Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933)

God, I love wax museum stories.

This isn't quite the first horror movie about a wax museum, as that plum goes to the 1924 German film Waxworks (or, to use the much more evocative German title, Das Wachsfigurekabinet), but it's a pretty close follow-up. It was filmed in two-strip technicolor, which gives it very weird, vivid colors, especially lots of pastels for a very, well, peculiar look.

As a movie it's actually pretty good, though not as atmospheric as I could've liked (which makes sense, as it's less of a horror movie and more of a mystery, hence the title). The actors mostly do good work, especially Lionel Atwill, but the standout bit is Glenda Farrell's spunky girl reporter protagonist, who gets most of the best lines and delivers them all in an incredibly rapid patois that is almost impossible to understand at times.

Though the movie may not be as heavy on the atmosphere as, say, the Universal monster movies of the same era, it has the incredible set design that I've come to associate with older horror films. The London Wax Museum at the beginning is amazing, both outside and in, and the workroom set at the end of the movie is equal parts Dr. Frankenstein's lab and Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Beautiful.

Special mention should also go to the makeup design of the villain, which is remarkably iconic and deserves to rank alongside many of the Universal monsters as emblems of early horror cinema, at least if you want my take on it.

The Strange Worlds of Coffin Joe

Up until a few days ago, I'd never even heard of Coffin Joe, who is (or was?) apparently something of a weird horror-host-esque superstar in Mexico. Basically, he's a character, seemingly indivisible from the actor/director who created and plays him, at the center of a series of weird transgressive cult horror films starting way back in 1964 and with a new installment supposedly coming out this year (after a nearly twenty-year gap). The overarching plot, as I understand it, is that our buddy Coffin Joe is out to find the perfect woman who can bear him a perfect child. Which he seemingly pursues through all manner of torture, weirdness, psychadelia, and other exploitation/cult film standbys.

But none of that is relevant to what I'm here to talk about. I've not seen the movies, and they'd probably be a little too transgressive for my tastes if I did, though some of the stills I've seen have been pretty iconic looking. No, I'm here to talk about something else entirely: titles. The Coffin Joe movies have the best collection of titles (as culled from the wikipedia entry linked above) that I have ever seen.

Hold your breath, because there's a lot of them:

• At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul


• This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse


• Strange World of Coffin Joe


• Awakening of the Beast


• The End of Man


• Sex and Blood in the Trail of the Treasure


• When the Gods Fall Asleep (my personal favorite)


• The Bloody Exorcism of Coffin Joe


• Women of the Violent Sex


• The Strange Hostel of Naked Pleasures


• Hellish Flesh


• The Woman Who Makes Doves Fly


• Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind


• Perversion


• The Secret of the Mummy


• Fifth Dimension of Sex


• Fatal Hours


• 48 Hours of Hallucinatory Sex


• The Embodiment of Evil

(Note that those titles actually constitute a partial filmography of actor/director Jose Mojica Marins, and he doesn't seem to play Coffin Joe in all of them. In fact, in one of them he seems to play the tituler End of Man. Nevertheless and all other things notwithstanding, that list of titles as presented is some of the best reading I've ever come across.)

If I Ran the Movies, Part I

Today, I’m going to talk about what I would do with the sequels to a couple of very different franchises: Final Destination and Gremlins. They go together because both of my suggestions deal with the set-ups of the movies, and both of them screw with audience expectations.

Final Destination 4
We all know the formula for a Final Destination movie by now, right? We’re introduced to a group of young people who are going to be our protagonists, and then we watch them all perish in some elaborate and deadly accident. Once the last of them dies, it is revealed that what we just watched was, in fact, a psychic vision of impending disaster, which is then prevented. The rest of the movie occupies itself with the abstract force of “death” picking off the kids one by one, etc.

My version differs from this framework only in one important way. For illustrating my example I’ll use a rollercoaster, since I was watching the third Final Destination movie when I came up with this idea. (I hear that in the actual fourth Final Destination they’re going to be at NASCAR.)

Anyway, in my version, we’re introduced to a group of young people, given just enough time to get to know each one a little bit, maybe a total of fifteen minutes or so for the entire introduction montage thing. Then we watch them all die horrible deaths. Here’s where the change comes, though. Rather than a fade out or jump cut that reveals that it was all just a premonition, the camera pans from the last death over to the other group of young people who are actually our protagonists and whose psychic vision already prompted them to get off the rollercoaster just before the spectacular crash that we just witnessed. From there, the movie spools out as usual.

Gremlins 3
This one came about after the advent of the recent Gremlins-themed TV commercial, when a friend and I were discussing how you could possibly make a third Gremlins movie.

The problem is that Gremlins 2 effectively destroyed the franchise. Not by being bad, but by being so ridiculously over the top that the top was no longer visible anymore. In modern Internet parlance, the movie would’ve probably been referred to as jumping the shark, only in this case it jumped so far that it actually wound up in another dimension. A more awesome dimension than the one it had just left.

So the trick with Gremlins 3 would be, how would you one-up that?

My version of Gremlins 3 would open with a small town, not unlike Kingston Falls. You would have your usual opening credits montage of the small town (possibly in autumn, when small towns are at their most picturesque), you’d meet a group of people who could very easily be the stars, music would play, and then somehow Gremlins would get involved. Maybe a kid brings home a bad mogwai and feeds it after midnight. Something like that. The specifics of the spark of the Gremlin infestation are moot. Anyway, in short order, the Gremlins are overrunning the town, people are dying, cars are on fire, that sort of thing. Nothing here that we didn’t get at the end of the first movie. The trick is, this is maybe the first twenty minutes.

Then, once the infestation is clearly established, a rainstorm comes up, and the Gremlins flood the streets and begin multiplying as they are wont to do. That’s when a government plane flies overhead and drops some sort of experimental sunlight-y bomb on the town, ostensibly wiping all the Gremlins out. The credits roll.

Here’s where the big trick comes in. When I say the credits roll, I mean all of them, clear up to the MPAA logo that’s at the end of every credit sequence. These literally are the movie’s closing credits, and they’re the only ones it’ll ever get.

Once the credits have rolled all the way through, cut to a shot of the rubble that’s left of the town. In a normal movie, this would be the after-credit Easter egg, a couple-minute shot setting up a potential sequel or a gag. In this case, it plays out just like one. The camera pans in on the rubble, and a Gremlin hand suddenly thrusts out of it!

The difference is, this Gremlin hand is enormous. It seems that some unknown quantity in the sunlight-y bomb made it not destroy the Gremlins, but fuse them all into one giant (and I’m talking kaiju-size here) Gremlin, who also happens to be immune to sunlight (hence why the bomb needs to be sunlight-y, to give a half-assed movie explanation for this plot device). The rest of the movie (which runs a full and normal length) deals with people fighting the giant Gremlin, who should also probably mutate (sprout lots of arms, maybe) or pop off smaller Gremlins to keep things interesting.

Return to the House of Mystery

Some days I feel like I'm almost too well-informed, like there are no pleasant suprises left for me. On those days the universe generally tends to show me my folly by springing something like this new House of Mystery series that I'd completely never heard of. Let's do a quick list of why this is the most exciting new comic I've heard about in a long time, without me having read a single issue:

• Relaunched House of Mystery. 'Nuff said (to quote the wrong company).
• A regular semi-anthology horror title with a cool central conceit.
• Bernie Wrightson (hisownself) is involved, albeit only tangentially.
• A great regular artist who looks to be perfect for the material and who I had, heretofore, never heard of.
• Bill Willingham, who is maybe my favorite writer working in comics right now.

Matango Picnic

I've talked about it before, and I probably will again, but Matango (aka Attack of the Mushroom People, aka Fungus of Terror) is a surprisingly effective adaptation of William Hope Hodgson's seminal fungus-person story "The Voice in the Night" by Toho (best known for being the company that made all those Godzilla movies). Like most of the Toho movies with which we're familiar, it involves rubber suit monsters, though in this case the monsters are a) mushroom people and b) only about the size of regular people. They're also wonderful, though I caution you that seeing pictures will never do them justice. You have to see them move, and hear the delightful noises they make.

Anyway, during the heyday of Toho, Matango had quite a lot of awesome marketing, including mushroom people riding tricycles and the wonderful diorama that I have dubbed the Matango picnic scene, images of which are produced below.

Very sadly, I don't own any of these great tie-ins, though hopefully I will someday. In the meantime, Matango is available in a very nice DVD edition and also (apparently) to download for free off the Internet. So check it out, and you won't be disappointed.

McFarlane Monsters [Repost]

[Originally posted here.]

My favorite toy line ever is the first series of "monster" toys ever produced by Todd McFarlane's then-burgeoning toy arm. They were 4-inch reimaginings of classic Universal monsters (reimagined, in no small part, because McFarlane didn't have the license to produce Universal monster toys and so had to change them enough to make them fall under the public domain). Released in 1997-98 there were two lines, each of which contained four sets. Each set was themed around one of the classic monsters and came with a monster figure, a victim or antagonist figure (generally), and an elaborate diorama base.

Naysayers of the line and Universal monster purists tend to decry the revisions as being typical of McFarlane's dark and sadistic design philosophy. I, clearly, disagree. If you want to see what would happen if McFarlane's typical design philosophy were applied to several of the same monsters, you need look no further than his dip back into the "monster" line, released in 2002, which is far too grotesque for my personal taste.

Which is not to say that the earlier lines weren't grotesque in their way. Certainly they were much "darker" than the traditional portrayals of their Universal counterparts, but they showed an influence more along the lines of the great Bernie Wrightson who, rumor has it, was working on a project for McFarlane Toys about this same time, though I've never seen substantiation that he had any hand in designing the figures. (They also, upon closer consideration, bear a more than passing resemblance to the designs from Monster Squad in several places.)

Regardless, I loved the figures precisely because of their design. That slightly more deformed style made them a little more monstrous than their (by now fairly familiar) Universal versions, while not delving into the off-putting depravity of McFarlane's later toy output. I also liked them because they were an appealing size (I seem to prefer 4-inch toys to the more usual 6-inch varieties) and because they were still at least making a token effort to be toys. While the figures themselves aren't particularly articulated, their fun diorama bases tended to have various odd action features, like a falling chandelier or a working catapult.

When I was younger and the toys were (relatively) new, I picked up the Dr. Frankenstein, Phantom of the Opera, and Sea Creature playsets, which are still my favorites, but I always wanted to get the rest. Now I'm a fair bit closer to that goal, since I just received the entire first line in the mail. I'm especially fond of the Frankenstein's Monster and Hunchback sets, but I like them all. Except for Dracula. He looks pretty terrible. About the only thing he has going for him is that he's got a hole in his chest where you can stick a wooden stake that comes with him. Also his diorama is pretty neat. The only one of all the monsters that I'm missing at this point is the Mummy. And he too will be mine one day. (One of the benefits of liking stuff that nobody else seems to care about is that after awhile if it doesn't disappear entirely it tends to become rather cheap.)

I'm just sad that the series couldn't have continued for just one more line so we could have gotten the Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (talk about perfect for a two-figure playset), Bride of Frankenstein, and... I dunno, Mole People. Or an ape one, like a King Kong knock-off, or maybe a Murders in the Rue Morgue playset.

[Phonograph of Souls] Nyarlathotep by Flint Glass

As the first in a series of music reviews for The Daily London Massacre, I thought that starting out with an album thematically centered around the Cthulhu mythos would be appropriate, or at least that I could do worse. Turns out I'm not so sure about that.

Nyarlathotep is the creation of a project (as they often call bands in the electronica genre) by the name of Flint Glass, and Wikipedia is going to tell me everything I will probably ever know about it.

Flint Glass is an experimental electronic project by French electronic musician Gwenn Trémorin. Flint Glass' debut album was released on Brume Records, which was co-founded by Trémorin and Boris Volant from the experimental collective Atelier112.

"Experimental electronic(a)" is usually a good byword for "What the hell did I just put in my ears?" Now, you could still say that with a smile on your face, having enjoyed the experience, but other times you may be angry and your ears might hurt, and sometimes (as in the case of Nyarlathotep) you will merely be bored and really, really tired of static effects.

The album looks promising to any fan of Lovecraft or the Cthulhu mythos in general. The track list is full of awesome sounding titles like "Shudde M'ell", "R'lyeh La Morte", "Brain Speaking Machine", "Yog-Sothot" and there are 15 of these (not counting four remixes), but half of them — literally every other track — are ~30 second interludes to the next piece.

Nyarlathotep seems like it's trying for an ambient feel: creepy and dark, with no particular compositional plot other than to push the shadowy, slithery feeling. It only half succeeds, because it also feels like it's trying to be an IDM album. All the full length titles have overly drawn out introductions which rattle into industrial drum and bass tracks that don't really go anywhere or do anything and then fade off into the next interlude. The end result is unfortunately generic, in spite of keeping a really good handle on the "gloomy and slimy" vibe. Perhaps my experiences in the ambient genre are limited, but I expected more variance. You could maybe put Nyarlathotep on in the background as a mood setter, but Flint Glass loves static bursts, distorted instruments and glitch, which makes the presentation too jarring for ambient, but still too meandering for IDM. Meanwhile, weren't we supposed to be thinking about awesome cosmic horror, not whether or not this song was going to do anything?

In spite of that, there are a couple of worthwhile pieces on the album. "Cthulhu Dawn" and "Silther Chaos" are both the longest tracks, but they are also the best. They both feature variety and a much better dynamic range that feels more like the conceptual ambient work it was intended to be. I get the impression that Flint Glass wanted to compose these pieces, and tacked in the rest as afterthoughts because hey! Cthulhu album!

Disappointing, but not a total loss, Nyarlathotep gets 2 out of 5 tentacles, mostly for having two good songs.

Review: Iron Man (Wolfgang's Take)

I have a hard on for Iron Man.

Now that that's out of the way, I need to preface this review with another statement: while Iron Man has always been one of my favorite concepts for a super hero, I have never read a single Iron Man comic. Everything I know about Iron Man comes second hand from friends that do read comic books, or through cartoons, video games and now this movie.

At this point, I could probably just point at Orrin's review and nod stoically as if to say, "He's damn right, you better believe." But, I'll enthusiastically echo the sentiments in my own voice. Iron Man was awesome; it was witty, sarcastic, smart and even managed to be thoughtful and relevant in spots without losing itself to its references. Robert Downey Jr. was amazing and his interactions with his silly robots and other people were the highlight of the whole thing for me — aside from the slick, absolutely sexy design of the computer interfaces he uses and the Iron Man suit itself.

I felt a tiny bit disappointed that the film's villain wasn't more super, and I cringed once or twice at some of the writing for Pepper Potts (though I think she has the best name ever), but in the next fifteen seconds I was enraptured by something else the movie gave me, so I can hardly complain. Additionally, after I left the movie theater, the first thing I wanted to do was to go find the Essential Iron Man trades and read then cover to cover, just to know more about Iron Man and his other adventures, and I don't even read comic books.

So, go see Iron Man, it is pure superhero entertainment that won't insult you by being stupid or watered down with anything else.

Review: Iron Man (Orrin's Take)

First Spiderwick and now Iron Man; if 2008’s movies are going to continue to be this fun we’re looking at a contender for Best Year Ever. (Although I think any year, no matter what its lineup, would be hard pressed to beat 2004’s Hellboy/Incredibles/Harry Potter 3 hat trick.)

This is probably going to be a pretty short review, because I find that I don't actually have a lot to say about Iron Man except "Go watch it!" Robert Downey Jr. was (predictably, and as everyone has been saying) the best part, and the movie wisely knew to keep him on screen most of the time, but everyone did great, including Gwyneth Paltrow, who doesn't normally do it for me. Terence Howard didn't have a lot to do this time out, but that's fine. Also be sure to watch (listen?) for Paul Bettany as the computer AI Jarvis (though you couldn't prove it by the IMDb).

There are lots of nods to comic stuff throughout the movie, but never overt ones that come across as annoying. It's also set up perfectly for a sequel (which had better involve Mandarin and Fin Fang Foom), and they even drop a setup for an Avengers movie that will probably never happen. (Be sure to stay 'til after the end credits.)

The pacing is fairly breakneck, but doesn't really feel like it, and most of the scenes are given room to breathe without ever wearing out their welcome. In a perfect world I could have asked for a better climactic fight scene (mostly just with the camera pulled back further so I could see more of the action), but as it is Iron Man was way too good for niggling complaints. As I already said up there: "Go watch it!"

The Shirleys?

As pretty much everyone in the horror(-type) writing community has already reported, the first annual Shirley Jackson Award finalists have been announced, and it’s a damned good list. More on that in a second, though. First, for those who don’t know, what the hell are the Shirley Jackson Awards? Well, they’ve got a manifesto on their website, but basically they’re the latest attempt by genre writers and editors to create an award that’s actually prestigious and based on quality, rather than the grim popularity contest that most of the other awards have (purportedly) become. I’ve not read everything on the finalist list, but based on what I have read they’re doin’ a good job so far.

Among the stories and books that I’ve read from the list, there’s only one that I didn’t like. I may never fully understand the critical love that Jeff VanderMeer’s “The Third Bear” has been getting, but it’s been getting it all over the place, so there must be something there that I’m just missing. I should probably read it again. The others, though, are all solid gold, even in my uneducated opinion.

Laird Barron got a whopping three nominations, each one of them richly deserved. His collection was solid, and the two stories that got nods are among his best. The only other story I’ve read in the novelette category is “The Janus Tree,” which was also excellent, but I will say that I’m glad to see William Browning Spencer make the list and I’m planning to read “The Tenth Muse” just as soon as I get a chance.

In the short story category I’ve only read the aforementioned “The Third Bear” and Nathan Ballingrud’s “Monsters of Heaven,” but I can say that the latter is the best work yet from a prodigious (and rising) talent, and it’s been getting a lot of much-deserved attention.

As much as I’m rooting for Laird in his earlier categories, and as great as The Imago Sequence was, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Sarah Monette’s The Bone Key walks away with the Shirley (or whatever they’re calling it) for collection. Not only did I love The Bone Key (which got even better on a second read), but it represents a step into the more old-fashioned sort of horror that is my true love. (You’ll be able to read more about this in probably the June issue of The Willows. I’ll keep you informed.)

I’m glad to see Ellen Datlow’s excellent Inferno getting a nomination for anthology (you can read my thoughts on that one here), and I am (of course) ecstatic to see Baltimore, by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden, on the finalist list for novel. (That’s also two delightfully old-school horror books represented here, which pleases me greatly.)

I’ve left out some major talents (like Joe Hill) who made the list, because I hadn’t yet read the stories in question. But if I were making a nomination list for a horror(-ish) award, I couldn’t do much better than this. Congratulations to all involved.

The Return of Robert E. Howard

I remember when Robert E. Howard wasn’t hip.

I remember when the only Conan most people knew was the movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger, and if they had, by some chance, read the books, it was the old Lancer/Ace paperbacks that were revised, rewritten, and otherwise altered or added to by Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp. And I can certainly remember when no one had heard of Solomon Kane or Bran Mak Morn.

Now, though, we seem to be in the midst of a Robert E. Howard renaissance. There’s a successful Conan comic from Dark Horse that’s on its sixth or seventh collection (not counting spin-offs and one-shots). There’s another Conan movie in the works, as well as a rumored film version of Bran Mak Morn. And later this year we’ll be getting a Solomon Kane movie and a new comic series (also from Dark Horse). There’s even a comic adaptation of Howard’s horror short story “Pigeons from Hell” coming out, written by Joe R. Lansdale (again, from Dark Horse). And that’s not even getting into the various role-playing game supplements, and an MMORPG.

Admittedly, this isn’t the first time Robert E. Howard’s work has seen an upsurge in popularity -- the last time probably culminated in the aforementioned Schwarzenegger flicks -- but this time people seem to be sticking truer to the source material and to Howard’s original visions. Gone are the altered texts, replaced with fully illustrated collectible editions of Howard’s own blazing, dynamic prose (from Del Rey). Even the adaptations seem to be sticking closely to Howard’s style, atmosphere, aesthetics, and themes, and jettisoning most of the traditional fantasy baggage that Conan and Howard’s other characters acquired through the 70s and 80s.

There’s some great talent associated with the various Howard projects, too. From Joe R. Lansdale mentioned above, to Kurt Busiek and Cary Nord on the Conan comic, to Scott Allie writing the forthcoming Solomon Kane series (and after his work on The Devil’s Footprints I couldn’t think of anyone better). I don’t really know the director of the Solomon Kane movie, but anyone with a weird war story in their filmography probably isn’t a bad choice, and James Purefoy is a perfect pick to play Solomon Kane. There’ve been a lot of directors mentioned in association with the new Conan movie (including names as exciting as Neil Marshall and as weird as Rob Zombie), but there’s been nothing that could actually qualify as news, and last I heard Peter Berg was still attached to direct the Bran Mak Morn movie, which could be interesting. (I hope, futilely, that it’s based on “Worms of the Earth.”)

Full disclosure: I myself didn’t become hip to Howard until this recent explosion in his popularity. I saw the old Conan movies, of course, and liked them because they were fantasy movies with monsters in them (and great music). Looking back I think the first one was probably okay, and the sequel probably garbage, but it’s been a long time. (I remember liking the monster at the end of Conan the Destroyer). My brother had all those old Lancer/Ace paperbacks, and I remember reading them when I was a kid. The famous Frank Frazetta covers stuck fast in my imagination, but the books themselves didn’t grab me much. It wasn’t until I was able to read Howard’s unexpurgated prose in the new Del Rey editions that I became a convert. I guess I had good timing.