdown Presents: Die, Monster, Die

What would Halloween be without Roger Corman's American International Pictures? Well, probably about the same, but Corman was responsible for some of the best and worst horror and sci-fi movies in cinematic history. One of my favorites of the Corman canon is the 1965 film Die, Monster, Die (a title that, in German, means "The monster, the"*). Like most Corman films, it's a mixed bag, and it has many detractors, but I love it because it has everything I want from a Corman horror film: a gothic setting, a corny romance plot, outrageous creatures, women with melting skin, and, most important, Boris Karloff.

Die, Monster, Die is adapted from the H. P. Lovecraft story "The Colour Out of Space," perhaps in an attempt to duplicate the success of AIP's Poe adaptations with Lovecraft (In fact, there is a Midnight Movies set that pairs this film with another Lovecraft adaptation, the trippy and surreal version of The Dunwich Horror with Russ Tamblyn and Sandra Dee--in a very un-Sandra-Dee-like performance).

The film opens with an American named Steven Reinhart (Nick Adams) disembarking from a train in the British village of Arkham (the name taken from the Lovecraft story). He begins to seek out transportation or directions to "the Witley place," yet every time he asks someone for directions, he is met with either fear or ridicule. As he walks through the village, shutters and doors slam and villagers give him the cold shoulder. I have to say that, though I've seen this same opening in dozens of Universal, Hammer, and AIP horror movies, I'm still a sucker for it. Perhaps it's because of my admiration for the novel Dracula, which begins with such scenes where Jonathan Harker is constantly warned not to seek out Dracula's castle, but he does anyway. Such a scene creates the perfect atmosphere of mystery and anticipation for a movie like this, and the always dependable hero invariably and stubbornly chooses to shoulder on despite the warnings.

Steve is forced to walk to the Witley place, and along the way he comes across a deep chasm surrounded by burnt trees. The chasm is clearly a matte painting, but it's a good one, and I find that one of this movie's strengths is its set design and visual effects, which, while not perfect, are superior to most Corman films of the previous decade.

Once Steve arrives, he discovers that the gate to the mansion is locked, and the woods surrounding it contain hidden bear traps. He carefully manages to make his way to the mansion, only to find no answer when he knocks on the giant wooden doors. The door is open, however, and like any good American, he has no problem waltzing right in to someone else's property and making himself at home.

Steve is quickly confronted by angry, wheelchair-bound patriarch Nahum Witley, played by the always-entertaining Boris Karloff. At this time, Karloff was near the end of his life, and he really was wheelchair-bound due to arthritis, but he plays it all to his advantage in this performance, even in scenes where he's required to get out of his chair.

Karloff begins to abuse Steve, demanding an explanation for the unwanted intrusion. Steve explains that he was invited to the home by Karloff's daughter, Susan (Suzan Farmer), whom Steve had met in college back in the States.

"Susan and I were in the same Science class," Steve explains.

"Science!" Karloff scoffs, with the same tone of derision one would expect at a Republican presidential debate.

This brief line sets up a key theme in this film: the dichotomy of science and the supernatural. As Steve recognizes strange occurences at the Witley place, he desperately adheres to empirical, scientific explanations, while Karloff insists that the events are all caused by supernatural forces unleashed by his father, Corbin Witley. The tension between these two epistemologies becomes interesting because neither is based in fact in any way. Steve constantly uses "radiation" as the explanation for everything that happens in the movie with a combination of fear and naivete that was common in Cold War movies, especially Corman's sci-fi films, where radiation could just as easily cause a person to grow to 50-feet tall or melt off a person's skin.

The radiation in this film comes from glowing green extraterrestrial rocks that caused the chasm Steve saw early in the film. Karloff believes that the rocks were summoned by his father through an occult ritual, and the obsession with these rocks has haunted the family for generations. Nahum stores the rocks in a dungeon beneath his ancestral home, in a room with skull-shaped contraptions and statues of creatures that seem right out of Lovecraft. He also uses the rocks to promote plant growth, keeping a greenhouse with giant tomatoes and other plants. As he says to his wife, Letitia (Freda Jackson), who is suffering from some mysterious ailment caused by the rocks, "I see the future, and all I have planned for it will fill it with a richness we have never known"--a line clearly written for Karloff's voice.

As Steve and Susan investigate the strange occurences in the house (occurences that only now seem strange to Susan, though she's experienced them her entire life), they both break in to the greenhouse. In the "potting room," they discover not only more glowing rocks, but also some giant, tentacled, Lovecraftian monsters that Steve describes as "a zoo in hell!" and "a menagerie of horrors." Where's your beloved science now, Steve? Well, he's quick to deploy his all-purpose response to things he can't readily explain: "radiation caused these mutations." Keep on thinking that, Steve.

Once Letitia's face melts in the film's most memorable scene, Nahum finally realizes the extent of his obsession, and he vows to destroy the giant space rock in his basement dungeon. In a scene that must have been grueling for the arthritic Karloff, he lifts himself from his wheelchair, grabs a battleaxe from the wall, and smashes it into the rock. However, Nahum is overcome by the radiation, and his skin begins to take on a glowing green metallic luster. He is finally transformed into a creature resembling a glowing metal version of Karloff's Frankenstein. And, I have to say, the glowing metal Karloff is pretty cool.

One of the biggest criticisms this movie receives involves the acting of the two main protagonists: Nick Adams and Suzan Farmer. I've always thought Adams was a rotten actor, and after making this film, he would only have a few years to live before dying of a drug overdose. In the meantime, he bounced around a lot of TV shows and B-movies, like Godzilla vs. Monster Zero and Hammer Studios' Frankenstein Conquers the World. In Die, Monster, Die, he really overplays his American toughness, which seems suitable most of the time, except when dealing out scientific explanations about the effects of radiation. However, that toughness is not really reflected in his physical performance: he fails to move with any sense of alarm when Susan or others scream for help, and he's completely inept in his battle with the creature at the end. Karloff lumbers around slowly, yet Steve keeps throwing weapons at him that miss by a mile. When Steve has to rescue Susan from her transformed father, Steve's shot with a battleaxe gets closer to hitting Susan than the creature. And Steve has little to do with the creature's demise: Karloff stumbles over a railing while trying to attack Susan, and Steve barely gets himself up off the floor to rescue her. The creature's radioactive glow ultimately causes the house to burn down, and the young couple manage to escape.

For most of the film, Suzan Farmer seems to be in another movie, which is oddly suitable here. Her wardrobe consists almost entirely of pink sweaters and skirts, which contrast the film's gothic setting. And her character seems willfully oblivious and incurious about her home and family.

Does science win in the end? To the film's credit, it suspends such an obvious conclusion, though that may be due more to the film's dangling plot threads than anything willful on the part of the creators. The creatures in the greenhouse and the giant, living attack plants never return, and we're meant to assume they were destroyed in the fire.

Despite its many liabilities, this is still a fun, entertaining gothic horror film that manages to overcome a lot of the detriments of earlier Corman films, like weak special effects and ineffective monsters. Many critics complain that it's mystery isn't very mysterious, but I think such criticism misses the point. We pretty much know all along what Karloff is up to, and the only real shocks come when Letitia's melting face is revealed. Instead, it's best to see this movie in the mad scientist/occultist vein, as Karloff's character tampers with forces he shouldn't.

Bonus Content: Here's part of the introduction to the film by great late-night TV host Sammy Terry, from Indianapolis's WTTV Channel 4. Sammy Terry had a long career in Indianapolis, lasting to the end of the 80s (this clip is from 1987), long after most horror show hosts had disappeared from TV.



I didn't grow up in Indiana, so I didn't get to see Sammy Terry in his heyday, but I remember WTTV doing Halloween specials with him in the 90s, when I was attending Purdue University.

*Yes, I stole that joke from The Simpsons. No, I could not help myself.

Breaking News: Lessing, and not Dr. K, wins Nobel Literature Prize

In a month that has seen Dr. K overlooked by the MacArthur Foundation, Oprah (Oh, Oprah--what does Marquez have that would cause you to pick him for your book club twice before Dr. K?), and the National Book Awards, now the Nobel Prize committee has seen fit to add to what was already a trifecta of disappointment by awarding the literature prize to Doris Lessing.

In all seriousness, I met the news of this prize this morning with surprise not because I thought Lessing was undeserving, but because I was almost sure she had already won it.

The Golden Notebook (1962), the work most often mentioned as Lessing's masterpiece, is a novel that I read at just the right time in my intellectual development. It was my senior undergrad year, and the novel helped cement my appreciation for the playfulness and challenges of postmodern narratives. And, at the time, I felt a great sense of accomplishment in having completed it.

The novel involves a writer named Anna Wulf who keeps four separate notebooks designated by different colors: black, red, yellow, and blue. Each serves a separate purpose in her process of both autobiographical and fictional creation, and the division between the two forms blurs. The novel itself shifts between these notebooks and a novella called "Free Women," in which Anna is a character. To make things more complicated, we are often informed that the notebooks have various formal qualities that are explained in bracketed passages: notebooks are written in columns, or with front and back sides of pages serving different purposes, or as diaries, or as scrapbooks of newspaper clippings.

In a graduate course on postmodern British fiction, I made the comment that it would be interesting to disassemble The Golden Notebook and re-arrange the pages in order to read each notebook separately and on its own. But then, I didn't want to do that, I cracked, because it would ruin what was an expensive book. The professor then refered to me as a "smart-ass."

I also often find myself thinking of her quintet of novels collectively titled The Children of Violence. The title refers to the post-World War I generation, who have collectively witnessed a world that is filled with violence on a scale never seen before in history, and world events so often seem to bear out the fears and anxieties of these novels. The title character, Martha Quest is a loosely autobiographical version of Lessing herself, and the novel follows her from the interwar period in her native Africa through the Second World War. The final novel, The Four-Gated City (1969), begins with Martha in England during the 1950s, but Lessing takes an ambitious turn in this autobiographical series by moving it into the future, imagining a World War III that closes out the century.

The Nobel Prize committee made a good call here, and the award should encourage more people to read Lessing's novels.

Some Items Related to Recent Posts

1) I'm going to call it right here: the best moment of the current TV season will be Kristin Chenoweth singing "Hopelessly Devoted to You" on tonight's episode of Pushing Daisies. That is, unless Hiro and Ando profess their powerful, secret love for one another this season (and we all know that it's not a matter of "if," but "when").

2) I raised the "found laptop dilemma" with another group of students today. Their response was much more reasonable, with only a minority stating they would keep the computer, while the rest would try to find the owner. One student made a suggestion that guaranteed her an A in the class: she said I should have inserted pornographic pictures into the church PowerPoint presentations so that they would appear during services. She then went on to describe how elderly parisioners would run screaming from the church. And this student's name, interestingly enough, is Tyler Durden.

3) Fall break started for me today, which means I'll have more time this week to work up some more extensive entries into the Halloween Countdown. Expect more film entries over the next few days.

My Good Deed for the Day

Last night, I was driving home from work, when I spotted what looked like a black shoulder bag or briefcase lying in the middle of the road, in the oncoming traffic lane. I decided to pull my car over to the shoulder and see what it was. I imagined several different possibilities:

1) It was an IED (In which case, stopping to check it out would be stupid).
2) It was a briefcase full of cash.
3) It was a briefcase full of blues.
4) It contained a laptop and perhaps some other electronic devices

Before I could cross the road to get the bag, some traffic started coming in both directions. A black SUV ran right over the bag, and I heard a loud crunch. Whatever was in the bag, I thought, was toast. The SUV stopped for a second, but seeing me crossing the road, the driver quickly took off.

I picked up the bag and took it back to my car. Upon opening the bag, I discovered it, indeed, contained a laptop, and to my surprise, the laptop was still working. In fact, it seemed that the impact with the car must have triggered the power switch, because the machine was booting up. I stuffed the laptop back in the bag and went home.

I knew right away that I wanted to find a way to return the computer to its rightful owner, as I knew how I would feel if it were my laptop that were lost. But in the meantime, my curiosity was piqued about the contents of the computer.

Upon getting home, I showed the bag to the other Dr. K, and we both proceeded to try and discover the name of the owner of the computer. I searched through the bag and found a business card for a pastor at a nearby church. The other Dr. K found some church related documents on the computer, including PowerPoint presentations with hymn lyrics. She also found the same name on a Word document in the computer, so we concluded our investigation.

At this point, the imagination of a person who has read too many stories--especially stories with ironic twists and didactic morals--kicked in. That imaginative voice told me that all the signs, especially all the religious stuff, were pointing to one conclusion: this was a test of my moral integrity. Though I had not entertained the idea of keeping the computer, the circumstances were telling me, in no uncertain terms, that it had to be returned to its rightful owner. If I failed to do so, some ironic twist of fate would surely befall me.

I then called the number on the business card.

A woman answered the phone, and I asked for the man whose name was on the card.

"He's not home," she responded.

"Do you happen to know if he lost a laptop today?" I asked.

"No, I don't think so. Why do you ask?"

"Because I found a laptop in a shoulder bag lying in the middle of the road, and the bag contained a business card with that name on it."

I explained where I found the bag, and she responded that they live near that intersection. This led me to imagine what must have happened: the computer's owner had put the bag on top of his car and forgot about it, driving a couple of blocks before it fell off.

"Does the computer have a bunch of hymns and church sermons on it?" she asked.

"Yes, it does," I replied.

"Then it must be his."

We then exchanged information and agreed to meet at a location nearby, as we both lived in the same area.

The other Dr. K decided to come with me to drop off the computer, mainly to see the story to its conclusion, but also to watch my back in case something went down, like the woman accusing me of stealing the laptop. We soon left together for the drop off.

When we got to the location, we found the woman sitting in her car in the parking lot. I pulled out the bag and handed it to her, and she then waved to another car on the other side of the lot.

"That's my daughter," she explained. "She wanted to make sure everything was okay." It seems that we both shared the same paranoia about the situation.

I then explained that I watched the bag get run over by an SUV, but the computer still seemed to work.

"I should do an ad for Dell," she joked.

We then chatted for a little bit before she asked, "Do you want anything for this?"

Now, I didn't want any reward, but I thought this was a funny way of offering one. How is someone supposed to respond to such a question? "Yes--I figure this laptop cost around $1500, so I figure 10% is in order." Instead, I responded, "No, thank you. That's okay. I just know that if I lost my laptop, I would hope that someone would return it in the same way."

"Well, my husband will be glad to get it back. He's a music director at the church, and all of his work is saved on this computer."

We then exchanged information and said goodbye. However, I haven't heard from the laptop's owner since then.

Today, in one of my Freshman Composition classes, I told the story to my students, but before giving all the details about the computer's owner, I asked them, "How many of you would have kept the computer?"

All of them raised their hands.

When I asked "Why?" most responded that there would be no way of finding out the owner's name, and others commented that it would be easy to keep because no one would know they had someone else's computer. Then I told them that the owner was a pastor at a local church.

"Ooooohhh," they all reacted.

"Does that change your response to my earlier question?" I asked.

Most did acknowledge that it changed their minds, or at least made them superstitious. I found, though, the students' responses to this moral question to be very interesting, especially living in a part of the country where the church has such a strong influence over almost all aspects of people's lives.

Dr. K's Halloween Countdown Presents: The Singling!

From Mystery in Space 111 (1980) comes the awesome tale of the human race's final destruction at the hands of alien invaders: "The Singling":


By the way, that kid on the cover--he's dead. Even Macgyver would be screwed facing laser-touting aliens with only a pop gun and stuffed dolls.

Based on its title alone, "The Singling" sounds like it should come from a Simpson's Treehouse of Horror episode. At the very least, the title is decidedly undramatic, perhaps proving that all the good titles have been taken for stories involving the last man on earth (including The Last Man on Earth). What this title needs to make it dramatic is a little Jim Aparo lettering:

"The Singling," written by Gerald Brown and drawn by Jim Aparo, is an experimental story that occasionally popped up in DC's mystery and sci-fi books of the 70s and 80s. In this case, the story is completely "silent," with text appearing only at the beginning and the end.

The opening pages reveal the destructions the aliens have wrought on the American capitol, including this particularly symbolic image:


The symbolism here is obvious: the aliens have effectively castrated America. Or, at the very least, they performed a botched circumcision.

The aliens continue to work their way through the capitol, coming across other symbols of American history and power.

If there were a word balloon for this panel, I believe it would say something like, "Hey, Lincoln: I've got your Emancipation Proclamation right here!"

Shortly, the alien mother ship arrives and beams down the alien leader and his/her/its entourage. Some kind of awards ceremony ensues in which James Brown's cape and a large, shiny, round medallion are given to an alien by the alien leader. At least I assume it's the leader because he's the fattest.

Perhaps, however, the aliens are celebrating too quickly, as a lone human with a sniper rifle manages to get a bead on the alien leader.

But then:

Oh well, so much for that last bit of hope.

The captured human is then brought to the alien leader, who encourages his newly medallioned underling to show his loyalty and dispose of the pesky human.


Having taken care of business, the alien then returns to the ship while the leader and others remain in Washington, DC, to oversee its continued destruction.

On the next page, we see the same alien now beaming down to the wreckage of a destroyed home, thus providing the final moment of irony that anyone who has ever read one of these sci-fi comics or has ever seen an episode of The Twilight Zone expects.

(Click on the image to embiggen.)

I'm not exactly sure how to read these final images. Did the destruction of his home and family occur before or after Col. Davis negotiated with the aliens? Nothing in the story cues us to the correct answer, though I think we're supposed to assume it happened after. Whatever the case, he should also have an award for "The World's Crappiest Negotiator."

Friday Night Fights: Hulk vs. Groot

Bahlactus rang the bell on a new series of Friday Night Fights last week, but unfortunately I was out of town that day and got back too late to contribute.

So, I'm making up for it with an entry that comes from what, it is safe to say, is the single greatest fight comic of all time: Incredible Hulk King-Size Annual 5, "And Six Shall Crush the Hulk"--scripted by Chris Claremont, plotted by Len Wein, and drawn by Sal Buscema and Jack Abel.

In these 48 pages of pure, high-grade awesomeness, Hulk fights 6 different creatures who originally debuted in pre-Marvel Atlas sci-fi comics. One of these creatures is the talking tree, "Groot, the Monster from Planet X."

Hulk, I know what you feel. Almost every day I find something that causes me to shout, "Go away, dream!"

Also, I want "Overlord of All the Timber in the Galaxy" to appear on my next set of business cards.

Hulk and Groot quickly commence to fighting, with Groot landing a devastating blow:

Meanwhile Hulk also relives a particularly traumatic childhood viewing of The Wizard of Oz:

Hulk completely splinters Groot, leaving nothing left but a stump, though that does not stop Hulk from continuing to shout at him:

This panel also very much resembles the average day in Dr. K's classroom.

Groot apparently recovers from this fight, as he is currently co-starring in the Annihilation: Star Lord miniseries, where he teams up with Rocket Raccoon.

I would also like to acknowledge the fact that I did not once take the easy road and make some kind of "Hulk gets wood" joke. We try to keep things classy here at the Super-Spectacular.

Dr. K's Halloween Countdown Presents: Jacques Tourneur

During my Halloween Countdown, much of my focus on films will deal with movies that are going to show up on Turner Classic Movies' excellent horror film line-up for the month of October. As I was putting together my list of films to cover this month, I noticed that many of them were showing up on TCM, so I decided to use that network's schedule as a guide for my own posts. Their selection of Roger Corman, William Castle, and Tod Browning films is especially exciting.

Tonight, TCM is featuring the films of Jacques Tourneur, one of my favorite directors. Tourneur is probably best known as the director of one of the three greatest films noir, Out of the Past, and for his low budget horror films he did for RKO Studios and producer Val Lewton. With the exception of Curse of the Demon (a fine horror movie in its own right, starring an aging Dana Andrews and the incredibly hot Peggy Cummins, star of one of the other three greatest films noir, Gun Crazy), the rest of the films are all Lewton/Tourneur collaborations.

I can't really add much to what has already been said about Cat People (1942), especially regarding its important role in both the history of the horror genre and the history of RKO Studios. If you are a horror movie fan and you haven't seen this movie, then you need to, at the very least because it establishes so many conventions of the genre and it has been borrowed from so heavily (though more contemporary horror film directors could learn a lot from it, in my opinion). It's the film most often cited as an example of how to do suspense without gore, and though I have nothing against gore, I also admire a movie that plays with my imagination in this way.

The movie also has an overt sexual subtext that remains effective and surprising today. The beautiful Simone Simon plays Irena Dubrovna, an Eastern European immigrant who quickly falls in love and marries architect Oliver Reed, gamely played by lantern-jawed Kent Smith. (In a nice and appropriate homage to this film, comic writer and walking movie encyclopedia Will Pfeifer temporarily gave Selina Kyle the alias "Irena Dubrovna" in his excellent Catwoman series.) Their marriage, however, is never consummated, as Irena has an extreme fear of intimacy: she believes in an Eastern European curse that sexual desire will cause her to transform into a supernatural cat creature. The film plays out its tension by never revealing until the very end whether the curse is real or a figment of Irena's damaged psyche. Though Oliver encourages her to undergo psychiatric treatment, it doesn't help, primarily due to the sexual advances of her smarmy therapist, Dr. Judd, played by Tom Conway (Conway is really incredible in this movie, playing Judd as a sleazy, amoral opportunist who manipulates Irena into a sexual relationship).

I teach Cat People regularly in Film classes, and it goes over well with students, even if they have little experience with films of the period. During one memorable discussion, I asked students to comment on any symbolism they noted in the film. One student responded, "Well, there is the statue with the cat impaled on a sword."

Trying to push the interpretation further, I asked, "And what does that statue represent?"

The student responded, "It's a CAT impaled on a SWORD! I don't think it needs any more explanation than that."

Another film worth checking out tonight is I Walked with a Zombie, the second collaboration between Tourneur and Lewton. The thing I love most about this movie is its plot: it's basically Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre set in the Caribbean with zombies, and pretty much every Victorian novel would be improved by the inclusion of zombies (except for the ones that already have zombies, and those could always use more). Tom Conway is again in this movie, and he's great as the husband who may have had his wife zombified in order to prevent her from having an affair with his brother. As with the earlier film, this one features characters who are psychologically complex and twisted, and that helps contribute to the film's overall suspense. Tourneur also builds on the visual style he developed in Cat People, and the zombie scenes are particularly effective and atmospheric.

TCM is also showing The Leopard Man, a lesser attempt by Lewton to recreate the success of Cat People. It is worth watching the opening scenes, however, as Tourneur displays yet another textbook example of how to film and structure a suspenseful scene, with a pretty startling conclusion. The rest of the movie, unfortunately, does not hold up to this opening. Also, The Leopard Man stars Dennis O'Keefe, who does fine here as a huckster who ill-advisedly uses a leopard in a night club act. O'Keefe is another actor who would make his mark in film noir, especially in the great films of Anthony Mann--T-Men and Raw Deal.

These three movies, and some other great horror films, are available in the Val Lewton boxed set that Warner Bros. put out a couple of years ago--a set that I would highly recommend for its films and its plethora of extras. Over on Will Pfeifer's excellent blog, X-Ray Spex, he covers another great Lewton film, The Seventh Victim, in today's entry of his own Horror Movie Marathon. Check it out.

Pushing Daisies

I'm going to go out on a limb here. I've watched a lot of television in my life, logging in more hours than I'd ever want to count. And I have to go back to the debut of Twin Peaks to find a pilot episode that excited me more than the one that aired tonight for Pushing Daisies. The show has a distinctive narrative and visual style that melds the best qualities of its creative team, writer Bryan Fuller and director Barry Sonnenfeld, and it's darkly funny and quirky without being precious.

The premise alone is odd enough. Young Ned (Lee Pace) discovers that he can bring dead things to life with just one touch, but he tragically discovers some drawbacks to the power: a second touch will cause the revived person to irrevocably die, and if the deceased is revived for more than one minute, someone within the general proximity will die in his or her place. Ned runs a bakery called "The Pie Hole," and uses his powers to revive dead fruit for his pies. On the side, he also works with a private detective (Chi McBride) to investigate murders by reviving corpses and asking who their murderers were.

The opening episode does a great job of being a self-contained story while also setting up the status quo well, with a cast of goofy characters and a nice promise of ongoing romantic tension, as Ned revives his dead first love, Charlotte, in order to investigate her murder. Bryan Fuller has found an excellent way to avoid the shark-jumping problem that plagues most series based on romantic tension: if Charlotte and Ned touch, she goes back to being dead.

Though there isn't anything like this on television, it's hard to call it unique. As the review in today's New York Times noted, this series owes a lot to the film Amelie, especially in its quirky tone, visual style, and use of voice-over narration. However, it also feels very much like a work of its creators. It has the same dark humor as Fuller's Dead Like Me, and director Barry Sonnenfeld's visual style creates a bright, colorful, and distinctive world for this series in a way similar to what he created for the Addams Family movies (though not so bright and colorful there, of course).

I hope this series manages to live up to the potential of its pilot. And I don't want to be pessimistic, but I also hope the series gets a chance to live up to its potential. As a smart, dark comedy set just slightly outside of reality, it may be a hard sell to a general audience, but it has all the markings of a cult hit. It would be great if ABC allowed this series to find its niche audience and then would be satisfied with that, but I think that amounts to wishful thinking. At best, word of mouth will spread enough to give this series a vocal following that will keep it afloat for a while.

The website for the show also features a promotional comic that appears to be put together by Wildstorm. The comic was written by series creator Bryan Fuller and drawn by both Zach Howard and Cameron Stewart.

ABC hasn't put the pilot episode up on its site yet, but hopefully they will so that people who missed tonight's episode can check it out. I saw very little publicity for the series, and I only watched because of the positive New York Times review, but I hope the positive response draws some extra support from the network.

Grimjack Returns at ComicMix

ComicMix launched its first web comic today with the return of a great badass comic character from the 80s: Grimjack. The web comic, by the original Grimjack creators, John Ostrander and Tim Truman, will be serialized weekly.

The first six pages look very good so far, and the web reader ComicMix has created works well. Also, the story is quite "new reader friendly." The basic Grimjack concept is pretty easily accessible, anyway. As an early caption in the story reads, "The name's John Gaunt, aka Grimjack, and I'm the guy you hire when you need an asshole on your side."

And if that's not enough to get you to check it out, then this should seal the deal:


Other new series will debut daily for the next week, including Grimjack spinoff, Munden's Bar.

Mike Gold, former editor at DC and First Comics, has put together a great line-up of creators, many of whom are revisiting creations originally published by First Comics in the 80s. I'm personally looking forward most to the return of Mike Grell's Jon Sable, Freelance, which ranks in my top 5 all-time favorite comic series.

For anyone who wasn't around during the heyday of First Comics in the 80s, it is impossible to overstate the quality and significance of the work put out by that company. Howard Chaykin's American Flagg!, Mike Grell's Jon Sable, Ostrander and Truman's Grimjack, Baron and Rude's Nexus--all of these were groundbreaking, amazing comics, and Mike Gold did a fantastic job as editor cultivating the talent and giving them freedom to explore their visions. I'm incredibly excited for this new venture from ComicMix, and it's already off to a great start.

Dr. K's Halloween Countdown Presents: Weird War Tales 41

In celebration of the coming of Halloween, I decided to do a series of posts on my favorite horror comics and movies that will run throughout October.

First up is one of my all-time favorite comics, Weird War Tales 41 (Sept. 1975), featuring a rare "book-length novel," "The Dead Draftees of Regiment Six"--story by Michael Fleisher and Russell Carley, art by the amazing Jose Luis Garcia Lopez.

The story opens in the midst of the American Civil War (or "The War of Northern Aggression" as my neighbors call it), as the Union Congress is about to pass the 1863 Conscription Act, which instituted a draft in the North, but made an exemption for anyone who could pay a $300 fee or provide a substitute, as these two panels explain:

From the get-go, Fleisher is clearly turning this story into an allegory for the Vietnam conflict, where the rich and the priveleged were often exempted from the draft with cushy assignments in the Texas Air National Guard.

For the next few pages, we see the corruption this draft law engenders, as crooked draft registrars take bribes from poor draftees and the rich pay their exemption fees. In an interesting addition, Fleisher introduces us to Jonathan French, a popular abolitionist who encourages participation in the war against slavery. However, French is also a crooked coward who uses donations to the abolition cause to pay off gambling debts. So, the targets of Fleisher's satire are widespread, including the government officials who abuse the system for profit and those who encourage the war (though for a good cause) but are unwilling to fight themselves.


When French is faced with his own draft notice but unable to pay the fee, he quickly develops a plan to coerce young Tom Haynes to serve as his substitute.

Bum leg or no, Tom wakes up, hung over, in a carriage headed for Camp Wainwright, while French remains back home, preparing to seduce Tom's sister.

Tom and the other draftees who were unable to escape conscription are forced to the front lines as "cannon fodder, and they are quickly routed in a battle with Rebel forces.

Because this is Weird War Tales, death is not the end for these soldiers, and their ghosts rise up to take revenge on those who brought this fate on to them.

Their first target: the commanding officer, Colonel Crocker.

The ghosts then make their way back to New York City, where they also kill the crooked draft registrar and burn the armory to the ground. The burning of the armory is soon joined by regular citizens, who all pour kerosene and throw wood on the fire in protest of the draft. This, then, sets off a full-scale riot.

Tom manages to get revenge on French, but, unfortunately, Tom discovers that his own sister has been a victim of the riots.

However, in a great twist, we discover that the ghosts from Regiment Six are the true cause of the 1863 Draft Riots in New York, a fact conveniently left out of history books.

Always remember this important message, kids: comics won't lie to you like your teachers will.

In rereading this story, I was struck by how much it resembles Joe Dante's film Homecoming, which is also a satirical allegory about American soldiers returning from the dead to get revenge on those in the system that wronged them. In the case of Dante's film, the soldiers come back from the dead as zombies to vote against the President in the 2004 election. But it's interesting to note that both Dante and Fleisher shared similar impulses toward satire at different historical moments.

Bonus Content Solely for Chris at The ISB.