Smashing Atoms

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Make Room, Morlocks

One of my favorite film bloggers, Kimberly Lindbergs, proprietor of the fantastic 60s, 70s film blog, Cinebeats, has joined the unstoppable Voltron of collective movie bloggers that is the Movie Morlocks, the official blog of TMC. She has already posted a few excellent reviews, so don’t pass up the chance to become a fan of her work outside of Cinebeats.

Kimberly has also been nominated for a “Rondo” in the 8th Annual Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards for best horror blog. Huzzah, and good luck!

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Jack Davis in the First Issue of Mad Magazine

It’s genuinely a hard task to pick my favorite cartoonist out of the original Mad Magazine crew. I admire Harvey Kurtzman, Bill Elder, Wally Wood and Jack Davis all greatly, and for different reasons. They were amazing draftsmen and funny as all get out. But I think Jack Davis would win out in the inking category. His inks are amazing to look at; the variety of line weight, the tangible texture of clothes and faces that he is able to create from the stroke of a pen, is not only instructive but really pleasing to the eye (much of this attention to detail is on display on the splash page of “Hoohaw”).

But the thing I notice most about a Jack Davis drawing: the shoes and hands. The men’s shoes have such great detail and specificity. And the hands, well, they may be, hands down (oi!), the best in the business; you can see every joint, how they all work together to form an actual, functional mechanism. Indeed, a Jack Davis comic panel is a treat to behold.

Long live Jack Davis, the King of Hands!

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The Zombie and Shark Musical Variety Hour Which Sometimes, Very Rarely Mind You, Has a Cooking Segment at the End of the Program, Show

After their successful pairing in the hilarious and light-hearted Lucio Fulci film, Zombi 2: Electric Boogaloo, Zombie and Shark decided to have a go with their own television variety show. This was not the first time a famous duo attempted to solidify themselves among the pantheon of memorable variety shows; Frank Sinatra and Fidel Castro, Albert Einstein and Phyllis Diller, The Wolfman and Frankenstein are just a few of the pairings that failed stupendously. But Zombie and Shark were confidant. America was ready for a primetime variety show hosted by the undead and a deadly shark. 

They pitched the show to CBS and the next fall, The Zombie and Shark Musical Variety Hour Which Sometimes, Very Rarely Mind You, Has a Cooking Segment at the End of the Program, Show premiered to the highest ratings in the history of CBS,  a record which was previously held by the televised launch of the first monkey in space. The nation was collectively smitten with the charismatic duo. Frequent guests included Harvey Korman, Carol Bernett and the man who invented processed cheese spread, Charles Gouda.

Zombie and Shark were the toast of Hollywood until The Smothers Brothers burst upon the scene with a retooled version of their old variety show. Initially called Mr. Bagorium’s Fantastique Ice Cream-A-Torium before it was changed the title everyone remembers, Now We’re Gonna Sing At You, the show was an instant hit for the Smoothers Brothers. Zombie and Shark were hastily removed from the spotlight.

Today, Zombie and Shark spend their sunset years in a retirement village in Florida, recreating their memorable match-up from Zombi 2 in the community pool every day at 3:00 with an evening show at 5:30. The audience, consisting entirely of retirees from surrounding communities, couldn’t be more pleased with the two minor celebrities.

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Take the Monsters Bowling, Take Them Bowling…

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Lust For Frankenstein: Lady Frankenstein

Lady Frankenstein (1971)

Director: Mel Welles

I don’t know anything about this Lady Gaga all the kids are talking about, but I can tell you that the Italian entry into the Eurotrash/horror category, Lady Frankenstein (La Figlia di Frankenstein), is worth some attention in the canon of Frankenstein-themed movies. Not the typical B-movie version of the original Universal run, Lady Frankenstein indulges in scenes and characters that manage to subvert past attempts at pure repetition. Case in point: the choice of a woman as the stand-in for the mad scientist role of Dr. Frankenstein. Some writing on this movie has pointed toward the emergence of feminism in the late sixties, early seventies as the catalyst for this decision. True, the Dr. Frankenstein of this film is posited as a strong, ambitious woman, but more anything the notion of Dr. Frankenstein as a woman seems to be a rather transparent excuse for nude scenes rather than a caculated illumination of a political movement such as feminism.

Directed by Mel Welles with a script by cult writer Edward di Lorenzo, this film stars the sultry Rosalba Neri (listed as Sara Bey in America), an Edwige Fenech look-alike who made the rounds of European horror films, spaghetti westerns and euro sleaze in the 60s and 70s and esteemed character actor, Joseph Cotton, who, by this time, was at the end of an eventful career (he is quoted as saying, “Orson Welles lists Citizen Kane as his best film, Alfred Hitchcock opts for Shadow of a Doubt and Sir Carol Reed chose The Third Man – and I’m in all of them”). The production is surprisingly high-end, Welles seemingly making a stab at the quality and look of Hammer Films, with specific Italian touches.  The results are notable indeed; Lady Frankenstein feels and looks different than what was current at the time in most Italian horror/Giallo films (in fact it looks like an early Mario Bava production). Imagine a gothic Jane Austen film but with body snatching, and a Frankenstein monster that looks like the Elephant Man on a good day, and Joseph Cotton. 

As Lady Frankenstein opens, Baron Frankenstein (Joseph Cotten) and his assistant Dr. Marshall (Paul Muller) are in the process of receiving a corpse for their re-animation experiments from the local grave-digger. The next morning the Baron’s daughter, Tania (Rosalba Neri) arrives at the Baron’s castle having completed her University course in medicine. She wants to join the family business, but the Baron is resistant to this notion.

The Baron and Dr. Marshall eventually complete their crazy experiments, the culmination of which is implanting the brain of a criminal into a giant Neanderthal. Of course, re-animation is never as easy as it looks, and the newly-minted creature kills his creator, the Baron, by hugging him to death. Perhaps the monster just wanted someone to love. 

With her father dead, Tiana decides to take the mantel of local nut job and create her own monster, one that can kill the first which is now ambling across the countryside in search of locals to squeeze. Her ultimate motivation for this decision is convoluted at best: to save the good name of Frankenstein by creating a monster that will stop the other monster who is killing villagers, which was created by the Baron in the first place. (Well, no one ever said the storyline had to make sense. Throw in a good bit of nudity and plot holes are forgotten.)

Soon a plan is hatched to place the brain of Dr. Marshall into the body of the Baron’s slightly retarded man-servant, Thomas. In one of the weirder scenes in the film, Tiana seduces Thomas with her wares, and, during love-making, Marshall smothers the man-child with a pillow. Tiana soon completes her insane plan to recover the good name of Frankenstein, but everything backfires when an angry mob with torches and pitchforks show up at the castle (it wouldn’t be a Frankenstein movie without an angry mob). The film quickly comes to an abrupt and bizarre end when, amid the fire set by the mob, the new Thomas-Marshall hybrid monster kills Tiana in the throes of passion. It’s an awkward ending, but seems to fit with the somewhat clumsy pacing of the rest of the movie.

As with any B-movie/exploitation outing, the dialogue and acting can be questionable at best, but Lady Frankenstein emerges above other standard Frankenstein-themed schlock like Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter (1966) mostly due to its production value and the casting of Rosalba Neri. In addition to the more obvious merits, there are some truly strange moments in Lady Frankenstein that save it from being condemned as typical B-Movie faire (the EuroTrash angle at least helps it from being too run of the mill). Most of these moments have to do with Tiana plotting some fiendishly pseudo-sexual manipulation of the weaker sex, which, it would seem, leads to her ultimate downfall.

Now that Lady Frankenstein has been relinquished into the arms of “public domain”, there are several places online to see the film in its entirety for free, which, really, is not a bad way to spend an afternoon.

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Sweating Bullets

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Lots of Jerks and One Funny Man

In the grand tradition of super-sizing crappy fast-food combo meals, this Sunday night’s broadcast of the 82nd Annual Academy Awards will not only have an expanded Best Picture category (great, more movies about people struggling, dying, being really, really earnest, and or struggling at dying while being really, really earnest about it), the Oscars will have two hosts as well—Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin—because one host interacting with awkward and dumfounded presenters is just not enough. While Alec Baldwin is engaging in that smarmy used-car dealer way, it would be great to see Baldwin play straight-man to the much funnier and multi-talented Martin. Could this be another Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis comedy juggernaut in the offing? Probably not, seeing as Steve Martin’s frenetic and howlinginly retarded stand-up stage persona is long gone, but one can only hope (not that I don’t enjoy his humor pieces for the Shouts and Murmurs section of the New Yorker, but there’s something wonderful about a guy doing an entire “bit” based around blowing up funny-shaped balloons). 

And really, who wants to see the ultra-banal James Cameron make a jack-ass out of himself yet again, when you can watch Steve Martin as the genuine article and actually laugh yourself pukey…

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Strange Tales of the Zombie Girl

A new, more stylized design for the Zombie Girl character I’ve been tinkering with. Her powers? Zombification of course. I think. Or maybe she can summon a horde of muskrats that work as part-time CPAs.

 

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Night and the City

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