Music: "The girls are saying that you're wrapped too tight."

In the world of horror rock, the B-list rarely sees love. There's more Drac, Frank, and Wolf Man tunes than you can tip a Marshall stack at, but you don't run across a ton of tunes singing the praises of the Blob, for example. (Though the Latin-jazz influenced bubblegum of The Five Blob's "The Blob" is nice, it doesn't have the presence on Halloween mixes that lesser vampire or werewolf tunes do.)

Today, we get snippet of one of the best songs about the Mummy, another under-represented baddie from the filmland. I Was a Teenage Mummy a 1992 indie that aped the teen-horror schlock of the '50s. One of the highlights of the flick is the wonderful soundtrack filled with fuzzed out modern rockabilly garage groups. Below is the trailer, with the A-bones squonked-out sax-enhanced theme song "Mum's the Word."

The full song's available on iTunes and Amazon for download.

Link Proliferation: Don't be a slutagator.

Just a quick one today.

Gator Loving

Regulars of this blog know my love for all film crocogator-ish, so I thought it was about time we actually discussed us some crocogatorish loving news. According to a 10-year study of gator nests in Louisiana, some alligators monogamously pair bond.

The ecologists were surprised to find that out of 10 alligators' nests that were studied, seven females chose to mate with the same male over the course of many years. The open habitat and dense population of alligators in this area makes it likely that females encounter many males during the breeding season, further corroborating the idea that mating fidelity is by choice, not chance. As Lance said in a press release: To actually find that 70 percent of our re-trapped females showed mate fidelity was really incredible. I don’t think any of us expected that the same pair of alligators that bred together in 1997 would still be breeding together in 2005 and may still be producing nests together to this day.

Ain't it sweet.

Heads Will Roll

Over at Largehearted Boy, the regular "Book Notes" column features Marc Estrin's historical novel The Good Doctor Guillotin. The novel follows the different lives of five men, all of which meet at the gallows for the first guillotining of the French Revolution.

For fans of popular music (in the folk sense rather than the current mass cult sense) Estrin links to three revolution era songs beloved by the revolting masses.

The Marseillaise needs little explanation. The one intriguing fact is that it was written by C-J Rouget de Lisle on April 25, 1792, the very day our hero Nicholas Pelletier, the patient, the package, was executed. Claude-Joseph wrote it at his table in Strasbourg -- childhood home of the builder of the execution machine.

Ça ira is an enthusiastic, if bloodthirsty, tongue twister in which we find the aristocrats swinging from lamp posts and Marie Antoinette in hell. It was the most popular "people's song" during the Revolution.

La Carmagnole was a popular revolutionary song and dance again concerning Marie Antoinette who, by the way, was unpopular not only because of her "Let them eat cake" attitude toward the poor, but because her Austrian family was likely to attack France to preserve its own and Europe's monarchies. Listen at Wikipedia. There is a wonderful Kathe Kollwitz drawing and set of sketches ("Carmagnole") of a revolutionary crowd dancing around a guillotine in Paris.

Next time you're drunkenly stumbling down the streets of the Financial District, raging impotently at the self-appointed masters of the universe, and promising to wash the nation free of sins of their corruption in a tidal wave of their accursed blood, you now have a couple of songs you can sing at the top of your lungs.

Nifty.

This Is a Picture of a Mummy Monkey

Mad science: You scream, I scream, we all scream for thousands of years.

The Archeology Magazine Web site has up a spiffy post exploring the phenomenon of "screaming mummies" – the gaping open mouth common to mummies that appears, on initial observation, to be a sign of agony and pain.

For well over a century, the contorted features of ancient mummies have led to speculation of untold pain and horrible deaths. The examples quoted above are from the examination of Egyptian mummies more than 120 years ago. Today, similar descriptions can still be found in television programs and academic writings. "Is this the face of a queen? What kind of terrible end did she meet?" and "a terrible head wound, an agonized scream," intones the narrator of "Secrets of Egypt's Lost Queen," a 2007 documentary. A photo caption in the scholarly volume Mummies and Death in Egypt (2006) reads "mummy of a boy five years of age, fixed in agony." And the widely covered 2007 discovery of Chachapoya mummies in Peru prompted this newspaper headline "Moment 600 years ago that terror came to Mummies of the Amazon" and copy "Hands over her eyes and her face gripped with terror, the woman's fear of death is all too obvious."

Author Mark Rose suggests a different explanation: Ancient funerary practices that did not account for postmortem changes in the jaw.

Your jaw bone ascends toward the back (almost at a right angle to the horizontal line of the teeth), ending in a rounded protuberance (the condyloid process), which fits into a shallow groove in your temporal bone on the lower part of your skull.

The nature of this joint is a key to understanding why mummies scream. Physician Trisha Macnair explains in "Human decomposition after death" on the BBC Health website.

"This temporo-mandibular joint is fairly loose.... Unlike the tight ball-and-socket linking the leg and the hip, the jaw and cranium are held together only by ligaments and muscles. If unimpeded--by the position of the body, wrappings, or very fast desiccation--the jaw will drop down as the muscles relax and decompose after rigor mortis."

For the curious, we keep modern corpses from opening their mouths by tying the mouth shut. Morticians run a thread up through the bottom of the chin, loop it through the nostrils, cross over in the mouth, out the chin again, tighten, and tie.

Link proliferation: "Killinger: The Case of the Curse of John Wilkes Booth's Mummy"

Sic semper mummyus

R. J. Brown has a article on the bizarre posthumous career of actor and presidential assassin John Wilkes Booth. Brown gives a quick overview of the once popular "Booth's not dead" subgenre of conspiracy theory and the delves into the story of David E. George:

On January 13, 1903 a man in Enid, Oklahoma, by the name of David E. George died. in his last dying statement, the man confessed to his landlord, Mrs. Harper, that he was in fact John Wilkes Booth.

Though few believed the story, enough saw truth (or profit) in it to have George's remains mummified and put on display. And, in true mummy fashion, the mummy of "John Wilkes Booth" carried with it a curse:

The postmortem career of John Wilkes Booth, whether it belongs to true history or folklore, none-the-less provides a fascinating story. The mummy scattered ill-luck around almost as freely as Tutankhamen is alleged to have done. Nearly every showman who exhibited the mummy was subsequently ruined financially. Eight people were killed in the wreck of a circus train in 1902 on which the mummy was traveling. Bill Evans, a wealthy carnival king, who bought the exhibit in later years was financially ruined by continual strokes of bad luck after the purchase. Finis L. Bates, the original owner, wrote a book in 1908 entitled "The Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth" which attempted to prove that the mummy was in fact John Wilkes Booth. he suffered much ridicule because of that book and died penniless in 1923. Perhaps the only person to sponsor the mummy and not suffer strokes of financial bad luck was Reverend True Wilson. It must be pointed out that Wilson was largely responsible for originally getting the prohibition law passed. However, shortly after Wilson bought the mummy, the repeal of the prohibition law was made official. (Let each reader make their own determination as to whether this was a cause-effect in this case or not.)

It was that or "Bonnie and Died"

From Dustin via the blog of McNally Jackson, SoHo's finest purveyor of vendible books: "More exciting than James Bond, Mike Hammer, Travis McGee and then some!" Alan Scherstuhl, the man behind the Crap Studies column of Kansas City's The Pitch, presents the pulp-trash overload that is Killinger: The Rainbow/Seagreen Case.

Here's a little taste of the unique literary stylings of Killinger author P. K. Palmer:

"Killinger turned to face her. There was a definite interruption in the pattern of his white shorts."

"Killinger feinted with the start of a kinkeri, a genital knee-kick designed to castrate without use of a knife."

"The man looked at the long splendid legs before him. He looked up past them and past the glorious rounds of the breasts at a wondrous face and long tawny hair. He rose to introduce himself. 'My name is Jeddediah Killinger the Third.'"

Are we not Neil Young?

This may cause a feeling of dread and horror or it might make your day.

In 1982, Neil Young (under the pseudonym Bernard Shakey) co-directed – along w/ bud Dean Stockwell – an apocalyptic comedy about a dorky garage mechanic who refuses to let the fact that an impending nuclear war is about to end all life on Earth diminish his dreams of rock and roll stardom.

What? Not weird enough you say?

Okay, the flick – made for $3 million over the course of 4 years - features Dennis Hopper at a time when his daily intake of sundry bad substances had reached a heroic three grams of coke a day, 30 beers, an unknown amount of marijuana, and numerous Cuba libres. Plus, it has Russ Tamblyn, best known as Riff, the leader of the Jets from West Side Story.

What? Still not weird enough?

Alright, because I like you – I wouldn't do this for any other crowd – I'll throw in, as the stars of the flick, Devo.

Here's Neil Young and Devo performing "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)."

Neil Young & Devo


But she would have killed in the extemporaneous speaking portion of the program

Welcome to the inaugural installment of "What horror movie are we today?" Today, we're Audition. From the folks at CNN:

A married Chinese businessman who could no longer afford five mistresses held a competition to decide which one to keep.

But the contest took a fatal turn when one of the women, eliminated for her looks, drove the man and the four other competitors off a cliff, Chinese media reported.

The spurned mistress died and the other passengers were injured, the reports said.

In a way, they were all victims of the ailing global economy:

When the economy soured, the businessman apparently decided to let go of all but one mistress.

He staged a private talent show in May, without telling the women his intentions. An instructor from a local modeling agency judged the women on the way they looked, how they sang and how much alcohol they could hold, the Shanghai Daily said.

The judge knocked out Yu in the first round of the competition based on her looks. Angry, she decided to exact revenge by telling her lover and the four other women to accompany her on a sightseeing trip before she returned to her home province, the media reports said.

It was during the trip that Yu reportedly drove the car off the cliff.

Fan shut down his company after the crash and paid Yu's parents 580,000 yuan ($84,744) as compensation for her death.

Stuff: El Santo!!!!!!!!!!

I have nothing newsworthy to share with you today. So, instead of a review or links to horror-ness, here's a clip of the Hero of the People, The Man in the Silver Mask, the one and only El Santo, kicking some monster butt!

Happy Friday!