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Post by dem on Sept 18, 2016 9:37:39 GMT
After reading 'Girl on the Torture Wheel' I wondered whether the detective pair were featured in any other stories or if this was their only adventure. It was okay but not a patch on Bellem's Dan Turner tales. I thought the writing style was far less smooth-flowing than Bellem's. Can't help you there, Rip, but would like to think so because Jerry Matherson and June Garcia are as obnoxious a pair of dicks as I've encountered in the pulps. Right from the off I was rooting for them to go away. There was at least one more Bellem Johnnie Piper adventure, Frozen Fire, in Spicy Adventure Stories, Sept. 1937. "Piper's assignment required him to photograph the largest diamond in the world. But the camera guy could barely keep his mind on his work while the old millionaire's niece was around!" For variation's sake, here's a one-man film crew inflicting peril on the entire planet. Wallace West - The Phantom Dictator: ( Astounding Stories, August 1935; Avon Fantasy Reader, #17, Nov. 1951). "In a few days the new order will begin.... Obey my wishes in this matter. I am working only for your good. If there is a man, woman or child in America who has not seen my pictures, make it your duty to bring him to the next showing. And if anyone speaks evil of Willy Pan, denounce him. He is your enemy and mine." It is THE FUTURE again, i.e., 1953. Cinema audiences across America are gushing over a new national hero, too-cute-for-words cartoon character Willy Pan, an ingratiating satyr on misshapen goats legs who solves the world's problems with just a swish of his magic wand. Only psychiatrist Dr. Matthew Brown, who has been away in Canada for several weeks, is immune to Willy's charms, until Miss Mary Hawkins, his glam young assistant, imposes on him to take her out for the evening to see new feature, The Magician. "When we reached the theater we found a milling crowd outside, fighting to get to the ticket booth. Police lines had been formed to control the mob." The movie is a masterpiece of animation, but Dr. Brown is appalled by what he sees. By means of a 'loveable' little character, Willy's creator, Dr. David Jamieson, wannabe Dictator, is seizing control of the the population through subliminal commands. The entire American public have succumbed to mass hypnotism! Dr. Brown appeals to Congress and, in desperation, the President himself, but no joy there, they have all fallen under the spell. As a last resort, the shrink turns to Jamieson's arch-rival, film-maker Felix Weinbrenner, to fake a Willy Pan movie to revive the people from zombiedom. Its a crazy stunt to pull, but it might just work! Great story, terrific ending, and all eerily reminiscent of what happened over here when the national lottery was first introduced and you couldn't get a word of sense out of anyone for months. |
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Post by dem on Aug 1, 2017 20:20:18 GMT
 Hugh Rankin ( Weird Tales, August, 1927) . A ghost-story of the motion picture industry - Martini, the raja of the films, boasted that he always collected his debts. |
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Aug 1, 2017 20:43:38 GMT
"Terva Gaston Hubbard"? "Martini, the raja of the films"?
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Post by dem on Oct 25, 2017 17:27:35 GMT
"Terva Gaston Hubbard"? "Martini, the raja of the films"? Is about as good as it gets. Terva Gaston Hubbard - The Phantom Photoplay: ( Weird Tales, Aug. 1927). Panic on Cinemagraph Pictures' the Reign of the Raja shoot as Rosoff Martini, matinee idol, collapses on set at close of a bedroom scene with Hazel Donner, the former beauty queen. Martini dies cursing assistant director, Stanley Milton, who owes him $5. The screen idol won't rest until he collects his loot - with interest. Milton has mixed feelings about the tragedy. On the one hand he's delighted to have put one over on the star. For all his posturing as Martini's best mate, Milton loathed him. But for a shared appreciation of O. Henry, the pair had nothing in common. The problem is, without Martini his big break is scuppered. The movie has been scrapped. Help is at hand. Martini's identical twin appears from nowhere, agrees to stand in for his late brother and finance the movie on condition Milton get shot of senior director, the great Parmalee. Milton, being one greedy grasper, readily agrees .... |
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Post by dem on Feb 5, 2018 10:23:17 GMT
William Arnes - Shrieking Victim Of The Vampire's Curse. (Theodore S. Hecht [ed.], Horror Stories #5, Oct. 1971). Truth or fiction? No one dared separate them now. "Enjoy."
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Post by dem on Apr 28, 2018 11:03:04 GMT
Red Boggs - The Monster Of Planet X: (Fantastic Monsters of the Films #4, 1962). Steve Noon, ace planet scout, in a battle for his life versus armies of tiny six-legged, tentacled horrors - or so he thinks. The Earthling doesn't live long enough to find out that he'd strayed onto an alien movie set mid-shoot and his adversaries are stuffed automatons.Steve takes a bad fall, fractures his skull and drops down dead, but the director is still dissatisfied with his performance: "Half a million we spent to build that creature and it still looks fakey, Zov, fakey as all creation. Nobody will be scared by such an obvious clockwork machine. You can see the wires when he walks."
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Post by dem on May 14, 2018 6:29:24 GMT
Dale Clark (Ronal Kaser) - The Devil in Hollywood ( Fantastic, Aug. 1963: originally Argosy, Aug. 8, 1936). "The picture in its entirety was shown only once - at a special preview for the Los Angeles homicide squad. And those hard-boiled dicks came out of the projection room with pallid faces and bulging eyes." Kamiliev, the brilliant if temperamental Russian actor/ producer, has alienated the Hollywood in-crowd to the point where none of the majors will employ him. Furious with the world, he recruits character actor Henry Otters and young unknown Coral Gay to star in the no-budget horror movie that will relaunch his career. Kamiliev plays the part of a kindly old philosopher who falls for a young ballerina. When he learns that the girl is up for sale to the highest bidder, he bargains his soul to raise the money. Tyler, the cameraman, is uneasy about the entire shoot. Kamiliev the method actor is an even more frightening proposition than Kamiliev the producer, who is already maniacal enough. Does he really believe the Black Mass and bestial bedroom scenes will survive the censors? Coral's acting has improved no end, mainly because her on-screen terror is genuine. Henry Otter, who plays the Devil, regards Kamiliev as a dangerous lunatic and threatens to quit. The Russian, totally immersed in his role, attacks a woman passer-by on the street. Tyler considers walking, but, with just the final scene to film, relents. He has to know how it all ends.
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Post by dem on May 26, 2018 9:39:59 GMT
Robert Bloch - Sock Finish: (Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Nov. 1957). Borderline case in that the crew - bar a stuntman - are relatively safe, it's only female lead Miss Swivel-hips that Artie Ames has a down on. Artie was a slapstick star of the 'twenties whose career flat-lined with the arrival of the talkies. Three decades on, he's invited to reprise his trademark custard-pie-throwing routine in nostalgia movie, The Good Old Days. The publicity team contrive a romance between himself and Miss Swivel-hips, except Artie isn't in on the gag. When he proposes marriage, she of the 39-inch bust good as laughs in his face, whereupon Artie resolves to end both their careers with a bang.
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Post by dem on Sept 23, 2018 10:42:08 GMT
Cover: Gutenberg Montiero: Panels Jerry Grandenetti Delightful film-crew-in-peril strip in Creepy #24 (ed. Bill Parente, Warren, Dec 1968) Cover Gutenberg Montiero Type Cast, written by Archie Goodwin and illustrated by Jerry Grandenetti. Poor Roland Bryce's dilemma - and its gory outcome - recalls that of Chan Carlo in Syd Bounds' classic, The Relic (London Mystery Magazine #82, Sept. 1969) - so much so it may even have provided the inspiration. Don Glut & Jerry Grandenetti's The Devil Of The Marsh (Creepy #29, is, as title suggests, an adaptation of H.B. 'Ethel' Marriott-Watson's eerie fantasy of the same name. Cover: Vic Prezio: Panels Jerry Grandenetti The Great Marsh hides a strange evil. One can even croak there. |
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Post by dem on Nov 10, 2018 13:47:41 GMT
Priya Sharma - The Show: (John Kenny [ed.] Box of Delights, Aeon Press, 2011). "This was not Pippa’s TV histrionics but the heartbreak of the truly wounded. Thomas stood back, well satisfied with his work."Showbiz Paranormal team visit allegedly haunted cellar for an episode of their hit Reality show. The Pub was built on the site of a notoriously brutal prison where sadistic inmate, 'Thomas the Knife,' ruled the roost. The bar staff have been a revelation. It is almost as though the poor saps genuinely believe there's something "evil" down there! Presenter Pippa, her producer-husband, Greg (ex chat-show hosts), and their star prodigy, Martha Palmer, phoney medium, descend the narrow staircase with cameraman in tow, expectant of a routine 'investigation.' Martha sure picks a bad time to acquire her late mother's gift. Read it here: Nightmare #49, Oct. 2016)
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Post by dem on Jul 13, 2019 6:50:28 GMT
Borderline case really, but commendably nasty. Steve Allen - The Public Hating: ( Bluebook #100, Jan. 1955)  John McDermott. "I ask you to rise. That's it, everybody stand up. Now, I want every one of you .... I understand we have upwards of seventy thousand people here today ... I want every single one of you to stare directly at this fiend in human form, Ketteridge. I want you to let him know by the wondrous power that lies in the strength of your emotional reservoirs, I want you to let him know that he is a criminal, that he is worse than a murderer, that he has committed treason, that he is not loved by anyone, anywhere in the universe, and that he is, rather, despised with a vigour equal in heat to the power of the sun itself."Yankee Stadium, NYC, 9th Sept. 1978. Public execution of political prisoner Prof. Arthur Ketteridge. The crowd and all we viewers at home are invited to concentrate our combined wills and fry "the most despicable criminal of our time." We believe he criticised Government policy. |
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Post by helrunar on Oct 28, 2019 2:37:37 GMT
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Post by humgoo on Jun 11, 2020 5:01:02 GMT
One of those I-don't-know-what-it-means-but-I-really-like-it stories.
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Post by humgoo on Jul 18, 2020 20:28:44 GMT
The Maze at Huntsmere - Reggie Oliver (Mark Beech (ed.), Soliloquy for Pan; collected in Reggie Oliver, Holidays from Hell; reprinted in Rosemary Pardoe (ed.), The Ghosts & Scholars Book of Mazes). "I knew Seymour Charteris before he became a heterosexual. That was in the late seventies when we were both aspiring young actors." Thus begins the story. Seymour has made a U-turn alright, stealing the girl from the narrator, but the old passion is still there, isn't it? Just needs some trigger maybe. Like, a hedge maze in the centre of which stands a statue of Pan, "perched on a marble tree stump, one goat foot dangling, the other planted on the flower-strewn earth"?
And how can you not to choose to shoot a rape scene before that very statue, if you're a big-time screenwriter for ITV's Denton Park, "a saga about an impoverished aristocratic family between the two world wars"? The film crew don't feel too comfortable working there, though, and "the boy playing Hiram got a little carried away during his rape scene with Catriona." Such an enthusiasm is soon to rub off on Seymour himself.
It has a happy ending, sort of.
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Post by andydecker on Oct 15, 2020 18:26:24 GMT
Robert Bloch - Return To The Sabbath: The brief rise and gruesome fall of Austrian horror actor and black magician Karl Jorla. His first film, Return To The Sabbath, made as a favour to a director friend, was never meant to be released but somehow finds its way to LA where its shown in a burlesque fleapit. Jorla's stunning turn as a reanimated corpse decides aspiring producer Les Kincaid to sign him up for a Hollywood remake and Jorla jumps at the chance to get out of Austria. His fellow diabolists are furious as Return's big resurrection ceremony exposes secrets of their craft. The director is ritualistically murdered in a Paris hotel and now several shadowy figures show up on set. I had to re-read this and was surprised how well this story has aged. It was written in 1938, and they want to do a remake because Americans don't watch European movies. The more the world changes ... The plot is pretty grim for Bloch at this time of his career, but works like a clockwork and shows how original he can be without the crutch of Lovecraftiana. It is sad that there never was a complete Bloch. |
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