Happy Halloween!

"Your dates are here!"

The Horror, the Horror...Halloween Countdown 2009

So, despite all the terrible reviews (I feel like) I read, I pulled DIARY OF THE DEAD, the fifth "official" George Romero zombie flick, released perhaps a couple years ago. I'd had some trepidation about it, considering LAND OF THE DEAD (the fourth) was more than serviceable but showing some "strain" in Romero's attempt to navigate a "studio" zombie movie.


With DIARY OF THE DEAD, Romero is working more "independently" once more. The red flags for this movie, however, begin with Romero returning to the initial moments of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD territory, refitting his zombie mythos into our current society, with its hubris, its slavering consumerism, its shallowness.


Man, I wanted to like DIARY, and it's still better than most zombie ilk made in the wake of DAWN OF THE DEAD in 1979 (not the admittedly fun but excreable remake...which takes a premise and dumbs it down significantly--another strike for Romero in that he "embraced" the remake, which is like me "embracing" a Tarzan movie starring Zach Braff)...which is to say, DIARY OF THE DEAD is a monumentally pretentious movie that hamstrings Romero in a way I've never seen before.


I've loved most everything Romero has done (still haven't seen all of KNIGHTRIDERS), and I think he was and is still as good as ever. His movie BRUISER was a fantastic "idea" movie, probably the best of modern Romero. LAND OF THE DEAD suffered from a desire for Romero to create sympathy for the Walking Dead, accomplished in a method that fit Romero's more proletariat style...Romero may layered his stories with social commentary, but subtle he ain't. "Thinking" zombies was almost as bad as "running" zombies, but you couldn't argue Romero didn't know how to shoot the sh*t out of a good zombie slaughter scene, whether the eaters are eating or getting blown away.



DIARY OF THE DEAD strains credulity, sure, but worse it just heaps on the heavy-handedness with its characters. The idea is that a group of Pitt college kids are shooting a class-project horror movie and stumble into Romero's "new" Zombie Apocalypse. One kid, name of Creed, decides to document the events on camera, downloaded to his laptop and edited, for posterity and presumably to become "famous." This isn't a short-coming of the movie at all. I liked the set-up actually...the characters are really hard to stomach. Everyone is incredulous that Mr. Creed is filming death, moray decay and cannibalistic murder, but nobody tries to stop him. Romero never touches on the idea that perhaps, just perhaps, all these youthful bright lights want to be stars. Even if it's the movie about the end of the world.


Instead most of the flick is concerned with a bunch of pompous posturing by various characters, which does fit in with the modern mindset of "starring" in each and every one's own movie. The problem is that the Creed kid just simply has no strength, moral or otherwise, while the "center" of the movie is his girlfriend, a "college student" if she didn't look thirty years old. Her strength comes from constantly brow-beating her poor boyfriend for his sketchy ethics in the crisis, and as understandable as it is...well, the kid never has a good argument for his actions. Frankly his relationship with this girl doesn't seem remotely real...without any basis for emotion, we can't have the tense attraction as between Ben and Barbara in the original NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, or the strained need of Stephen and Francine in DAWN OF THE DEAD, or the playful pull between John and Sarah in DAY OF THE DEAD. In the fourth film LAND, the failing of DIARY's central relationship is also clear, a kind of muted charm without heat. The problem with LAND and DIARY lies wholly within their inability to make us care about the characters. This wasn't the case at all in the first three movies, but Romero's natural subtlety hinders inherent suspense.



Anyway, there's little in DIARY that is purely Romero, which is no good, and yet I can't dismiss it. I can say that Romero's reliance on CGI splatter is really grating. He might as well put the film reels of all his great movies in the bathtub and piss all over them. CGI in a Romero zombie movie is akin to watching classic 1970s porn in which all the full-bodied bush has been removed for the sensibilities of a shaved-beaver modern mentality. If you get my meaning. The whole point of 1970s porn would be the hairy genitals, hairy chests, and hairy upper lips topped off with white-man afros. Without those details, you don't have 1970s porn. And without squibs and Tom Savini make-up effects, you haven't a Romero zombie movie. It stands as a testement to the fact that every movie ever made is an accomplishment of many, not just one talent.


I can't recomment DIARY OF THE DEAD to anybody but the completist. Yet I can't say it's worthless, because there's never been a worthless Romero movie ever made. So there's that.




By the way, the top image is one of Travis Pitts' fantastic "Zombie America" 1950s retro posters. Go here http://www.imagekind.com/MemberProfile.aspx?MID=c3993939-15b1-45c0-bf80-904fb28bf10e for more such and others of brilliant magnitude.

The Horror...the Horror: Halloween Movies!

Ever since I was a kid in the 1970s, I've understood that Halloween for little kids is putting on a cheap plastic mask and rubber-smell (ahhh, how great it was) body vest with Frankenstein Monster or the Hulk on it, bought from K-Mart in those cool boxes with the transparent window so you could see the mask. The thing is, you can only do this until you're, like, nine or ten at the outside. Then you're a partial-grown thug bullying the small kids on Halloween night.

What happens is, you start having the Halloween Creature Feature type thing, movies throughout the evening and night. I feel like this was a serious part of Halloween when I was growing up. I think it was so wonderful and accessible because horror movies were all classics from the 1930s-1960s, so everyone knew them and loved them, and rarely did they need to be "edited for television." These days, with all the Jasons and Freddies and Aliens and Predators running around, it's hard to have a Halloween movie night where the kids and the adults can all watch.

That said, I'm not making a list for General Audiences. Just for me. And you, lover.

My favorite Halloween movies for Halloween, in no particular order!

Halloween Cover Calvacade!

Probably my favorite monster/weird comic book covers. There's never a time not to show them off!

What Should Have Happened: Gil Kane's WEREWOLF BY NIGHT!

"You know What Should Have Happened?"

This is a question that I use to torture myself when I consider how events might have gone in the past. Like you imagine what John Carpenter's CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON might have been like, had that movie ever been made back in his prime (as rumored). Or you imagine a The Shadow movie directed by Sam Raimi (could happen.) Or you think you came up with, like, the greatest comic book fight ever (Fantastic Four Human Torch vs the 1940s android Human Torch), only to find out it was done a couple years before you were born.


In that vein, "What Should Have Happened?" considers, well, what could have happened if the looking glass had gotten tilted just a little more, if the chicken bones had landed just another way. We might be reading/seeing something more different, more fantastic, than we could imagine.

So in the spirit of All Hallow's Eve, I thought I'd mention the underrated WEREWOLF BY NIGHT comic of the 1970s and what it might have done to become mentioned in the same hallowed breath as TOMB OF DRACULA.

And his name was Gil Kane.

Kane had been a superhero standard for DC Comics throughout the 1960s, pencilling classic runs on THE ATOM and GREEN LANTERN prominently. His dynamic compositions were unrivalled, though Kane certainly had detractors. He leaped onto the Marvel bandwagon at some point in the late 1960s and plugged away at various titles like AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, THE INCREDIBLE HULK and CAPTAIN AMERICA AND THE FALCON.

I never cared much for Kane's artwork. That's a fault in me, folks. I never approached a Kane comic and thought, "Hot damn! Gil Kane!" like I would other artists. Latter years Carmine Infantino and Frank Robbins fell into that category of bringing out my apathy, both as a kid and an adult. But, as with everything, it's basic ignorance that is shown up in the end, and after seeing Infantino's seminal THE FLASH work from the early 1960s, and Frank Robbins' feral renderings of THE SHADOW in the short-lived 1970s venture, I had to stifle any misgivings. So it was with Gil Kane and WEREWOLF BY NIGHT.

The short summation of WEREWOLF BY NIGHT: the series lasted three years, centered on a young teenage dude named Jack Russell (yeah, terrible pun in the name) who has inherited a lycanthropic curse once he hits eighteen years of age. Every phase of the full moon he turns into a ravaging Wolf Man, and the bulk of the series involves him trying to break his curse and save his younger sister before she, in turn, suffers the same curse.

WWBN's art chores were handled by the great Mike Ploog initially, and then workman Don Perlin (above) arrived for the bulk of the series. Doug Moench wrote almost all of the series, but for most of the first issues it was Gerry Conway and Len Wein writing. There were some good stories there, but nobody seemed to get a solid handle on WWBN. Marv Wolfman ("Finally! A Wolfman writes a Werewolf!") came onboard in strong fashion, with the aforementioned Gil Kane for the two-part "Hangman" arc.

Gil Kane only penciled those two issues of WWBN, 11 and 12, with the fantastic splash presented above. The next issue was Kane inked by Don Perlin, who would take over art chores soon. The story concerns the "Werewolf" (okay, I'm going to call him "Wolf Man" because a werewolf is a man who turns into a literal wolf, as in folklore, while a Wolf Man is a wolf/man hybrid created by the movies in the 1940s...which is what WWBN's adventures are about, a Wolf Man) and a masked avenger called "The Hangman" duke it out in Gil Kane-rendered dynamism. The Hangman is a vigilante who not only saves women from being robbed and raped on the city streets, but he kidnaps those victims himself and imprisons them in his secret lair. Why? So he can protect them. This was quite a story, one of the many gems at the beginning (and at the end) of the series.

Aside from Tom Sutton's artwork on another two-parter (and who knows why that association didn't take off...Sutton never seemed to work on anything at Marvel or anywhere else very long, far as I know), Kane brought a new kind of sensibility to his bombastic superhero style: the art of terror and suspense.

Some might say it wasn't a good fit, but I don't know. I see some interesting stuff going on with Kane's Wolf Man.

I know Don Perlin was a solid artist, the kind who, like Don Heck and Sal Buscema, kept churning out the comics on schedule for Marvel in the 1970s.

Not to say Perlin wasn't good, but when compared with the beautiful power of Gene Colan and Tom Palmer's classic TOMB OF DRACULA work (and you see their version of the Wolf Man of WWBN above), WWBN suffered in comparison.

I'll probably say WWBN never acheived the "classic" status due to the art, mostly (though admittedly writer Moench never quite hit on a solid formula for WEREWOLF...the secondary characters didn't have the same life as in his subsequent MASTER OF KUNG FU series. To be honest, WEREWOLF BY NIGHT and Moench's other creation Moon Knight suffered the same lack of interesting subplots, which TOMB OF DRACULA scribe Marv Wolfman excelled at). Still in all, WWBN is a solid read, even if Perlin's art looks mechanical at times. It's still good, but not as good as some of the other stuff of that era that critics hold up as pure gold.

So I was thinking about Gil Kane and what might have happened, had Kane been the artist of WWBN beginning with issue 11. He certainly did some covers for the book, reproduced here. All I keep thinking is how Kane's work looked at that time, how the art had a sensual richness to it that would prevade Kane's work the rest of his career. Couple that with Kane's obvious desire to "break free" of superhero comics (with his dabbling in Richard Stark-esque hard crime stuff with his "Savage" stories for independent publishers), and I just wonder if an opportunity was missed.

I wonder if Gil Kane might have produced one of the best comics of the 1970s in those years. Who knows?

But there's something, something savage and watchful, hiding in those covers. Something that will attack, and tear, and rip, if given the chance. I mean, something is there.

Isn't there?

The Horror, the Horror...Countdown to All Hallow's Eve

To set the tone for this, the best of months, I'm throwing up some of the coolest music from one of the coolest burly bands in the world: DEADBOLT. If'n you don't know about them, you best find out!





Speaking of Halloween, I won't say the holiday as I understand it is about as dead as Abe Lincoln, but I think people have sucked all the mystery out of it. See, the point of Halloween is to become someone, or something, else. In fact, you could be said to be "possessed" by the very evil spirits which roam that night, and to give them corporeal form is a kind of sacrifice. Or, you could just be having fun without insisting everyone know the drunken anal expulsive is you. And don't get me started on how parents can't let their kids twenty feet out of their sight while trick-or-treating; kind of hard to blame them, what with all the sex offenders living right next door to you. Is the world really full of more pedophiles today, or does it just seem that way and there was really tons of kid-touchers back when but they knew if they touched kids they'd receive a shotgun shampoo? Maybe all this "civilized" law-abidingness where it concerns sex offenders isn't the way to go. Maybe folks should know who their neighbors are. Either way, Halloween isn't the wonderful, strange experience it once was. Ray Bradbury weeps.