Random Picture #3: Hot for creature.

Movies: Mermaid from the Black Lagoon?

Mermaid Heather, long-time ANTSS supporter and one of the folks who inspired this very blog you are reading, is celebrating her fifth year of blogging with guest posts about film favorites. She graciously invited me to join in so I sent in some thoughts on my personal fave: The Creature from the Black Lagoon. It starts a little something like this:

The Creature is, unabashedly, my favorite of all the old Universal monsters. This is why I've never actually written a review my favorite horror film, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, before. And, honestly, I don't think I can do it now. You can't review something you love. That would be like giving a clear-eyed critique of your lover's sexual chops while you're both still in the afterglow. (If you think that's a good idea, try it and see.) So this is less a review than a tribute - which is appropriate since this whole shebang is a tribute to another horror-centric amphibian: Mermaid Heather. So, with her kind permission and your patience, let's talk Creature.

Of all the classic marquee-grade monsters in Universal stable, two of them are notable in that they never receive a name. Though he's often erroneously called by his creator's name, Frankenstein's tormented creation is never named. The other nameless horror is the man fish creature at the center of the Black Lagoon franchise. Unlike Dracula or Larry Talbot or Imhotep, these two characters remain "the Monster" and "the Creature."

Curiously, these also happen to be the two monsters whose backstories are scientific rather than supernatural. Though there's a notable distinction between the two. The Monster, of course, is a product of Frankenstein's mad science. He's a freakish thing, an affront the natural order, a rip in the sense of the world brought into being through an act of supreme will and profound hubris. In this, Frankenstein's monster most resembles a work of art. He's a unique imposition of man's will onto the raw material of nature that, once created, takes on a life of its own.

The Creature, on the other hand, is unique in the Universal pantheon in that he (and everybody assumes the Creature is a he) is not a freak of nature. Richard Carlson, doing his heroic-square bit in the role of Dr. David Reed, repeatedly mentions that the Creature is a logical result of evolution. The isolated, Edenic lagoon of the title is, the good doctor tells us, "its natural habitat." When skeptical Dr. Thompson and the jovial, yet curiously sinister, guide Lucas express doubt as to the existence of the Creature - even after two other doctors on the expedition claim to have seen it - the nay-sayers are given a lecture by Kay, the expedition’s resident hottie and fashion plate, on the amazing diversity of amphibious life. The impossible, Kay suggests, is just the real we haven't discovered yet. The Creature is, in an odd way, the anti-uncanny. Instead of "what should never be," the strange and mysterious Creature is: He's as he should be, in his natural home.

The rest is o Heather's site. Go check it out.

Stuff: In the cards.

The Pointless Museum web site has wonderful gallery of horror themed Top Trump playing cards.

Top Trumps was a slightly more complicated version of war. Simplified, you and another player compared “traits” and the card with the biggest number won.

Though many of the cards feature recognizable horror icons, my favorites are those that either botch known properties – like the dandy fop Godzilla in a cape and a gambler's tie – or use a known figure to illustrate some weird, ill-fitting generic horror type – such as the use of the robot from The Phantom Creeps as "the cannibal."

Plus, even I, Lucas, enjoy the card of the Fish Man!

Books: Freddy's heat bills are atrocious and that money's got to come from somewhere.

So let's say you're some forest dwelling slasher. You live a simple, Thoreau-esque life. Your needs are no lavish. You have a pair of overalls and some army surplus. You have a head bag for casual wear and a hockey-mask for formal occasions. You don't watch television, play video games, or read – so your entertainment costs are at a minimum. You don't pay rent because you would presumably disembowel anybody who came to negotiate a lease for the accursed patch of sleepover camp that you call home.

Still, there are those unexpected costs that creep up on you. The cost of arrows, for example. Sure, a study machete will get you through a good 98% of teen slaughter situations. But it's nice to have ranged attack options. And you know you don't have time to go around recovering every arrow you let fly at some undergrad doofus who decided to leave his empty beer cans and spent Coney whitefish all over your nice clean woodland. These kids roam in packs and there's always a lot of screaming and yelling and running. Oy, the endless running. It gives me pains! Those 390 A/C/C Pro Superlight alloy/carbon broadheads you liter about really start to add up.

What? Make your own arrows? Sweetie, please. You're a slasher, not the last Mohican.

So you need money, but what to do? You can't just get a job. If the locals see you, you'll lose that all-important edge of sinister mystery. Plus, like, you're kinda justly wanted by the law for being a mass murdering psycho. What you need is a lucrative option that takes you far from your core market, allowing you to capitalize off your image without diluting the brand identity in your core market.

Well, you're in luck, my homicidal friend. Welcome to your new revenue stream. Pulp fiction book covers in India!

The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction is a sampler-plate intro to the delightful world of Tamil-language newsstand lit: a pulp universe recognizably similar to our own mass-market pulp alternoverse, but filtered through distinct cultural norms and given a unique spin. Editor and translator Pritham K. Chakravarthy selects ten notable Tamil-language market lit legends that give new readers a sense of the range in subject and tone of the Tamil pulps. I don't know that fans of American pulps will find their new favorite author hiding in these pages, but the talent on display in these stories is undeniable. Furthermore, the combination of familiar tropes and foreign culture make reading the volume a surprising pleasure, like eating comfort food that somebody has spiked with a particularly rich and unusual spice.

Why should a shambolic, seemingly sub-literate mass murderer like yourself care?

One of the treats included in the Tamil Pulp Fiction anthology is a series of color plates showcasing the trippy covers of this market lit. Several of these covers include images, both iconic and obscure, from American horror flicks. Below are samples of covers that rip off images from the legendary, The Exorcist, to the cult, Fright Night. The crappy scans are my fault. Chakravarthy's book contains high-quality reproductions of these and dozens of others.

Link proliferation: Rocket from the womb.

Now somebody's going to have to knit the prostate of Jason Voorhees

And you thought there wasn't anything scary about the Twilight franchise.

In what might be the weirdest display of fandom I've ever encountered, here's the womb of Twilight heroine Bella, complete with half-human/half-vampire mutant fetus, made out of felt.

Space rock

Regular readers know that I've got a handful of critical blindspots. No matter how discerning I may try to be, any work that falls in one of those blindspots is getting a more than a fair shake on this blog. These aesthetic Achilles heels include, but are not limited to:

1. giant alligators and/or crocodiles
2. lucha flicks
3. horror or sci-fi themed rock groups
4. anything in which the Creature from the Black Lagoon makes an appearance

The Spotnicks, Sweden's finest Space Age themed surf rock combo, belongs in category 3. Here's their "Rocket Man," performed in full-battle dress.



Cannibal holocaust?

According to CNN:

Five members of the [Amazonian] Kulina tribe are on the run after being accused of murdering, butchering and eating a farmer in a ritual act of cannibalism.

No arrest warrants have been issued because Brazilian authorities are legally restricted from entering Kulina tribal lands, near the Brazil/Peru border.

The victim was herding cattle when he met with a group of Indians who invited him back to their village.

"They knew each other and they sometimes helped one another. They invited him to their reservation three days ago and he was never seen again," Clementino [Village Chief of Staff for the Brazilian town of Envira - CRwM] said.

"The family decided to go into the reservation and that's when they saw his body quartered and his skull hanging on a tree. It was very tragic for the family," he said.

"Who counts dead humans?"

The pan-Euro culture rag Eurozine has posted a jargon-laden, but still fascinating story on the political implications of a post-Soviet literature that writer Dina Khapaeva claims is "overwhelmed by all kind of magic and monsters – vampires, witches and werewolves."

While there's a lot of academic blah blah to wade through, there are more than a few gems worth discussing amongst fans of supernatural horror. Here's Khapaeva on the social context of Russian horror/fantasy:

The nightmare of post-Soviet fiction, which is full of macabre atrocities, consists not only in the triumph of supernatural forces over humans. It is also to be found in the absence of any plausible distinctions between good and evil, which results in the advocacy of narrow-minded selfishness. The main novelty of gothic morality consists in its attitude towards morality itself. Morality is considered something to be avoided, something that can influence the hero's life in the most negative way: "If this guy gave up his selfish wheeling and dealing, his life would certainly become worse. The more morality, the more misfortune", says the vampire-hero of Night Watch. True, such an attitude towards morality stems from a radical reconsideration of the place of humans in the general system of values. Morality as such is dismissed as an irrelevant atavism. Indeed, what moral norms could be applicable to monsters, to vampires – to non-humans?

Of course, the new attitudes towards morality revealed by the world of fantasy fiction are not reducible to the difference between "fiction" and "reality". A simple mental experiment helps to prove this statement. If we remove the vampires, werewolves and witches from these narratives and substitute them with cops, gangsters and their victims, if we parenthesize the witchcraft and the magic, the story would not differ much from a pale description of everyday Russian life.

Curiously, while American's like to frame horror and fantasy in terms of liberation – either in the form of a coded embrace of the other (monster in the closetism) or in the form of some tricked out post-Freudian model of suppressed desires (the turgid sexuality of neo-Victorian high horrorists) – Kaphaeva sees a very different dynamic at work in post-Soviet gothic works:

The main feature of gothic morality consists neither in a rejection of the old ethical system ("hypocritical Soviet morality"), nor in an embrace of a new ethical system (the "strict but fair" rules of the mafia). Gothic morality is a denial of any abstract system of values that could be considered equally pertinent for all members of a given community. Consequently, moral judgment becomes concrete, situational and totally subjective, a deictic gesture that assigns the predicate "good" or "bad" to this or that concrete practice taking place here and now. Power to make such a "moral judgment" is restricted to the boss – the head of the clan, the mafia godfather, the director of a company or rector of a university. The compromise reached by the different clans is also concrete and situational, and is justified not in terms of universal values but in terms of the personal relations between the heads of the clans.

The total denial of morality leads to a cult of force. Gothic morality considers murder an everyday routine – who counts (dead) humans? "Life against death, love against hate, and force against force, because force is above morality. It's that simple," concludes the hero of Night Watch.

She ultimately sees post-Soviet gothic horror and fantasy as creepy, nihilistic resurrection of a sort of cultural Stalinism:

Gothic society does not simply generate a social alternative to democracy: it profits from every loss of democracy. Gothic society has no respect for individuality or privacy, and openly contradicts the idea of human rights. Such social organization leaves no room for public politics and leads to the closing of the public sphere.

She ends with perhaps the bleakest description of Russian social dynamics I've ever read, evoking a system "zona": a form of political and criminal oppression that flourished in the Soviet Era gulag system.

The most important feature of gothic society is the way the zona, the particular form of Soviet camp, is converted into a founding principle of post-Soviet society. Since the inception of the Gulag, the Bolshevik policy was to mix criminals with political prisoners. Criminals were considered by the Soviet regime "socially proximal" and were allowed to impose criminal norms on the rest of the prisoners, thus helping the wardens to run the Gulag.

The zona permeates various aspects of social life and relations in Russia; its legacy is not limited to the post-Soviet prison and army. Aside from its most notorious and obvious manifestations – such as camp slang's transmogrification into the language of power and literature, the convergence of mafia and state; or the unbelievable degree of corruption – the rules of the zona are reproduced in the principles of social organization. The total absence of resistance to camp culture, the incapacity, due to the long tradition of their contamination under the Soviet regime, to distinguish clearly between the zona and "normal life", and the unwillingness to reflect on the history of the concentration camp make today's Russia especially vulnerable to a gothic path of development.

Even I, Lucas, attended the NYC Comic Con

Here's a little snappy snap of everybody's favorite Gill Man at the NYC Comic Con.

And, while we're on the subject of Comic Con, here's a boss Cobra Commander outfit somebody worked up.

Finally, though it was a great costume, this dude in the well-executed Blackhawk costume didn't seem to get much love in the post-Con costume pic collections. Perhaps the reference just doesn't snap with kids today. At ease, flyboy; ANTSS still digs you.

Art: A short announcement followed by the art of J. R. Williams.

All right, Screamers and Screamettes, I'm going on to "auto-post" for a few days. I've got to head out of town for a funeral and even I, perhaps the most low-rent personage you've ever had the displeasure of knowing, am not so bereft of class that I'd blog at a funeral.

So, in the mean time, through the wonders of technology™ - technology is a registered trademark of Globamark Corporation LLC: "Making your future brighter by owning it." – a couple of, hopefully, interesting post will get thrown up on to the site in my absence.

I'll be back on Friday. Stay classy, Screamers and Screamettes.

To start the ghost blog period off right, soak up a little cultcha why don't ya with the awesome post-pop art of J. R. Williams. Here's a collection of his most monstrous paintings, illustrations, and digital comic collages. Featuring guest appearances by the Addams Family, Screaming Lord Sutch, everybody's favorite resident of the Black Lagoon, and many more.

You can find more of his work on Flickr.

J. R. Williams originals are available at his page at the Comic Art Collective.

Stuff: Even I, Lucas, have heard the legend of the Fish-Man. And I, Lucas, have a small statue of him fighting the Predator too.

It's been way too long since I've indulged in any Creature from the Black Lagoon goodness, so I give you something to waste those last few moments of the interminable Friday workday afternoon: a link to a nice gallery of Gillman models – from the goofy, such as the Creature's Crate above, to the kind-of-badass, such as the Creature versus Predator statue shown below. Be sure to check out the bizarre female creature models. Though it has always been a fragment of the beast's sad legend that he is, in fact, the last of his kind, model makers can't seem to resist giving the Gillman a she-creature sea creature to hang with. Inexplicably, these she-creatures always seem to have breasts, suggesting that these fish folk nurse like mammals. Too weird to think about. Have fun this weekend, my little Screamers and Screamettes.

Stuff: Even I, Lucas, have heard the legend of the Fish Man, and I've gone to his music festival too.

The line-up for the annual Siren Festival, Coney Island's summer music blow-out, has been announced. I bring this up because the festival's new event poster features none other than our beloved Creature from the Black Lagoon!

See him? He's there. Click on the image and you'll find him half-hidden behind the Cyclone. He is, by nature, a timid beast.

Music: Zombies, demons, and, then, something really scary.

Are all you Screamers and Screamettes having a swinging and screamin' good weekend? As a little Sunday treat, here's two tunes to dig on followed by one that will either induce laughter or tears, depending on your tolerance for bad 80s retro crap. We'll start with the good stuff (that way you can cut out early if you want to avoid the neon-colored punchline).

This Sunday, we're giving you the ol' psychobilly one-two. Starting with Creepshow, a horror-tinged quartet from Ontario. Formed in 2005, Creepshow consists of Hellcat on guitar and lead vocals, Sickboy on the upright, the Reverend McGinty working the keyboard, and Matt Pomade in the engine room. The band spent their first year working on a live show that, by all reports, is a wild and rocking good time. After building a loyal fan-base, the dropped their first long-player: 2006's Sell Your Soul. Currently the quartet is touring with an alternate line-up. Frontwoman Hellcat is on maternity leave and her sister, Sarah Blackwood, is filling in. Here's the original line-up performing their short, but sweet, "Zombies Ate Her Brain."



Eagled-eyed viewers may have noted the appearance of a Creature from the Black Lagoon lobby card in the background of the breakfast scene. Now that's a band with excellent taste (no pun intended).

Keeping it all in the family, Hellcat's hubby, a cat who goes by the name Hooch, also fronts a psychobilly band. He's the face of The Matadors. Here's the man who knocked up Hellcat and his crew rockin' their "Creeping Demon."



Finally, last night, after grilling up a mess of ribs and drinking many a beer, a friend and I got to talking about the career of Kurt Russell. These things happen when you've had enough to drink. This led, as such conversations should, to a the topic of Big Trouble in Little China. And that led, of course, to us popping said flick into the old DVD player. Until last night, I had not noticed that director John Carpenter is not only the man behind the camera on this picture, he's the dude responsible for the very, very 80s soundtrack and he can be heard singing the closing credit theme song. Screamettes and Screamers, I present to you John Carpenter's overlooked masterwork: the music video for "Big Trouble in Little China."

Stuff: Even I, Lucas, have heard the legend of the Fish Man. And it totally ate my, Lucas's, quarter.

So, Screamin' regulars, I was in Atlantic City last weekend and I ran across a wonderful Creature From the Black Lagoon slot machine. From the site of IGT, the games maker:

Overview

Return to those hot summer nights at the drive-in with the Creature From the Black Lagoon™ game! Silly scenes of horror from this time-honored monster movie combine with wisecracking backseat banter to thrill you whle you play this fun 5-reel, 15-line theme. This game is drenched with ways to win!

Claw™ Bonus

When three or more claw symbols line up left to right, there's no need for those 3-D glasses as the clawing Creature reaches out and shreds the screen to reveal bonus credits.

Snack Lagoon™ Bonus

Four or five scattered snack symbols lead to the concession stand touch-scream bonus. Who knows - there may be a lurking chance to double the tasty total and receive a bonus treat!

Enjoy breathtaking animation and enhanced stereo sound as winning line credits accumulate. For example, quirky comments accompany classic clips when three or more Creature symbols swim just above the screen's surface.

OH NO! The Gill Man has a grip on unsuspecting Kay! Not to worry. When three or more of these symbols line up left to right, the Gill Man releases her and dives back to his lair revealing screaming bonus credits and entertaining clips from the movie.

I didn't play it, so I don't know if they've added their own "wisecracking backseat banter," MTS3K-style. I hope not.

Music: Even I, Lucas, have heard the legend of the Fish-Man. And I, Lucas, have heard this song about him too.

As the Screamin' Regulars already know, CRwM's got a bit of thing for the Gill-Man. I'm a sucker for the The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

I really should just break out the classic trilogy, do a massive freakin' review, and get the whole thing out of my system. Unfortunately, that sounds suspiciously like work. So, instead, I present to you a music tribute to the fishiest of Universal's classic creatures from the rockabilly group Rusty and the Dragstrip Trio.

Enjoy.

Book: "Even I, Lucas, have heard the legend of the Fish-Man. And I, Lucas, have read the book too."

Dark Horse, one of the longest running and most successful independent comic book publishers in the history of the medium, is no stranger to pulp tinged horror. For example, the Kirby-by-way-of-Lovecraft Hellboy comes out with Dark Horse's distinctive chess piece knight logo on the cover. The more frantic and over-the-top Goon is also a Dark Horse publication. Dark Horse also puts out a wide range of horror-related film adaptations. They've cranked out endless Aliens and Predator books. They even produced two issues of a Dr. Giggles book, believe it or not.

Dark Horse also does business in books of the non-comic variety, under the Dark Horse Press imprint. Here to, horror and licensed work is their bread and butter. Novels based on Aliens, for example, appear on the DHP backlist.

Recently, Universal Studios licensed their iconic stable of monsters to DHP. It is, in many ways a perfect fit. Novels based on the films Dracula, Wolf Man, Frankenstein (and his bride), and The Mummy are all in the works or already waiting for you on the bookshelves of you preferred vendor of fine readables.

The book that first caught my attention was DHP's Creature from the Black Lagoon tie-in: Paul Di Filippo's Time's Black Lagoon. Not being the biggest sci-fi fan, I don't recognize the names of many sci-fi authors, but Di Filippo's is one of the handful of guys whose work I'm familiar with. I read his Steampunk Trilogy with great pleasure, enjoy the reckless way Di Filippo blended high and low culture references, as well as the reckless, but ultimately respectful, way in which treated the various genres his works borrowed from. To me, his involvement in this venture was reason enough to take notice.

Time's Black Lagoon, like the Di Filippo's steampunk work, is a carefree mash-up of 50's horror, contemporary speculative fiction, and pulp action novel. Set mainly in the humid, post-climate change New England of 2015, the novel focuses on the adventures of Brice Chalefant, a marine biologist who, as the novel opens, has pretty much flushed his promising scholarly career down the toilet. At the end of a well-attended lecture on the impact of global warming on the environment, Brice went off on a tangent about how humans would be better equipped to handle the water-logged future if their genetics where altered to make them amphibious. This suggestion is soundly mocked and Brice goes from rising star to "the Merman Guy" overnight. However, not everybody at his university thinks he's nuts. The well-loved but eccentric Professor Hasselrude thinks Brice's fish-man idea is not only reasonable, he's seen it before. Turns out that Hasselrude was the nephew of the late Dr. Barton, the man who attempted to surgically alter the creature of permanent land-bound existence in the 1956 The Creature Walks Among Us. Hasselrude hips Brice to the history of the Gill-Man, suppressed and complete forgotten by 2015. The Gill-Man, they agree, would be the perfect template for Brice's theories. Unfortunately, the long-dead Gill-Man from the 1950s seems to have been the last member of Devonian species. It's another dead end for Brice until a friend of his, a DoD funded physicist working out of the University of Georgia, shows him what he's been working on: a time machine made out of an iPod. Suddenly, the Devonian is accessible and Brice and his significant bother, pro-outdoor guide Cody, mount an expedition to the Devonian. What they find completely rewrites the backstory of Creature of the Black Lagoon and opens up an entirely new mythology for the most neglected of Universal's famous monsters.

Like good pulp entertainment, Time's Black Lagoon aims to entertain. And on that level, it delivers. I suspect hardcore sci-fi fanboys will be disappointed in the lack of detail given such issues as time travel, but Di Filippo is less interested in science as he is in how science was presented in the wonderful sci-fi/horror flicks of the '50s. Despite the updated info about quantum physics and genetic manipulation and climate change, TBL is an intentional throwback to the '50s films that inspired it. Even the dialogue resembles that weird everything-is-a-speech dialogue that was a hallmark of classic sci-fi/horror. For example, on telling Cody he wants to study the Gill-Man, she tells Brice:

"Brice, I understand why you have to pursue this until you can't take it any further. It represents the possible culmination of everything you've been striving for. But all I ask is that you don't let it become an obsession, as it for Barton and the others. This creature and the knowledge it represents has ruined too many lives."

Of course it has sweetie; of course it has.

TBL never makes a bid to be anything other than a good time. It is unlikely that, even within Di Filippo's backlist, it will be considered a must read. But, for fans of pulpy fun and geeks of the Gill-Man franchise, it is well worth the admission price (about $7.00).

Stuff: "Even I, Lucas, have heard the legend of the Fish-Man. And I, Lucas, have played the game too."

Poor Gillman, seemingly doomed to eternally play second fiddle to the rest of the immortal Universal Monsters icons. Unlike Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, or the Invisible Man (all of who inspired more sequels than our amphibious friend) he had no great literary heritage to boast of. Supposedly, the Creature from the Black Lagoon had his humble beginnings in a legend a Mexican cinematographer once told film producer William Alland. The only other "un-sourced" beast in the Universal stable was the Wolf-Man, and the werewolf turned out to be a vastly more popular monster in the long run.

Given his second tier status, it is nice to find that the Creature gets a little love from culture industry now and again. Over at Boing Boing, the popular link-dump site, news that a new novel from sci-fi author Paul Di Filippo would feature the Creature caused a reader to send in a link to images of the 1992 Creature from the Black Lagoon pinball game.

The game had a nice meta-twist in that it combined the movie's plot with details from the drive-in culture of the 1950s, including a soundtrack featuring the classic "Rock Around the Clock." The game also featured a hologram (pictured above) of the Creature: a fun detail that was also a clever allusion to the fact the film was shown in 3-D.

Fun times with the Fish-Man!