Massive Universal Monsters collection coming to Blu-ray

Hot on the heels of Universal's announcement that "legacy collections" of its Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Invisible Man films were headed to Blu-ray in August , the studio let slip that a comprehensive Blu-ray box set of its iconic 1931-1956 films would be accompanying it. That's a whopping 30 FILMS that will available in HD as of Aug. 28.

The Gill-man and his invisible cohorts account for the lion's share of these new releases. The Creature set includes Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), Revenge of the Creature (1955) and The Creature Walks Among Us (1956). This time out, Revenge of the Creature has been given a 3-D restoration. This collection is available for pre-order from Amazon by clicking HERE.

The Invisible Man set includes The Invisible Man (1933), The Invisible Man Returns (1940), The Invisible Woman (1940), Invisible Agent (1942), The Invisible Man’s Revenge (1944) and Abbot and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951). This collection is available for pre-order from Amazon by clicking HERE.

For those of you looking to break the bank with the comprehensive box set, here's a list of the films you can expect to find in the collection. You can take a look at the set's bonus features at Amazon HERE.

Dracula w/Bela Lugosi (1931)
Dracula w/Carlos Villarías (1931)
Frankenstein (1931)
The Mummy (1932)
The Invisible Man (1933)
The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
Werewolf of London (1935)
Dracula's Daughter (1936)
Son of Frankenstein (1939)
The Invisible Man Returns (1940)
The Invisible Woman (1940)
The Mummy's Hand (1940)
The Wolf Man (1941)
The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942)
The Mummy's Ghost (1942)
The Mummy's Tomb (1942)
Invisible Agent (1942)
Phantom of the Opera (1943)
Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943)
Son of Dracula (1943)
House of Frankenstein (1944)
The Mummy's Curse (1944)
The Invisible Man's Revenge (1944)
House of Dracula (1945)
She-Wolf of London (1946)
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)
Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951)
Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)
Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955)
Revenge of the Creature (1955)
The Creature Walks Among Us (1956)

That other John Karlen vampire movie is on Amazon Prime

DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS, the kinky/glam movie about decadent French vampires that John Karlen made in the wake of HOUSE OF DARK SHADOWS, is now streaming on Amazon Prime.

It's a strange movie that not enough people have seen, partly because of what was happening in the market place at the time of its release. During 1970-71 the cinematic Vampire Arms Race had escalated significantly, with everyone from Dan Curtis, Hammer Studios, AIP and Toho (?!) doing their best to make nosferatu relevant again. Audiences had so many traditional monsters to choose from in those years that many simply died on the vine. The arthouse sensibilities of DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS didn't exactly give it a competitive edge.

If you're unfamiliar with the film, here's the official log line:

"International screen icon Delphine Seyrig stars as Elizabeth Bathory, an ageless Countess with a beautiful young 'companion' (Andrea Rau) and a legendary legacy of perversion. But when the two women seduce a troubled newlywed couple, they unleash a frenzy of sudden violence and depraved desire that shocked both art house audiences and grindhouse crowds worldwide."

You can find DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS streaming on Amazon Prime by clicking HERE. For those of you who want to dive a little deeper, there's also a Blu-ray available that features a commentary track by John Karlen available at the same link.

MONSTER SERIAL: Child of Dark Shadows, 1973

By PATRICK McCRAY

Was it just me, or did CBS used to show movies opposite Carson? Or maybe Letterman? That’s where I saw scads of vital films. THE OMEGA MAN (the second time). THE LAST OF SHEILA. And this. Before I had any idea what DARK SHADOWS was, CHILD OF DARK SHADOWS sounded like some kind of documentary about runaways or drug abuse or something similarly instructional, but Snyder was a rerun, and so during those lazy, insomniac-by-choice summers of my misspent middleschoolism, it was the only game on the three channels we called choice back in the wilds of the early Eighties.

When I ended up watching the show, the film was so different that it took two years and a fresh Fangoria to explain that, yes, Virginia, this was the third DARK SHADOWS film. Not that I was dissatisfied with it. Schoolgirls in panic! Haunted portraits. The I Ching. Occult heroes. It was all there. By Jove, I was a fool not to have put the pieces together myself. If anything, I kept waiting for the TV show to get like the movie. Where was Anton Castille when Collinsport needed him?

By 1973, Dan Curtis was in an odd position. The name DARK SHADOWS still had bankability, but you have to give the audience some, you know, DARK SHADOWS. If NIGHT OF DARK SHADOWS taught what was left of Team Curtis anything, it was that. Unfortunately, with Jonathan Frid and David Selby gone, it was going to be an uphill battle. He was wise to very carefully sift through what was left to give the audience as much familiarity as he could. No, Julia Hoffman is dead, but there’s Joanna Hoffman. Sure. Just trade the tweed for a pantsuit. Check. Jerry Lacy as a failed televangelist Trask, desperately trying to start his own campus in Collinsport. The important question was, “Is he still an asshole? Yes? Then it’s DARK SHADOWS.”

Were Nancy Barrett and Alexandra Isles a bit, um, august to be playing high school girls? Yes, but who cares? We never see any classes other than those run by hottie hipster, Jason Kane (John Karlen), and that’s “figure modeling,” so maybe it’s a finishing school. I don’t know, and I’m not sure it matters. The crucial thing is that Curtis and Hall were doing what they did best — reconfiguring other works of horror into their own narrative.

Left, the 1984 home video release by MGM. Right, the novelization by David Gerrold.

By doing this, they gave the audiences of 1973 everything they wanted then. It was almost as if DARK SHADOWS, the television version, worked from the literature of the past. Now, we have the literature of the present, and Curtis was in the thick of 1970’s neo-pagan-christian-mysticism with several audacious twists. (Roger’s snarling, driverless Jaguar is a personal favorite.) The smartest thing that I think Curtis pulled off was to return to the familiar turn of time travel, but with a twist he’d never done, and with a strange moral inversion that caused bad behavior for years to come in junior highs across America.

Yes, hauntings and deaths and an old portrait. Got it. There were girls dropping like flies at the school and the word “poltergeist” was invoked in cinema for the first time to my knowledge without bothering to google it. It’s clear early on that Joanna Hoffman and Isiah Trask are in cahoots in their bizarre scheme to begin the End Times. This was a dash of Hal Lindsey that needed a send-up, and by having Grayson Hall and Lacy pair up over ceremonies based on the forbidden “Third Testament,” we not only get great storytelling/satire, but we also get to see what Spielberg totally ripped off for the climax of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK.

Front and back cover art for Robert Cobert's soundtrack.

Smarter still was the idea that, if DARK SHADOWS were to continue as a franchise, it would need a new, continuing central character. Enter Christopher Pennock, as the Avanti-driving, kickass, good-guy Satanist (!), “Anton Castille,” cousin to the late Tracy Collins (Kate Jackson), there to investigate her death. Thanks to his own set of I Ching wands (and a helpful trance or two), we learn that the Victoria from the painting found in the Old House is not an ancestor ...  it really is Victoria. The footage of her trip back to 1738 is still missing, but the film cuts around it nicely. I would have enjoyed seeing her go back to that era to burn the Third Testament when it’s fresh off the boat, but the way they handled it was just as clever. The seance and the monologue that Isles delivers in it finally justifies the faith I had that she really could understand things. That she would (so the stunning monologue tells us) go back to 1738, die at the hands of Bishop Trask, only to come back and haunt Collinwood to stop his descendant was maybe the only ghost gag that Hall and Curtis had not tried. When the sniveling Trask begs Castille to perform the exorcism and he refuses, knowing that the Right Reverend is the ultimate target of the spectral attacks? That gave me no end of ammo in religious debates with my mother for years to come.

Italian one-sheet poster for CHILD OF DARK SHADOWS, 1974.

Is it a mess of a movie? Yeah, but it’s never dull, and you can’t say that for NIGHT. It was banned in Little Rock, and you have to love that. Of course, MGM shit its pants at the idea of a continuing series of DARK SHADOWS films with Pennock as Castille, battling black magic with even blacker magic, so CHILD truly was the end of that phase of DARK SHADOWS. A shame, because Pennock shows genuine star power in the part, finally taking on the mantle of male lead with Barnabas and Quentin written out. Would audiences have supported the film more had the advertising made Dan Curtis’ new direction more evident? Of course. (I’m not so sure about DARK SHADOWS fans getting behind someone not a Collins… yet.) Thankfully, MGM had no real power over the novelization and the four successful print sequels, all of which focused on Castille, a man we eventually learn is, of course, a Collins.

Of course, he’s a Collins. It took three books to get there, but come on. This really is DARK SHADOWS.

Melissa Snyder's 2012 DVD review of CHILD OF DARK SHADOWS, from Monster-a-Go-Go Magazine.

Monster Serial: Night of Dark Shadows, 1971

By WALLACE McBRIDE

As a cultural phenomenon, DARK SHADOWS ended not with a bang, but a whimper. Four months after the show’s 1,225th (and final) episode, MGM released the second feature film based upon the ABC-TV daytime drama. Directed by series creator Dan Curtis, NIGHT OF DARK SHADOWS reportedly fared well financially, but proved to be a baffling denouement for fans.

Thanks to bizarre creative decisions on both sides of the camera, the movie was just as confusing to new audiences, though. NIGHT OF DARK SHADOWS wasn’t edited as much as it was eviscerated, with an estimated 40 minutes hastily cut from its 129-minute running time thanks to a last-minute studio mandate. The movie that eventually screened to paying audiences was a frustrating compromise that satisfied hardly anyone.

David Selby and Kate Jackson play a young married couple who move into a mansion they’ve recently inherited. Before long, Selby begins to have violent changes in his personality as spirits begin fighting for possession of his soul. This isn’t GHOSTBUSTERS, though. There are few special effects in the film, and the ghosts make most of their on-screen appearances via flashback. Save for a few action scenes, the conflict in NIGHT OF DARK SHADOWS is mostly internal as Selby’s character struggles with nasty impulses he can’t understand.

While not the most sophisticated story ever put to film, NIGHT OF DARK SHADOWS certainly deals with mature concepts that were probably lost on the younger audiences that so loved the daytime series. Selby and Jackson’s marriage slowly unravels throughout the course of the story as director  Curtis and screenwriter Sam Hall narratively argue against the adage “Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.” There’s a greater danger in this film from people who are unwilling to let go of the past, which was always a favorite theme of DARK SHADOWS.

From a creative standpoint, NIGHT OF DARK SHADOWS is “Dark Shadows In Name Only.” Curtis made the bewildering decision to have members of the television cast reprise their roles for the movie, and then change those characters so completely that they were unrecognizable to longtime fans. Lara Parker, the actress who played the obsessed witch Angelique on the TV series, plays another witch entirely in NIGHT OF DARK SHADOWS … a witch also named Angelique. It’s no surprise that the MGM/US marketing department famously screwed up the story summary on the original VHS release of the film, mistakenly referring to the villain as “Lara Parker.” The movie's name-game was enough to confuse anybody.

The half-hearted similarities suggest Curtis had grown tired of Collinwood but couldn’t figure out how to leave, a problem shared by many of the characters in this movie. Still, there are a lot of solid ideas on display in NIGHT OF DARK SHADOWS and I can’t fault it for ditching the blood and guts of its predecessor in favor of a more psychological approach. At its heart, NIGHT OF DARK SHADOWS is about an artist chasing his own self destruction. Throw in a haunted house, not-quite-forgotten murders and the occasional ghost, and you have a story that plays like a rough draft of Stephen King’s “The Shining.” King was a fan of DARK SHADOWS and wrote a bit about the series in his horror memoir “Danse Macabre,” and I have to wonder if this movie played a nascent role in the development of “The Shining.” I’m not suggesting King stole any ideas from NIGHT OF DARK SHADOWS, but it’s hard not to imagine King, sitting in some Maine theater in 1971, ticking off the various problems with the film while letting his imagination seek out solutions.

The biggest problems with the film — pacing, editing, confusing story elements, etc. — were clearly exaggerated by the whirlwind editing session that left approximately 1/3 of the final film on the cutting room floor. I’ve seen the movie a handful of times over the years, but I don’t feel like I’ve ever really seen it. The main story doesn’t end as much as it just stops, with a typically ‘70s nihilistic epilogue tacked onto the end.

While Selby and Jackson aren’t given much to work with from the script (on paper, their characters aren’t any more dynamic than Brad and Janet in THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW) it doesn’t stop them from turning in solid performances. There’s a certain give-and-take between the actors, and it’s easy to overlook Jackson’s role in the film. If you don’t buy her fear, you won’t buy Selby’s growing menace. The reverse is also true, and their chemistry becomes increasingly important as the story unfolds. NIGHT OF DARK SHADOWS could easily be turned into a stage play, leaving every scene in the movie to be driven by the actors.

And then there’s my favorite performance in the entire film: Grayson Hall. Playing an even darker version of REBECCA's Mrs. Danvers, Hall is actually kind of sexy in the film. And, like Collinwood itself, she’s comfortably haunted and totally at ease with her situation. As the house’s favorite agent, she’s left to seduce Selby’s character, which she does with a quiet voice and slinky body language.

Unlike other older films that were extensively abridged before hitting theaters, the excised footage of NIGHT OF DARK SHADOWS still exists, and surviving cast members have re-recorded dialogue tracks in hopes of preparing a restored edition for a future home video release. I don’t know if the lost  footage will have a transformative effect on the overall film, but at least it would give us a chance to evaluate a version of the movie that doesn’t play like a glorified highlight reel.

Perhaps someday we’ll have the opportunity to travel back to 1971 and solve the final mystery of Collinwood once and for all.

This column is among those featured in "Bride of Monster Serial," a collection of horror essays written by contributors to The Collinsport Historical Society. Buy it today on Amazon!

Monster Serial: THE BLACK CAT (1934)

By PATRICK McCRAY

Feast your eyes on the Art Deco inferno of Weimar angst and fury!  The scars of the Great War will never heal!  Satanism runs amok, with potential necrophilia skipping not far behind!  Look there, on the screen; it’s THE BLACK CAT!  Boris and Bela at last match wits and share the screen for the first time!

It can reduce/elevate any horror fan to express the passion of a Sam Kinison.

Plot is not the essential element to THE BLACK CAT, but so what?  There’s no plot to a piece of music by J.S. Bach, but that doesn’t stop it from being a compelling and hypnotic narrative journey. So, it’s much the same for Edgar G. Ulmer’s classic, black and white tone poem, THE BLACK CAT. This is a 66 minute feast of strange and wondrous details from a world of secrets too dark for us to completely know.

At least, that’s what it feels like.

Let me get some things out of the way right now, before the Mikes and Joels of the world make hay. (I feel the need to do this since I once had to halt a screening for a group of MST3K-trained adults who thought they were cleverer than the movie. Spoiler Alert: they were not.)

Okay, so here’s the disclaimer.  As horror movies go, it is neither traditionally scary nor impishly charming, although there are bickering police officials who get solid laughs while debating about tourism.  And, come to think of it, David Manners and Julie Bishop seem to have a lot of fun as the American couple who find themselves in the midst of the war on morals and memory that exists between the protagonists.  The writing is sometimes stiff.  Although only sixty-six minutes, there are moments when it drags. (Perhaps because of the reported interference by Universal.)  But none of those things are the point.

The film still remains one of the most compulsively watchable symphonies of amazing details in all of cinema.  It does what movies are supposed to do; it shows you things you never imagined or possible, with people you never dreamed could have existed, in conflicts beyond the reckoning of anything average or mundane.  Although I would not call it “scary,” it is seeped in dread and mystery and sadness and repressed rage.  That’s a trade I’ll take.

The plot concerns Bela Lugosi as Vitus Werdegast, a brilliant psychiatrist and survivor of a POW camp where he encountered his greatest nemesis, Hjalmar Poelzig, played by Boris Karloff. Poelzig is a visionary architect and Satanic leader, somewhere between Gropius and Crowley. He had stolen Vitus’ wife and child, and then married the latter as the former seems to be held in suspended animation.  Yes, in a 1934 movie.  Vitus has “accidentally” arrived at Poelzig’s home with two American tourists in tow, and the film becomes a sometimes quiet, sometimes furious, always intense test of wills between Vitus and Hjalmar, often with human lives at stake.

By the end, a Satanic ceremony has broken out (with worshippers wearing tuxes and gowns beneath the robes in a touch of class that would have made Dok LaVey proud.)  Guns are brandished.  Bela skins Boris alive.  Manners and Adams escape.  And, in a motif that would be echoed in BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, Vitus concludes that they belong dead, too.  The house is demolished in an explosion he detonates, taking the prison camp upon which it was built, with it.

It’s a grim movie, so what makes it work?

I remember when I first saw it on the late movie when I was thirteen (a good year for me to see old films.)  There were Boris and Bela, dressed to the nines and showing class, panache, and restraint as they went about their war of wits.  (And let this be another nail in the coffin of the argument that Lugosi was incapable of subtlety.  Both he and Karloff show a kind of quietly meditative intensity worthy of a Pinter play.)  The set, though, seemed to be from the future.  I asked my all-knowing mother about this, and she explained that it was Art Deco.  I had seen the style before, but usually in recreations or as small, architectural elements.

I had never witnessed an entire world sliced by its severity.  While it should have been a clean, calming, fear-free setting, Ulmer presents it as a Kryptonian Hell.  It is as icily merciless and nakedly decadent as Poelzig, whose makeup and hair seem equally angular and severe.  The architecture is the story.  It is the mechanized and perfected new world, mercilessly ready to highlight>copy>replace the pomp, ceremony, and style of Vitus’ old world charm. You know, basically the Borg Cometh.  The angst of a Europe desolated by one war and then rebuilt for another is made excruciatingly clear… and nauseatingly seductive at the same time.  What a duality with which Germany was faced. Seductive, simple solutions for living, indeed.

It all seems so clear after World War II. What’s amazing is that the film was sending such a resonant warning and, perhaps, plea for action prior to the war. Of course, Hollywood inherited so many refugees from Germany that it’s also not surprising.

Ironic.  The horror genre is so often marginalized, and yet, had it not been a horror film, would we be looking at it, today?

And was I the one talking about the film being more style than substance?

I take it back.

---

Patrick McCray is a comic book author residing in Knoxville, Tenn., where he's been a drama coach and general nuisance since 1997. He has a MFA in Directing and worked at Revolutionary Comics and on the early days of BABYLON 5, and is a frequent contributor to The Collinsport Historical Society. You can find him at The Collins Foundation.

Monster Serial: SUNDOWN: THE VAMPIRE IN RETREAT

By JESSICA DWYER

When you think of westerns you don’t typically think about vampires. First of allm the western is synonymous with desert landscapes under brightly lit skies. Showdowns at noon with big expansive landscapes with sun drenched mountains. But the vampire western isn’t as farfetched as you’d think, and in fact it has happened more times than you know.

This subgenre is peppered with films that actually fit into it quite well. NEAR DARK is probably one of the most well-known of these movies. Then there’s BILLY THE KID VS DRACULA. Another is the lost classic CURSE OF THE UNDEAD. But another film that seems to slip under people’s radar is the Anthony Hickox directed SUNDOWN: THE VAMPIRE IN RETREAT.

SUNDOWN is a hybrid on many fronts. It’s a vampire horror film, it’s a western, and it’s an unapologetic comedy who revels in its absurd plot. But it’s also an homage to the classic vampire and the western films that inspired it. So even though SUNDOWN laughs at itself, it also salutes the genres it is borrowing from.

SUNDOWN was released on VHS in 1991, sadly not getting a theatrical release (which is a shame because the movie is very pretty.) Hickox gathers together some great actors whose roots are firmly entrenched in the genres he’s referencing. David Carradine, whose father played Dracula in classic universal films as well as the aforementioned BILLY THE KID VS DRACULA, is cast here as the mysterious Jozek Mardulak. John Ireland, who was in numerous westerns from the mid-40s on, is the blood thirsty Quaker Ethan Jefferson. Bruce Campbell, the patron saint of horror comedy, is Robert Van Helsing, a descendant of the famous vampire killer.

The film focuses on the Harrison family who are going to the desert town of Purgatory. David Harrison (Jim Metzler), his beautiful wife Sarah (Morgan Brittany) and their two precocious daughters Juliet and Gwendolyn are visiting Purgatory to inspect a synthetic blood factory that has begun to malfunction.

Hoping the trip will be a vacation and easy fix, they head off, unaware that the town is populated by vampires hoping the blood substitute will allow them to life without relying on violence. Funnily enough, Juliet has a love for vampire toys which seem to be all she wants her mom to buy her.

Before they arrive we see some of the townsfolk cross paths with a group of young campers who witness their friend get his head knocked off by Mort (the great M. Emmet Walsh). He and his brothers live and work at the only gas station in town. Mort is taken into custody by the local sheriff (also a vampire) because of his crime. The witnesses are also taken in because the vampires can’t have them babbling the truth.

With the arrival of the Harrisons we are introduced to more of the strange townsfolk who are comprised of all walks of life and nationalities. We’re also introduced to Shane (Maxwell Caulfield) who knew David and Sarah before he was turned into a vampire, and was the one who came up with the idea of having him come and fix the plant. Shane’s reasons for this are personal ... he wants Sarah back and wants to make David pay for taking her away from him. Shane has joined forces with Ethan, who thinks Mardulak’s plans are a bad idea: Vampires shouldn’t try to live with humans, they should feed on them. Strong ideas from a Quaker.

As the story progresses Robert Van Helsing arrives. He’s a bumbling vampire hunter, but still a Van Helsing. He meets Mardulak’s protégé, Sandy (the lovely Deborah Foreman), who takes him on a tour and falls in love with him in the process. A vampire in love with a human — a Van Helsing of all things — is unheard of. Eventually tensions boil over and the vampires pick sides, those who want to learn to live at peace with humanity and those on the side of Ethan and Shane who want to devour it.

The Harrisons find help in the form of Mardulak and the good vampires, and we see Van Helsing turned by Sandy (in a hilarious scene) who he stands by during the battle. We discover (as does Ethan, much to his dismay) that Mardulak is actually Count Dracula, who has tired of the bloody old ways. The good vampires triumph with the help of the Harrison family.

This essay is one of dozens featured in our new
book, "Taste the Blood of Monster Serial."

SUNDOWN was a great little flick that deserved far more than it got upon release. The film pre-dated the “TrueBlood”/Sookie Stackhouse books and the idea of a blood substitute by more ten years. It also had some neat ideas in regards to portraying vampires. The fact that the townsfolk were from various countries and kept the appearances of the times and places they were from is a nice touch. And anyone who has tried knows mixing comedy and horror isn’t the easiest, but Hickox and co-writer John Burgess pull it off with panache. While there is camp a plenty, it’s meant to be there and it’s fun to watch.

There’s also the interesting subplot of Shane and Sarah and the fact that Juliet is most likely his child from an affair. There’s a scene where Shane shows up to basically rape Sarah, and the little girls barge in on the attack. Where everyone would be seeing a giant bat, Juliet sees Shane himself. That’s an interesting take on the mythos that’s lost sometimes in viewing.

While there is a lot of camp, comedy, and crazy in SUNDOWN, there is also a beautiful point that is made at the end. The Harrison’s raise a large wooden cross which wards off and stops the evil vampires, but at first it also harms the good ones. Then suddenly, the pain ends. Mardulak/Dracula turns with tears in his eyes and states “We have been forgiven.” It’s a beautiful scene and shows that SUNDOWN has a lot more going on than you think at first blush.

---

JESSICA DWYER is the host of Fangirl Radio and editor/writer of the website Fangirl Magazine.  She has written for various sites over the years and is a staff writer for HorrorHound Magazine for which her work has been nominated for the Rondo Hatton Awards.  Her short fiction has been published by Post Mortem Press.  She is currently working on producing and writing various projects for film and television as well as an upcoming book.

Monster Serial hits DragonCon, HorrorHound Weekend

Two MONSTER SERIAL writers have managed to temporarily escape the secret lair of The Collinsport Historical Society. Lucky for me, though, they've shared their destinations on Facebook.

Jonathan Chaffin (who has not only written for long-standing feature, but provided the cover art for the first bound volume) is attending DragonCon in Atlanta, Georgia, from Sept. 4-7. He's also the proprietor of the successful HORROR IN CLAY, which will have a booth is at the Comics & Pop Art show at the Hyatt ... more specifically at the exhibit level in Grand Hall East.

Writer Jessica Dwyer will be at HorrorHound Weekend in Indianapolis, Indiana, from Sept. 11-13. Jessica is the creator and editor of the Fangirl Magazine and will be roving the halls of Indianapolis Marriott East that weekend, almost certainly in the company of Robert Englund. (No, really.)

Both will have copies of MONSTER SERIAL books for sale. If you see them around, let them know I'm looking for them ... 

Monster Serial: DAN CURTIS' DRACULA

By PATRICK McCRAY

"You know what keeps me coming back?  The air.  Smell that?  Just like lemons.  This is real air.  Nature’s air.”  

Those were not the words I was expecting to hear from the Creature from the Black Lagoon, the misunderstood title character from Jack Arnold’s smear campaign.  I resisted mentioning fish out of water. He was bitter about the film at one time.  But now...?

That smile of his says everything. It’s a real smile. Nature’s smile.

“Come in. Patrick, right?  Can I get you some tea?”

Herb Gillman, during his Hollywood years.

Herb Gillman, DDS (retired), extends a webbed hand and welcomes me to Tao House, Eugene O’Neill’s home in Danville, California, which he’s recently restored with the help of Roger Davis.

“I’ll open it back up to the public in a bit.  But for now?  It’s my little slice of Zen.”

The green tea is hot.  I know I’ll have to enjoy it while the air is still chill, before the California sun begins to slow roast all of us.  I’m intrigued by Herb’s remark about Zen.  Not exactly Tao.

“Zen, Tao, Scientology.  It’s all connected and connections.  But I don’t know from religions, kid.  I’m just a cranky old dentist who made it big.  I’d trade it all for beautiful sunset and a beautiful woman who flossed.”

“So, you’re not dating now?”

“Oh, I’m never not dating.  But a man reaches a certain age, and his priorities change.  It’s not like it was.  But it never was like it was.”

He hisses wistfully and glances at a painting of a beguiling woman with decadent, bee-stung lips and endless eyes.  He looks down at his cup.

“Pretty,” I remark.

“One of mine.”

“The model or the art?”

“Yes to both and no to both.”

A cat rubs its nose against the trousers of Herb’s white, linen suit.  He smiles.  I know that I can push the issue.

“Seriously, who was she?”

“Fiona Lewis.”

“Oh, the actress!  She’s great. I loved her in THE FURY and LISTZOMANIA and INNERSPACE.  She’s like Diana Rigg with fizz.”

“Fizz,” Herb chuckles. “I like that that.  I’ll tell her you said that.  Fiona, not Diana.”

Fizz!

“She’s English. Just friends?”

“Very much. There was a time when it was more and there was a time when it was a lot, lot less.”
“How’d you meet?”

“Golfing buddy of mine was shooting a movie of the week of DRACULA.  He asked me to come along as ‘technical advisor.’ That’s code for ‘Jack Palance’s dialect coach.’”

“This was the Dan Curtis version... 1974?”

“Well, it was supposed to be ‘73, but Nixon preempted the whole thing for Angew’s resignation. You know, if you rearrange the letters in Spiro Agnew’s name, you get ‘grow a penis’?  Emmis. Where was I?”

“I have no idea.”

Jack Palance as Dracula.

“DRACULA for Dan Curtis. Yeah, you know, Dracula was always the best out of all of us at Universal.”

“Really?”

“Look at the competition. I don’t even count.  This Creature is a victim of circumstance.”

He’d slipped into a dead on impression of Curley Howard for the last part.

“That was good.  Okay, the rest of your Universal rat pack?”

Herb counts off on his claws.

“What’s the Mummy’s story again? Who cares?  It’s basically Dracula’s. Frankenstein’s Monster is the Red Skelton of the lot ... a sad clown trawling for sympathy. I can do that myself.  And the Wolfman? Oatmeal north of the eyebrows. He’s just a weird animal or something.  When he’s a man, he just talks about wanting to be dead.  What kind of character is that?”

“Point taken,” I say.  Herb’s on a roll.

“So, that leaves Dracula.  He can think.  He can plan.  He knows what he’s doing.  Best character, and they have yet to give him a really good movie.”

“Those are bold words.”

“Yeah, well, I’m too old for anything else.  See, the book’s the problem.  All of these letters and things.  And Vlad’s totally unmotivated to move to Carfax Abbey.  The best stuff is in the beginning.  I could go on, but Vlad gets the shaft.  Dick Matheson did the best he could, adapting it for Dan Curtis.”

“So, how did it break down?”

“Well, you got Jack Palance as Dracula.  Inspired casting.  And they almost never let him talk after the first reel.  When he has a conversation with Nigel Davenport’s Van Helsing, it makes you realize what a sister act we all missed out on with those two.  Palance went Method.  Savage, feral performance.  He went there.  I mean, he wasn’t sleeping in a coffin, but he got into the part.  Very intense.  And if there was one guy who didn’t need to get more intense off-camera, it was Palance. That explains the walking.”

“The what?”  Herb’s got me.

“Walking.  Dracula’s always walking in the picture.  It’s like he spends half the movie walking.  I would have liked some more action, but it calmed Palance down. Between us, I think Dan was just filming it on a golf course. And then he did some day-for-night to disguise it all. But what do I know?”

“Does it follow the book?  Maybe Dracula walks a lot in the book....”

“What is he?  Dr. Detroit?  No, he walks in this version more than he does anything else.  Or he uses dogs.  Lotta dogs in the movie.  Scary as hell.  I hate dogs.  Dan?  Loved ‘em.  He’d yell, ‘It’s not spooky enough!  I want more dogs, goddammit!’ And he got them.

Jonathan Frid in HOUSE OF DARK SHADOWS, 1970.

“As for the rest of the book, again, what’s to follow?  There’s no there, there.  So, Dan did what he does best: adapt! This time, from himself.  It’s just HOUSE OF DARK SHADOWS all over again.  Babe — this time, Fiona Lewis instead of Nancy Barrett —in the catacombs.  Same camera angles for staking.  A music box.  And the whole maghilla with the vampire being motivated by a reincarnation of a lost love.”

“That was Dan Curtis?”

“Well, it sure as hell wasn’t Stoker.  Nah, Dan invented that with Barnabas Collins.  And every vampire story after it just ripped it off.  With his version of DRACULA, at least he’s refining his own source material.”

“So, it has highlights?”

“Tons.  The sets were all very modern.  You know, Dracula’s a regular guy.  Why would he be wandering around in a dump like we see him in every other movie when he could be in a palace.  And that’s what we found.  Great art design because it really was authentic, 1897 decadence.  And such great acting.  Simon Ward.  I thought he was great as Buckingham in Dick Lester’s MUSKETEERS movies....”

“Not to mention, Supergirl’s dad,” I say, jumping in.

“You beat me to the punch.  He’s great in SUPERGIRL.  Most authentic Kryptonian dialect ever. Better than Sarah Douglas’ accent, and she’s also in the movie as one of Dracula’s brides. Sheesh. Don’t leave home without her.  But back to Simon. In DRACULA, he nails it as Arthur Holmwood, who’s just a bunch of those suitors from the book rolled into one guy.

Sarah Douglas, kicking Superman's ass in 1980.

“And I gotta be fair, kid.  It’s as good as an adaptation of that book can get.  The source material is the classic glass ceiling, keeping the bat on the ground.  Dan’s work on DARK SHADOWS was the biggest favor that Dracula ever got.  He kinda went full circle with the whole vampire mythos jazz.  You know?”

I smile.  What else could you say?

“Paddy, me lad, I have no idea what we were supposed to talk about.  But,” he checks his watch and stands, “I am about to be late for rehearsal.”

“You’re back in the game?”

“Never left it. LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT. James Tyrone, at last!  God bless the Pasadena Playhouse for letting this cranky old fish stick on the boards.  We open in three weeks.  How do they expect me to remember all of those lines in that time?  Crazy.”

“It’s a crazy business.”

He laughs.

“Ain’t it, though?  But I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

We part as warm friends.

It was only later that I remember.  LONG DAY’S JOURNEY was written by Eugene O’Neill.  In whose home we’d spent the morning.

“It’s all connected and connections,” Herb had said.

Emmis.

Patrick McCray is a comic book author residing in Knoxville, Tenn., where he's been a drama coach and general nuisance since 1997. He has a MFA in Directing and worked at Revolutionary Comics and on the early days of BABYLON 5, and is a frequent contributor to The Collinsport Historical Society. You can find him at The Collins Foundation.

Monster Serial: DRACULA vs FRANKENSTEIN

By HERB GILLMAN

DRACULA vs FRANKENSTEIN.

Words to thrill the inner five year-old in all of us.  And for the five year-old, I think it delivers.
Do the two giants meet?  Yes.  Do they fight?  Yes.  Extended grappling.  Decapitation of Frankenstein, as I seem to recall.

And here is a fine point of order.

With the intense emotional regression living in director Al Adamson’s vision, he is not “the creature,” or “the monster,” or “Frankenstein’s monster.”

This film is made by and for all those who simply call the creature, Frankenstein, and they know a Frankenstein when they see one, goddammit, so don’t tell me it’s “Frankenstein’s Monster!” It’s Frankenstein.

If you approach the film from that perspective, you’ll be fine.

Dr. (okay, now we’re getting correct) Frankenstein’s descendent, Dr. Duryea, labors in a lab under a Venice Beach spook show.  He’s brought back the Creature.  He’s making deals with Dracula to do science stuff while a comet passes over.  He’s using injections to turn a non-speaking Lon Chaney, Jr. into a murdering mutant, killin’ gals under the boardwalk. I’ve seen it several times and the details of it go in one eye and out the other.

A showgirl goes in search of her missing sister (a victim of Duryea’s), only to find companionship in adventure and social release with a middle-aged, bead-wearing “observer,” who oversees a commune of white, suburban, immaculately bathed hippies.  He’s great ... like Ron Burgundy’s uncle.  He can talk about his feelings, make a woman feel whole, but still has a mellow sense of authority that rolls off him like the scent of bourbon Borkum Riff over a Moscow Mule.  When he needs to Help Investigate, Mike Howard is on the scene, yinging and yanging his way through the shit, man. Through the shit.

And arguably, there is a lot of it here.

The two of them are the foci for occasional revisitation for the film as it comes up with stuff to happen between when it starts and when it ends.

That’s pretty much what it feels like.

By all fair measure, it is a Bad Movie.  On a Ron and June Ormond level.  It doesn’t have the blood and bosoms of an HG Lewis movie nor the ascetic indulgence of an Ed Wood opus, but it still works.  Yes, bad movies can work, and it’s actually making me uncomfortable to use the phrase “bad movie.”

Because I don’t believe in the “good” bad movie.

It’s either bad because it doesn’t entertain me, or it’s good because it does.
 
Look at the films of Ed Wood. They are tight, bizarre tales of strange urgency and poetic fervor. They almost feel like Medieval morality plays with strange masques and choruses pronouncing odd cant and shamanic portents.

No, I’m not kidding.

Cinema, prior to video games, was our newest art form and a medium younger than many of the artists still exploring it.  Certain (not all) movies don’t conform to the rules and conventions we’ve agreed upon as acceptable filmmaking.  That doesn’t make them bad.

Bad means, well, bad.  You wanna talk “bad”?  Let’s talk UNDERWORLD or CHARLIE’S ANGELS: FULL THROTTLE or BALLS OF FURY.  These are films that made me angry over the time I’d wasted on them.  They are “bad” as in, “I would never watch them again.”

I’d originally begun this review as a comedy review for Herb (the Creature from the Black Lagoon) Gillman to review in first-person.  I couldn’t get it off the ground, although for fun, I include the beginning below ...

As I told my patient, Steve Sondheim over something we drank out of a skull at Trader Vic’s, in a quote he downright pilfered from me, “Art isn’t easy.”

Truer words, my friend.  Truer words.

Hello, my name is Dr. Herb Gillman.  Most people around Cocoa Beach know me as the “so gentle it’s mental” dentist, but a few peer a little deeper, and still recognize me as the eponymous “Creature” of Universal’s notorious mockumentaries.  Guilty as charged… but only of being one of the last of my kind.  That’s it.  I had been goaded into appearing in three “Creature from the Black Lagoon” documentaries before catching wise to Universal’s exploitation of me.

Universal liked to obscure the truth.  Why?  I don’t know.  Director Al Adamson and I were both well into our cups at the Riverside premier of SATAN’S SADISTS a year earlier.  The subject came up.  We agreed to change things for the better.

Sometimes a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it.

Sometimes it falls and it sounds like a majestic tree-thing that has fallen in a tragic, arboreal manner.
Sometimes it sounds like the mighty oak is hitting my sister, Carol Channing.

All are good, noble sounds.

We made none of them.

Instead, we made DRACULA VERSUS FRANKENSTEIN.

I liked that beginning a lot.  I think it was going to be an attempt at an exposé gone horribly awry.  Maybe Herb was going to be the choreographer of the deliciously wretched, Vegastastic, Ann-Margaret-by-way-of-Big-Lots opening musical number, performed (not sure about sung) by Regina Carroll, the director’s wife.

But, dammit.  I enjoyed watching the strange, haphazard, wooden movie.  It’s just thrilled with the illusion of its absent panache, and there is a perverse enthusiasm in that.  I remember the days when having a video camera (or a computer) was considered tantamount to having a platinum plated Trapper Keeper. (Or a Kenner Millennium Falcon in its first year of production.)  The idea of being able to make a movie at all was a fantasy as distant as a milkshake date with the indescribably sublime Lisa Welchel.  I can feel the giddiness that Al Adamson, roughhewn though he may be, was out to make a Monster Movie, by gum, and his friend Forrest J. Ackerman would be on hand as technical advisor to see that things went right.  The enthusiasm is palpable.

The ridiculousness of the film is piled higher than a sandwich from Canter’s.  You want a money-eating littler person, it’s there.  You want hilarious and nonsensical circular logic in the movie’s attempts at deep dialogue?  Say no more; they will.  Russ Tamblyn?  Yes. We have Tamblyn.  Lon Chaney never speaks, but cradles a puppy in a bizarre homage to OF MICE AND MEN.  (Yes, Chaney in that boozy state is sad, but he was still working and getting a check.  There are worse fates for an actor.  And he looks far less miserable than I know he was during his Mummy stint.)  Heck, we even see the actual electric props from FRANKENSTEIN and a zillion other Universal classics… in full color and going strong!

This essay is one of dozens featured in our new
book, "Taste the Blood of Monster Serial."

I watched the film for a second time with a friend, and we found it imminently quotable and enjoyable.  In all of this, I am not saying to throw critical standards out the window.  Nor am I saying that we merely take ghoulish delight in bad films the way that some treat three-car pileups.  No.  I’m just suggesting that the phrase “so bad it’s good” go the way of “some of my best friends are…” in the lexicon.  It’s an interesting mental exercise.  Take the phrase out, but defend a movie you used to just slather with that bit of rhetoric.  I think you’ll find very quickly why you actually like it.  And it’s not just because it’s “bad.”  Maybe it’s shamelessly overwrought.  Maybe it’s drunk on its own theatricality… which is better than having no theatricality at all.  Or maybe it’s just fun.  Fun is not anathema in cinema.  Even serious films have a jolt of it.  Imagine saying that a film was “so joyless that it was fun”?  Hard to pull off.  Possible, Henry Jaglom, but rare.

Let’s hear it for Al Adamson and fun.

Compare that to the sinking feeling you probably get today as one lugubrious trailer unspools after another at your multiplex.  Zach Snyder could use a little Al Adamson.  Or maybe more than a little.

---

HERB GILLMAN is the alter-ego of Patrick McCray, a comic book author residing in Knoxville, Tenn., where he's been a drama coach and general nuisance since 1997. He has a MFA in Directing and worked at Revolutionary Comics and on the early days of BABYLON 5, and is a frequent contributor to The Collinsport Historical Society. You can find him at The Collins Foundation.

Monster Serial: THE LAST MAN ON EARTH (1964)

By Patrick McCray

If the last man alive... a man who battles zombie vampires by night and faces the existential dread of staking and burning bodies by day ... can be embodied by that rugged and manly survivalist, Vincent Price, then maybe humanity does have a future.

If the above scenario (sans the elegant raconteur and bon vivant, Mr. Price) sounds familiar, it’s because I just described the premise of Richard Matheson’s groundbreaking novelette, I AM LEGEND.  Robert Neville survived the pandemic that either killed the rest of the population or turned them into vampiric mutants.

By day, he works diligently to secure his home and supplies.  By night, he simply holes up in his fortified, suburban one-level and ignores the attempts of the vampires — led by the Oliver Hardy-like Ben Cortman — to lure him out and join them for dinner, wink-wink.

So, in this film version, why is Neville called “Morgan,” while evil neighbor, Ben Cortman, gets to stay Ben Cortman ... and looks like Tab Hunter?

That was the first question on my mind as a teenager when I watched Vincent Price in and as THE LAST MAN ON EARTH… clearly, a film version of Richard Matheson’s I AM LEGEND?  Not only a film version, but the most faithful adaptation of the three.  The others are Boris Sagal’s dizzying, comic bookish THE OMEGA MAN with Charlton Heston and the 2007 version with Will Smith, written by the man being held on charges for writing BATMAN AND ROBIN and the 1998 LOST IN SPACE.

My relationship with THE OMEGA MAN — one of my favorite movies — has been the subject of a prior rhapsody.  Rhapsody Part Two involved finding the book.  Even with Louisville’s 1980’s plethora of used book stores, that was a task as impossible as finding the supposedly ubiquitous Marilyn Ross DARK SHADOWS novels.  At the time — around 1984 — my father had a lot of business dealings on the west coast.  I still beam with pride at the in-the-name-of-geekdom abuse of power he exercised when he dispatched various assistants and interns to search around San Diego to dig up a copy of I AM LEGEND.  Believe it or not, it wasn’t easy.

I always take this as a good sign.  It means that people like a book too much to trade it out for fifty cents and shelf space.  In the world of the bibliophile, where shelf space is gold, that’s saying something.  

The book was the tie-in copy for THE OMEGA MAN, and so it had a great painting of Heston at his surliest and most jogging suitiest on the cover.  Must be more of the same, right?  I fondly recalled the depth and nuance that Vonda McIntyre gave to the scientists on Space Station Regula One in her novelization of THE WRATH OF KHAN.  Surely, a master such as Matheson must have done the same, right?  I locked myself away to cherish every word, certain that it would add even more detail to the adventure of alienated, middle-aged squaredom that I loved so dearly.

Um, no.

No.  This has nothing to do with THE OMEGA MAN.

Zip.  Nada.

It was better.

In fact, it might have been the most adult book I had read up to that point.  I don’t mean adult in a stolen-copy-of-Erica-Jong sense.  I mean actually, emotionally mature.  What a spare and sad study in the slow torture of solitude.  A book like that might have really helped the kid in LET THE RIGHT ONE IN.  For an only child in a neighborhood populated only by the elderly, living with a single parent who was rarely home, that story made life seem much, much less lonesome.  It felt that way because Richard Matheson understood.  And because he understood, that meant that someone knew what it was like.  And if someone knew what it was like, then I wasn’t really alone.
That was my logic, anyway.

So, that made me Neville.  Who were the vampires?  I dunno.  I never really thought about it.  Somewhere in the back of my mind, I think I knew that I didn’t have to be alone all the time.  I could be playing sports, going to summer camps, or engaged in similarly homoerotic activities, but these held little interest for me. Maybe there were no vampires, but I sure knew what Robert Neville felt like.  If he’d had a life totally unlike the one in the book.  But it doesn’t matter.  You get the idea.
When I taped THE LAST MAN ON EARTH off of cable, it was both delightful and wildly confusing.  It was very much the book.  Only set in Italy.  With changes.

The film was originally supposed to be a more prestigious production (with Fritz Lang in talks to direct it at one point — the imagination boileth over), but Matheson was so unhappy with the direction that things took that he eventually removed his name from the project.  If he’d known what was coming with THE OMEGA MAN and The Fresh Prince of the Apocalypse, he might have counted his blessings.

For all of the areas of similarity, there are just as many differences.  Wisely, to keep it from having that MARK TWAIN TONIGHT vibe, the film spends a lot of time in flashbacks.  The effect of watching Neville’s daughter and wife waste away from the pandemic in both body and spirit is the most horrifying part of the film.  The vampires don’t really form a society so much as they stratify into “vampires” who are almost  cured and ones who are not.  The Almosts are pissed at Neville — um, I mean “Morgan” (Vincent Price) — for doing his Last Man on Earthly duties of staking them during their sunlight slumbers, but how was he to know?  They seem organized.  Why not just leave him a note?  “Hey, Morgan.  We’re going to put on red pajamas when we sleep.  If you see us in red pajamas, leave us alone.  We are not evil.  Oh, and Tuesday is trivia night if you want to come.  Signed, Epstein’s Mother.”



Something like that.  But if they had, we’d have no movie.  Nor would we have the heavy-handed and honestly chilling post-WW2 Italian Guilt portrayed via the Almost Cured’s black-clad police force chasing Neville — hell, I mean Morgan — into a church (one carefully depicted as having no crucifix). The black suited Almost Cured (or Almost Vampiric, if you’re a pessimist) take exception to Morgan denouncing them as “freaks,” claiming that he’s actually the last (real) man alive.  They spear him in the chest and… scene.

Okay, so it’s an ending that falls apart.  It doesn’t have the Christ analogy of OMEGA MAN, nor does it 100 percent fulfill the irony of the novel, in which Morgan — damn, I mean Neville — finds that he’s their boogeyman.  But this is never going to be a story that ends happily.  The journey is the point, and what matters in a journey like this is its passenger.  Again, Vincent Price defies expectations and presents the most credible “last man” imaginable.  Why?  Because he has no real training for this, but he’s pulling it off anyway.  He can’t make fortresses and elaborate traps.

This essay is one of dozens featured in our new
book, "Taste the Blood of Monster Serial."

Morgan — there, I got it — is just a guy.  His home is just secure enough to allow him to survive.  We completely understand the madness he battles. As I have found again and again, Price excels at defying expectations and delivering emotional truth. Be wary of those too eager to cry “Ham!” at classical actors.  Those are the actors who truly play the middle notes on the emotional keyboard so well.  Why?  Because they understand the power of the extremes, and can justify them rather than simply ape them.

Price had several one-man shows in his time, including DIVERSIONS AND DELIGHTS, a stage play in which he played Oscar Wilde.  What perfect typecasting!  It’s to Price’s tribute that his other, great (almost) one-man-show should be the diametrical opposite in character, language, and tone.  Combined with Matheson’s story and (some of his) language, we have a film that is bleak, but never depressing.

Does it beat the idea of Price in Heston’s OMEGA MAN jumpsuit, machine gunning mutants and macking on Rosalind Cash?  I’ll leave the answer to you. For me, the matter is clear.

PATRICK McCRAY is a comic book author who resides in Knoxville, Tenn., where he's been a drama coach and general nuisance since 1997. He has a MFA in Directing and worked at Revolutionary Comics and on the early days of BABYLON 5, and is a frequent contributor to The Collinsport Historical Society. You can find him at The Collins Foundation.

Monster Serial: FROM DUSK TILL DAWN

(Editor's Note: Patrick McCray has written the lion's share of these Monster Serial pieces and was getting a little ... bored? Delirious? Insane? Whatever the reason, he decided to wander off the reservation for his piece on Robert Rodriguez's FROM DUSK TIL DAWN, keeping furious/random notes on a viewing experience. You can find the results of his mad science experiment below.)

By Patrick McCray

In 1996, Quentin Tarantino was as popular as the Charleston is today.  Directing movies. Redistributing movies.  And, in FROM DUSK TILL DAWN, he took to both writing and starring in them.  At the time, his specialty seemed to be humanizing inhumanly cruel criminals, pitting them in situations of intense vulnerability.  In FROM DUSK TILL DAWN, he follows that model with a diabolically funny twist, making — essentially — two movies.

The thieving, murdering, and well-dressed Gecko Brothers (George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino) hold a vacationing preacher and widower (Harvey Keitel) hostage.  The plan?  Hide in Keitel’s RV to slip into Mexico, evading US law enforcement and (they hope) meeting up with his Latino compatriots.  Clooney’s anti-hero isn’t just dueling with the law and Keitel’s iron resolve. There are the latter’s two kids (Juliette Lewis and Ernest Liu) to keep an eye on, as well as the delusional impulsivity of his priapic and bruxing brother.

Successfully arriving at the Mexican safe haven and rendezvous point of the Titty Twister  strip club, the warped family unit waits it out, meeting a gun-penis-toting (you just have to see it) biker named Sex Machine (Tom Savini) and Fred Williamson as a battle-hardened Vietnam vet with Serious Issues.  When the movie completely  changes into a vampire film, as the employees of the club reveal themselves to be vicious bloodsuckers, all of the aforementioned team up to survive through plain, old ass kicking.

It had been nearly twenty years since I’d seen this movie.  I was so delighted with what I found in the first five minutes that I decided to restart it and keep a running log of my thoughts on the more astounding moments.

6:35 p.m. We start

6:35 p.m.  Yeah, Miramax.  I remember them.  Do they still count?

6:37 p.m.  Redneck, liquor store clerk is reading a bridal magazine.

6:38 p.m.  I’m not sure if I’m supposed to laugh about a mongoloid child giving food poisoning to a cop. But I am.

6:40pm  George Clooney doesn’t age.  Quentin is quirky.  Better actor than I remembered. WILD BUNCH reference.  Good.

6:42 p.m. Is that an Amber Lynn video tape in the background?

6:43 p.m. They shoot sideways.  Is this where that started?  I hear it’s the wrong way to shoot.

6:43 p.m. Clooney improvises amazing explosive.

6:44 p.m. Man on fire shooting gun!!!

6:45 p.m. The irony is hamfisted, but damn you, you have style.

6:45 p.m. I forgot about Harvey Keitel in this.  Juliette Lewis, too.  Too bad she’s a Scientologist.

6:47 p.m. Story by Bob Kurtzman.  Who wrote Star Trek 09 and created JACK OF ALL TRADES?

6:47 p.m.  No, it’s a different Bob Kurtzman.

6:48 p.m. This is like Rob Zombie via suburbs. That’s okay.

6:49 p.m. Maybe it’s FACTS OF LIFE, but Clooney will always be a hero. And my favorite Batman. Yeah, I said it.

6:51 p.m. I hope Clooney is playing the same character he plays in Gravity. Maybe this is a prequel.

6:52 p.m. I think Quentin’s going to do something bad to the hostage woman. But I hope he doesn’t.

6:53 p.m. Keitel and Lewis!  Wholesome as father and daughter!  Love seeing an opposite played. Lewis always sounds kinda... you know... slow. What was her appeal?  The 90’s, folks.

6:55 p.m. A pastor whose faith is gone. I wonder if it’s coming back?

6:56 p.m. Is there an app that could have made this thought-logging easier?

6:56 p.m. Talk, talk, talk.  I want a beer or to play Second Life. I know it’ll pick up. Quentin just lets them get talky too often. My nightmare is him collaborating with Kevin Smith.

6:57 p.m. News photo of the liquor store clerk with big fish. Hey, it’s John Saxon!!!!!!!!

6:58 p.m. Kahuna burger in-joke. Okay.

6:59 p.m. Why does Clooney stay with Quentin, when he does such horrible things like raping hostages?  Someone will atone.

7:04 p.m. Juliette in bikini alert!!!

7:04 p.m. Hilarious cunnilingus-oriented inner monologue for Quentin. Art imitating life?

7:05 p.m. The 90’s. Kevin Smith. What happened to you?

7:06 p.m. Even as a preacher, Keitel is a BAMF.

7:08 p.m. Keitel gives monologue about his dead wife.  I miss my mom.  Wonder if she’d be proud of me?  I think she’d have to try.

7:10 p.m. Lots of mini-frames within shots. Windows. Doorways. Is this to give a comic book-like effect?

7:11 p.m. Quentin, what is it with the foot fetish?

7:12 p.m. Oh, the cunnilingus inner-monologue isn’t a delusion.  He believes it. I remember this got a laugh. After he confronts a befuddled Juliette Lewis about what he thought was a proposition, his brother chastises him.  He mouths, ”Talk later.”  That’s the button on the gag.

7:14 p.m. Cheech Marin as a border cop!  This is the remake-Kolchak I always imagined. Yeah, Cheech.  He’d be a great Kolchak.

7:17 p.m. They’re in Mexico.  They seem like a team, now. Good thing Clooney is so charming. He gets away with being a lethal and lovable criminal.

7:20 p.m. Titty Twister sighting!  Cheech gives his infamous vagina list monologue. I saw a guy in grad school do this. I wonder how Stephen Fry would deliver it?

7:21 p.m. I’m getting a crush on Juliette. Drop the Dianetics!!!

7:22 p.m. What would jezebel.com say of the other vagina monologue? Probably proclaim it sex positive. Why?  Tarantino’s name is on it. Cool trumps PC every time.

7:23 p.m. Knowing the punchline, the Aztec architecture makes total sense in the bar.  I love consistency.

7:24 p.m. Danny Trejo. That is all.

7:25 p.m. Bare breasts. Rare. They’d all have bikinis on now.

7:26 p.m. My friend says that a stripper looks a ... Hey, it’s Tom Savini!

7:27 p.m. Savini penis gun.

7:29 p.m. Fred Williamson. All is right with the world.

7:30 p.m. Salma Hayek. I like her in this more than FRIDA.  But it’s the kind of main act in a movie strip club that you know, sadly, will never end in nudity. And a part of me dies.

7:31 p.m. I think that’s a Kahl Albino Boa she has on. Sweet snakes.  Really nice. I miss Babydoll, my boa.

7:33 p.m. Positive ethno-non-centrism.  Latinas are just prettier to me.  Scientific fact.  Sorry.

7:34 p.m. Not enough Latinas in East Tennessee.

7:37 p.m. Okay, it’s a vampire movie. Salma looks like G’kar when she transforms.

7:38 p.m. Vamp-pandemonium.

7:38 p.m. Cheech is a Klingon vampire.

7:39 p.m. Vampire explosion at sight of the cross. This movie is officially Very Catholic.

7:40 p.m. I’d read an Adventures of Tom Savini comic.

7:42 p.m. Fred Williamson just ripped a vampire’s heart out.  Just like in real life.

7:43 p.m. Clooney and company square off against female zombies. Issues with women?  Resolved.

7:45 p.m. Evil Tarantino Vampire!

7:46 p.m. Touching moment all around after Clooney kills Tarantino.

7:47 p.m. Dinner.  My food is here.  Excuse me while I eat.  Also, Keitel remains stalwart voice of reason.

7:48 p.m. Bat attack!!!!!!!!

7:49 p.m. Eating tacos.  What a mess.

7:53 p.m. Clooney inquires if anyone has read a real book on vampires. Savini asks, “Like a Time-Life book?”

7:54 p.m. Back to dinner.

7:56 p.m. Williamson has Nam flashback!

7:57 p.m. Savini vampire transformation shtick.

7:58 p.m. Savini bites Williamson and Keitel!

7:59 p.m. Bats get in.

8:00 p.m. Keitel improvises shotgun cross against bat horde.

8:02 p.m. Weapon making montage!!!!

8:05 p.m. My friend insinuates something about the Whedon having come up with yet another something else first. Just when I’m having a good time.

8:08 p.m. Another vampire killing montage. This one with Jerry Goldsmith omen-type music.

8:08 p.m. Savini decapitated with a whip.

8:08 p.m. Rat Zombie Vampire!

8:09 p.m. Keitel shoots vampires through an impaled Williamson.

8:10 p.m. Keitel vampire. My worst nightmare?

8:11 p.m. Juliette has very powerful, um, bullets.

8:12 p.m. The sun!  Shoot for the holes!  Just like Peter Cushing!!!  Bats = destroyed.

8:13 p.m. Cheech shoots in doors in third role. His third role in the movie.  He is the Peter Sellers of this film.

8:15 p.m. Juliette and Clooney have that weary hero-survivor vibe.

8:16 p.m. Juliette’s going with him. Ah, Clooney won’t let her. Thanks. On behalf of nice guys, I appreciate that.

8:17 p.m. It was the top of an Aztec temple matte painting all along.

8:18 p.m. Elvis has left the building.

Believe it or not, that was without spoilers.  I teach cinema studies, and am amazed at how younger viewers find the movies of “my generation” to be dull.  With this one, I think they’d be surprised.

After two decades, I was, too.

---

PATRICK McCRAY is a well known comic book author who resides in Knoxville, Tenn., where he's been a drama coach and general nuisance since 1997. He has a MFA in Directing and worked at Revolutionary Comics and on the early days of BABYLON 5, and is a frequent contributor to The Collinsport Historical Society. You can find him at The Collins Foundation.