Dragonslayer!

This artwork by the late Jeffery Jones is a pretty sweet image for a pretty sweet little 1981 movie.  Dragonslayer was a neat little micro-epic with outstanding special effects, even by today's standards, and an above average story of an apprentice dragonslayer having to fend off not only the monster but an entire village to boot. The movie loses its way a bit in the wildly spectacular ending which while visually compelling is at odds a bit in tone to the rest of the movie. But overall an outstanding effort. 

Here's a sketch Jones made as he constructed the poster.

 

And here is the final product, one of the more alluring posters from an era when posters were really nifty by and large. 

   

"Vermithrax Pejorative", the dragon remains the best evocation of a dragon on the screen that I've ever seen, and that's saying something given the advances in special effects since that time forty years ago now. Since then of course there have been a host of dragons done with computer graphics and some are quite excellent such as those in Reign of Fire and of course Smaug for The Hobbit trilogy, but somehow with the myriad physical effects and some dandy stop motion, this little movie gave us a dragon that was indeed scary and without uttering a word was vile as well. 

 

Marvel adapted this movie with art by Marie Severin, and the cover above by Earl Norem is effective if not especially opulent.

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Popeye - The 1940's Collections!

Recently added the 1940's Popeye cartoons to my collection and enjoyed them thoroughly. These are some of the cartoons starring the Sailor Man which are most impressed in my memory from childhood and many many hours catching the cartoons in the afternoons. These are all in color and in these cleaned up versions are brilliant to behold -- they've never looked this good in my experience. Whether the method was Technicolor or the cheaper Polacolor, all the cartoons are handsome. 

That said, these are not as strong as the earliest Popeye cartoons from the Fleisher studios. Too many of the cartoons have mechanical plots which are just gimmicks to get Bluto and Popeye fighting over Olive. The settings change but the characters are the same all the time. The wonderful gruffness of Popeye's vintage muttering is diminished a great deal and so he's somewhat simplified as a hero, and even at times appears to be a dupe. Bluto changes, sometimes beyond immediate recognition but his role as antagonist is fulfilled by him or some dope very similar.

A few here and there break from the pattern and they are refreshing to see. These are shining vintage cartoons, but be warned that all signs of political correctness have been removed for the sake of authenticity. There's racism and sexism galore in many of these cartoons, but any adult should be able to encounter them without getting triggered. Seek to be insulted and you shall find. 

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Into The Enchanted Forest !

Last week while I was plumbing the depths of a quintet of Harvey Comics collections I was also spending some time watching some vintage Casper the Friendly Ghost cartoons. I picked this collection up earlier this year and it contains a wealth of Casper stuff. There are all 55 Casper cartoons made for theater release from 1945 to 1959 by Famous Studios (the former Fleisher Brothers operation) for Paramount Pictures. Also included are 26 new cartoons made in 1963 when the Casper TV show hit the air. It's a remarkable collection to watch as the series switches from full animation to a stylized versions similar to what UPI was doing to the limited animation which came to dominate and make possible television animation. There is even one of them which was designed for 3-D though this collection only has the very handsome 2-D version. 

Now I've always been a little off put by Casper's treacly personality in the past and at times it grates here still, but I found more of a classic cartoon subversive quality to many of these cartoons. I especially grew to look forward to the nigh inevitable reactions from adult humans and animals to the presence of a ghost with the classic "It's a G-g-g-Ghost!" stammer and a creative exit. My personal favorite is a cartoon where a scientist working a time machine is explaining his device, sees Casper and then erupts with fear transforming into a rocket and heading into the stratosphere. The the Popeye transformations when Spinach got onto the scene and into his system, these fearful changes were something to energize the cartoons. 

The cartoon series and the comic book were particularly interrelated with many of the cartoons adpated to comics later the reverse when Harvey took full control of the character and made the TV episodes. We get lots more Spooky and Wendy, both who had shown on the big screen and we get Nightmare's debut. These cartoons from the Shout Factory were quite entertaining at times, more than I expected. I got them because of the high quality of Shout Factory products and my general interest in the Fleisher Studios and Famous Studios cartoons. I liked them for their own merits quite a bit. 

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Dojo Classics - The Scream Queen Trilogy!

I can be something of a dunce from time to time. Despite collecting and viewing with great relish the three flicks Doctor X, Mystery in the Wax Museum, and The Vampire Bat it never once occurred to me that all three feature the same leading duo of the original "Scream Queen" Fay Wray and one of my favorite Golden Age actors Lionel Atwill. I knew they were in these movies, but I'd never once considered (or at best had all but forgotten) that these three flicks are connected productions.

Both Doctor X and Mystery in the Wax Museum are two-strip color productions from Warner Brothers, both wonderfully lurid horror flicks directed with luster by Michael Curtiz, which are so raw that they are unpredictable. The conventions of horror are present, but they are not locked in to the point of destroying a sense of surprise. These movies have definite twists.


Doctor X tells the story of the "Moon Killer" a deranged cannibal who lurks in the night and kills all manner of folks and seems to be connected to Doctor Xavier's surgical research center. Atwill plays Doctor X and a ravishing Fay Wray plays Xavier's daughter with a loopy reporter-type in the male lead, such as it is. Xavier gets permission from the police to conduct some wacky investigation involving an outlandish lie detector he's concocted and it goes horribly awry. There's some outstanding action in this one and some truly strange images when the Moon Killer is revealed.


Mystery in the Wax Museum is the most famous of this trilogy and was the follow up to the reasonably successful Doctor X. It's a story most know of a sculptor played by Atwill who is disfigured and seeks revenge and a means to recreate his art in perhaps the most insane way possible. House of Wax starring Vincent Price is the more famous remake, but in my estimation I find the original infinitely more watchable. That's in no small part to the lovely Wray who is the chief victim in this one, if not the chief female character.The reporter role here goes to the wonderfully funny Glenda Farrell. The sets if anything are more bizarre than in Doctor X, and those were strange for sure.


Now apparently while the post-production of Mystery in the Wax Museum was underway, an independent company called Majestic hired Atwill and Wray and used the publicity of their familiar teaming to make The Vampire Bat. This is a movie that makes use of old Universal sets and adds Dwight Frye to the cast making it as near a Universal monster movie as it's possible to make without actually doing it. It features Atwill as the suspicious doctor in a typical vague European town plagued by a seeming vampire. Melvin Douglas is on board as the resident skeptic and inspector. This movie turns out to be a wonderful blend of Dracula by way of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Frankenstein.

This last movie was a quickie and all of these flicks were made and in the theatre before Fay Wray appeared in her defining role in King Kong. Her chemistry with Atwill is tremendous in these movies and even in the one where he plays her father there's no small amount of sexual tension, as unsettling as that seems. Atwill shows up in all three films with an urbane smoothness that can be quite creepy. Kong might've been her biggest co-star for sure, but Atwill was certainly a worthy contender.

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Dojo Classics - Doctor Cyclops!

I'm spending my month consuming some of the most entertaining sci-fi and monster flicks out there. A few years I picked up the two Universal Sci-Fi collections sold exclusively for a time at Best Buy and now available in one complete set on Amazon.

I'm starting with the real oddball in the mix, the 1940 Ernest B. Schoedsack production of Dr.Cyclops. This movie by one of King Kong's creators hits many of the same notes with an expedition finding danger on a grand scale in the remote jungle. This time though instead of a giant ape threatening wee humans, the humans get shrunk by the mad scientist Dr.Thorkel who then tries to murder them all before they can derail his crackpot schemes for world domination.

This is a movie that starts out excellently with some truly macabre scenes where Paul Fix plays the man who brought the eccentric Thorkel to the jungle and a radium deposit of magnicent proportions. The lighting is luried and shimmers as the madness of the tale reveals itself. Sadly the movie never achieves the wonderful power of the opening, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have virtues.


Thorkel calls in some respected scientists to check up on his work and then dismisses them summarily when they've done the meager work. Their pride will not allow them to leave and so they fall victim to Thorkel's power. He shrinks them and the myopic scientist becomes a "Cyclops" threatening the small group throughout the remainder of the movie.

It's right after they get shrunk that the tone of the movie undergoes a regrettable change and the well-developed tension is allowed to dwindle. We watch the shrunken humans (a blowhard elder scientist named Bullfinch, a beautiful assistant , a reluctant engineer, a itinerant fortune hunter, and Thorkel's own hispanic helper named Pedro) try to survive and the movie becomes more mild adventure rather than the great horror pic began as.

Albert Dekker as Dr.Cyclops is pretty good, though you do get weary of his mugging by the end of the flick. The greatest weakness I think is the odd shift in tone and the fact the romantic couple played by Thomas Coley and Janice Logan never seems credible to me. She's pretty spunky and he's a bit of a laconic lout.

The movie does look great from time to time, mostly when Cyclops is putting on his exotic headgear to watch radiation play across the bodies of his victims or when he's tweaking his machinery, which always seems to be doing. This is a pretty decent movie, but when you realize what it might have been given the wonderful opening it's a shame.

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Dojo Classics - Island Of Lost Souls!

Island of Lost Souls, a Paramount movie based on The Island of Dr.Moreau by H.G.Wells is one of those truly frightening movies from the earliest days of sound cinema. I've had a copy of the VHS version for years but despaired that I could not replace it on DVD along with most all of the other great horror cinema of that time, especially the stuff from Universal. But at long last it did arrive thanks to the folks at Criterion, who offer up quality packages but at somewhat steep prices. That price made me blink, but I was able to cough it up at last.


The Criterion package comes with several extras (though I'd have liked more, especially some more stuff on the Wells story itself). It offers up the movie with a really outstanding audio commentary by Gregory Mank, who does this the best of anyone I've ever encountered. He clearly does his research and carefully times his comments to key sequences in the movie. It's an enhanced viewing to listen to his commentaries. Richard Skal offers up a solid ten minutes of background and insight. There's also a conversation between John Landis, Rick Baker, and Bob Burns which sadly is ripe with personality, but low on actual information. An interview with the original director of the fiasco version of the story from 1996 is oddly done (with weird lighting) and offers up some meager insights into that failed project. A section on Devo, the band which drew some inspiration from the movie is pretty intriguing, but I'd have loved more here. All in all a pretty eclectic gathering but not really as developed as some packages I've come across.

Nonetheless, the main show is the movie and it's a grand mini-epic, a movie directed by Earle Kenton with precision and aplomb. Charles Laughton's Dr.Moreau is a hideous but fascinating creation, much more monsterous than anything he cobbled together on his vile operating table. Beautifully rendered by the great actor.


Bela Lugosi is famously in this one for a short time and offers up his typical over-the-top performance, but truth told it probably took something that large to overcome the wild make-up he has to wear. It's a testament to the strength of Bela's personality that he is instantly recognizable underneath all that fur.


A lot of the talk is centered on the Panther Woman, a part selected with a nationwide talent search which yielded the attractive Kathleen Burke. She's clearly a limited actress in this picture, and one who a lot is demanded of. There's a silent-screen quality to her acting which hurts the subtle aspects of the movie alas.


Leila Hyams (who turned down the role of Jane in the MGM Tarzan movies by the way) and Richard Arlen are very good in the heroic his and her roles necessary to keep this movie morally upright.


Visually the wrestler Max Steinke appearing as beast man Ouran steals a lot of the show. His lust for Lota (the Panther Girl) and later Leila Hyams is palpable and gives the movie a real sense of menace. His grin might the most horrific thing in the movie.

This movie is a spry and nimble story which doesn't waste a second of footage. That's what I love about these early flicks, the story is jammed in and each second is pregnant with meaning. Each scene tells us something, so staying focused on the screen is important. This movie is an excellent example of that kind of efficient and effective storytelling.

While the price tag is steep, the movie is of the highest quality. I recommend Island of Lost Souls for one and all (save the kiddies of course).

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Murders In The Zoo!

Just watched Lionel Atwill at his heinous height in Murders in the Zoo. This 1933 pre-code horror flick also stars Kathleen Burke, the woman most famous as the "Panther Woman" in Island of Lost Souls. Add in a bumbling Charlie Ruggles for humor and rather stiff Randolph Scott for classic heroics and you have a movie my friends. In fact the hero of the piece ends up being the girlfriend Gail Patrick who doesn't even rate a poster mention.

The word that came to mind after I finished it was "ghastly". We see Atwill dispatch some people with a cold-blooded effectiveness that leaves you breathless at times. The movie opens with him sewing the lips shut of a man who kissed his wife, and a who then is left to tied to survive in a savage jungle.  The metaphor of the zoo itself, a place where wild animals are barely restrained by the slimmest of civilized precautions is evident as the sophisticated Atwill is as deadly as any snake, cat, or other critter aching to get loose.

The movie is lurid and creepy and I cannot recommend it highly enough. It's like there's danger everywhere, and man himself is not removed really from the savagery on every front. One harsh part of this flick is seeing the zoo conditions which were I assume standard at the time, and are pretty rugged and even cruel. So if you can get by man's true viciousness to his fellow creatures, then you might enjoy this drama about his cruelty to his own kind.  If you can get a copy or catch sometimes on the television, I say do so. It's worth the effort.

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