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Post by The Lurker In The Shadows on Oct 20, 2023 22:21:16 GMT
Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein is my Bela birthday film. I don't much like the comedians, though I loved them as a kid, but Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr, Glenn Strange, and Vincent Price will ease the pain.
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Post by The Lurker In The Shadows on Oct 20, 2023 20:51:05 GMT
Mark Gatiss has introduced previously non-existent women's roles into his previous ghost story adaptations, so I wouldn't be surprised if a few turn up in Lot 249.
(I rather enjoyed the Gatiss & Moffatt Dracula, I must admit. Not a faithful take, obviously, but I thought it did some interesting things, even if not always successfully. The middle episode was the highlight, with the journey of the Demeter almost like The Thing but on a ship.)
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Post by The Lurker In The Shadows on Oct 20, 2023 19:55:17 GMT
.... stumbling block being they seem to be subscription based, and it's only the occasional supernatural issues interest me. Are they not available in WHS or similar? WHSmith is one of the few shops to stock it. You can also order individual copies of recent/current editions from MagsDirect. magsdirect.co.uk/?s=commando&post_type=productIndividual issues are also available on Kindle and other digital platforms.
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Misty
Oct 20, 2023 17:38:59 GMT
Post by The Lurker In The Shadows on Oct 20, 2023 17:38:59 GMT
Interesting that they were doing these in 2020. Were they all new stories? Yes, the Treasury of British Comics produced a few Misty & Scream Specials and a Misty Winter Special, featuring new material, alongside separate collections of classic Misty strips. The most recent book is Misty: 45 Years of Fear, which includes material from the original 70s comics as well as a couple of newer strips from the specials.
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Post by The Lurker In The Shadows on Oct 19, 2023 20:18:57 GMT
The next four Hallowe'en editions, due next Thursday, will include two classic reprints Phantom Pilot and Haunted Skies, and two originals, Commandos Vs Zombies 0 - a prequel to the zombie trilogy - and Nightmare Express.
More info about these titles in due course, but I can reveal that Nightmare Express is my first Commando script, it was drawn by the brilliant Mike Dorey, whose work on strips like Ro-Busters and MACH Zero in 2000AD I've long loved, and that the story is my own blood-spattered love letter (or Arthur Grimsdyke-style Valentine's card) to classic horror anthology films, particularly the films of Amicus, which I've loved since first seeing Dr Terror's House of Horrors during a BBC2 Horror Double Bill when I was 9 years old.
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Post by The Lurker In The Shadows on Oct 18, 2023 18:53:49 GMT
On the DVD set, where does the Barnabas Collins story start? The Barnabas story starts on Disc 24, when Willie Loomis goes hunting for treasure, but Barnabas doesn't really appear until episode 210 on Disc 25. Disc 25 also has a short introductory montage to recap the earlier episodes, as the initial DVD releases kicked off with the Barnabas storyline and skipped the earlier episodes, which weren't released until much later.
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Post by The Lurker In The Shadows on Oct 18, 2023 15:45:45 GMT
Dark Shadows is my all time favorite television series. It's very theatrical and a lot of it is considered "too slow" by viewers today (even those in my own age cohort)--it was shot live on tape, as was a lot of 1960s British television, so it's more like watching a stage play with brilliant actors who occasionally flub a line or make a pratfall because they only had 3 or 4 hours to rehearse before going in front of the cameras (which were huge, and sometimes show up onscreen, along with the boom microphones, the stagehands, etc.). I used to think "you had to be there" to enjoy it but I'm on a fan group on a platform called Discord and a lot of the most enthusiastic fans are youngsters in their 20s. The intrigue continues. Hel. I knew about Barnabas Collins and Dark Shadows via various horror film books when I was growing up, and a BBC screening of Night of Dark Shadows, though my first chance to watch an episode was when Channel 4 had a Soap Weekend in the mid-90s showing episodes of various soap operas from around the world. Bizarrely, the DS episode they chose was one without Barnabas, but from the 1897 storyline. I confess, I wasn't impressed at all by the cheap videotape look and theatricals, so I didn't bother watching when the SciFi Channel were airing it... ...until one night, when I was up late writing and it came on, so I left it on in the background (at the time they were showing two episodes per day starting at 3.00am). The next night I found myself paying more attention, and by the third night I was stopping what I was doing to sit and watch it properly, as it reeled me in. This was the end of the parallel time story and the trip to Collinsport in the future and the beginning of the Rose Cottage and Gerald and Daphne saga. From this point on, I was hooked. The videotape quality and inability to edit out fluffs didn't matter in comparison to the imagination and ambition of the series, and the theatrical acting is all part of the atmosphere. It remains one of my favourite series, which I return to time and again, thanks to the coffin-box set of DVDs of the entire series, the books, and the Big Finish audios.
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Post by The Lurker In The Shadows on Oct 17, 2023 20:59:55 GMT
I watched the first episode a while ago, did its style change much over the run? I've seen references to the Barnabas Collins ones, they seem different in tone. It started out as a gothic drama with storylines about family secrets and rivalries, revenge and murder, with only hints of the supernatural in old family legends and folktales. Then, after a few months, the first ghost made an appearance, though the supernatural elements were still in the background. The supernatural elements helped the ratings, so a longer storyline involving a human incarnation of a phoenix ran for a few months. Then producer Dan Curtis decided to go all out and bring in a vampire, which is where Barnabas Collins came in, with the plan being to kill him off after 13 weeks. Only he proved too popular, and there was no way it could go back to being a regular soap opera, so they travelled back in time to 1695 to show how Barnabas became a vampire, and this brought in Angelique, the witch. The show would go on to include more time travel into different eras of Collinwood's past - and, briefly, its future - more ghosts, werewolves, Frankenstein-like monsters, Jekyll and Hyde-type characters, zombies, curses, Lovecraftian elder gods, and parallel universes, among other things. And all of this at tea-time, every weekday, for about 5 years.
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Post by The Lurker In The Shadows on Oct 16, 2023 18:16:22 GMT
I think tonight's viewing will include some episodes of Dark Shadows to mark the passing of Lara Parker, who played Angelique, the witch whose obsessive love turned Barnabas Collins into a vampire, as well as various other roles in the gothic soap opera, including a pair of twins, one good, one evil, and other incarnations of the witch. She played a ghostly manifestation of Angelique in the film Night of Dark Shadows, and decades later returned to Dark Shadows on audio for Big Finish, made a cameo appearance in the Tim Burton film, and wrote several very entertaining novels based on the series.
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Post by The Lurker In The Shadows on Oct 15, 2023 20:45:17 GMT
Karloff was far luckier than Bela Lugosi in some of his final films, such as Targets (which I recently watched on the great BFI bluray) and, of course, The Sorcerers, though neither bizarely are as well known as Lugosi's Plan 9 From Outer Space, though I know which I would prefer to watch! Not just in his final films. Poor Bela was screwed over by Hollywood from early on, as he petitioned so hard to play Dracula on film after his stage success that they paid him far less than they should have done. And the ingratitude continued from there on, with Lugosi side-lined, turned into a stooge, or having his role butchered, like in Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman. Shameful behaviour by Universal, as it's the presence of Lugosi, far more than Tod Browning's direction of the script, that elevated Dracula and kicked off the lucrative horror cycle they traded off for decades. It's sad that he didn't live long enough to find a champion, beyond Ed Wood Jr.
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Post by The Lurker In The Shadows on Oct 14, 2023 19:54:18 GMT
Greatly enjoyed the new BFI Blu-ray of Targets, Peter Bogdanovich's early feature starring Boris Karloff as an aging horror film star who believes his brand of gothic chills are out-moded, and Tim O'Kelly as a young family man who snaps and goes on a killing spree. A justifiably lauded film that contrasts the make-believe horrors of cinema with real world horrors. Karloff is tremendous in his last great role, which is basically a more world-weary version of himself.
I also rewatched Arrow Video's Blu-ray of Mario Bava's Black Sabbath, with Karloff playing both host, linking together the three stories that make up the film, and also Gorka, the 'wurdulak', feasting vampirically on his own loved ones. The Blu-ray features both the Italian and US versions of the film, which vary in some interesting ways, particularly in the story of a young woman receiving menacing phone calls, which is a ghost story in one version but not in the other.
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Post by The Lurker In The Shadows on Oct 14, 2023 17:36:12 GMT
Do you read these in print or in digital? I always prefer print where possible.
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Post by The Lurker In The Shadows on Oct 14, 2023 0:41:52 GMT
I really enjoyed Radiance Films' recent blu-ray release of the film, which offers the rarely seen UK edit of the film and the previously available on DVD and blu-ray US cut. Though the differences are minor, the UK cut has a few extra lines between Christopher Lee and Vincent Price which extend their all-too-brief interaction in the film. It's a film that grows on me with each subsequent rewatch. Alfred Marks' turn as Bellaver is terrific. I can easily imagine a spin-off series where Bellaver and Donald Pleasence's Calhoun from Death Line trade sarcastic quips while rounding up villains and monsters.
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Post by The Lurker In The Shadows on Oct 13, 2023 20:56:41 GMT
Nice to see Commando entering the realms of recycling.
Should point out that The Shape-shifter didn't originally appear in 1980, and was written by Georgia, not George, Standen Battle.
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Post by The Lurker In The Shadows on Oct 13, 2023 12:11:01 GMT
I am always astounded that Commando is still alive and fighting, considering how far removed this is from mainstream comics. With Rebellion relaunching titles like Battle Action and Smash, it feels like the mainstream is moving back towards Commando territory. The current Commando editorial team are also keener to experiment and push the boundaries a bit more than in previous years, so there has been more of a mix of genres, with horror and science fiction stories featuring with more regularity. The recent Commandos Vs Zombies series has been collected into a single volume, and there's a new Starblazer collection due soon, too.
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