The Werewolf of Woodstock (1975, directed by John Moffitt)

Posted on October 8, 2026 by Jedadiah Leland

Shortly after the end of the famous Woodstock music festival, a hippie-hating local (Tige Andrews) goes out to the now-deserted festival grounds and attempts to destroy the stage. Since the stage is still attached to the power lines, he ends up getting electrocuted. He survives, but now, whenever there’s an electrical storm, he turns into a hippie-hating werewolf. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately, depending on how you look at it), the world’s most clean-cut hippie band has shown up in town so that they can say they performed at Woodstock.

The plot of The Werewolf of Woodstock sounds like a comedy, but the movie takes itself fairly seriously. Most of the film’s campiness appears to be unintentional. Producer Dick Clark was able to rope a fairly respectable cast into appearing in this short film. Along with Tige Andrews as the werewolf, Andrew Stevens appears as a member of the band, while Belinda Balaski plays a groupie who gets kidnapped by the werewolf. Michael Parks and Meredith MacRae show up as two big-city cops who are called in to deal with the town’s werewolf problem. I believed that Tige Andrews really did hate the hippies with every fiber of his being, but otherwise, no one seems that invested in their roles.

Is the movie worth watching? It is, just because it’s short and there’s a scene where the werewolf steals a dune buggy. I watched it on a Russian site, though it wasn’t a very good upload. It doesn’t appear that it’s even been released on DVD or Blu-ray. I’m surprised. I would think some company would have released it just for the title alone.

Graphic Novel Review: X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills by Chris Claremont and Brent Eric Anderson

Posted on October 8, 2026 by Jedadiah Leland

X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills was the fifth Marvel Graphic Novel. It was first published in 1982. It’s 44 years old, and it still makes an impression. When I was a kid, there was a copy of it hidden among the periodicals and magazines at Waldenbooks. When I was in the store, I’d find it, open it, and pick up where I had left off. I knew there was no way I could get away with buying something called God Loves, Man Kills, but that’s because the story wasn’t for kids.

Two children are shot and killed in a playground and left hanging from a swing set. Why? Because they were mutants. Magneto, who until that point had been presented as a villain, is the one who gives them a proper burial. From the beginning, X-Men was a comic book that was actually about prejudice and racism, but God Loves, Man Kills made the message clear. The opening of the story wasn’t something you’d find in a normal monthly Marvel comic.

The villain is a white-haired televangelist named William Stryker. He preaches against mutants. He secretly leads the Purifiers. He kidnaps Professor X and attempts to use his powers to destroy the X-Men. The X-Men and Magneto team up and face an enemy so obsessed with their destruction that, for once, Magneto no longer seems like the fanatic. Even Professor X is tempted to give up his dream of coexistence.

Stryker appears to die, shot by a human security guard who fired to keep Stryker from killing a mutant. It’s a powerful ending. In typical Marvel fashion, the ending was ruined when they decided to bring Stryker back. Stryker died multiple times and somehow came back to life repeatedly. Eventually, he went from being a televangelist to being a Satanist. Marvel never knew how to leave well enough alone.

God Loves, Man Kills remains powerful, though. It was a true graphic novel, with a plot and themes worthy of a novel and graphics that were far more mature than anything to be found in the comics. I read it at Waldenbooks, and I’ve never forgotten it.

Music Video of the Day: Bewitched by Candlemass (1988, directed by Jonas Akerlund)

Posted on October 8, 2026 by Jedadiah Leland

The lesson of this video is don’t try to bury Messiah Marcolin.

Marcolin was the lead singer of the Swedish doom metal band, Candlemass. In this video, for their song Bewitched, Messiah Marcolin not only comes back to life and rises from his own coffin but he uses his powers of awesome singing to create an army of brainwashed zombies. This would be scary, except for the fact that Messiah Marcolin spends most of the video looking like this:

And this.

He does somehow manage to entrance a cute girl about halfway through the video.

I guess that’s the power of Swedish doom metal.

This video, which has been called one of the most enjoyably bad metal video of all time, is significant for being the first video to have been directed by Jonas Akerlund. From working with Candlemass, Akerlund went on to direct videos for everyone from U2 to Jane’s Addiction to Beyonce to The Rolling Stones to almost everyone else who has ever had a hit song.

Horror Game Review: Voodoo Castle (1979, Alexis Adams)

Posted on October 7, 2026 by Jedadiah Leland

Count Christo has been cursed by his enemies and is currently in a coma. Your job is to search his castle and gather together both the clues and the equipment necessary to reverse the spell. If you take too long you might get hit by the curse as well. So, don’t waste any time!

Sometimes, I miss the simple and innocent text-adventure games that used to be a mainstay for personal computers. I’ll get nostalgic for the puzzles and the simple commands of “n, w, e, s.” I miss the familiar pattern of: “Get object,” “Look object,” and “Inventory,” to make sure that you still had the object with you. I’ll fondly remember when you could play and beat a game without having to spend hours sitting in front of a screen.

Then I’ll remember how frustrated I used to get with games like Voodoo Castle. Like many of the early test adventures, Voodoo Castle takes a bare-bones approach to story-telling. Later editions came with simple graphics but, even then, it never really made you feel as if you were actually a part of the story. Searching the castle isn’t a problem. Figuring out how to cast a spell when the game’s parser can only understand two words at a time is the bigger frustration. There’s at least one puzzle where the game itself specifically tells you what to type and for that, I was thankful. Good luck figuring out what to type to cast the spell necessary to awaken Count Christo, though.

Voodoo Castle is available to download from a lot of abandonware sites. There’s also a buggy version on the Internet Archive, which loads slowly and gets hit by errors. The best thing about the version on the Archive is that it opens with an open letter from Scott Adams, the husband of the game’s author, in which he encourages you not to give the game to your friends.

Before anyone panics, this game is no longer for sale and Adventure International no longer exists so you can safely download Voodoo Castle or share it with friends if you wants. I still wish I had seen this message when I was younger. I had no idea I was a pirate. I feel guilty now.

Great Moments In Comic Book History #47: Classic Comics Series Featuring #28

Posted on October 7, 2026 by Jedadiah Leland

From 1976 to 1978, Marvel published a comic book with an unwieldy name. Each issue of Classic Comics Series Featuring adapted a piece of classic literature. In 1977, the #28 issue featured the work of Edgar Allan Poe. Three stories were adapted: The Pit and the Pendulum, The Tell-Tale Heart, and The Cask of Amontillado.

In doing so, they gave us one of the best covers of the 1970s horror boom.

Credit for that goes to Gene Colan, Tom Palmer, and Danny Crespi.

Inside the comic, readers would find this image of a man not only tied beneath the pendulum but also covered in hundreds of rats.

Credit for that memorable image goes to Rudy Messina.

Fredric Wertham was not available for comment.

Previous Great Moments In Comic Book History:

G.I. Joe: The Revenge of Cobra (1984, directed by Dan Thompson)

Posted on October 7, 2026 by Jedadiah Leland

“G.I. Joe is the code name for America’s daring, highly trained special mission force. Its purpose: to defend human freedom against Cobra, a ruthless terrorist organization determined to rule the world!”

It’s good to see that some things never change. Land, sea, or air, G.I. Joe is there! If Cobra ceased to exist, would G.I. Joe be disbanded? It seems strange that G.I. Joe is apparently the only opponent Cobra has, especially when you consider that Cobra is an international organization. Is there a British version of G.I. Joe?

Those questions and a lot more were not answered in the second G.I. Joe animated five-episode miniseries, The Revenge of Cobra. This time, Cobra steals a special laser from G.I. Joe and uses it to power a weather machine. As usual, Destro does all the work, and then Cobra Commander ruins everything by pushing the machine too far. The machine breaks into three separate pieces, all of which land in different and very dangerous parts of the world and continue to create havoc. The Joes and Cobra fight to retrieve the three parts. Duke, meanwhile, gets captured again and ends up fighting in the arena of the Cobra Temple again.

It’s the same basic plot as G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, just with more emphasis on showing off all of the toys that the audience could then demand their parents buy them. This episode features Zartan and his Dreadnoks, and whenever they’re on screen, they might as well have a price tag on their foreheads, because who wouldn’t want to be Cobra’s master of disguise?

In G.I. Joe terms, a five-part miniseries is the equivalent of a 90-minute film. There’s a lot of action packed into those 90 minutes, and there’s a cliffhanger every 18 minutes. The animation is sleeker than in A Real American Hero, but it’s still clunky in that ’80s way that will either make you feel nostalgic or bored. Snake Eyes is given next to nothing to do, which is a mistake, because everyone knows Snake Eyes and Scarlett were the only members of the team who really mattered. If you watch, be prepared to hear “Yo Joe!” every two minutes.

There are a lot of battles in The Revenge of Cobra, but no one ever dies or is even seriously injured. What would G.I. Joe and Cobra do without each other?

The Immortalizer (1989, directed by Joel Bender)

Posted on October 7, 2026 by Jedadiah Leland

Dr. Divine Will See You Now!

Dr. Divine (Ron Ray) has a successful practice going in his heavily guarded clinic. The mixed-up mutants and rednecks who work for him go out into the city and bash attractive 20-year-olds on the head. They drag them back to the clinic, where old people pay a million dollars to have their brains put into younger bodies.

“If you’ve been thinking about plastic surgery, Dr. Divine would like to change your mind!”

Dr. Divine has a point. Why get plastic surgery when you can just pay a million dollars to have your brain scooped out of your skull and stuffed into someone else’s head? Laugh at the plot all you want. Jordan Peele won an Oscar for coming up with the same basic story. Of course, The Immortalizer doesn’t have any of the subtext of Get Out. In fact, it doesn’t have any subtext at all, beyond the fact that everyone wants a body that’s healthier than the one they’ve got.

Gregg (Chris Crone) is among those abducted. He manages to escape from the clinic, but he struggles to get anyone to take him seriously when he tells them about what’s happening. Eventually, he does get some help, but will it be in time to save his friends?

This is very much a direct-to-video, late-’80s horror film, complete with big hair, bad acting, and gratuitous nudity to go along with the lengthy shots of the brain surgery. The doctor worries about the bodies getting damaged, but he’s the one who is opening up people’s heads and moving brains around. That’s going to leave scars. It’s fun in the nonsensical way that most late-night Cinemax horror films were fun. It’s on Tubi, and it’s a nostalgia rush, even if the title does sound like the name of a minor Marvel comic villain.

Spider-Man vs. The Immortalizer? My money is on Spider-Man. He’s been around since 1962, and he’s still only in his 20s. Who needs brain surgery when you’ve got radioactive spiders?

Book Review: Marvel Comics: The Untold Story by Sean Howe

Posted on October 7, 2026 by Jedadiah Leland

Hello, fellow readers! I’m doing today’s book review while Lisa gets some well-earned rest.

Today, it seems like everyone is an expert on the history of Marvel Comics, but if you actually talk to them, you discover that the majority seems to think that history started when the first Iron Man movie came out in 2008. They should definitely read Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, which begins when Marvel was known as Timely Comics and ends right when the MCU is on the verge of taking over pop culture.

The history of a comic book company might not sound that interesting, but Marvel Comics: The Untold Story is surprisingly compelling. We follow the company from the Timely years through the modern era. We see how Marvel changed comics forever in the 1960s. We see how they continued to challenge conventions in the 1970s while also becoming the type of big business that sold a lot of comics and left behind a lot of angry readers and creators. We feel as if we’re watching as Stan Lee becomes a minor celebrity and struggles to get a foothold in Hollywood. Howe spends as much time discussing the bad times as the good ones. In the 1980s, Jim Shooter burns a lot of money with the New Universe. In the 1990s, Marvel goes from being the upstart company that took risks to being a symbol of the moribund establishment. With the success of the MCU, it’s easy to forget how bad things got at Marvel before the movies gave the company a new life.

The book doesn’t shy away from the controversies, in particular the question of whether Stan Lee took credit for the work of others. Lee comes across as an exuberant force who was tireless in his efforts to promote Marvel but who also could be prickly and egotistical. Artists and writers like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko are profiled as the talented men who never got the credit they deserved for Marvel’s success. Chris Claremont is described as someone whose ideal X-Men story would be the characters just hanging out in New York and talking. John Byrne is described as using unsold New Universe comics to start a bonfire. Todd McFarlane fires Rob Liefeld by telling him, “We don’t like you no more.” The book is full of memorable moments.

Howe’s book is at its most interesting when it discusses Marvel in the 1970s. That was when a new crew of artists and writers, many of whom were young hippies who had recently graduated from art school, joined the company and discovered that Marvel was a business first. The comics may have dealt with current events, but they were still largely being drawn and written by veterans from the 1940s and 1950s. (In the 1970s, Stan Lee tried to attract female readers with Ms. Marvel but the first issue, written and drawn by men whose career stretched back the Golden Age of Comics, is described as being a series of crotch shots.) The book examines the conflict of artists trying to create in a corporate environment where the one rule is that nothing can ever change.

It’s a must-have for anyone who claims to be a fan of Marvel.

Music Video of the Day: Nemesis by Shriekback (1985, directed by Tony van den Ende)

Posted on October 7, 2026 by Jedadiah Leland

Everybody happy as the dead come home! You’ll never get that chorus out of your head after listening to Nemesis.

Director Tony can den Ende has also done music videos for The Proclaimers, Meat Loaf, Melissa Etheridge, Joe Cocker, Thomas Dolby, Manic Street Preachers, and Guns N’ Roses.

Enjoy!

G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero (1983, directed by Dan Thompson)

Posted on October 6, 2026 by Jedadiah Leland

G.I. Joe has been doing a pretty good job defending human freedom from Cobra, though somehow Cobra Commander is still walking free and living in a gigantic temple that any halfway decent special mission force should be able to find. When Destro shows up at the temple with the MASS Device, it looks like Cobra will finally be able to rule the world. The MASS Device is a transportation unit that is fueled by three unique minerals. Cobra Commander decides to take over the world by using the device to… steal the Eiffel Tower? I’m starting to understand why Cobra hasn’t had much success in its quest to rule the world.

After their leader Duke gets abducted by the device and is forced to fight in Cobra-sponsored gladiatorial games, G.I. Joe tries to track down the minerals so that they can fuel their own transportation device. It leads to constant battles in which everyone is blowing things up and shooting laser guns but somehow no one gets injured. In the 80s, no organization provided better job security than being a member of Cobra and G.I. Joe. No matter how many times someone failed, no one was ever fired from Cobra. No matter how many battles they fought, no one was injured on either team.

G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero was the five-episode miniseries that introduced not only the G.I. Joe cartoon but also the G.I. Joe theme song. G.I. Joe is there, according to the song, and they are. Each episode takes the Joes to a different part of the world so that they can build their transporter. It’s entertaining in a way that a lot of bad things are entertaining once they are old enough to be viewed through the lens of nostalgia. Watching, I realized that Cobra was so inept that it seemed pointless to create an entire secret army to fight just them. It doesn’t really matter. It’s just a cartoon. What matters is that, as always, Snake Eyes is the man, Destro and the Baroness make evil look cool, and Scarlet can do backflips through any battle.