Thrilling Wonder Stories was a pulp magazine that was published from 1936 to 1955. It was one of several pulp magazines that had the word “thrilling” in its title. The stories were mostly science fiction and I guess they were meant to be more thrilling than all of the other science fiction that was being published at the same time. The stories were apparently thrilling enough for the magazine to run for 19 years.
Below are a few of the covers of Thrilling Wonder Stories, done by some of the best artists of the pulp era.
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 filmmakers! Today, we honor the one and only Lucio Fulci!
4 Shots From 4 Lucio Fulci Films
Zombi 2 (1979, dir. Lucio Fulci)
City of the Living Dead (1980, dir by Lucio Fulci)
The House By The Cemetery (1981, dir by Lucio Fulci)
Baffled! is an entertaining little made-for-TV movie from 1973. Leonard Nimoy plays a race car driver who suddenly starts to have psychic visions of a woman who lives in what appears to be a gothic manor. The woman is in some sort of danger. Nimoy, of course, would rather just race cars but a parapsychologist (Susan Hampshire) convinces him that he has to figure out what his visions mean.
Now, to be honest, Baffled! is not a particularly scary movie. Some of Nimoy’s visions are spooky but there’s nothing in this movie that’s going to give you nightmares. Though it may not be horrifying, Baffled! is a lot of fun. Apparently, it was meant to be a pilot for a TV series. If it had been picked up, I guess Nimoy and Hampshire would have been helping out a new guest star every week. Nimoy seems to be having a lot of fun playing a psychic race car driver and he and Susan Hampshire have a really sweet and enjoyable chemistry.
Listen, it’s John Carpenter. As a month, October pretty much belongs to John Carpenter and there’s never a more appropriate time to share a music video for one of his songs. Interestingly enough, Night is one of Carpenter’s rare compositions that is not also a part of a soundtrack.
It certainly sounds like it belongs in a movie though, right?
To be honest, I ordered a copy of this 1993 YA novel from Half-Price Books strictly because of the cover. I mean, there were several old Christopher Pike books to chose from but that image of the young woman driving her car with the skeleton sitting beside her just leaped out at me. I think a lot of it had to do with the fuzzy dice hanging from the rear view mirror. I’ve got a St. Patrick medal hanging from my mirror but if I wasn’t half-Irish and if I hadn’t been raised Catholic, I definitely would have the dice….
Well, actually, I probably wouldn’t have anything hanging from my mirror. Seriously, those big dice look like they’re going to get in the way. I mean, she’s already driving in the rain and she’s got a skeleton sitting next to her. Does she need the distraction of giant dice? No wonder death is coming along the ride….
Anyway, the book itself is about an 18 year-old named Teresa. Teresa is an aspiring songwriter and singer. She just broke up with her boyfriend Bill. The book takes place on the night that she was planning to lose her virginity to Bill but now that she’s single and miserable, she figures that she might as well just drive to the Bay area. Teresa also decides to pick up two hitchhikers because apparently, she’s never read a scary book or seen a horror movie before.
The hitchhikers are named — look, I’m not joking — Freedom Jack and Poppy Corn. Freedom Jack and Poppy Corn are also heading to the Bay and they have all sorts of interesting stories to tell about yet another couple, John and Candy. Now, to be honest, I wouldn’t pick up hitchhikers in the first place. I don’t care how lonely I am. I don’t care how much its raining. I don’t care how late at night it is. I’m not picking you if you’re standing on the side of the road. But even if I did pick up a pair of hitchhikers, I would probably kick them out of the car as soon as they started telling me a story about a doomed couple who are obviously the hitchhikers in a past life. Somehow, Teresa doesn’t immediately catch onto the fact that Freedom Jack and Poppy Fresh are actually John and Candy despite the fact that it’s incredibly obvious. (John = Jack. Candy = Poppy Corn. I mean, come on….) Then again, Teresa doesn’t seem to be the smart in general.
Anyway, Teresa’s journey with the two hitchhikers leads to her stopping off at both a castle and a church and losing her virginity. The journey continues without anywhere seeming to get anywhere because they’re on a road to nowhere and this is one of those Christopher Pike books where nothing is what it actually seems to be. There’s a lot of twists but they’re all somewhat predictable twists. If you’ve read any of Christopher Pike’s other books, you’ll be able to guess what’s going on in The Road to Nowhere. In the end, everyone has come to peace with their past and chosen their future. While the stories of Teresa and Bill and John and Candy contain moments of deep darkness, Road to Nowhere , especially when compared to Pike books like The Immortaland Die Softly, is actually rather optimistic about the ability of people to move on and find some sort of peace.
Finally, let’s give the book some credit for coming up with names like Freedom Jack and Poppy Corn. That, in itself, is an accomplishment worth celebrating. Still, I wish the cover had more accurately reflected the content of the book.
No, not in Miami. Not Jacksonville. Not Ft. Lauderdale. Certainly not Orlando. No, this film takes place off the back roads of Florida, where people are honest country folk and some folks live in a houseboat and you should always be careful when walking around the bayous because there might be some alligators lurkin’ about. Of course, in this part of Florida, they call them gators. Anyone who says alligator obviously thinks they’re too good for downhome country living.
Anyway, it turns out that there’s more to worry about in Florida then just alligators. There’s also the chance that your houseboat might get struck by a meteor. And then, everyone on the houseboat might be transformed into a zombie and, after they’ve eaten all the alligators, they might start eating all the humans.
When a sudden zombie outbreak occurs, you have to hope that you’ll get a good law enforcement response. Unfortunately, law enforcement in these parts means an elderly sheriff and a bearded deputy who is always trying to catch a peek of the local women skinny dipping. The sheriff, by the way, is played by Buster Crabbe. In the 20s and 30s, Crabbe was an champion swimmer who won Olympic medals and went on to play Tarzan, Flash Gordon, and Buck Rogers. At the height of his popularity, he was known as “the King of the Serials.” In The Alien Dead, the 70-something Crabbe plays Sheriff Kowalski and, if nothing else, it seems like he was enjoying himself. Really, that’s important thing when it comes to a movie like this.
The Alien Dead is an extremely-cheap looking film and, with the exception of Crabbe, none of the actors appear to have done much before or after appearing in The Alien Dead. There are some scenes that are so dark that it’s next to impossible to actually tell what’s going on. Despite being a rather short film, the pace is still slow and there are certain scenes that seem to drag on forever. There’s a lot of perfectly valid criticisms that one can make about The Alien Dead.
But you know what?
I like the film.
Seriously, in a strange way, the film actually does work. Yes, the acting is pretty bad and the dialogue is often rather clunky and the plot doesn’t make sense and blah blah blah. Those are all true facts. But, there are isolated moments where The Alien Dead achieves a dream-like intensity. For instance, there’s a lengthy scene where the zombies attack and all of the action is shown in slow motion. I realize that may have been done to pad the film’s running time but strangely enough, it works. Even more oddly, the film’s cheap gore effects add to the movie’s already dream-like feel. Finally, if nothing else, the film captures the humid atmosphere of the Florida bayou. Watching the film, you can feel the sweat and hear the buzzing of mosquitos. At its best, The Alien Dead works as a piece of outsider art.
Finally, The Alien Dead is one of those films that had been released and re-released a few times on video. As you can see below, one of those releases was apparently inspired by the success of Evil Dead.
I watched the 1982 film, Kung Fu From Beyond The Grave, on Prime earlier today. It was an enjoyable film from Hong Kong. It starred many of the same people who appeared in Kung Fu Zombieand both films had a similar attitude, mixing horror and family drama with martial arts and juvenile comedy and topping it all off with a random vampire. As I said, it was fun to watch and I was certainly never bored.
That said, I would be lying if I said I actually understood everything that happened in the film.
That’s not really the fault of the filmmakers or, at least, I don’t think it is. The version that I watched was badly dubbed into English and it was obvious that, during the film’s trip from Hong Kong to the grindhouse theaters of New York City, some pretty heavy editing was done. That’s pretty much par for the course when it comes to the martial arts films of the 70s. In fact, for many Americans, a good deal of the appeal of these films is the fact that the plots are often incoherent. Who needs a detailed plot when you’ve got so many great fight scenes, right?
The film opens with a narrator explaining that, every couple of months, the Gates of Hell are opened and the dead can wander the Earth. (The film — or at least the dubbed version of the film — seems to be pretty sure that everyone who dies ends up in Hell.) Chun Sing (Billy Chong, star of Kung Fu Zombie) is visited by his dead father, who informs Chun that he was killed by an evil wizard (Chin-Lai Sung) who works for a local crime lord named Kam Tai Fu (Lieh Lo). Chun now has to avenge his father’s death and what I liked about this film is that, much as with Kung Fu Zombie, it suggested that Chun is a bit annoyed to be bothered with it. One gets the feeling that Chun was perfectly fine with not knowing who was responsible for his father’s death but, now that the annoying old man has wandered through the Gates of Hell, Chun is now obligated to do something about it.
Unfortunately, it’s not going to be easy to revenge because Kam’s wizard is not only an expert martial artist but he’s also capable of summoning super natural help. In this case, that help comes in the form of a vampire. What is Chun to do!? Wait a minute — the Gates of Hell are still open! Why not just get some friendly ghosts to help him take on Kam, the wizard, and the vampire!?
And that’s really pretty much the movie for you. For 87 minutes, people yell at each other, people fight, vampires pop up, and occasionally a large group of pasty ghosts appear and swarm on their enemies. There’s also a subplot about people getting their hearts ripped out of their bodies while visiting the local brothel which …. well, I know it had something to do with Kam’s wizard but I’m not really sure why it needed to be done. Still, the scenes of heart theft add to the film’s already chaotic atmosphere. They just seem to belong.
Which one is better, Kung Fu Zombie or Kung Fu From Beyond the Grave? The fight scenes were actually better in Kung Fu From Beyond the Grave but Kung Fu Zombie had a far more clever sense of humor. I personally would have to give the victory to Kung Fu Zombie. That said, they’re both wonderfully berserk films and if you want to add a little martial arts to your Halloween horror, these two films make the perfect double feature! And they’re both on Prime so ….. enjoy!
In 1971, for the entire month of January, children across the UK were terrified of the Autons.
That was because Doctor Who began its eighth season with a four-part story called The Terror of the Autons. Previously seen in Spearhead From Space, the Autons were plastic aliens who could disguise themselves as anything. That mannequin in the store? It might be an Auton. That strange looking man handing out flowers? Might be an Auton. Your favorite plastic doll? It might be an Auton waiting to kill you in your sleep.
In this case, the Autons had returned to Earth because of the machinations of the Doctor’s greatest foe, The Master. This serial featured the first appearance of The Master, with the Roger Delgado playing the role and becoming the series’s most popular villain since the Daleks. (This serial also featured the first appearance of Katy Manning as Jo Grant, who went on to become popular for entirely different reasons.) But as evil as The Master was, it was the Autons who reportedly kept viewers awake at night. Even after The Doctor (played, at that time, by Jon Pertwee) defeated them for a second time, you could never be sure whether that mannequin was harmless or if it was an Auton stalking you whenever your back was turned.
For modern viewers, it can seem strange to hear that people were ever scared by Doctor Who. But the Autons are an exception. The Autons are actually creepy.
The Master doesn’t seem to be too scared of them, though.
The Terror of the Autons would go on to be the first episode of Doctor Who to be cited in the House of Lords, when it was listed as a recent programme that might have a dangerous effect on the minds of the people watching. But who knows? Was that Lord Beaverbrook or was it…?
Through the Shattered Lens 