Showing posts with label Creature Features. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Creature Features. Show all posts
HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
In honor of All Hallow's Eve Great Old Movies presents reviews of a crop of international horror films from different periods. We have the 1940's minor classic, House of Horrors with Rondo Hatton; the modern zombie thriller World War Z; the fifties British creature feature The Crawling Eye; the rare Italian psycho-thriller Spasmo; the Spanish shocker The House That Screamed; and the American horror-comedies An American Werewolf in London and Fade to Black. WARNING: Some of these movies are more horrible than horrifying. Have fun!
Another shameless plug for my latest book, which covers about forty-five years of horror stories told in comic books. Many of these were influenced by films and radio, and sometimes the stories in horror comic books were turned into movies -- without crediting the comic book. Fans of the controversial and vivid EC horror comics will enjoy reading about the stories that were adapted for such series as Tales from the Crypt as well as for the theatrical films Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror. Then there were long-running comics based on The Twilight Zone and Boris Karloff's Thriller. Giant bugs, bloodsucking vampires, flesh-eating fiends, giant voracious man-eating crabs, psychotic wives with axes, deals with the devil, adulterous husbands with murder on their minds, flesh-tearing werewolves, giant spiders with human heads and fangs, dinosaurs out-of-time and on the rampage, Frankenstein and Dracula -- The Horror Comics has it all. You'll read about such stories as "Airboy vs the Rats;" gory classics like "Foul Play;" weird ones like Simon and Kirby's "Head of the Family;" chilling heart-breakers like "Mr. Reilly, the Derelict" and "The Kid's Night Out;" adaptations of Poe, Lovecraft, Stevenson and Ray Bradbury -- and much more, such as the classic terror tale from Dell's Ghost Stories: "The Horror of Dread End," which gave many a kid nightmares back in the day. You can order direct from the publisher's website or from Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
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| Now in [trade] paperback! |
Shameless plug:
McFarland has just issued an inexpensive trade paperback edition of my book Creature Features: Nature Turned Nasty in the Movies. It can be ordered on their website and from amazon.
The hardcover edition of Creature Features got some interesting reviews. One gal apparently thought the book was too cerebral, while another fellow thought it wasn't cerebral enough. These were two diametrically-opposed critiques, with one basically saying that there's no point in subjecting these kinds of movies to serious analysis, and the other going on pretentiously about the lack of "sub-texts." [I see nothing wrong in looking at the performances in say, giant bug movies, but nothing will get me to say that The Giant Behemoth is actually a study of post-Freudian separation anxiety or something like that.] What can you do with reviewers like those but laugh?
On the other hand, Monster Memories magazine called it "A must read ... Schoell knows his stuff ... Schoell has done a superb job in offering a fresh slant on a genre we thought we knew everything about." American Reference Books Annual listed it as a "critical, informative review."
While published by a scholarly press, Creature Features is written in an accessible, popular and not stereotypically "academic" style.
In other words, it's informative but fun.
End of shameless plug.