Table of contents for Issue 151 December 2014 in RUE MORGUE

To quote the wisdom of soundtrack sage Ray Parker Jr., “’Bustin’ makes me feel good.” More precisely, watching Ghostbusters puts me in that wonderful place that only certain ’80s movies can put me. Films such as Goonies, Beetlejuice, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Back to the Future, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Big Trouble in Little China and The Monster Squad – which boast ambitious pre-CGI effects, catchy soundtracks, wisecracking characters, adventure to burn and absurdly happy endings – are a refuge from the realities of adulthood. It’s like sneaking off to your old tree fort for a while to read comics and eat Smarties. One of my happiest times in the past few months was watching the re-released Ghostbusters in the theatre. It proved the perfect escape during what has been…

October 30th, 2014 saw a fitting homecoming to one of the greatest literary wanderers, Edgar Allan Poe, with a life-sized bust of the author unveiled at the Boston Public Library. Cast in bronze and created by Bryan Moore, the work was funded by a Kickstarter campaign that ended this past July and raised $35,102, surpassing its $30,000 goal, thanks to 230 backers. The project’s largest financial supporter was none other than Guillermo del Toro. “Within twenty minutes of our Kickstarter campaign going live, he gave us $10,000,” says project producer Izzy Lee, who aided in the organization of the online campaign by dealing with media requests and sourcing donors. “That was a dream come true. Del Toro had donated to the H.P. Lovecraft bust project and he stepped up again.…

THE REAL GHOSTBUSTERS ECTO-1 (Kenner, 1986) Ivan Reitman’s 1984 hit film spawned a successful 1986-91 animated TV series, The Real Ghostbusters, which, in turn, produced a mountain of merchandise, including a line of action figures, vehicles and playsets from Kenner. One of the most popular of these was the Ghostbusters’ signature vehicle, the Ecto-1, released in 1986. Measuring 14 inches, the toy came with a swiveling gunner seat for the roof and a claw accessory which could reel in the accompanying orange ghost. Loose examples can sell for around $40, while boxed specimens can fetch more than $250 on eBay. MORE CRYPTIC COLLECTIBLES AT RUE-MORGUE.COM…

GODZILLA WEARING AN OCTOPUS HAT.” THAT’S THE WAY PETER VENKMAN DESCRIBED CTHULHU, IN WHAT IS UNDOUBTEDLY ONE OF HIS BEST QUIPS. That line wasn’t spoken by Bill Murray, but by Lorenzo Music (best known as the voice of Garfield in numerous prime-time animated specials), who also voiced Venkman in The Real Ghostbusters. Benefiting from the limitless possibilities of animation, along with scripts written by the likes of John Shirley (The Crow), Michael Reaves (The Night People) and J. Michael Straczynski (Changeling, World War Z), The Real Ghostbusters series leaned towards horror more than either Ghostbusters film. For that reason we put together this handy list of the series’ creepiest episodes. “THE BOOGIEMAN COMETH” (SEASON 1, EPISODE 6) Monster in the closet? With pale skin, red lips, and cloven feet, the…

DEATH HAS FINALLY COME D FOR ARCHIE ANDREWS. AFTER MORE THAN 70 YEARS OF HIGH-SCHOOL DANCES AND MALT-SHOP DATES, 2014 WILL GO DOWN AS THE YEAR “AMERICA’S TYPICAL TEENAGER” COULDN’T ESCAPE THE GRIM REAPER. In the penultimate issue of Life with Archie, released in July 2014, an adult Archie was shot to death while protecting his friend, openly gay gun-control advocate Kevin Keller, from a would-be assassin. Meanwhile, in an alternate timeline, the teenaged Archie and his pals have spent the entire year fending off ravenous hordes of zombies in Afterlife with Archie. Archibald Andrews, whose trademark look is largely credited to original artist Bob Montana and an eventual revamp by former pinup artist Dan De-Carlo, made his first appearance in the December 1941 issue of a comic-book series called…

THIS ISSUE: LANCE PUTS THE “HO” IN “HOMICIDE” CLAUS 2.0 INFINITE SANTA 8000 Midnight Releasing My parents told me that Santa Claus bought toys to good girls and boys, while the bad ones got a lump of coal. And yes, as a child I received enough coal to heat a small town for a decade. I wish that instead that they had told me the story of Infinite Santa 8000. The animated movie is set in an apocalyptic world populated by mutants and robots, where the few remaining humans must kill to survive. Santa, who now sports gnarly cybernetic implants, has relocated his workshop to an abandoned motel in the desert and fights cyborgs in gladiatorial arenas for sacks of meat. You’ll get to see Santa and his robo-reindeer battle…

Between the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, the drug scene and the sexual revolution, the ’60s left a huge imprint on Western pop culture, so it’s kind of odd that horror cinema went largely untouched by all that upheaval. Oh sure, there were a few genuine milestones in a decade that kicked off with Psycho and wound down with Rosemary’s Baby and Night of the Living Dead, seasoned liberally with increasingly lurid fare from Hammer, but given the staggering number of classics lurking on the horizon in the ’70s, one could be forgiven for thinking of the ’60s as a lame duck decade for genre film. Well, think again. Pivotal works are few and far between, but if your taste runs to bargain basement fromage – and if you’re…

A COMPANION TO THE HORROR FILM Harry M.Benshoff, ed. Wiley-Blackwell Matt Hills, Harry M. Benshoff, Mark Jancovich, Peter Hutchings, James Kendrick, Isabel C. Pinedo, Xavier Mendik, Joan Hawkins – the average genre fan may not be familiar with these names, but they’re some of the most important writers in horror film studies. And they’re just some of the scholars on hand to discuss key concepts, themes, ideas and titles throughout the 600 large-format pages in A Companion to the Horror Film. Essays in Part I deal with important approaches (philosophy, psychoanalysis, gender, sexuality and social allegory) and contexts (reception, distribution and censorship). These writings establish firm ground for understanding what horror is and how its effects and meanings are achieved. Of special note are essays on “Horror and Psychoanalysis” by…

CRAWLSPACE SOUNDTRACK Pino Donaggio INTRADA Pino Donaggio is one of Italy’s most prolific film composers, not to mention director Brian De Palma’s go-to collaborator on such famous films as Body Double and Dressed to Kill. With Crawlspace (1986), Donaggio shows his willingness to tackle cheap and sleazy genre fare along with big budget screen thrillers and dramas, always approaching his work with the class and grace of a true maestro. Crawlspace is no exception to this rule, balancing a sublime, wordless female vocal with beautiful strings and sexy sax accompaniment on “Martha’s Lament,” while “The M&M Murders” utilizes ’80s horror synth sounds alongside tense violin stabs to create an atmosphere far elevated from what one might typically expect from a Bmovie horror score. Worth mentioning is a haunting vocal…

150 ISSUES. An awesome milestone for @RueMorgue! Congrats, guys. Keep up the awesome work. Special props to @GhoulishGary for the cover. BRIAN BAKER, VIA TWITTER JUST HAVE TO thank you for your fantastic H.R. Giger tribute in RM#149! Now that’s how a tribute is done! I’ve been a Giger fan since Alien came out and I still found some new info in your tribute – very well done. He’ll be missed and I really have to get myself to his museum next time I’m in Europe. RM is always an outstanding magazine, but this one is my favorite issue. OLIVER JB, VIA FACEBOOK THANKS FOR THE Giger special edition, it’s great! Hope you’re enjoying the onset of Autumn and the darkening sky… DEBBIE HARRY – NEW YORK, NEW YORK I’M…

CASE NO,151 Sigourney Weaver claimed to have suffered nightmares for two weeks after reading the script for M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village. A 66-year-old UK woman was pronounced dead after a fall in which her contraceptive coil perforated her uterus. A fear of hospitals had driven the woman to live with the coil for 29 years. According to his daughter, Boris Karloff had to have three major back surgeries during his lifetime as a result of carrying Colin Clive up the stairs of the windmill in the climax of Frankenstein. This past October, doctors in Edinburgh, Scotland spent half an hour removing a three-inch long leech from the nose of British backpacker Daniela Liverani. For weeks prior, the 24 year-old had dismissed the object in her nostril as congealed blood.…

THE ABILITY TO ENDLESSLY RE-WATCH A FILM FOR DECADES AND STILL RETAIN A PREVAILING SENSE OF CHILDLIKE WONDER, AWE AND TERROR IS SOMETHING TO BE CHERISHED. When we are young and possessed of few discriminating tastes and prejudices, we embrace all manner of cinematic insipidity with a less-jaundiced eye. As we grow into adulthood, the movies we cleaved to as kids may unveil their foibles, but their power to transport us often remains undiminished. They still moisten one’s eyes with nostalgia, accelerate one’s pulse with excitement and prickle one’s flesh with goosebumps. For many millions of fans across the world, one movie that has always maintained this proficiency is Ghostbusters, Ivan Reitman’s spooktacular fusion of side-splitting laughs, spine-chilling scares and jaw-dropping special effects. Back in the summer of 1984, just…

IT’S HARD TO IMAGINE A WORLD WITHOUT TROMA. EVEN IF POTTY HUMOUR, GORE GAGS AND GRATUITOUS NUDITY AREN’T YOUR THING, IT’S BEEN GOOD TO KNOW THAT SOMEWHERE OUT THERE, AN INDEPENDENT FILM COMPANY IS CHURNING OUT BMOVIES WITH ZERO REGARD FOR PRODUCTION STANDARDS, CENSORSHIP… OR GOOD TASTE. Call them shlock or sleaze or low-brow trash, they are at least honest and, at best, authentic punkrock genre cinema. It all began in the early ’70s when college classmates Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz started producing low-budget softcore comedies and acquiring B-movies for distribution. The pair quickly developed a reputation for offering the kind of indie flicks you couldn’t find elsewhere, and so they founded Troma Entertainment Inc. in 1974 and went on to co-direct and produce all of Troma’s titles from…

OWL ON THE PROWL STAGE FRIGHT (1987) Blu-ray Starring David Brandon, Barbara Cupisti, and Giovanni Lombardo Radice Written by George Eastman and Sheila Goldberg Directed by Michele Soavi Blue Underground In 1987, the Italian giallo was pretty much dead. Eclipsed by its American bastard child, the slasher film, whose own cycle was already mired by absurdities, the oncemighty murder mysteries had fallen to the very gutter they had previously managed to transcend. Enter Michele Soavi’s Stage Fright, a film that somehow managed to perch high atop the subgenre’s finest entries well after it had any business doing so. In it, a theatre troupe, rehearsing for a play about a serial killer, falls prey to the real thing: an owl-masked, axe-swinging maniac named Irving Wallace (Clain Parker). After Wallace escapes from…

THIS MONTH: man made monsters Thomas Kuebler painstakingly moulds and sculpts life-sized characters that are so incredibly realistic, you can almost hear his Krampus bust hiss. It even takes a bit of courage to get close enough to see if his work is indeed made by human hands. Kuebler assures us that they are, and describes his process. “I approach sculpture the way a classical painter approaches the next painting,” he reveals. “It is as much about that frozen moment in time as it is about the character. Sometimes I’ll create a whole environment around the character to capture that moment.” After a ten year career in toy design and animatronics, the artist started his own business and channels his expertise into commissions and personal work without the time or…

The horror soundtrack LP market continued to boom in 2014, with releases from Death Waltz, WaxWork and Mondo delivering more ambitious releases than ever, not to mention new imprints such as Lunaris, Strange Disc, and Spacelab9 popping up. But like any trend that gets hot, there’s bound to be some failures. Here are a few of them… GHOSTBUSTERS 30TH ANNIVERSARY 10” (ARISTA RECORDS) Vinyl purists have complained the recent LP resurgence is driven more by a desire for rare collectors items than audiophile listening experiences. Exhibit A: this Ghostbusters EP, a Record Store Day “exclusive” limited to 1000, 2000 or 5000 pressings, depending on which retailer you ask. None of that matters, because shortly after RSD it was mass produced for sale at the Ghostbusters online store and Hot Topic…

THE WALKING DEAD: SEASON 2 PS3, Xbox 360, PC/Mac, iTunes Telltale Games Telltale Games continues its winning streak with The Walking Dead: Season 2, the follow-up to 2012’s award-winning interactive adventure. Picking up sixteen months after the events of the first outing, Season 2 puts the player in the shoes of Clementine, the girl you were entrusted with protecting in Season 1. Now alone, she has to fend for herself in a world populated with “walkers” and equally dangerous bands of bandits and scavengers. In time, she encounters a new group and joins them in their escape from a ruthless former ally. There’s been some minor tweaking to the mechanics, but for the better, with the result being quicker reaction times and more fluid controls. Between puzzle-solving and the occasional…

A pair of educators face termination from their jobs after an article by journalist Matthew Kauffman appeared in the October 3, 2014 edition of The Hartford Courant. Titled “Two Educators Behind Violence and Nudity in Slasher Flicks,” it concerned the filmmaking hobbies of Mark Foley (principal of Granby Middle School in Connecticut) and Aaron Vnuk (a guidance counsellor at Sage Park Middle School). The creators of such titles as The Limb Collector, The Demon of Castlebury and Slicing Beauty, both men had – until recently – been anonymously indulging their passion for making horror movies under the pseudonyms Mark Daniel and Aaron Thomas Howell. This changed after Kauffman’s piece appeared, embroiling both men in a controversy that threatens their reputations and livelihoods. “The manner in which the story was written…

STAY PUFT LIMITED EDITION SUPER DELUXE VINYL A special edition re-release of the hit theme songs for Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters II (by Ray Parker Jr and Run DMC, respectively) on a white vinyl 12” with 3-D lenticular images and a six-inch figure of the iconic Mr. Stay Puft would have been enough to fry our eggs on a counter, but Legacy Recordings went the extra mile by making the whole affair marshmallow-scented. Limited to 3000! ghostbustersstore.com FUNKO FIGURES Funko’s Pop! line got in on the official licensing fun with 3 ¾” tall vinyl figures of our boys in beige (plus a special edition of “burnt” Stay Puft, which stands at 6”), first shown at last year’s San Diego Comic Con. The SDDC exclusives included a combo pack of the ‘Busters…

DESCRIBE TROMA IN THREE WORDS. John Bowen: “More,” “more” and “more.” Last Chance Lance: Cool as fuck! WHAT MADE YOU A TROMA FAN? JB: Not what so much as who. And his name’s Lloyd. LCL: It started back in 1984 with The Toxic Avenger. Some friends brought a crappy VHS copy of it to a party and I hadn’t seen anything so appallingly goofy and irreverent since Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. A few years later I came across The Class of Nuke ’Em High and that sealed the deal. I immediately became a Troma fan for life! FAVOURITE FILM? JB: Terror Firmer is a sentimental favourite from my early years at Rue Morgue. Poultrygeist, because it’s an example of Troma’s berserk, no-holds-barred kitchen sink approach really working cohesively on the…

SHOULDA BEEN UNMADE DRACULA UNTOLD Starring Luke Evans, Dominic Cooper and Sarah Gadon Directed Gary Shore Written by Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless Universal Every few years, the folks at Universal try to make a few bucks by dusting off their line-up of classic movie monsters and slapping them back on the big screen. Back in 2004 they tried it with the lamentable Van Helsing, 2010 saw the reimagining of The Wolfman and even old flat-top was rebooted earlier this year in I, Frankenstein. The problem is that most of these stories have been done to death and it’s become exceedingly hard to create new properties around them unless you shoot them off into space, set them in a contemporary time period, or re-invent them from scratch. And that’s exactly…

Double Duty Two roles are better than one, especially when it comes to the iconic Barbara Steele. Not long after her star appearance in the Gothic chiller Castle of Blood (1964), she reunited with director Antonio Margheriti for The Long Hair of Death (1964). This medieval-era follow-up, bristling with suggestions of witchcraft and spooky, crumbling crypts, clearly harkens back to Mario Bava’s Black Sunday (1960), only with a stronger focus on the role of twins and doppelgängers as agents of terror. Doubling, reflections, changelings and other literary techniques have been a mainstay of horror since the very beginnings of the genre. Typified by the split personality of the honorable Dr. Jekyll and the ruthless Mr. Hyde, this theme more often manifests as twins: one good, one evil. Margheriti’s film, out…

“SOME TIMES I LIKE A GOOD MONSTER STORY. COMING FROM THE MOUTH OF JOE R. LANSDALE, THESE WORDS ARE A BIT OF AN UNDERSTATEMENT” Horror aficionados probably know him as the insanely prolific writer of the screenplay for Bubba Ho-Tep, in which an elderly Elvis (Bruce Campbell) and “JFK” (Ossie Davis) face off against a mummy in a retirement home. Or you might have caught the Lansdale-penned Masters of Horror episode “Incident On and Off a Mountain Road” with its memorably deformed “Moonface” killer (both projects were directed by Don Coscarelli). Then there’s his 2010 Bram Stoker Award-winning story “The Folding Man,” featuring a gaggle of cadaverous nuns and the titular creature, unleashed upon a horde of hapless yokels. Of course, Lansdale isn’t just known for horror; over the years…

DEAD FLESH DELICACIES Zombies have completely and thoroughly invaded the mainstream, beginning with the success of Resident Evil and 28 Days Later, back in 2002. They grew in significant numbers in 2004 with Dawn of the Dead and Shaun of the Dead, and marched through the rest of the decade in a slew of imitative films and Resident Evil sequels. But it certainly wasn’t always this way, which is what makes Ken Weiderhorn’s under-appreciated Shock Waves (1977) – premiering on Blu-ray from Blue Underground – an anomaly for the era. A decrepit dive-boat captained by John Carradine encounters bizarre weather conditions before hitting a ghost ship in the dark and running aground off the shore of a seemingly deserted island. In exploring the island, the passengers and crew discover an…

THEY – MOSTLY – DRESS IN BLACK AND ARE VENERATED AS CANADA’S BEST KNOWN GOTH BAND, EVEN THOUGH their music is actually an amalgam of pop, metal and electronics, as well as, yes, the spookier forms of music collectively (and inadequately) termed “Goth.” And yet, the members of The Birthday Massacre – singer Chibi, guitarists M. Falcore and Rainbow, drummer Rhim, bassist Nate Manor and keyboardist Owen – are far from spooky in-person. “I wonder if we disappoint people sometimes, that we’re not dark and brooding,” notes Chibi during an in-person interview with the band in their hometown of Toronto. “Being brooding, we wouldn’t be ourselves,” adds Rainbow. “And a big part of the band is just being ourselves and promoting that sort of vibe amongst our audience.” That vibe, which…

ONIBABA (A.K.A. DEMON HAG) KANETO SHINDO JAPAN - 1964 Atowering presence in Japanese cinema as a writer, director and pioneer of independent filmmaking, Kaneto Shindo’s career traversed no less than seven decades. It encompassed, in the words of American film critic Chuck Stephens, “dizzying aesthetic heights and delirious pulp-action lows.” Born in 1912, Shindo made his debut as a writer in 1940 and would go on to pen over two hundred scripts for the likes of Kenji Mizoguchi, Seijun Suzuki and Kinji Fukasaku, but also for the 1970s “pinky violence” trilogy Rica the Half-Breed and both the big and small screen adventures of blind swordsman Zatoichi. As if writing didn’t keep him busy enough, Shindo delivered another 46 films as a director in the 50 years between his 1951 debut…