This trailer has been out for a while but when I saw it tonight before the Avengers, I realized that if there’s any movie that I’m truly looking forward to seeing later this year, it’s the latest offering from Pixar, Brave.
And no, it’s not just because this film is about one of my fellow flame-haired ones…
Well, maybe a little.
Last summer, I decided to watch and review all 50 of the films to be found in Mill Creek’s Chilling Classics box set. Mill Creek, of course, is a company that’s best known for releasing box sets that seem to primarily feature low-budget films that, for whatever reason, have now found themselves in the public domain. If you’re a fan of old school B-movies in general, then you probably know just how fun it can be to read the back of a Mill Creek boxset and discover what obscure films are waiting inside. The thing that I especially love about Mill Creek is the fact that — in the best grindhouse tradition — they describe every film that they distribute (whether it’s George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead or something like Las Vegas Bloodbath) as being a “classic.”
So, anyway, I started to watch and review the films in the Chilling Classics box set but, as 2011 drew to a close, things got rather hectic and busy here at the TSL Bunker. In between covering the Oscar season and keeping the world supplied with weekly trailer posts, I had to set aside my plans to review the entire boxset for another day.
Well, I’m happy to say that day is here! Last night, I dug out the old Chilling Classics box set and I watched a South African slasher film from 1981, The Demon.
The Demon actually tells two separate but connected stories. In the first story, a teenage girl is kidnapped from her bedroom by a masked killer. Her distraught family calls in a tormented psychic who quickly proves himself to so superfluous and useless that you’d forget all about him except he’s played by the late Cameron Mitchell.
If you’re a fan of old school grindhouse and exploitation films then you’ve undoubtedly seen a handful of films featuring Mr. Mitchell. A former “legitimate” actor who, early on in his career, appeared in things like Death of a Salesman, Mitchell eventually became better known for appearing in low-budget exploitation films. Mitchell could always be counted on to shamelessly overemote and, regardless of the film he was appearing in, he was always a lot of fun to watch. If nothing else, Mitchell always seemed to be rather amused by the films he found himself in. It’s a shame that Cameron Mitchell died before Quentin Tarantino could engineer a comeback for him.
In The Demon, Cameron Mitchell spends most of his limited screen time standing on a rocky cliff while staring down at the ocean below and having psychic visions that don’t really seem to have much to do with anything else happening in the film. Actually, visions is the wrong word. As Mitchell says, “Sometimes…I get these feelings. Vibes, as the kids would say.”
And the kids are in a lot of trouble because our nameless killer has moved on to the city where he spends his time hanging around outside of a place called Boobs Disco and stalking two teachers named Mary (Jennifer Holmes) and Jo (Zoli Markey). This is the film’s second storyline and it mostly consists of Mary spotting the killer out of the corner of her eye and Jo pursuing a relationship with the most boring man on the planet.
Like quite a few films that seem to pop up in various Mill Creek box sets, The Demon is technically a pretty bad film but, once you accept that fact, it’s also an occasionally entertaining mess that delivers a handful of effectively creepy moment.
The scenes featuring Cameron Mitchell are entertaining for exactly the reason that you think they are. These scenes are such obvious filler and were so obviously added as an excuse to get a “name” actor to join the cast that it’s impossible not to admire the nerve of the filmmakers. They weren’t going to let a silly thing like narrative cohesion get in the way of producing a 90 minute film. Playing the world’s worst psychic, Cameron Mitchell delivers his lines with such a truly unfocused intensity that I actually spent the first half of the movie convinced that he was the murderer. The final fate of Mitchell’s character is truly shocking (if just because it kind of comes out of nowhere) and Mitchell plays his final scene as if he’s starring in a dinner theater production of some lost Shakespearean play.
If the scenes featuring Mitchell are mostly entertaining for being so bad, the scenes in which the nameless killer stalks Mary and Jo are actually pretty well done and the final confrontation between the final girl and the killer is handled surprisingly well (though I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at the fact that the film contrives to have the final girl fight for her life while topless). The killer’s lack of personality makes him all the more intimidating and both Jennifer Holmes and Zoli Markey are likable and believable in the roles of Mary and Jo. If nothing else, The Demon proves that even a really poorly produced horror film can be partially redeemed (if not saved) by a likable cast of potential victims.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, The Demon — like many forgotten exploitation flicks — serves as a valuable time capsule of the society that produced it. To offer up just one example:
To say that Marvel Studios’ The Avengers has become a hit sensation since it’s release this weekend would be an understatement of cosmic proportions. I think almost everyone has seen it or, if that’s not the case, then there was a lot of people who saw it multiple times (guilty of seeing it twice over a 24-hour period). People were amazed by the action, spectacle, comedy and everything in-between. One thing that really stuck to me was the theme for the team itself. It’s that theme which I’ve chosen as the latest “Song of the Day”.
“The Avengers” theme was composed by noted and veteran film score composer Alan Silvestri (he was also instrumental in composing the very good film score for 2011’s Captain America). While I thought that Silvestri’s score for the whole film was quite good it was the theme for the group that stood out best. It had hints of the old-school heroic them from Captain America but within an overarching sound that didn’t denote a singular hero but a team coming together as a group of heroes.
One thing that rarely gets used in such heroic themes (at least haven’t been utilized of late) would be the French Horn section. In this theme they’re used to great effect and, to be honest, it’s the best use of French Horns in a film score since Basil Poledouris used it to great effect in his classic soundtrack to Conan the Barbarian. In fact, I’d say that this theme wad primarily all about the French Horns being backed up by the other sections of the orchestra. If one doesn’t know what a French Horn sounds like will hear it at it’s most epic around the 1:10 mark of the video. Now those are epic notes.
Now I go back to listening to this track while I continue to gather my thoughts for a review of this film.
Honestly, friends, sometimes a person just doesn’t even know where to begin. I suppose I could individually list the catalogue of atrocities that make up writer-director Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Tree, but frankly that would mean spending more time talking about this film than I really have the energy to, and besides, our nearest thing to a “star” critic here at Through The Shattered Lens, Lisa Marie Bowman, has already done a pretty damn fine job of performing a blow-by-blow dissection of this thing’s rotted corpse in her capacity as occasional scribe over at HorrorCritic.com, so there’s no real need to duplicate what’s been done before. Allow and/or indulge me, then, as I take a slightly different tack and document my personal journey of despair with Hardy’s exercise in highly confused pointlessness.
To begin with, I should point out that the original Wicker Man is quite likely one of my ten-or-so all-time favorite films. Critics who say it’s “not actually a horror movie” are quite right, of course — it’s a unique — hell, frankly singular — amalgamation of so many different styles that the end product is well and truly unclassifiable. Part horror flick, sure, but also part musical, part (very) black comedy, part clash-of-cultures melodrama, part satire on Christian piousness, and part period-piece-albeit-in-a-then-contemporary-setting, it stands on its own as the only thing quite like it ever made. Screenwriter Anthony Shaffer perhaps put it best when he stated that his main goal was to pen a meditation on the nature of sacrifice, and everything else just sort of took off from there.
Obviously, there are so many elements about the first film that the 2011 “thematic sequel” could never hope to duplicate — songwriter Paul Giovanni is no longer with us, so right off the bat we know the music’s not going to be nearly as good because, quite frankly, it can’t be. Anthony Shaffer has passed away and therefore whatever follow-up material comes about wouldn’t in any way be his vision for how the story could or should continue. Edward Woodward has likewise left behind this mortal coil, and his character died at the end anyway, so replicating his magnificently anally-retentive performance is probably going to prove to be out of the question, as well. Christopher Lee is, while still awesome as hell, also extremely frail and old at this point. And anyway — The Wicker Man still retains all its poignancy and power to this day and has only gained luster over the past 40 years. The abominable Nicolas Cage/Neil LaBute remake proved that revisiting the material was a lost cause, so why bother, five years on from that failed experiment, with any sort of a sequel, “thematic” or otherwise?
Unfortunately, Robin Hardy wrote a book some years back called Cowboys For Christ that updated some of the concepts from his earlier film and he got the notion that it would make a decent-enough little flick. He was able to scour up $7 million-plus worth of financing, and got the folks at Anchor Bay so interested they promised not only a widespread “home viewing platform” release (and I caught this on a free screener copy that was sent my way so therefore can’t fairly comment on any extras the DVD and Blu-Ray might contain), but a even a little theatrical run, as well. It never made it to my area, and disappeared after a week from the markets it did make it into, but still —the fact that they chose to give this thing some theatrical burn when it seemingly had DTV written all over it was enough for me to, foolishly, get my hopes up.
I guess we believe what we want to believe (which is rather one of the points of the first film, after all), and a steady stream of reviews for this one that placed it at the “embarrassingly bad” end of the spectrum at worst to “maybe not quite as horrible as I’d been fearing but still pretty goddamn awful” at best weren’t enough to dampen my enthusiasm at this point. I figured it just had to be better than most folks were giving it credit for, because there’s just no conceivable way it couldn’t retain, say, at least 1/100th of the darkly charismatic charm of the first film, even if entirely by accident, right? After all, the original director was on board, and Anchor Bay wasn’t so ashamed of his finished product that they tried to hide the thing away at the bottom of some film vault (although given that it’s shot on HD, perhaps a “film” vault wouldn’t be the right place to stick it in, anyway).
It’s certainly fair to say that I wasn’t expecting greatness, or even anything of the sort, but something that still somehow cleaved to even a miniscule fraction of the spirit of the original would have been good enough for me. Unfortunately, what I got was a story about two painfully stereotypical Jesus-lovin’ Texas yokels who have gone on a mission (more typical of Mormons than of born-againers, it must be said) to evangelize in some small Scottish town that apparently has never heard the “good news.” One of our less-than-convincingly-portrayed country bumpkins, Beth Boothby (Brittania Nicol), was apparently a famous country singer with something of a “reputation” before turning her life over to Christ, while the other, her fiancee Steve Thomson (Henry Garrett), is little more just a walking, talking cowboy hat. Once in the “heathen land” of Scotland, they enjoy the decidedly non-Southern hospitality of local nuke plant owner Sir Lachlan Morrison (Graham McTavish, in something more akin to a respectable performance than his colleagues seem capable of) and his OTT-in-the-deception-deaprtment wife, Delia (Jacqueline Leonard), but of course the dastardly couple, whose power plant has through some unexplained (and probably inexplicable, so it’s just as well Hardy doesn’t even try) means left the entire town sterile, have other plans for their simple-minded God-fearin’ visitors, plans that the Texas two-steppers are apparently too stupid to suss out even as they’re practically being openly prepared for the burning stake and, get this, the dinner table!
Yes, evidently the heathen folk of the United Kingdom’s northern reaches have taken to cannibalism in the four decades or so since our last visit, and while Hardy seems to think this somehow ups the “black comedy” factor of the proceedings, really it just serves as a cop-out by more clearly delineating who are the “good guys” here and who are the “bad guys,” a simple-minded, black-and-white approach that the first Wicker Man never resorted to even when Sgt. Howie was being burned alive (in, it must be said, one of the most visually dramatic sequences ever committed to celluloid).
And that’s a pretty much the problem at the crux of The Wicker Tree in a nutshell — sure, there are numerous and obvious others, ranging from wretched acting to dully-executed visuals to poor pacing to obvious run-time padding to inarticulate (at best) dialogue to recycled-into-a-less-involving-context story ideas to laughably one-dimensional caricatures standing in place of real, actual characters — but at the end of the day, it’s Hardy’s mistrust of his audience’s ability to make up our own collective mind, and the blatantly heavy-handed approach he takes in explaining everything for us that stems from that mistrust, that makes this such a condescending failure. I could live with the far-less-subtle approach to the “clash of cultures” theme that he takes here in comparison with the first film. I could live with the nowhere-near-as-compelling music. I could live with the rather — uhmmm — “broad strokes” with which he paints each and every character . I could live with the pointless and frankly even a bit insulting to the guy Christopher Lee cameo. Hell, I could even live with the Christian turning the tables on her pagan pursuers and winning in the end. But what I absolutely can’t abide is that Hardy thinks we’re all so unsophisticated and beneath the task of understanding his apparently-in-his-mind-quite-complex-and-challenging-themes that we need for him to hammer them home with a with a burning wicker stake through our heads. He’s had 40 years to think about how he wants to follow up a genuine, justly-lauded classic and this is what he comes up with? Set fire to me now, please, before the third installment, which he’s already working on, ever sees the light of day.
“Gods help you Theon Greyjoy. Now you’re truly lost.” — Ser Rodrik Cassel
Tonight we saw season 2 of HBO’s Game of Thrones series hit it’s second half running towards what could only be a climactic season ender of epic proportions. The show took a sort of misstep with an wheel’s turning previous episode that was mostly set-up. The show has been that way from the very start of the season, but last week’s entry was even moreso. Tonight’s sixth episode was titled “The Old Gods and the New” and it was a theme of faith that ran throughout the episode.
When I say faith I don’t mean of the religious kind but the faith one puts into the actions of others. Whether that faith is deserving or not is irrelevant. We see the youngest characters of the series with their faith tested from beginning to end. While it was mostly the Stark kids both legitimate and illegitimate who had to suffer in tonight’s episode we also got to see Daenerys Stormborn tested as her stay in the city-state of Qarth begins to turn for the worst and her inability to think with her mind instead of her heart has put her in a precarious situation.
The episode begins with Bran’s dream from last week finally coming into fruition as the seas has come to Winterfell and gone over the walls. It’s Theon Greyjoy and his merry band of Ironborn reavers who have taken advantage of a defenseless Winterfell. Any lingering doubts as to which house his loyalty lies now ends with his taking of Winterfell and imposing himself as it’s lord. Theon has bought into his biological father’s Ironborn way of life as he’s taken his own lordship through the “iron price” and not gold. Yet, this part of the episode also show’s that Theon has much to learn about being a ruler as some of his petty behavior comes to the forefront in his treatment of Rodrick Casell and being fooled by the wildling Osha. Just like Renly Baratheon before him, Theon likes to play at being a lord and someone who thinks they have power over the people when it’s all just in his head.
The same goes for King Joffrey over at King’s Landing who witness first-hand that his maniacal, iron-fisted rule of the realm has weakened what had been a strong realm and which is now ripe for all-out rebellion from within the city’s walls and not just from without. A riot of his own making doesn’t end even with his shouts to his Kingsguard and the Gold Cloaks to kill everyone when they’re outnumbered despite their armor and weapons. Joffrey begins to see what his Hand has seen and that’s the people of King’s Landing don’t see him as their rightful ruler and would rip the city and those who follow him apart (like the poor Maester who got the zombie feeding frenzy treatment) even if they die doing so.
For a moment Sansa Stark doesn’t understand why the people hate her as much as Joffrey and season 1 Sansa petulantly peeks out after her close brush with rape and death at the hands of the mob. It takes some wise counsel from her handmaiden Shae to educate her as to why they hate her so. Whether Sansa will learn from tonight’s events or not will show whether her character has grown from the shallow, fashion plate and status obsessed young teen or season 1 to the more savvy and leery young lady who has been quite adept at steering through the maze that makes up the game of thrones within the castle walls. One thing for sure is that she seems to have gained herself a protector in The Hound.
Over and north of the Wall we find Jon Snow and the small band of Rangers led by Qhorin Halfhand doing a sort of long-range recon patrol deeper into wildling territory to find out just exactly what’s going on with the wildlings and their self-proclaimed king Mance Rayder. We see Jon get a lesson in the importance of being a Crow delivered not so delicately by the veteran Qhorin who also seem to see something important about Jon, but who also sees an idealist who may not survive the Wall if he continues to think like someone who lives South of the Wall instead of on and North of it. It’s easy to say that Jon learns his lesson, but as we see after a successful ambush of a wildling patrol Jon still hangs onto too much of the chivalry and nobility of the the southern realms instead of the reality of the Wall and the North. He’s been a frustrating character since the first season and his steadfast “Ned Stark-ness” almost gets him killed and has saddled him with a pretty, wild redhead who may just be the death of him before he reaches his potential.
We now come to the Arya and Daenaerys portion of tonight’s episode. These are two young girls who have been thrust into situations not of their making and trying to make the best of it.
At Harrenhal we see Arya continue her indentured servitude to Tywin Lannister who seem to treat her with more respect than he does his own commanders. Whether he suspects who Arya truly is he does seem to treat her less a servant and more like an unofficial sounding board. The conflict of emotions this treatment from Tywin was quite evident in Arya’s face as she smiles behind Tywin and his council’s back when he compliments her and berates one his generals. Her situation gets really precarious as one Littlefinger appears in Harrenhal to talk shop with Tywin. This scene was masterfully done by veteran tv director David Nutter who milks the tension Arya feels at the prospect of being found out by the duplicitous, but observant Littlefinger. Her faith in the enigmatic Jaqen H’ghar seems well-deserved as she gives him a second name and sees that name given over to Death as Jaqen has promised. With each day in Harrenhal it looks like Arya looks to be the one of the all the youngsters in Game of Thrones who has begun to see the reality of the world instead of the ideals she has been taught growing up.
Far across the Narrow Sea we come to Daenaerys who is still trying to fend off the advances of Xaro Xhoan Daxos and the other merchant lords of Qarth who wish to put their hooks into her if she ever wants their help in getting across to Westeros to take back the Iron Throne she sees as rightfully hers. Where Arya has learned to think with her head instead of her heart to put herself into situations to her advantage the same cannot be said about Daenerys who still believes that her rightful claim to the Iron Throne and being the Mother of Dragons would make everyone bow at her young feet and give her everything she needs to get what she wants. When diplomacy doesn’t get her what she wants she reverts back to threats and actually sounding more and more like her dead brother Viserys who also used too much empty threats to try and get what he thinks was due to him. The episode sees her with even less retainers than what she had going into Qarth and worst yet minus the three dragonlings.
While “The Old Gods and the New” was still a set-up episode it also contained much character growth for the young cast. We see them learn the hard way that being a ruler of a realm and of men doesn’t come easy or come across as a game without consequences. Idealism gets tested and for most of the episode comes off less a virtue and more of a near-fatal flaw that cannot survive in the war-torn lands of Westeros let alone the intrigues of the city-states of Essos across the Narrow Sea. Faith has been tested as Bran sees firsthand as he sees what he thought was a brother to him and his family turn against them in a fit of pettiness and need to prove himself to his biological sire.
With more pieces being moved across the board it’s getting much clearer now that the war for the Iron Throne is close to being decided, but it doesn’t mean peace will come to Westeros. While the elders fight the wars begun by a child and being won by another it looks like tonight’s episode also shows that no matter how things turn out this season it’s the children of the series who have been forced to grow up by the war who will have to pick up the pieces. Tonight we see that some look ready to do so while most still look ill-equipped to survive it.
I recently finished reading a wonderful new book from Mark Hayes. The name of that book is RanDumb-er: The Continued Adventures of an Irish Guy In L.A. You can order it here and I seriously recommend that you should.
Mark Hayes is a comedian, a DJ, a writer, and, as you can probably guess from the book’s title, he’s also an Irish guy who has found himself living in one of the most uniquely American cities around, Los Angeles. In RanDumb-er, we follow Mark as he looks at American culture with occasionally hungover eyes and an often biting (but never cruel) wit. Whether he’s dealing with a B-list celebrity who is busy predicting the end of the world, bravely trying to survive a date with a girl who insists on howling like a wildebeest, or experiencing a fake snowfall at the Grove, Hayes is never less than entertaining and sometimes even rather poignant.
He also realizes, early on, that all American girls love an Irish accent. And it’s true! Whenever I hear an Irish accent, I get all girly and giggly and one of the things that I loved about RanDumb-er is that, even though it takes place in Los Angeles, it is ultimately an Irish story. I think that the Irish have a special ability to appreciate the small absurdities of existence (and I’m not just saying that because I’m a fourth Irish myself!) and that’s what truly makes RanDumb-er stand out as a work of non-fiction comedic literature. Any writer can capture the obvious weirdness of living day-to-day. What makes Hayes so special as writer is that he picks up on the small oddities of life that we don’t always notice and he makes us consider them in a new light.
Consider the moment, early on in the book, in which Hayes has a panic attack when he realizes that he managed to accidentally leave his scissors behind in Ireland when he left for L.A. In just a few pages, Hayes manages to perfectly capture the anxiety that comes with travelling. Once you get over the initial excitement, you suddenly realize that you’re somewhere new and that you can no longer claim to be able to completely control your surroundings. It’s at moments like these that you truly realize how vulnerable you are and just how false your assumption of control is in environments both new and old. Hayes captures all of this without ever failing to make us laugh as we recognize our own individual neurosis in his story.
(I have to admit that one reason why I related to Hayes’ panic over his scissors was because, when I was in 17, I went with my family to Hawaii and it wasn’t until we were all walking along the beautiful beaches of Honolulu that I realized that I had left my St. Vitus medal back in Texas and I proceeded, under the most brilliant blue sky and surrounded by beautiful people frolicking half-undressed on the beach, to have one of the biggest panic attacks ever. Eventually, I recovered but trust me — not a day went by that I didn’t think about that medal.)
As a writer, Hayes has a very interesting and compulsively readable style, one that goes beyond the fact that he happens to be a very funny guy. Hayes writes in a stream-of-consciousness type of style and the end result is that, after a few pages, you feel that you truly are inside of his head and you are experiencing Los Angeles — and all the weirdness that goes with it — with him. If you cross James Joyce with Jack Kerouac and then add in a little Terry Southern and Tom Wolfe with a slightly less drug addled Hunter Thompson, you’ll have Mark Hayes.
Perhaps the best thing about RanDumb-er is that Hayes ends it with the promise of a sequel. I, for one, can’t wait to read it and you should feel the same. However, for now, you really should go over to Amazon, order your own copy of RanDumb-er and get acquainted with the continued adventures of an Irish guy in L.A.
RanDumb-er. Read it.
**PLEASE DON’T READ IF YOU HAVEN’T WATCHED THE AVENGERS** **PLEASE DON’T READ IF YOU HAVEN’T WATCHED THE AVENGERS** **PLEASE DON’T READ IF YOU HAVEN’T WATCHED THE AVENGERS** **PLEASE DON’T READ IF YOU HAVEN’T WATCHED THE AVENGERS** **PLEASE DON’T READ IF YOU HAVEN’T WATCHED THE AVENGERS** **PLEASE DON’T READ IF YOU HAVEN’T WATCHED THE AVENGERS** **PLEASE DON’T READ IF YOU HAVEN’T WATCHED THE AVENGERS**
**PLEASE DON’T READ IF YOU HAVEN’T WATCHED THE AVENGERS** **PLEASE DON’T READ IF YOU HAVEN’T WATCHED THE AVENGERS** **PLEASE DON’T READ IF YOU HAVEN’T WATCHED THE AVENGERS** **PLEASE DON’T READ IF YOU HAVEN’T WATCHED THE AVENGERS** **PLEASE DON’T READ IF YOU HAVEN’T WATCHED THE AVENGERS** **PLEASE DON’T READ IF YOU HAVEN’T WATCHED THE AVENGERS** **PLEASE DON’T READ IF YOU HAVEN’T WATCHED THE AVENGERS**
This post sprang from my desire to discuss the film with my geek brethren and not spoil for the folks that follow me on Twitter or have the misfortune of being my Facebook friend. If you haven’t seen the Avengers movie, please do not read this post.
Things that caused Geekasm (due to be modeled after the much loved Mark Millar & Bryan Hitch run on the Ultimates):
Overall Geekasm:
The Big Bad:
Avengers did what I previously thought was impossible… it Leonidas-kicked Iron Man 1 off its throne and now reigns on my all-time favorite comic inspired movie. Nolan has a tough act to follow. The gauntlet has been dropped. I attribute this remarkable feat to Joss Whedon’s screenplay and the cast for the most part. I will not spoil the film and simply state what I enjoyed in a vague manner.
What I loved:
Minor quibbles:
Jacob Kurtzberg, known to the world as Jack “The King” Kirby, was the unappreciated artistic genius and innovator. I hold him in the same regard as the equally legendary Osamu Tezuka, kamisama no manga (god of comics)/godfather of anime/Japanese Walt Disney. Both men revolutionized their respective fields, inspired and continue to inspire many generations.
Joe Simon and Jack created Captain America (the first Avenger) and the Cap Parody, Fighting American. Kirby created Nick Fury, the Mighty Thor, Iron Man, Black Panther, the X-Men, the Incredible Hulk, the Fantastic Four, and the Avengers with Stanley Lieber, known to the world as Smiling Stan Lee. OMAC, Silver Surf, Kamandi, The Last Boy On Earth, X-51, the Eternals, Devil Dinosaur, Etrigan the Demon, Challengers Of The Unknown, Kobra, and the entire Fourth World mythology were his solo creations. The King was responsible for the character design of Thundarr the Barbarian and Goldie Gold & Action Jack.
As a wee lad, I was captivated by his level of detail and imagination. Now that I am in my 30’s, I continue to appreciate his work and be perpetually in awe of how his work showed that he wasn’t afraid to dream big. I am delighted to see the Kurtzberg Legacy live on through books Godland by Joe Casey, Tom Scioli and the epic yet short-lived Jersey Gods by Glen Brunswick and Dan McDaid, and Kirby Genesis by Kurt Busiek, Alex Ross And Jackson Herbert.
Below is Mark Waid and the late Mike Wieringo’s tribute to Jack during their Fantastic Four.
Here are some examples of the King’s work.
Here are some examples of the work inspired by him.
Jack’s cameo on the Incredible Hulk
Here is one Kirby Documentary
Hola and happy Cinco De Mayo! I’m not sure if Cinco De Mayo is as big a deal up north as it is down here in the Southwest but today is going to be one of the few Saturdays that I don’t go to the movies. Instead, I will be observing this day with friends, family (I am a fourth Spanish), and cerveza. But first, here’s the latest edition of Lisa Marie’s Favorite Grindhouse and Exploitation Trailers…
(Be warned: Some of these trailers are a tad bit more explicit than some of the other trailers that I’ve featured as a part of this series. Watch with caution.)
1) Tombs of the Blind Dead (1971)
This is one of the first of the great Spanish horror films.
2) Return of the Evil Dead (1973)
The Blind Dead returned in this gory and violent sequel. One of my prize possessions is my Blind Dead box set, which was released (in the shape of a coffin, no less) by Blue Underground.
3) Vampyros Lesbos (1971)
This is the German trailer for Vampyros Lesbos, directed by the infamous Jess Franco. Just try to guess what this film is about…
4) Oasis of the Living Dead (1981)
In a career that has spanned over 500 films, Jess Franco has dealt with not only lesbian vampires but zombies as well…
5) Night of the Bloody Apes (1969)
From Rene Cardona comes this surprisingly bloody films about what happens when an ape’s heart is transplanted into a normal human being. Fortunately, there’s a wrestler around to save the day…
6) The Werewolf Vs. The Vampire Woman (1970)
Finally, let’s end things with a Paul Naschy film, shall we?
Through the Shattered Lens 