We've reached the end of 2008's Halloween Countdown, and all that remains to be done is to crown this year's groovy ghoulish track of honor. The past two winners have been sedate, atmospheric affairs -- "Unexpected Guest" by UK Decay and "A Forest" by The Cure -- but this time I've chosen something a little more uptempo...but no less befitting this day of fiendish delights...
The Damned - Nasty (from 1984's "Thanks for the Night" single)
This hard-to-find gem, recorded shortly before Captain Sensible's long departure from the band, was alone worth the price of The Light at the End of the Tunnel box set. It's a breathtaking roller coaster ride that captures the The Damned doing what they did best -- garage rock-inflected punk with overtones both humorous and horrific.
The track was originally recorded for use in the "Nasty" episode of The Young Ones (a.k.a. "the greatest television show ever"), as seen in this fantastic clip which opens with one of the most quotable lines ever uttered...
I remember that day as if it was yesterday...
Back in my junior high days, my friend Brian and I would hike up the Middlesex Canal path to the (now defunct) Northeast Trade Center whenever Jolly Jim's Flea Market rolled into town. A three dollar admission fee (if a friend wasn't working the gate that day) would grant one access to a hundred or so stalls filled to the brim with overpriced crap...and the one dude in the far corner who sold comic books.
Brian was an early adopter of the comic collector ethos that stresses bags, backing boards, and buying multiple copies of a book for investment purposes. For him, these trips were joyless exercises in speculative accounting where he'd blow ten bucks on two "hot" comics that he'd never actually read.
For me, though, it was all about the quarter bins, which in those days were packed near to bursting with overstock from the previous decade (i.e. the 1970s). Three dollars would net the ambitious longbox digger a dozen issues of disposable entertainment -- reprints of Silver Age DC sci-fi stories, random issues of Marvel Team-Up and Marvel Two-in-One, and books involving obscure bits of trivia gleaned from my (then) incomplete run of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe.
None of the comics I purchased could even remotely be classified as "money" books -- though that hasn't stopped some of the sleazier comics stores from slapping a ten dollar price tag on the Monark Starstalker issue of Marvel Premiere and seeing if some fool will take the bait -- but I didn't get into the hobby to see a return on my investment. I got into it because it was dumb escapist fun.
That's how I ended up with a complete run of the "It! The Living Colossus" stories from Astonishing Tales. They aren't especially good or groundbreaking or intellectually stimulating, but they entertained me.
It! (the exclamation point signifies a clicking sound, as per the language of the African bushmen, I assume) originally debuted as "The Colossus" in Tales of Suspense #14 (February 1961), back in the days when Marvel's bread and butter were improbably named monsters bent on terrorizing the world. The Colossus was an example of the socialist Realism aesthetic gone horribly wrong -- a hundred foot tall stone statue commissioned (under threat of death) to celebrate the power of the proletariat.
Unfortunately, the Marxist concept of historical inevitability did not take into account the possibility that a crab-like alien creature would appear, merge with the monument, and go on a rampage behind the Iron Curtain...
...which offered Jack Kirby the opportunity to re-imagine The Amazing Colossal Man as Cold War agitprop. Damn cool, indeed.
Though the story ended with the promise of a new age of global peace and understanding, The Colossus returned in Tales of Suspense #20 (August 1961), in which the Soviets decide to ship the now-inert statue to Hollywood as a "gesture of peace." The alien crabmen, having backslid from their previous state of enlightenment into a warlike state, once again seized control of the Colossus, resulting in another stone cold rampage. The American military fared no better than its Warsaw Pact counterparts in stopping the carnage, and even the mighty beatniks were helpless in the face of the stone titan's wrath.
It was left to Bob O'Bryan to save the day, and the unappreciated set designer concocted a plan to lure the aliens out of the Colossus and into a bigger, meaner looking statue loaded with high explosives and a remote detonator. O'Byran's quick thinking earned him the renown long denied him as well as the affections of starlet Diane Cummings.
The Colossus, now sporting the "It!" moniker, returned in the pages of Astonishing Tales #21 (December 1973) as one of Marvel's many attempts to dress up superhero material in monstrous clothing. Bob O'Byran, having been upgraded to a crack special effects man during the interim, decides to put the Colossus to use as the star of a sci-fi blockbuster. His work is interrupted, however, when a ham actor rival for Diane's affections causes an accident that leaves O'Bryan confined to a wheelchair and trapped in a perpetually surly mood.
Bob's rants about the cruelty of fate are interrupted by a bunch of goons seeking to abscond with the Colossus, and in his impotent rage discovers he has the power to telepathically control the statue. He also discovers that animated stone constructs are vulnerable to nerve gas -- despite having neither lungs nor nerves -- and the Colossus is hauled off to the lair of Dr. Vault, a mad scientist of the most generic variety.
Vault has a hankering for a strong, new body and thinks that a bald, granite statue with no genitalia would be perfect for his purposes. He is not as keen about the size, though, and uses his mad science prowess to shrink the Colossus to a more strip club-friendly eight feet tall. The process is interrupted around the thirty-foot benchmark by O'Bryan, who reasserts control and smashes up Vault's hidden lair. Filled with a renewed sense of purpose, Bob spent the next three issues fighting various scale-appropriate fellow monsters from Marvel's pre-superhero days in between indulging in bouts of typical four-color melodramatic angst.
Viewed with a grown up's eye, the stories are pretty bland and predicable, with the beats rigidly mapped to the overused device of O'Bryan losing his connection with the Colossus at dramatically convenient moments. They also suffer from an over reliance on passing reprinted Silver Age material as in-story flashback sequences and Dick Ayers, an artist whose work I tend to like, trying too hard to mimic Jack Kirby's early 1960's style....which was nifty in 1961, but baffling and distracting in 1973.
Yet for all that, I still retain a good deal of affection for the run, because there's a point where you just have to put aside the quibbles and take the concept of a thirty-foot telepathic flying (Did I mention the Colossus can fly? It! can, and why shouldn't It! be able to?) statue that fights Giant Space Gargoyles on top of the Capitol Records building and fights Giant Chinese Kung-Fu Fighting Dragons for the absurd thing of flawed beauty it is.
O'Bryan takes the destruction of the Colossus in stride, as he'd already moved on past the animated statue follies of youth into more adult pursuits. Comics being comics, though, both Bob and the Colossus have made the occasional appearances since then, as there is no character so obscure or resolution so final that someone won't resurrect It! out of irony...or even worse, totally sincere reverence.
...white cake with black and orange candies whipped into the batter, with a modest glaze of cream cheese frosting and featuring some season-appropriate decorations. We do plan on using a sacrificial skull dagger to cut it, though, as some traditions are worth observing.The events leading up to the recent economic meltdown, as depicted in The Witching Hour #51 (February 1975):
It sounds like a sweet deal...until you realize that you've leveraged your immortal soul for far more than it is actually worth. When the spiritual commodities market crashes, it crashes hard, and no amount of intervention, government or divine, can stem the karmic tide.
(Satan, being the wily devil he is, was able to finagle a seven figure bonus for himself from the executive board just prior to the collapse -- and government takeover -- of the Beelzebub Brothers brokerage house.)
The Misfits - Horror Business (from the Horror Business EP; collected on The Misfits, 1986) - No Halloween Countdown would be complete without something from the Garden State's unparalled masters of horrorpunk, so here is the band's loving tribute to Alfred Hitchcock, Sid Vicious, and Nancy Spungen.
Patterson's People - Shake Hands with the Devil (from a 1966 single) - Here's a dandy little slice of 60's freakbeat that proudly wears its infernal raunchiness on its sleeve.
A Resurrection Plant, eh?
That reminds me of something that happened to a friend of a friend of mine a while back. This guy worked the late shift at a warehouse in North Reading, and used to drive home along Route 62 during the wee hours. Well, this one time he was making his way down the dark and lonely state highway when he spotted something really weird along the side of the road. It was a potted plant -- some kind of fern, he said -- just sitting there on the shoulder of 62 westbound in the middle of the sticks with no sign how it ended up there.
It was late October, when the first killer frosts come to the northwestern suburbs. This guy figured that the plant would die if he didn't do something, pulled to the side of the road, and retrieved it. He wasn't the gardening type, but thought that maybe his mom or his girlfriend at the time could do something with it. Anyhow, he put it on the passenger seat of his '86 Monte Carlo and hopped back behind the wheel.
While the plant, being a plant, didn't move or say anything, the guy said he could sense a "really creepy vibe" from the potted fern. He said the interior of his car felt colder, even though he had the heater cranked to the max. (That's not uncommon for a GM car, though.) He also claimed to sense an "aura of sadness" coming from the plant and it got stronger as he got closer to the Wilmington town line.
The sensation abruptly stopped when he pulled up to the lights at the intersection next to one of the many giant luxury condo complexes recently plunked down in the northwestern suburbs. When he looked over at the passenger seat, the plant was no longer there.
He sped the rest of the way back to his apartment in Bedford. His roommate was still up when he got there and asked the guy why he seemed so jittery. The guy told about the mysterious fern, even though he knew how crazy the story sounded. The roommate didn't laugh, for he had worked part-time with landscaping firm near the area where the guy found the plant.
He told the guy about how a couple of years previous, a local nursery had gone up in flames when the greenhouse heater exploded. The force of the blast sent the contents of the nursery flying in all directions. The owner of the business decided not to rebuild, and instead sold off the property to an out-of-state residential development firm which cleared the land for a luxury condo development -- the very same development where the plant mysteriously disappeared from the guy's passenger seat.
So if you happen to be driving along Route 62 on some chill autumn night and see a solitary potted plant by the shoulder of the road, don't worry. It's just the Resurrection Plant making another sad, doomed effort to get back home....
(A little context, maestro!)
de tian - Beyond the Autumn - (from a 1980 EP) - This piece of DIY postpunk makes pefect music to haunt arthouses by.
Given the present state of the world, it's only natural to feel a little depressed. That's why I've decided to brighten your day with some uplifting content taken from "The Day Happy Died," a heartwarming tale from The Witching Hour #47 (October 1974).
Little Rusty Boland is in a bit of a funk. His house has burned down, his parents have abandoned him, and most devastatingly, his faithful dog Happy has trotted off to Doggie Heaven.
Rusty perks up a bit when he spots what appears to be Happy's ghost wandering around the neighborhood. The poor kid follows the pooch into the local cemetary, where a (not entirely) shocking revelation awaits...
Wow! Who didn't see that coming?
Well, at least Happy is safe, right?
"That's right, kids! Not only will you die horribly and your spirit will walk the earth for all eternity, but your beloved pets will waste away and die from broken hearts! Sweet dreams, little ones!"
I know I'm feeling much happier now. How about you?
Danse Society - We're So Happy (from Gothic Rock, 1994) - It's a repost, yes, but of a very fine piece of 80's gothica that fits today's theme so perfectly that I couldn't resist.
...and then there was the time when Josie McCoy was captured by a mad scientist who wanted to hack open the Pussycat's skull and make a powerful narcotic out of her gray matter...
From his studio lair hidden in the catacombs beneath the streets of Stockholm, the Phantom of the Pop Charts plots his next sinister move...
Longtime AT readers may remember last year's Halloween Countdown post on the subject of Dell's superheroic take on Frankenstein. As I mentioned back then, Frankie wasn't the only public-domain horror icon to be dusted off and repackaged by the publisher to cash in on a hot trend. Dracula, too, got a chance to strut around in spandex and fight the neverending battle for truth, justice, and the Transylvanian way...
In 1954, horror comics offered the grisly promise of a plague zombie poked by bill hooks and bisected by a rail...
The story is titled "DEATHBOX" and comes from DC's The Witching Hour #30 (April 1973), apparently by way of some high schooler's creative writing project...
Hey, Dr. Robert "Rack" Hansen, you might want to be careful. Reliable sources tell me that the place is full of spiders.
You can't say I didn't warn you, pal.
1977's Kingdom of the Spiders is just one of the many "animal attack" films that graced screens both big and small during my childhood, but the towering presence of William Tiberius Shatner sets this otherwise by-the-numbers affair head, shoulders, and polyester slacks above the rest of the genre pack. I daresay it's the best project involving small, hairy nightmares that The Shat has ever starred in...unless you count his time spent on T.J. Hooker opposite Adrian Zmed.
Plus, the film's ending is still pretty creepy in a really obvious and cheap-looking kind of way. (If you're going to pass off acrylic landscape paintings as aerial shots, it helps if the painter understands the concept of two-point perspective.)
Armagideon Time HQ's new house band has become a huge hit with the regulars...
Los Fabulosos Cadillacs - Calaveras y Diablitos (from Los Fabulosos Calavera, 1997) - That would be "skulls and little devils" en ingles, but you don't need to be fluent in Spanish to appreciate this soothing cut of latinized ska from Argentina's finest.
The original Halloween film from 1978 is hailed as a horror classic, and rightly so. Along with Psycho, it is credited with providing the template for the slasher film genre, yet like Hitchcock's 1960 film, the horror is a matter of atmosphere, pacing, and soundtrack rather than the gory, high body count excess associated with substandard imitations.
The silliness and implausibility of Halloween's premise are masked by writer/director John Carpenter's skillful presentation, which manages to sustain a real sensation of dread throughout the proceedings -- hunter versus hunted, everyteen babysitter versus a monster, Jamie Lee Curtis versus a dude in coveralls and a Shatner mask -- made even more terrifying by the utter absence of scenery-chewing antics on the monster's part. It's no mean feat to pull off effectively, which is probably why the film continues to be held in high regard by folks (like Maura, for example) who consider slasher films to be low-grade exploitative garbage.
The problem with success, especially within the realm of genre material, is that there's an overwhelming temptation to return to the same well again and again until the box office revenue runs dry. "Sameness with a spin" is the operating principle, and Halloween's success meant that whatever charms the original possessed had to be recycled, laminated and built upon with copious amounts of ludicrous backstory over the course of a half-dozen slasher-by-numbers sequels, an unnecessary remake, and the head-scratcher that is 1982's Halloween III: Season of the Witch.
The third entry in the series is a sequel in name only, featuring none of the characters or plot points established in the original film. Instead it explores the timely issue of druidic fundamentalist terrorism, as it pertains to neolithic monuments, seasonal merchandise, and the use of advertising. Or, to put it simply, magical Halloween masks that make creepy crawlies burst out of people's heads when triggered by a subliminally-loaded TV commercial. There are killer robots involved in the mess somewhere, too.
The idea, according to the producers, was to expand the franchise into a anthology format, which translates into non-bullshit language as "a shameless bait-and-switch ploy that banks on name recognition." (Carpenter and co-writer Debra Hill wanted to move past the franchise, but the moneymen had other ideas. From such behind-the-scenes wrangling such cinematic atrocities are born.)
Despite the film's messy genesis and numerous other warning signs, Fangoria was still willing to beat the drum of unwarranted optimism...
...though I suspect that the full page ads the magazine was running for masks based on the ones in the film may have had something to do with it. The film did make money, though not nearly as much as hoped for and racked up enough terrible reviews that the producers retreated to the comfort of familiar territory for the fourth film. The Wikipedia entry for Halloween III: Season of the Witch claims that it "has gained somewhat of a cult following among audiences," which signifies little except that the one fan of the movie knows how to edit a wiki page.
For me, the film is significant for being one of the first instances where the popcult coprophagia of childhood gave way to a more sophisticated assessment of "Wow, this film is total crap! Why am I wasting my time watching it?" (I consider myself lucky. Many geeks never reach that level of awareness in their lifetimes.)
While I'm not above dropping a reference to the Silver Shamrock jingle from the film, for today's musical selections I'm going with two gems featured in the original 1978 movie.
John Carpenter - Halloween Theme (from the Halloween 20th Anniversary Edition OST, 1998) - Yes, there is a boogeyman, and he really digs the piano.
Blue Öyster Cult - (Don't Fear) The Reaper (from Agents of Fortune, 1976) - First person to make a "more cowbell" joke gets a size 10 jungle boot to the ass.
Ladies and gentlemen, bats and ghouls, I give you...
...can invite the attentions of the Dark Powers.
Fortunately for Josie, she is blessed with friends both pure of heart (Melody) and hep to the sinister snares of the occult (Valerie). Val determines (by making a check against her Lore skill) that Josie's necklace is actually the Falcon's Claw, a totem associated with the Falcon's Nest, one of the many places of unholy evil which surround the Greendale-Midvale-Riverdale metropolitan area.
Before the ectoplasmic shenanigans get too out of hand, however, Josie finally cops wise to the connection between the yard sale trinket and the ghostly manifestations (and they call Melody the "dumb one" of the group), and violently casts the pendant away.
In the process, she also casts the candle she was holding in the direction of the drapery, causing a catastrophic blaze which quickly consumes (or in terms that would please Cotton Mather, "purifies") the Falcon's Next in a matter of minutes.
...followed by an pointed warning about the dangers of buying things from yard sales, because "sometimes you get more than you bargain for." Sure, that second-hand salad shooter seems like a steal at three bucks, but is the convenience worth the cost to your immortal soul? The road to utter damnation is paved with incomplete skittle ball sets.The thrills and chills continue as Mary Marvel brings a dynastic level of pain down upon the dessicated kisser of THE MAD MUMMY...
I dunno, I think it's kind of necromantic!
Well, I thought it was funny.
In all seriousness, she is a bit on the skinny side and terrible at making conversation, though I have been told that the sex is fantastic.
XTC - Poor Skeleton Steps Out (from Oranges & Lemons, 1989) - If there's one thing I have learned from a life of popcult immersion, it's that "xylophones = skeletons." Vibraphones, too, though the verdict is still out on the marimba's association with the restless dead.
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