The 1970 film, Count Dracula, is unique in that it’s a film that stars Christopher Lee but it wasn’t produced by Hammer. Instead, it was directed by Lee’s friend, the Spanish director Jess Franco. It was sold as being a far more faithful adaptation of the Dracula story than anything that had been filmed up to that point. Lee, who frequently bemoaned the quality of the Hammer films, later described Count Dracula as being a personal favorite of the many films in which he appeared.
In the scene, Dracula confronts Herbert Lom’s Prof. Van Helsing. Lee gets more dialogue in this scene than he did throughout the entirety of Hammer’s Dracula, Prince of Darkness.
Let’s be honest : at this point a person could commit an entire blog to reviewing nothing but quarantine-centric diary comics, simply because so many cartoonists are filling their own blogs with quarantine-centric diary comics themselves. Which is, of course, to be expected given present(-ish) circumstances — but it also means that it’s getting more and more difficult for any particular cartoonist’s quarantine work to stand out from the pack, simply because there’s a real glut of this kind of stuff out there.
Fellow Twin Cities resident Lance Ward needn’t worry, however — autobio has always been his “jam,” as the young folks said a few years back (when they were even younger — but then, so were all of us), and diary comics are often just short-form autobio strips in and of themselves. What makes his new collection of them, A Good Man’s Brother, a bit different than…
4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!
This October, we’ve been using 4 Shots From 4 Films to pay tribute to some of our favorite horror directors! Today, we recognize one of the most controversial directors of all time, the master of Italian horror, Ruggero Deodato!
4 Shots From 4 Films
The House on the Edge of the Park (1980, dir by Ruggero Deodato)
The Raiders of Atlantis (1983, dir by Ruggero Deodato)
Body Count (1986, dir by Ruggero Deodato)
The Washing Machine (1993, dir by Ruggero Deodato)
Culled from the pages of Providence’s legendary Paper Rodeo from 1995-2001, Fort Thunder alumnus Mat Brinkman’s Multiforce Shit is every bit the collection of curiosities one would expect, given that it’s an “odds and ends” compendium on its face — but who are we kidding here? The words “expect” and “Brinkman” don’t really belong in the same zip code together, much less the same sentence.
Italy’s Hollow Press — who recently issued a handsome, oversized hardcover collection of Brinkman’s Multiforce strips — were wise to go the completist route by assembling all this sidebar “shit” into this top-notch mini with production values to match the quality of its contents (archival quality cream-colored paper, heavy-duty cardstock covers with bronze-embossed exteriors covers and silver-embossed interiors), but this is no mere historical curiosity or relic of days gone by. That would be cool, but hardly essential, and I would submit that any assemblage…
Work is a death trap, and we all know it. If your job doesn’t kill you directly, it’ll likely kill you indirectly — either by means of stress-related conditions such as ulcers, repeated-motion fatigue and attendant joint decomposition/arthritis, heart disease, various work-induced cancers or, in a pinch, maybe you’ll get yourself killed in a car accident going to work, from work, or to or from some other place, such as a bar, hoping to forget about work for a little while. However you slice it, the minute you start punching a time clock, that clock is ticking against you.
In some cases, however, the connection between employment and death is a pretty straight line — like, what if your workplace literally sits atop a portal to hell? Which brings us to the first self-published mini (that I’m aware of, at any rate) from Michigan-based cartoonist Chris Russ, Eddie The…
4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!
Today, we celebrate the life and career Donald Pleasence! One of the greatest of all the horror icons, Pleasence was born 101 years ago today and that means that it’s time for….
The Watcher in the Woods is one of those films that scares you, but you see it in your youth and it first introduces you horror. It’s like a horror movie kiddie pool. I watched this today with my daughters, which makes a really bad dad or a really awesome dad. Not sure.
My Daughter’s – Half Scary, Half weird.
I would agree with that assessment. There’s possession and I think aliens, but they don’t burst out of your chest.
The Curtis family moves into a Good Value house rental in England next door to Mrs. Aylwood (Bette Davis). Right away, poor Jan (Lynn-Holly Johnson) starts seeing weird things all around the property like laser beams. Yes, laser beams. After a lot of strange things, we learn that Mrs. Alywood’s daughter disappeared. The middle-aged townsfolk are somehow responsible….dun dun dun.
There are a lot of themes in this movie that revolve around mirrors and eclipses. For a Disney film, it is pretty scary!
I any case, the movie is free! Watch it and determine for yourself if this was a bad parenting call.
Happy Horrorthon! I warn you that this post might look …. weird. My Chrome version of wordpress has been possessed. There’s NO OTHER EXPLANATION! EVER!
The Car: Road To Revenge is a sequel to The Car from 1977…. MINDBENDER! No wonder I feel like having a key party and getting an orange couch… Dramatization:
This film was written after Death Race 2050 – ALT Title: Miffed Max: Budget Road, Reviewed like a boss! also by G. J. Echternkamp. I have to write that G.J. is a genuinely nice person and these are great genre films. I could easily see Bruce Campbell starring in a Echternkamp movie. Believe me, I have some ideas….G.J. …DM me. 😉 really! Car 2 is set in a dystopian future, but really it didn’t seem any worse than Seattle today. Car 2 had fancy cars, embattled police, and shitty local government, and lawlessness; if you threw in some drizzle, I’d be right at home.
The film begins with Caddock (Jamie Bamber) of Battlestar Galactica fame. He’s a possessive and corrupt prosecutor who is in an on again off again thing with Daria (Kathleen Munroe). Apparently, he gets an evil computer chip that everyone wants … for some reason. I never fully understood why they wanted the chip or why they’d kill Caddock for it. Did the chip have the recipe for Coca Cola? Were they hardcore gamers? Did it have the latest version of Microsoft Word?
Caddock puts the evil chip into his car and it does …. something. I wasn’t really sure what it did, but when the bad guys go after Caddock for it and kill him, the chip causes Caddock to possess the car. Caddock Car spends the rest of the movie avenging his own death and trying to get Daria to be his … Car Girlfriend? I wasn’t sure how that Daria/Caddock Car consummation would work, but I know she’d have to use plenty of Jiffy Lube or maybe they could MAACO out for a while. I’m not saying it would be a AAA session, but maybe they could get used to it and have a GOODYEAR or two.
Caddock’s murder/slash possession puts Ranier (Grant Bowler) on the case. By on the case, he basically drinks a lot and gets into the pants of Daria. Bad idea because Caddock Car is possessive is it like Daria’s all Meineke and tries to run over Ranier…a lot. Then, the movie gets…weird. The bad guys who want the chip, kill or try to kill A LOT of people to get the chip. Why? It will apparently improve their body augmentations and I don’t mean like the piercings on a Seattle Soccer Mom…. I mean Robotech stuff. Caddock Car manages to squish most of his enemies to death and I mean jump on a Capri-Sun when you’re bored at your kid’s soccer game squish.
Caddock Car eventually gets the majority of his revenge. I had trouble figuring out who to root for sometimes, but I guess it was Daria. She was pretty badass and eventually kills Caddock Car, but Caddock Car is avenging his murder…so, maybe him too. Anyway, Caddock Car gets driven into the bottom of a …lake? Quarry? Large above ground pool? I could not really tell where the car ended up, but it’s dead…or is it???
I’ve reviewed a number of cat-centric comics on this site, so it’s time to even the score a bit — and there’s no more intriguing and unexpected a person to bring our canine friends to the table (errrmm, maybe that came out wrong) than Christopher Adams, whose Tack Piano Heaven manages to thematically encompass just about everything under the sun without confining itself to “be” any one thing in particular. Adams’ work is a constantly-shifting series of surprises, the very definition of “no solid ground,” so seeing him narrow his focus onto a singular subject is sure to yield interesting results — which brings us to his latest self-published ‘zine, Dog Book.
Strictly speaking, this is a 20-page “suite” of illustrations featuring, you guessed it, dogs, but it doesn’t take long to figure out there’s a lot more going on here than that. Utilizing any number of tools, including…
Originally self-published “way” back in 2017 but only now making its way in front of my eager eyes, Chicago cartooning legend Max Morris’ On Transit is an admirably rancid duo-tone nightmare very much in the Gary Panter tradition, albeit with perhaps an even more raw punk sensibility, and is a legit must-read item for anyone reliant upon the whims and vagaries of public transportation, particularly CTA buses — although the bus system of any major city works in a pinch as a substitute. And while the depiction of the ride herein is exaggerated for both comic and horrific effect, chances are good it’s going to ring true for most readers because, hey, most of us have been there and done that.
Like being a prison guard or a schoolteacher, driving a bus is one of those occupations where you’re better off admitting silently to yourself that the inmates are running…
Through the Shattered Lens 