Review: Reissues of Robert Pollard's 'Kid Marine' and 'Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department'

As the twentieth century transitioned into the twenty-first, Robert Pollard was in a similar state of transition. In 1998 and 1999, he made his first hi-fi Guided by Voices albums, each with new line ups, each for different labels, and each with different critical consensuses (Mag Earwhig!: yay! Do the Collapse: nay!).

Bob’s all-new solo career was similarly unstable. He began it in 1996 with the promisingly haphazard Not in My Airforce, which he followed with the tight, almost uniformly terrific Waved Out in 1998. However, the possibility that solo Pollard might continue to progress fell apart with that same year’s Kid Marine. The music was not bad—a new backing band that would help him make the villainously underrated Do the Collapse provide polished performances— but the songs don’t display Pollard’s usual golden ear. The lack of structure can be expected from the guy who created all those fantastic fragments on Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes. The lack of hooks is much less forgivable. There are some pretty good songs, such as “Far Out Crops” and “White Gloves Come Off”, but there’s nothing in the realm of the previous albums’ “Psychic Pilot Clocks Out” or “Subspace Biographies” to anchor it. “Town of Mirrors” boasts a big shout-along chorus perfect for band/audience communion in concert, but that chorus isn’t very catchy and the rest of the track barely qualifies as a song.

Then the instability continued as Pollard finished out the century by collaborating with GBV’s newest MVP wingman, Doug Gillard. Multi-instrumentalist Gillard recorded the instrumental tracks for Pollard’s songs solo before passing the tapes back to the writer, who fastened his own weird words, melodies, and voice to them. The results are probably Bob’s best non-GBV work. Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department uncaps a flood of fabulous songs, many of which would become live GBV staples. Those thirsting for the hooks absent from Kid Marine had their needs well quenched with stuff like “Frequent Weaver who Burns”, “Pop Zeus”, “Do Something Real”, “Tight Globes”, “Messiahs”, and the rest of a bloody beautiful disc that ranks majestically alongside GBV’s early twentieth century work.

Both Kid Marine and Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department were available in limited vinyl editions twenty years ago, but those are hard to come by today. So GBV Inc. is reissuing both in newly remastered editions on vinyl, as well as in FLAC and MP3 formats. I only had access to the digital files, both of which are brick walled to the extreme.

Review: 'Elvira: Mistress of the Dark' Blu-ray

Someone should have given the Razzies a Razzie for nominating Elvira the “worst actress” of 1988 for her “acting” in Elvira: Mistress of the Dark. Firstly, Cassandra Peterson does no act in this film. She just delivers 90 minutes of her Elvira character and all of the sassy one-liners and double-entendres that come with it. Her performance requires no more acting than she was expected to bring to an episode of Elvira’s Movie Macabre.

Secondly, Elvira is awesome: as self-aware and self-possessed as Mae West, as quick-witted as Bugs Bunny, and as tough as Rosie the Riveter. Throughout Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, she dispenses with leering sexists, exposes the hypocrisy of conservative Little Town USA, and disperses her one liners with equal aplomb. Plus director and SNL-veteran James Signorelli does a fine job of playing Tim Burton-on-an-extremely-tight-budget and the script by Peterson and John “Jambi” Paragon piles on the one-liners so high that it’s fairly pointless to gripe about their quality. Also: Edie McClurg. If you don’t agree that Edie McClurg makes everything better, I don’t want to know you. Her performance during a scene in which a magic casserole transforms a church potluck into a Roman orgy is worth the price of admission alone.

Look, I’m not arguing that Elvira: Mistress of the Dark is the Citizen Kane of horror comedies, but I will argue that it’s the best Elvira: Mistress of the Dark it can be, and a much more agreeable shot of retro-eighties fun than Top Gun, Sixteen Candles, Red Dawn, and a dozen other poorly-aged artifacts wrapped up in one, great, walloping cheeseball.

I’ll also argue that it may be somewhat pointless to gripe about the quality of RLJ Entertainment’s new Blu-ray edition of Elvira: Mistress of the Dark. The image is on the soft and dull side with a palette that should pop like a bag of Skittles but looks a bit muted and grey; however, it’s very clean. Audio lacks range, hovering somewhere in the middle. Extras are non-existent aside from a trailer. Nevertheless, this is still a presentable and extremely affordable edition of a movie that is—I reiterate—not Citizen Kane. Diehards may hold out for a more luxurious edition, but this one will probably get the job done for most fans.

Review: 'American Comic Book Chronicles: 1940-1944'

The lingering aftermath of the Great Depression, a rise in organized crime, and especially, the country’s entry into World War II ensured that the early 1940s was a tumultuous time for the U.S. With such grim business rushing around them, many Americans found solace in escapist entertainment, and few entertainment mediums exploded as comics did between 1940 and 1944.

A timeline of this period is like a checklist of the most important developments in comics. These brief five years saw the debuts of Wonder Woman, The Flash, Green Arrow, Archie and his gang, Captain America, Sheena Queen of the Jungle, Hawkman and Hawkwoman, Sub-Mariner, Aquaman, Plastic Man, The Green Lantern, Captain Marvel, Dick Briefer’s Frankenstein, Pogo (before moving to newspapers), and many more of comics’ most celebrated characters. While we’d have to extend the timeline back just a year or two to include the medium’s two-most famous heroes, we would not have to in order to account for such foes and friends as Robin, The Joker, Catwoman, The Penguin, Alfred the Butler, Lex Luthor, Perry White, Clay Face, Hugo Strange, Scarecrow, and Two Face. This period also saw the first significant rumblings of a major backlash against funny books with Wonder Woman as the most frequent whipping-girl. Was there ever a more crucial half-decade for comics?

Interestingly, TwoMorrows Publishings’ American Comic Book Chronicles series has been issuing volumes for six years but is only now getting around to this key period of 1940-1944. Because so much happened during these years, the storytelling seems to rush through the material faster than a speeding bullet, but Kurt F. Mitchell and Roy Thomas actually make the tale reasonably thorough, reasonably critical, and politically sharp. Along with the cavalcade of legendary characters, the writers make room to name-check such forgotten oddballs as Supermouse, Kangaroo Man, super-witch Spider Widow, and Snowbird, the Strangler’s coke-addicted lackey. Mitchell and Thomas refuse to succumb to the thoughtless jingoism that defined so many of the comics of the era they cover. Like all volumes in this series, American Comic Book Chronicles: 1940-1944 is also a gorgeous, hardcover package, swelling with tons of full-color art beautifully and authentically reproduced.

Review: 'The Encyclopedia of Hammer Films'

Hammer Film Productions made more than 160 movies, about a third of which were the horror flicks that earned the company its looming reputation. With so many films and so many producers, directors, and writers who helped Frankenstein them to life, Hammer is well deserving of a monstrous encyclopedia like the one Chris Fellner is about to publish.

The Encyclopedia of Hammer Films is exactly what the title describes. Fellner’s tome supplies more than 525 pages of entries on the expected movies and crew members, as well as entries on Hammer’s forays into television, such as The Hammer House of Horror, and even some items with a somewhat tangential relationship to the production company, such as Blood of the Vampire (a non-Hammer production made by a crew with deep ties to Hammer) and Ida Lupino, whose husbands and father worked for Hammer and who played house-host to Hammer’s number-one star, Peter Cushing.

Entries on films each follow a similar format with subheadings listing cast and crew and UK and U.S. release dates, summarizing plots in great detail, offering quotes from critics and cast/crew members (Christopher Lee’s quotes are almost invariably about how he wasn’t being paid enough), and tersely running down production notes and trivia, some of which are quite interesting (I had no idea that Cary Grant was a major Hammer-head who almost starred in Phantom of the Opera in 1962). That terseness prevents this book about fun films from being truly fun. It would have been nice if Fellner took a more playful and less drily encyclopediac approach to composing his encyclopedia. He only drops his dry professionalism when discussing the so-called “Hammer Glamour” actresses for which the studio is famous. While the way Fellner leers over these actresses is technically appropriate in a book about a studio infamous for the way it exploited its female stars, it can make for uncomfortable reading in 2019, especially when the author does such unnecessary things as relaying certain actresses’ measurements. A book about the sixties does not have to read like a book written in the sixties.