31 Days of Dracula- Day 2: The Graphic Novel

Actually, I was wrong yesterday and didn't realize it until later.  The FIRST version of Dracula I ever read was the "Now Age Illustrated" version.  It's a graphic novel version from before they were a thing.  It's illustrated by Filipino artist Nestor Redondo.

Even today, I still remember black and white art.  The moment that stands out, even after all these years is Dracula, a gleam in his eyes and his hand raised.. asking "What devil or what witch was ever so great as Attila, whose blood is in these veins?' or whatever the quote was- I know it was abridged, but I definitely remember the part about Attila.

While I was working on this I had a moment:
OH MY.  1) Marvel did an edition of this book.  2) In color.
This was the panel I was remembering and DAMN if it isn't as effective now as it was then.

31 Days of Dracula- Day 1: The Book

Happy Halloween Month! 
In celebration of the most monsteriffic of holidays, I'm going to look at one of the greats of the genre, Dracula. 

I'll start where it all began: the novel.  Originally published in 1897, the novel has had multiple editions over the decades.  These three are the core of my bookshelf, and I'll be dealing with each of them in the next couple of weeks, but I'll start with the Essenital Dracula edited by Leonard Wolf from ibooks, the most recent version of the edition I read first. 
Yes, that does sound a little confusing.  The text used in this book is from the second printing of the first edition.  Wolf was the editor and annotator of The Annotated Dracula in 1975.  Byron Preiss Publishing updated the Annotated Dracula as The Essential Dracula, not to be confused with the Essential Dracula from McNally and Florescu from the seventies...
This is what happens when books enter the public domain.

Bats

I have to thank Kensington books for making William Johnstone's Bats available to me in galley format...the fact that I got a comped copy didn't influence me at all, but I have to say: I LOVED IT.

I love the "nature runs amok" genre, and one of my favorite movies is the eco-horror film from 1972, Frogs.  I also enjoyed the (no relation) 1999 Lou Diamond Phillips movie Bats.  So when I saw a listing for the e-release of William Johnstone's 1993 book Bats, I knew I had to read it.

It's crazy.  Johnny McManly lives alone in his compound in Lousiana, hiding from the world and kill squads after being a black ops superninja.  Then the bats show up. 

Giant bats. Smart giant bats. Smart giant mutant bats. 
A bat scientist shows up.  She's woman enough for Johnny, and he's man enough for her, in a totally g-rated sort of way.

The bats can handle sunlight. And are rabid. 
Then the Satanists show up. They aren't too smart so they let one of the bats bite them. Because Hail Satan. Rabies. Not Zombies, but rabid, bitey Satanists.

...and then there's a wild boar. A newly rabid wild boar.

Things just get crazier and crazier, in an awesome Saturday afternoon way.

The media shows up.  Johnstone gripes way too much about the liberal media, making his newspeople whiney enough that you're glad when the bats kill them.  But then, you know they're going to die because it's just that kind of book.

Because it's in football country, we get a nice chapter of Friday Night Lights go to Hell bats attack.

But Johnny McManly stops them with the power of his American testosterone.

The author is just to the left of Tim LaHaye. Not surprising given the inherent conservative nature of his usual genre, the western.

Deus Ex Machina ending, but otherwise a serviceable by the numbers nature gone amok story. Recommended.

The Swarm

There's an old joke about Pia Zadora in the title role in a production of The Diary of Anne Frank.  Toward the end of the play, someone in the audience  had gotten so annoyed with her, they yelled out "She's in the attic!".

Irwin Allen's The Swarm is like that.  A killer bees disaster movie, it should have been a hit. By the last act, though, you want to smear honey on Michael Caine and Katherine Ross, and not in the sexy way.

Following his successes with The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, and in the wake of Earthquake and the Airport movies, Allen returned to directing (after doing the action sequences in The Towering Inferno) after a sixteen year break.  He should have stuck to directing.

Based on the novel by Arthur Herzog, Irwin took a script from his Inferno writer Stierling Silliphant and turned it into a cast of thousands epic.  Michael Caine, Henry Fonda, Jose Ferrer, Olivia De Haviland, Richard Chamberlain, Patty Duke, and Slim Pickens  All wonderfully, marvelously overacting- Pickens mourning his son in a ten minute segment has more range- and EMOTION!- than I've seen in, well anything else he's done.

The effects should have been better.  It was Irwin Allen, for Heaven's sake.  But the wideshots of the swarm looked like coffee grounds.  The final bee killing conflagration was bad bluescreen.

The only redeeming things about it were A) the really, really bad science and B) awesomely snarkable material.  I can be quiet and respectful to movies when they warrant it, but this was PRIME MST3K materail.

We got a flatscreen television and a Roku for Christmas; Warner Brother has an interesting selection of movies that I'm looking forward to watching-  The Swarm?  I'm looking forward to forgetting.

Goals for 2016

I fell behind a little bit in my plans for the blog... things got a little crazy toward the end of the year.  But 2016 is going to be much more productive.
At the top of my plans?
To be a healthier Monster.
Right now, this is me:

and this is the Monster I want to be:

So there's a challenge.

We recently got a new television with a Roku device, so I'm going to be watching more movies.

I'll be writing about those.

I'm going to read more.

I'll be writing about that as well.

And I'm going to continue working on "the novel."  Because the Monster has to have a dream, right?

The Howling & Moon of the Wolf

I need to watch more werewolf movies.
Really, heck, who don't, right?
I decided that the other morning while watching the 1972 tv movie The Moon of the Wolf, starring David Janssen as a small town sheriff in Louisiana where... something is killing people.  The poster sort of spoils it, while the movie itself is rather like a murder mystery, with suspects and clues, til the third act reveal, where you actually get to see the killer for the first time.
It was pretty by the numbers, but workable for the constraints of the medium   In fact, the murder mystery aspect of the story was reminiscent of The Beast Must Die, which was part of my decision to try and watch more in the genre- the idea that werewolf movies- at least the ones where the identity of the werewolf is unknown, like Silver Bullet or Moon of the Wolf, are sort of a cross genre thing, the horror mystery.  I'll be getting back to that in future posts.

One the other hand,  sometimes the werewolves are right in front of you, a point as old as Lon Chaney's The Wolfman and An American Werewolf in London... and of course, The Howling.

Dee Wallace plays a reporter who, after getting attacked while on an assignment, leaves the city to visit a colony/spa run by a psychotherapist to recuperate.

While there, she hears the howling of wolves and realizes... somethings wrong.

Because, yes, it's a colony of werewolves.  Things go downhill for her from there.  But not for the viewer- The Howling is full of references to wolfishness, from clips of the original The Wolfman, including an after the credits bit, vintage Big Bad Wolf cartoons, and (my favorite) a copy of Ginsberg's poem Howl on a character's desk.

I haven't seen this in years, and I was really surprised at how similar it was to Howling IV: The Original Nightmare, which was essentially another film version of Gary Brandner's novel the The Howling that the movie The Howling was based on.  Similar, but so very much better than IV to a degree of noon and midnight.

Children of the Corn

I recently decided I was going to try and not re watch  any movie I'd seen within the last five years.
Instead of limiting my choices, I've found myself revisiting things I'd consigned to background noise and I'm pleasantly surprised.  This morning's movie, Children of The Corn (1984), is a terrific example of this.

I remember when it came out in the mid eighties, the cover to Stephen King's short story collection Night Shift was changed to the poster art in a tie-in.

The movie stars a pre-Terminator Linda Hamilton and a pre-Thritysomething Peter Horton as Vicky and Burt, a couple driving to Seattle by way of Nebraska.  Unlike their bickering counterparts of the short story, they're a cute couple- Vicki sings along with a "school's out" song to celebrate Burt's graduation from med school and his getting a position in Washington state.

Of course their journey is interrupted by them running over someone in the middle of the road, a child who was a good as dead, since he'd had his throat cut.

Since the movie starts with a flashback to the small town of Gatlin being taken over by it's children, the slaughter of diner patrons after church being effective since they really do look like small town churchgoers eating at a diner after the service, the boy's death wasn't as much as a surprise as it was in the short story.  In fact, the flashback is kind of a flaw for me- what I loved about the short story is the eerie discovery, the reader is along for the ride with Burt and Vicky as they discover this town, empty of adults, a sense of unease seeps from the pages.
The viewer knows what the couple are getting into even if the reader doesn't.

The monster at the center of all this is... something.  Wisely unseen, He Who Walks Behind the Rows, works through the children, appearing for the most part as a travelling disturbance of earth, rather like a large mole, but later re-animates the body of a follower and appears as a technicolor stormcloud.

Despite some of the special effects not aging gracefully (the technicolor stormcloud), Children of the Corn holds up pretty well, thanks to a foundation of a good Stephen King short story and two pretty above average -for an eighties horror film- leads.

Apparently, there are eight sequels.  I've seen the second movie in the series, IN A THEATER!, because a classmate and an acquaintance had roles.  I may re watch that, but from what I've  read about the others, I'll probably be avoiding them.