Spotlight On Werewolf By Night!

I saved watching Marvel's Werewolf by Night until Halloween. It is a delightful entertainment with many a familiar touchstone for longtime fans. I'll admit that I have little understanding of the modern Marvel monster universe, so I cannot say how close or far this film lands, but I can say it's a far cry from the original. Aside from a sympathetic man named "Jack" who becomes a ferocious werewolf, there seemed little left of the original Gerry Conway and Mike Ploog horror yarn. But that doesn't mean it wasn't entertaining. 

But first some good old-fashioned SPOILERS. (Be warned!)

SPOILERS BEGINNETTH!

The little movie is mostly in black and white, and I love that. Black and white gets too little credit for the amazing effects it can have. That classic look hearkens back to the vintage Universal days of monster yore.  We meet Jack, one of several distinctive looking men who arrive at the estate of Ulysses Bloodstone to contest for possession of the "Bloodstone". They are joined by Elsa Bloodstone, the estranged daughter of Ulysses. A monster is unleashed into a maze and the hunters set about hunting it and each other. The winner will claim the Bloodstone and lead the society of monster hunters. But Jack has a secret, he's not monster hunter but of course a monster and he's there to save the object of the hunt which is the greatest treat for me of the entire show. Man-Thing is the creature in question and while not quite the Man-Thing I remember, he certainly looks fantastic. Eventually of course Jack is forced to revert to his savage bloodthirsty nature, but that's the rest of the story. 

SPOILERS ENDETH!

I cannot recommend this entertainment enough. It was not what I expected but nonetheless I found it gripping and involving right up to the colorful ending. 

Happy Halloween! 

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Decades 1970's - Monsters' Ball!

When the Comics Code was amended in the early 70's and the long-standing prohibitions against horror tropes was lifted, the emaciated Code was unable to stop the horde of monsters which shambled forth. Marvel led the way with Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, and even a Werewolf by Night. Also there was a revamped Ghost Rider and other variations on the classic themes such as Morbius and Man-Wolf. This tome doesn't capture all of the monsters who escaped to the newsstands but it does a worthy job of getting many of them. What Decades - Marvel In The '70s really becomes in many ways is a celebration of the lush artwork of Mike Ploog, a talent who drew comics in the style of Will Eisner. Ploog's distinctive oily lines gave Marvel's monsterverse a different vibe, a somber somewhat more realistic aspect. Gene Colan's Dracula struck a similar vein and that's what makes the Marvel monsters different than what had come before, a grounded sense of this could really be. The stories didn't happen in fantastic clashes atop the skyscrapers of NYC, but in the back alleys and in the shadows where people had to deal with real death, or at least as close as any comic book story can offer. Eventually the monster rally subsided but for a time in the early Bronze Age, the monsters were well and truly unleashed.

Here are the covers of the comics in this volume.

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