Review: 'Classic Monsters, Modern Art'

When I took my wife to see The Bride of Frankenstein at NY's Museum of Modern Art on one of our first dates, the one thing she commented on after seeing it for the first time was how "iconic" every frame of it is. It may not be as lauded as Citizen Kane, but Kane doesn't have an image half as indelible as Karloff's monster lumbering through a crypt or Lanchester's Bride shrieking in horror when she first meets him. As far as I'm concerned, the horror of the unseen (see The Haunting or The Blair Witch Project) will always be scariest, but the monsters, crypts, and graveyards of less frightening films will never fail to scratch the itchy shoulders of those like me who look forward to Halloween more than Christmas.

Review: 'Futuristic'

A new Mark Voger book is always a big event in my house. His books are like Santa sacks loaded with all the best vintage Christmas presents: toys and comics and TV and movie box sets, all devoted to a particular mid-twentieth century theme. Having put together lavishly visual and warmly personal odes to monsters, superheroes, the British invasion, Christmas, and hippie-esque culture in the past, Voger now sets his scopes on the future... at least the future as seen from the fifties and sixties. Robots and rockets and aliens and big-helmeted cosmonauts orbit Futuristic. 

Review: 'Ghost of an Idea: Hauntology, Folk Horror and the Spectre of Nostalgia'

As a place for me to babble about my favorite rock music and horror movies of a century that only exists in the rearview, Psychobabble is nostalgic by definition. So a book like Ghost of an Idea, which ostensibly studies and derides the tendency of the horror film to look back with both fear and longing, probably isn't aimed at me. Nor is the almost willfully dense academic voice that dominates the first third of the book. 

Review: 'The Devil's Partner'/'Creature from the Haunted Sea' Blu-ray

 

In 1958, director Charles R. Rondeau followed up his first feature, The Littlest Hobo, with a low-budget horror/mystery picture in which a strange young man, who apparently can't sweat, drifts into a small town after his grubby Satanist uncle croaks. Soon various animals begin killing the locals while the nephew gets himself a sweet deal working at a gas station. 

No rational person would include The Devil's Partner on a list of classic horror movies, but it's reasonably well made with an effectively creepy lead performance from Ed Nelson (who most might remember from his regular role on Peyton Place, but those more likely to dig this flick will recall from the "Valley of the Shadow" episode of Twilight Zone), a tight little script, a fair dose of originality, and one genuinely creepily shot scene in which a horse stomps a rummy. 

Roger Corman liked The Devil's Partner well enough to scoop it up for his Filmgroup distribution company and slap it on a double-bill with his own Creature from the Haunted Sea in 1961. Loopier, trashier, and overflowing with anarchic attitude, Haunted Sea is definitely the more memorable picture, with its wacky Cuban counterrevolutionaries and cue-ball-eyed monster made of Brillo pads. However, The Devil's Partner is the picture that leads the Film Masters' new 4K-restored blu-ray double-bill. That's probably because Partner looks way better, nearly flawless, in fact, in a blemish-free presentation with natural grain and no irritating enhancements. Haunted Sea comes from rougher stock, but a restoration-comparison video included as an extra shows just how far the image came from the scratched, blurry 35mm print used for this very pleasing if imperfect restoration. I doubt you'll see the movie looking better, under the circumstances.

Both films are included in both their 16:9 theatrical and 4:3 TV aspect ratios, and both films gained a lot more information at the top and bottom of their respective pictures on the boob tube. Creature from the Haunted Sea also gains a whopping fifteen minutes of extra footage in its TV form. There are also audio commentaries (a silly one by some podcast guys for the main feature and a more impressive roster of Corman, location manager Kinta Zertuche, film historian Tom Weaver, and contemporary B-movie director Larry Blamire for Haunted Sea), two-Corman centric featurettes, and even a couple of booklet essays, making for a very nice package.

Review: 'The Many Lives of The Twilight Zone: Essays on the Television and Film Franchise'

With so many episodes, so many themes, so many incarnations, and so much continuing influence over the pop-culture zone, Rod Serling's Twilight Zone is ripe for deep analysis, which is why there has been so much of it. Editors Ron Riekki and Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., are now dragging in even more by compiling eighteen new essays by various writers in their book The Many Lives of The Twilight Zone: Essays on the Television and Film Franchise. 

A 'Twilight Zone' Doodle

Here's a little doodle I did to remind you that if you can't think of what to watch this Halloween season, one of the creepier episodes of The Twilight Zone tends to hit the spot. Consider trying "The Dummy", "Living Doll", "The Grave", "Jess-Belle", "The New Exhibit", "To Serve Man", "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet", "The Howling Man", "The Hitch-Hiker","Mirror Image", "It's a Good Life", "The Masks", or "Night Call". Hell... try them all!

Review: 'Alien Invasions! The History of Aliens in Popular Culture'

Because it isn’t very likely that aliens from other worlds have ever visited Earth, they can be imagined in any number of ways. Are they tentacled, bulbous-brained beasts? Are they green-skinned seductresses in brass bikinis and weird headgear? Are they friendly little, big-eyed chaps who just want to go (and phone) home? Are they hostile? Neutral? Are they super advanced or super primitive? Are they from distant galaxies or our very own moon?

Review: 'The Greatest Cult Television Shows of All Time'

Regardless of quality, nearly every TV show develops some sort of following. But earning the classification “cult television show” requires more than a following. By definition, cultists must be relatively few in number but legion in devotion. They stage conventions in honor of their favorite shows. They dress up as their favorite characters. They communicate in a secret language of quotes and catch phrases. They organize fervent letter-writing campaigns when their favorite shows risk cancellation.

Review: 'TV Milestones: The Twilight Zone.'

The Twilight Zone haunted TV screens long before the concept of auteur TV, and though Rod Serling was the anthology’s most recognizable face, he did not write every episode. Yet Barry Keith Grant still makes a fairly solid argument for Serling’s role as auteur in the new book TV Milestones: The Twilight Zone. Grant notes how Serling promoted a groundbreaking blend of traditional genres (sci-fi, horror, noir, fantasy, western) and how his center-left politics and Hobbesian “world at war” philosophy (art vs. commerce, individuality vs. conformity, etc.) and willingness to address current events distinguished The Twilight Zone as much as its gremlins, Kanamits, and asymmetrical doctors.

I’m no great proponent of the auteur theory, and such a variety of writing, directing, cinematographic, and acting talent was involved in The Twilight Zone that it would not be my pick for a prime example of auteur TV. Yet Grant makes his case sufficiently convincing by emphasizing how much of its creator went into The Twilight Zone and how unique it was for its time as a result. That kind of focus rather than a more sweeping analysis is also smart considering how slim these TV milestones books are. Barry Keith Grant makes good use of his 100 pages.

Psychobabble’s 12 Days of X-Mas Episodes: Day 12

Does the mere idea of stepping into another mall, watching It’s a Wonderful Life for the zillionth time, or talking to your loved ones make you throw up? Then settle your bowlful of jelly into the La-Z-Boy® and deck your hall with today’s installment of Psychobabble’s 12 Days of X-Mas Episodes instead! Merry vegetating!

Series: Twilight Zone

Episode: “The Night of the Meek”, in which a drunken, skinny department store Santa crosses over into that dimension of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. Rod Serling writes one of his finest episodes, capturing the crushing sadness of a man who cannot deal with society’s endless ills, so he drinks his life away. Art Carney’s performance is raw with emotion, but also very funny and perfectly natural. Sadly, this was one of those Twilight Zones shot on video to save money during the second season, so it looks like crap. But despite the episode’s aesthetic deficiencies, its humanity and humor still manage to fight through the fuzz, and if it doesn’t reduce you to a blubbering blob, you might have a serious dose of Scrooge-itis. Happy holiday!

How to Have Yourself a Merry Little Psychobabble X-Mas

A real evergreen decked with handmade ornaments. Choruses of “O Little Town of Bethlehem” around a roaring fire. A ham dinner with all the trimmings for you and yours. Midnight mass. These are the things that make up an old-fashioned Christmas. But there aren’t very Psychobabbley.

Here on Psychobabble, old-fashioned does reign supreme, but it ain’t that kind of sweater-vest brand of old-fashioned. It’s the stupendously, tremendously retro brand. Don’t understand what I mean? Well, don’t fear, don’t panic, and don’t throw yourself in front of the next oncoming reindeer-drawn sleigh. My holiday gift to you is the following 24-hour schedule for having a very merry Psychobabble-style X-Mas….with all the groovy trimmings.

December 25

Midnight: Wake up. Ideally you spent the entirety of Christmas Eve sleeping and building up reserves of energy, because the following is—as I’ve already stated—a 24-hour schedule. No sleep ’til Boxing Day. And you’re really going to need that energy because the first task on our holiday schedule is stocking up on the gifts. No lazy shopping in front of your fancy home computer. We do it the old-fashioned way: Midnight Sale at Toys R’ Us.  Be prepared to gouge out the eyeballs of a fellow loving parent for that last Cabbage Patch Kid on the shelf, because in Psychobabble Land, that kind of thing still happens.

1:00 A.M.: Now get all that booty home and wrap it as fast as possible because it is time to deck some fucking halls the Psychobabble way. If you’ve already set up projected LED snowflakes or any other newfangled decoration, tear that shit down and replace it with toxic melted plastic peanut snowmen on the windows, garish blow-molded Santa and reindeer display on the roof, and flaming hot C7 ½ multicolored bulbs around the eaves. Tarp up that brick fireplace and hang your stockings from a vintage cardboard fireplace by Toymaster. Finish it all off with an aluminum tree sprinkled with satin-covered Styrofoam balls and bathed in the artificial glow of a motorized color wheel.  

Review: 'The Twilight Zone Encyclopedia'

The Twilight Zone ran for 156 episodes written by 40-something different writers and featuring way more actors and actresses than I’m willing to count. You can literally fill an encyclopedia with this stuff, and that’s just what Steven Jay Rubin literally did with The Twilight Zone Encyclopedia.

Running for 424 packed pages, Rubin’s book discusses every episode, every writer, every director, every major theme (aliens, children, time travel, etc.), every significant location or item (Sunnyvale Rest home from “Kick the Can”, Talky Tina from “Living Doll”, etc.), and nearly every actor and actress who appeared in the series’ original run (understandably, people like Phil Arnold, who played “Man” in “Mr. Dingle, the Strong” and Jimmy Baird, who played “Boy” in “The Changing of the Guard” are a bit too much for our valiant author). And the original run is Rubin’s main concern, which he makes very clear in his book’s introduction, although he still manages to slip in a good deal of information about, for example, Twilight Zone: The Movie in his entry on “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”.

Rubin doesn’t make room for potential entries about such original series-related items as all the merchandise The Twilight Zone spawned or The Simpsons’ “Treehouse of Horror” episodes that so wonderfully parody so many classic Zones, but we do get a lot that saves the book from being redundant in light of The Twilight Zone Companion, Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic, IMDB, and Wikipedia. There are quotes from new interviews with a slew of people involved with the original series, odd bits of trivia (example: Russ Meyer was a still photographer for the series! Nina Roman-Rhodes, who played the maid in “Miniature”, was one of the few people who reported seeing a second gunman at the site of JFK’s assassination!), and quite a few unusual photos (my favorite: Gary Crosby of “Come Wander with Me” monkeying with an electric bass). Ten pages of Rod Serling’s final interview is a cool addition too even though the creator barely mentions The Twilight Zone at all.

Farewell, June Foray

Without her Talky Tina wouldn't have talked. Neither would hundreds of other characters, because June Foray was one of the busiest voice actors in the business. She is best known as the voice of Rocky the Flying Squirrel, who always served as a sensible counterpart to the flightier Bullwinkle's. More befitting Psychobabble's creepier sensibilities, Foray gave voice to the hair-pin shedding  Looney Tune Witch Hazel and the most terrifying killer hunk of plastic in the Twilight Zone, Talky Tina (based on her own recordings for the Chatty Cathy doll).

Foray was kept busiest putting words in the mouths of Bullwinkle's nemesis Natasha Fatale, Tweety's Granny, Cindy Lou Who, Raggedy Ann, numerous Smurfs,  and other cartoon creations, but she also dubbed live actors on occasion, including the little girl in the "Bewitchin' Pool" episode of The Twilight Zone, and fascinatingly enough, both of Chief Brody's kids in Jaws. She even made a handful of onscreen appearances in shows such as Bewitched, Green Acres, and Get Smart, but she'll always be best remembered for the sounds she made over her rich, 71-year career. June Foray died yesterday at the age of 99.

31 TV Shows for 31 Days of Halloween Season: Day 31

Series: The Simpsons

Episode: “Treehouse of Horror IV”, in which the annual Halloween episode of The Simpsons hits its peak with a scarifying trio of terror tales presented by Bart à la Rod Serling on Night Gallery. First up is a spin on The Devil and Daniel Webster in which corpulent Homer Simpson barters his soul for one doughnut and Satan assumes the form of pious neighborino Ned Flanders. Next is the traditional Twilight Zone parody in which Bart plays a junior Bill Shatner who discovers a gremlin saboteur messing with his school bus. Finally, there’s the lavish “Bart Simpson’s Dracula”, in which Count Mr. Burns keeps an undead army of the undead at the bottom of his Super Happy Fun Slide and neither Francis Ford Coppola nor Stephen King make it out alive. Back when The Simpsons was still funny, nobody did Halloween episodes like they did, and no Halloween is complete without watching one. Happy viewing and happy Halloween!

31 TV Shows for 31 Days of Halloween Season: Day 22

Series: Twilight Zone (1980s revival)

Episode: “The Shadow Man/The Uncle Devil Show/Opening Day”, in which the nerdy kid from “Charles in Charge” finds a bodyguard in a silhouetted boogie man that lives under his bed and ends up abusing that newfound power. The nightmare-stoking nocturnal appearances of the Shadow Man are what make Joe Dante’s segment unforgettable. The other segments—one a silly yet pretty unsettling short about a Satanic Captain Kangeroo and the other a role reversal tale in which Jeffrey Jones is the victim of a murder plot hatched by his wife and her lover (directed by John Millius, who wrote Quint’s U.S.S. Indianapolis monologue in Jaws!)—are pretty good, too.

31 TV Shows for 31 Days of Halloween Season: Day 1

Series: The Twilight Zone

Episode: “Living Doll”, in which an adorable little girl’s adorable little dolly faces off against rotten stepdad Telly Savales. The final moments are only rivaled by the denouement of “The Dummy” for the series’ most frightening scene. The use of slow motion was most likely a means of stretching out the sequence to fit Rod Serling’s narration, but it really contributes to the queasily unsettling atmosphere of a show in which a talking doll manages to slip in phrases like “You’ll be sorry,” “You better be nice to me,” and “I’m going to kill you” when she isn’t cooing, “My name is Talky Tina, and I love you very much.” Talky Tina: she’ll make you pee your pants like Betsy Wetsy.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 93

The Date: January 1

Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983)

What Is It?: Burgess Meredith takes over for the late Rod Serling as tour guide through a series of four dimension-busting tales. John Landis and Steven Spielberg’s stink, but Joe Dante and George Miller’s are most memorable. Landis’s wrap-around starring Dan Aykroyd and Albert Brooks is great too…especially if you want to see something really scary…

Why Today?: Since 1995, the Sci-Fi channel (now known as Syfy, which is apparently some sort of sexually transmitted disease) has been hosting a “Twilight Zone” marathon that gets started on New Year’s Eve and keeps rocking into the following day.

Monsterology: Dolls

In this ongoing feature on Psychobabble, we’ve been looking at the history of Horror’s archetypal monsters.

 Before kids have the social skills to make human friends, they often find companionship in little blobs of cotton or plastic. A child clutching a doll, pretending to nurse the toy while he or she is still gnawing on a pacifier, is a familiar—and adorable— sight. Thanks to the ways storytellers love to twist signifiers of innocence, images of dolls gnawing on children have become pretty common too.

Sorry. That was just too easy a transition to pass up. In truth there aren't a ton of images of dolls gnawing on kids. More often the doll will settle for a good, sharp kitchen knife. Or maybe its limbs will grow to monstrously ropey proportions so it can drag the tyke under his own bed and start strangling the lad. And maybe dolls menacing kids isn't even the most common way these playthings menace. If we were to do an official tally (we aren't going to), we'd probably discover that dolls most often pick on adults. Sometimes the dolls in question are really protecting the little ones from grown ups who would do the youngsters in question harm. In that way, these killer dolls are still doing the jobs of all dolls: helping children deal with a very difficult world.

The idea of a beloved doll coming to life has been a literary staple for centuries. In his 1986 essay “A Few Small Corrections to a Commonly Held Image,” Walter Scherf wrote of an old fairy tale in which a doll comes to life and starts shitting gold. When a prince pisses on the doll, the doll grabs the prince's ass. Just to be clear, Scherf notes that this is a children's story. More typical are tales such as Paddington Bear and Winnie the Pooh, in which cute (if neurotic) teddy bears come to life.

Ten Genuinely Great Classic TV Themes

A TV theme has a job to do and that is to set the tone for the show that follows. Unfortunately, most twentieth-century TV shows were pretty goofy and got the catchy/crappy themes they deserved. Hey, I can remember all the words to the “Brady Bunch” theme song as well as the next asshole, but it isn’t exactly my idea of good music.

On occasion shows ended up with legitimately good themes, either because they were extraordinary pieces of television that deserved complimentary music or…err… by accident, I guess. I’m not talking about programs that cheated by using pre-composed music or classic pop songs as themes, otherwise the following list would be loaded with classics such as “Paint It Black” (“Tour of Duty”), “Reflections (“China Beach”), “Bad Reputation” (“Freaks and Geeks”), “Rock Around the Clock” (“Happy Days”), “Five O’ Clock World” (“The Drew Carey Show”), “Having an Average Weekend” (“The Kids in the Hall”), “And Your Bird Can Sing” (“The Beatles” Cartoon), “Falling” (“Twin Peaks”), and “For Pete’s Sake” (a way better song than the cutesy “Monkees Theme”). Instead I selected ten songs specifically created for specific programs that I wouldn’t feel ashamed to blast with the TV turned off.

1. “Twilight Zone Theme” by Bernard Herrmann

The discordant tune that instantly conjures memories of gremlins, murder dolls, and pig doctors is Marius Constant’s “Etrange No. 3”, a piece of music recorded for CBS’s library of stock cues but not necessarily “The Twilight Zone”. Eugene Feldman edited it with Constant’s “Milieu No. 2” to serve as the series’ theme in the second season, probably because the music that opened the show’s first one simply isn’t very catchy. It is, however, an eerie scene setter composed by perhaps the greatest composer of cinematic thriller scores, Bernard Herrmann. If Constant’s “Etrange No. 3”/“Milieu No. 2” delivers the skin-crawling shocks of “Eye of the Beholder” then Herrmann’s theme is more in line with the haunting subtlety of “Mirror Image”…

2. “Route 66 Theme” by Nelson Riddle

Review: 'Tom Sutton's Creepy Things'

Perhaps you know him as Sean Todd, or more fittingly, Dementia or Grisly, but no matter what name he drew under, Tom Sutton was at the forefront of seventies horror comics largely because of his black and white work on Vampirella. Yoe Books/IDW’s new anthology, Tom Sutton’s Creepy Things, mostly focuses on his color work for titles such as Ghostly Haunts, Haunted, Ghost Manor, Midnight Tales, Haunted Love, and yes, Creepy Things (oddly the source of only one story in this collection). As it turns out, Sutton’s work was just as effectively goopy and kooky in color as it was in black and white. His style, which takes Graham Ingels’s signature ooze to nearly abstract levels, always works best when he was rendering ghouls, corpses, and creeps. His humans, particularly the ones he intended to look attractive, are often awkwardly drawn, sometimes distorted. This might not necessarily be a flaw though, as it leaves even his most “normal” panels looking unsettlingly abnormal. And Sutton had little patience for normality. Although he didn’t write everything in Tom Sutton’s Creepy Things, each of its stories reflects his innate weirdness. The book collects a nutso tale about a murderous teddy bear, one written from the grave’s point of view (and featuring some of the finest art in this book), one about the ghost of a hypocritical temperance advocate who finds himself a new drinking buddy, a nonsensical monster rally intent on cramming in references to every classic movie and literary monster you can think of, and a twisted twist on Richard Matheson’s “Twilight Zone” episode, “A World of His Own”. The book gets even weirder when Sutton works outside of the horror genre on the sci-fi fantasy “Lost in Transit”, the prehistoric sci-fi sci-fi fantasy “Goo”, the time-hopping sword-and-sandal fantasy “Journey to Lost Orlaak”, the hilarious fairy tale “The Tower Maiden”, and the adventure yarn “The Kukulkaton”, starring a sleazy, racist proto-Indiana Jones. In the final tale, “Through a Glass Darkly”, Sutton’s psychedelic B&W art and metaphysical, Lovecraftian storytelling are nothing short of sublime. All of this makes for one of Yoe/IDW’s very best anthologies yet.