Review: 'Kiss of Death' Blu-ray

Victor Mature is Nick Bianco, a two-bit galoot who gets pinched after a sloppy jewel heist. The coppers lean on Bianco to rat out his cronies, but he’s a stand up guy and goes up river. While he’s there, he gets the skinny that his wife killed herself after Rizzo, one of Bianco’s partners in crime, raped her, leaving Bianco’s rug rats locked up at the local orphanage. That’s the last straw for Bianco, who’s finally ready to squeal in exchange for parole. However, instead of squawking about his old accomplices, he starts playing a much more dangerous game by dishing dirt on Tommy Udo, a total psycho who did some time with Bianco.

Largely because Mature is a bit of a cold-fish lead, Kiss of Death is a slow burn, but it blazes white-hot whenever Richard Widmark steps on screen to embody Tommy Udo. No one played coyote-lean crazy like Widmark. Imagine Frank Gorshin losing the green tights and giggles and just going full on terrifying as The Riddler and you’ll get an idea of how Widmark plays Udo. The scene in which Udo pays Rizzo’s wheelchair-bound mom a visit is a classic of its grotesque sort. Director Henry Hathaway also deserves a hat tip when he plays it more subtly. The post-heist scene in which Bianco and his cronies make an excruciatingly slow escape on an elevator may have even taught Hitchcock a thing or two about suspense.

Twilight Time’s new blu-ray edition of Kiss of Death is light on the extras—it only boasts a trailer and a couple of audio commentaries—but the film looks fabulous with deep contrast, natural grain, and a very clean presentation. Audio can be a bit crackly and tinny, but it more than gets the job done, which is more than I can say for Nick Bianco.

Review: Sundazed's Standells Reissues

In 1966, L.A.’s Standells defined sixties garage rock and gave Boston its signature song when they recorded former Four Prep Ed Cobb’s “Dirty Water”. With its sneering delivery, greasy riff, and show of solidarity with “muggers and thieves” (cool people, all), the track defined the band as bad boys even though Larry Tamblyn, Dick Dodd, Tony Valentino, and Gary Lane insisted that they were a nice quartet of young fellows. However, going that route would do them no favors, and The Standells were absolutely at their best when playing the role of druggies (“Medication”), rabble rousers (“Riot on Sunset Strip”), and letches (“Try It”…the wide banning of which was a huge feather in the band’s collective cap).

They pulled off that masquerade without fail on their debut album. Dirty Water is a consistently nasty collection of menace and mayhem.  Obviously, the title track and the minor classic “Sometimes Good Guys Don’t Wear White”  are fabulous, but so are relative oddities like the sexy/stoned “Medication”, the lascivious “Little Sally Tease”, and the fuzzy “Rari”. A cover of “19^th Nervous Breakdown” won’t make you forget who Mick Jagger is, but it is right at home here. Even the token ballad “Pride and Joy” is tough.

The problem with The Standell’s follow up Why Pick On Me/Sometimes Good Guys Don’t Wear White (aside from a title that makes the name of The Left Banke’s debut seem positively concise) is that they go too soft on certain tracks like the Italian-language “Mi Hai Fatto Innamorare” and the almost Four Seasons-like “The Girl and the Moon”. The approach simply does not suit The Standells. Still, the sophomore album with the name I don’t have the energy to type again has enough grungy smashes to redeem it. “Black Hearted Woman”, “Mr. Nobody”, the brooding “I Hate to Leave You”, and the tracks for which the album was named do exactly what you want Standells tracks to do, though “Sometimes Good Guys Don’t Wear White” is a pointless rerun after its appearance on Dirty Water.

Released in 1967, the year of obligatory experimentation, Try It proved that The Standells could stretch themselves without violating their attitudinal ethos. Soulful horns embellish “Can’t Help But Love You” and a cover of “Ninety-Nine and a Half” powerfully, while the breezy, keyboards, mallets, and Brasil ’66-style harmonies of “Trip to Paradise” and the trippy swoops of “All Fall Down” are perfectly picturesque. In this more eclectic environment, even the light “Poor Shell of a Man” sounds really good. There are also more traditionally punky tracks like “Try It”, an acid-spitting take on “St. James Infirmary”, the throbbing “Barracuda”, the psychedelic yet totally exciting “Did You Ever Have That Feeling”, and the chaotic “Riot on Sunset Strip” for those who prefer The Standells to stay in the garage. All of this makes for what may be the band’s best LP.

 Sundazed records is now reissuing these three essential Standells albums on LP and CD. The CDs also include a few bonus tracks each. A fairly weak crop augments Dirty Water, though an appropriately tongue-in-cheek version of the Batman theme is a lot of fun and features some thunderous drumming.  The trashier extras on Why Pick On Me/Sometimes Good Guys Don’t Wear White are more essential because they help dilute the softness that plagues some of the proper album tracks. Try It, the most eclectic Standells album, also receives the most eclectic bonus tracks with the demo-like “Get Away from Here”; “Animal Girl”, which repeats the too-soft problem of those Pick On Me/Good Guys tracks; the stilted R&B of “Soul Dripping”; and the smoother soul of “Can You Dig It”. Sound across all three mono CDs is exceptional. You grumpy few who gripe that Sundazed’s discs are often too murky will have no such complaints here.

Review: 'Jay Disbrow’s Monster Invasion'

During the fifties, Jay Disbrow was a versatile writer and illustrator who dabbled in a variety of comic genres, but I’ll give you one guess which genre is the focus of Craig Yoe’s latest anthology, Jay Disbrow’s Monster Invasion. Despite some trepidation over the “gross” leanings of top-dog E.C.’s comics, Disbrow threw himself into fashioning horror tales for comics such as Ghostly Weird Stories, Forbidden Worlds, and Spook. His stories tend to be somewhat routine, but his artwork, which revels in giant, hairy monsters and some of the most deliberately ugly faces you’ll ever see outside of a nightmare, is distinctive indeed.

Disbrow’s most imaginative total-originals are “The Homecoming”, in which a Navy Admiral discovers his true nature in truly surprising fashion, and “Ultimate Destiny”, which puts a deliciously gloppy new spin on the old “I wish to live forever” plot. Disbrow kind of makes up for his more so-so plots with dense language that can get a tad purple but never talks down to the comics crowd. He also deserves major points for coining what may be the finest monster expletive ever coined. More than once, a terrifying Disbrow creation breaks the tension by exclaiming, “Graw!”

Other storytellers are behind the most compellingly far-out plots. His publisher, L.B. Cole, contributed the synopsis for “The Beast from Below”, in which a miner who fails to incite a labor strike turns into a giant murder monkey. Disbrow confesses that “The Insider”, in which a monster emerges from a book, is “a shameful swipe from H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Outsider’”… a story Disbrow apparently loved so much that he adapted it again as “Dwellers in Darkness”. Graw!

Review: The Creation's 'Action Painting'

They never managed to get a hit like a lot of the other bands that Shel Talmy produced, but some rock cultists— such as Talmy— insist that The Creation was every bit as good as The Kinks and The Who. You have to take a lot of what Talmy says with a Rock of Gibraltar-size grain of salt, but in this case, there’s some truth to his assertion. With mighty, colorful, crazy records such as “Making Time”, “Nightmares”, and “How Does It Feel to Feel”, The Creation easily made records as good as the ’66-era Kinks and Who.

Consequently, The Creation have been anthologized a few times, though the most thorough collections are kind of a mess. I’m specifically referring to Retroactive’s 1998 comps Making Time (Volume One) and Biff Bang Pow! (Volume Two). Both discs are loaded with great music, for sure, but they’re programmed in a nearly unlistenable manner. Different mixes of the same songs are sprinkled about in such a way that the listening experience becomes vexingly repetitive. 

Numero Group’s new collection Action Painting solves this problem with more considerate programming. All of the original mono mixes are gathered on Disc One with only one repeated song: “How Does It Feel to Feel” appears in both its original UK version and its superior US remake, which is tacked onto the end of the disc long after the other version has played. Disc Two begins with four decent cuts by The Creation’s initial incarnation as The Mark Four before moving on to new, Talmy-approved stereo mixes of most of the songs on disc one.

This approach is much more listenable than Retroactive’s, even though I would have given that buzzsaw US version of “How Does It Feel to Feel” pride of place early in the disc and arranged the tracks according to when they were recorded rather than when they were released so that “I Am the Walker” and “Ostrich Man”—two of The Creation’s finest—aren’t buried so far at the end of the disc. But these are minor quibbles. Really, Disc One of Action Painting is superb and basically all The Creation you’ll ever need to hear with nice, thick remastering by Talmy and Reuben Cohen.

The stereo mixes on Disc Two are more of a curiosity, though they do reveal some interesting, heretofore-buried sounds, such as some keening backing vocals on “How Does It Feel to Feel” and “Through My Eyes”. The tracks are allowed to play out completely without fades, which discloses interesting tidbits too. “Through My Eyes” has certainly never sounded more psychedelically demented than it does here.  Disc Two is also the only spot where The Creation’s covers of “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Hey Joe” appear on Action Painting, but these are fairly inessential tracks and you’ll never miss them if you decide to only keep Disc One in rotation. I certainly don’t miss having them in mono.

The hardback book/slipcase packaging is very attractive with a bevy of color photos, including repros of all The Creation’s picture sleeves , as well as some informative biographical and track-by-track essays. The too-tight pockets for the CDs could have been thought out a lot better, though. Nevertheless, Action Painting is a lovely package of some of the sixties’ most brutal music. It may even be definitive.