I'm not sure how important it is nowadays, but not too long ago posters were the way to go when it came to promoting a film. At a movie theater you'd gawk (well, at least I did) at the artwork presented on the "Coming Soon" marquees, with hopes that these wonderful films would end up at least one of the local theaters around where I lived (most of the time they didn't). In a vain attempt not to sound like an ol' fuddy-duddy, I won't rail too much against the recent, lame poster designs that most studio's pump out. In fact, I won't waste my time on US movie posters at all.
Yep, it's that time again. Time again to present to you, dear blog-aholics, a dozen or so non-western advertizements for thrilling monster films that you'll probably never get around to seeing. God knows, I've had a hard time tracking some of the films I've been writing about. They aren't your usual Netflix or Blockbuster releases.
Let's start out with my current fascination, the Indian Monster Movies:
GHABRAHAT (1989).
GHABRAHAT, from 1989 and director Sunil Kumar. No other information on this film. Looks cool, huh? The film sports a classy Ramsy Brothers-looking poster. Classy? Ramsy? Hey, when you've seen as many of these "Grade C" films as I have, then that moniker fit. It's on my list of films to look for.
On a side note: the monster reminds me of the skeletal creature from THE DEATH CURSE OF TARTU (1966). If you haven't had the chance to see this USA made horror film, then you should treat yourself to some of its charm. This is as close to an Indian monster movie an American production gets. No, seriously, it has all the right elements. Trust me.
Next on my list is a film that I have had on VHS since I got it from a pen pal of mine in the early 90's. I have since re-discovered it on VCD. It's the monsterific JAANI DUSHMAN from 1979, despite looking another Ramsy film, JAANI DUSHMAN seems to have benefited from a slightly higher budget, as along with its superior musical numbers, its monster is an incredible and very striking bouffant-headed werewolf.
Hindi poster art for JAANI DUSHMAN.
The hand-painted poster for JAANI DUSHMAN.
The crazy CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF variant.
The creature takes to abusing folks in the forest and in a spooky
underground warren/temple surrounding a spooky mansion (as it always is) . The two posters presented are the classic Hindi
one and a wonderfully crafted hand-painted canvas poster for what I
believe was the Urdu market. I have also seen another design where the
artist takes huge liberties in lifting Hammer's CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF
and puts it to use to illustrate their film. And considering what I can
make of the film, that intellectual theft is not too far of the plot.
In
this exciting scene, our
hero and a few of his friends has trapped the monster and in a desperate
attempt to smite the thing with a trident of Shiva. The hairy beast
lumbers about, stomping and grunting like most of its cinematic creature
cousins.
To round things off here are a few more Indian Monster Movie posters of films I NEED TO SEE:
Here's gooey monster for ya!
Another sleazy "Grade C" from the late 1990's
A Fredrick March-inspired poster for a 1981 creature feature.
AAARGH! [with apologize to comic writers everywhere]
I am currently suffering from brain freeze. A mind fart. Word shy. Bashful blog bang out. Writhering whathaveyous. THE total lack of knowing what to write about pretty much sums this malady up just fine. While I have give myself the job of writing at least 500 words a day for this blog (and other projects), it's the fear of not knowing what to turn out that causes the most creative constipation. The stack of recently purchased VCDs are sitting within reach. They mock me. Probably saying very rude things in Hind, or Telugu, or Urdu or whatever Indo-Aryan or Dravidian tongue is trapped within them.
There, I've flexed enough. Time to get down to business!
As anyone knows, who has blindly bought as much crap off line as I have in the past, what you see ain't exactly what you get. But at 75¢ to $1.25 per VCD who I am to quibble. Directors Ismail Inamdar and A.K. Misra's 1990's horror film PYAASI ATMA is a potboiler production which, due to the crap transfer (thanks, Nupur Video), it may as well b ea better film than what is presented.
The VCD art promises gore and a grungy monster with loads of blood and fangs and what looks like semi-nudity. A young married couple moves into their new home only to be threatened by an annoying ghost that terrorizes them. The angry spirit is determined to break up the marriage and run off with the husband while his wife prayers for his soul. There is a lot of banging of windows, slamming of doors, dramatic mood lighting, and the other such typical trappings of this species of haunt.
Where's the fanged horror? Instead of the advertized ghoul we have drawn out histrionics and the monster making token "pop ups" throughout. Just as the spectral hottie is about to take the man to her tomb for god-knows what reason, our heroine's prayers to her god pays off and the lustful spirit is obliterated in a holocaust of cleansing holy flame.
I'm not complaining too much, as I have been known to sit through quite a few Eurocine productions from the 70's and without flinching. PYAASI ATMA is not too far off that track of filmmaking.
The upside is the exceptionally fun soundtrack delivered in the crazed mash-up format found in a good deal of these low-budget productions.
As a side note: this PYAASI ATMA is not to be confused with the vastly superior horror/ghost-possession film of the same name from 1988 and directed by P. Chandra Kumar. It was Kumar's film I thought I was getting, but is available on to watch YouTube.
By the way, if someone every brings up the Ramsy brothers and their monster/horror films from the 70's to the present and say that they are crap slap them for me. At least their films have some element of production values, and there is an attempt at producing some chills AND they have a monster in them. A lot less can be said of my next VCD from the pile of doom: Ashok Jamaur's BHOOTON KA HONEYMOON.
Next up is ever popular thematic motif known as "those crazy kids who decide to party down in a haunted house". While PYAASI ATMA was your 70's ghost and monster flick, BHOOTON KA HONEYMOON is definable pure 80's drivel despite its 2001 production. Horny teenagers and rubber-masked monsters mix it up while "hit songs" playing merrily in the background of this somewhat entertaining film.
Side note again: these titillating horror films are pretty much the "grade C" of Indian cinema. They are fly-by-night productions quickly made and often shown to passengers of the Indian railway and in run-down theaters in small cities and towns. They are made for a quick buck for hungry audiences wild for such witless charms and phony thrills of a film like BHOOTON KA HONEYMOON. It doesn't matter than the monsters are some of the looniest-looking critters every the grace the screen. The oft-rowdy crowds are there to while away two and a half hours. Hell, I used to do that a few times a week at drive-ins during the summer back in my youth. I would KILL to have this kind of nuttiness still around.
Okay, so the kids have stumbled onto a haunted "honeymoon mansion" and they are killed off one by one by a variety of spectral horrors and sexy ghosts. The only ones left are our busty raven-haired leading lady and her man who, in a wonderful musical show of what I love about Indian cinema, must face some dancing and singing ghouls. (The much-maligned TROLL 2 can't hold a candle to some of the monsters in this film!).
Sadly, it turns out that the monsters are in reality a gang of criminals in the guise of the undead. Damn! Who would have thunked that? I was bummed out at that revelation.
One could feel jaded in this world of instant gratification via the internet. Torrent sites and YouTube does satisfy my sweet tooth for the easily discovered cinematic candies. But to experience the sheer thrill of the unknown may I suggest throwing all care to the winds and knuckle down to some random purchasing of movies from legit websites.
Well, maybe semi-legit.
I'm not sure about induna.com, a site that I have recently had the pleasure to peruse. With VCDs for as little as 75¢ and DVDs as cheap as $1.75 it would seem that it's a grey market store. Or maybe that's the market value for these products. The selection of obscure fantasy, horror, and mythological movies is incredible. Wading through their selection is not for the faint of heart, as a lot of what they offer probably doesn't have English subtitles, especially in the rare VCD department (VCDs [video CDs] are VHS and sub-VHS quality MPEG-2 encoded films).
My recent purchase was VCD heavy which has meant I have been sitting thru Indian films in two or three languages I am not familiar with (altho I am beginning to recognize some word and phrases thru observation). Hindi is the most common, with what sounds like Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam or Bengali in most of the rest (if I can see written text in the film I can ID it better).
Now on with the films:
Right off the batwe have HATIMTAI KI BETI, a famous fantasy film from 1955 (previously filmed in the 1930's and 40's), and one I have been after for a few years based on just this VCD cover alone. Along with all the gods and goddesses and the singing and dancing (and wonderfully crafted set designs) you have this winged black demon creature. Of course, the VCD lacks subtitles, but my girlfriend and I sat thru the first disc (Indian VCDs are typically two-three disc set, as each video disc can hold about 60-90 minutes of encoded video) without any real hassles. I finished up the second early this morning.
At this point in time I should mention I'll sit thru a foreign film I don't understand AND that lacks subtitles because, well, how else am I going to see it? Sure, some clarification of the plot would help, but the majority of these films are nowhere near an Indian version of MY DINNER WITH ANDRE.
HATIMTAI KI BETI is not the most exciting fantasy film unless you are a fan of dramatic Indian cinema and the sort. From what I gather the film follows one of the many adventures of a
popular 6th Centuery Arabic adventurer known as Hatim al-Tai. The creature in the film pops up a few times just to pester what I assume is some goddess. He seems to push her into making life troublesome for a variety of humans (á la Lucifer and Job). Not too far out of the ordinary, unless you are a fan of the actress "Helen" as this film is one of her first roles. The musical numbers are catchy and the two of the leading ladies are drop-dead gorgeous.
The film was later remade in 1990 as HAATIMTAI with more fantastic elements, including a giant, some hairy big-foot-looking monsters, a flying carpet and so forth. More about that film later.
Every couple of months I get a package in the mail. It's usually full of VCDs or DVDs of films I know very little about. In the late 80's thru the 90's I bought a great deal of VCDs from companies in Hong Kong and Singapore, fueling my love of Chinese fantasy and horror films. I've now begun to rummage around the internet for other counties sporting unknown (to me) and rare titles. This is because the HK/Chinese market has pretty much dried up (at least from my financial aspect of film purchasing... this stack of 15 videos cost me $50 which included 3-day DHL international shipping)
The package came from India, and what was inside was pretty cool. Not incredible, but not too far off from what I expected.
If you have the guts to order stuff just from the cover art alone, then you will end up with a pile of films that may look like this:
Back in the day, before technology could deliver tantalizing images of films directly to you on your home computer or on your phone or tablet, paper-based (rather than pixal) posters were the way to get your attention. Sure, TV commercials and film previews in a theater helped, but non-invasive, full color posters were works of art. Actually, the art of poster-design hasn't changed much since the 70's and the impact that STAR WARS had on the industry.
Of course I'm rambling about Western-based posters. Hollywood has influenced the look of film since the USA began cranking out blockbusters in the 1920's. Worldwide, each country had their own epic classics to compete with anything the States produced (check out Guido Brignone's MACISTE IN HELL from 1925 available in a slightly truncated form on a Oldies.com DVD). However, audiences in those counties, for the most part, adored Hollywood, and pretty soon most of those regional studios fell into second, third or fourth place (not all, as Germany had Fritz Lang to make classics). I digress. Posters. Back to posters.
Eyeball candy.
The bloated designs for STAR WARS and RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK pretty much changed the lush or arty posters of the 60's to mid 70's. For mainstream fantasy films, posters pretty much sucked after 1978. Mass produced cookie-cutter clutter. Luckily, we have hand-painted beauties from Africa, India, Pakistan, and other non-western locales to stimulate the imagination. Or, at least my imagination. These huge one-of-a-kind advertizements are now much sought after items and fetch hefty sums on Ebay and from private collectors AND galleries. I guess they're being bought up by hipsters.
But they rule.
The posters produced by folks at African-based video stores in Europe and the US (and on their home soil) are for the new and the old. There is no bias against old films - no misplaced hipster "kitsch", as they are given the love that only a naïveté auteur could produce. Check out this one for the 1958 Ray Harryhausen fantasy classic 7TH VOYAGE OF SINBAD with the distinctive Cyclops that was the highwater for animated monsters for decades. I would kill for this poster. It's from Ghana. And one for the late Don Dohler's ALIEN FACTOR (1978). It's pretty clear: these are MONSTER movies!
The locally-grown variety from Ghana have insane imagery as well, although the monsters on these works of art don't, for the most part. really appear in the films. I've sat through around a dozen or so Ghanaian or Nigerian horror/monster/fantasy/magical realism movies and the critters that inhabit these shot-on-videop grinders are usually folks in greasepaint who wear plastic horns on their heads. But the posters.... sheer beauty:
If I had the cash and a wall in my house where I could display these critters I would.
Tomorrow: Even more monstrous beauties from India, Thailand, Pakistan, and a few other non-western nations.
The college town had two pharmacies, and they both had impressive racks. Magazine racks, that is. The clerks in both store where wizened creatures with eye-glasses and beehive wigs, and not at all appealing. Every Thursday after school the magazine truck would toss a few wonderful brown-papered & wire wrapped packages in front of each store. Typically these bundles would land with a thump, and a huddled pack of kids and a few of the cooler adults in town would poke about the lot to see what may have been delivered. This paper and ink manna from heaven. The corner drug store had more comics than magazines, and mostly Marvel and DC comic. The other store had the movie magazines, the less popular comics... and cigars. For some odd reason that's why he ended up there. The excitable scent of fresh ink and unburnt tobacco. Such an incredible aroma.
The kid stood in front of the magazine rack. His eyes scanned every shelf. Bold colors, gutsy fonts, wonderful images for just about anyone's fancy. Not much this week, tho. Maybe next week will have more Halloweenie stuff. Being ten he wasn't too keen on the boobies books that populated the top shelf. That isn't too say that the titillating peek-a-boo nipple of Lynn Myers didn't arouse some alien ache in his oft-confused but getting-there-pubescent brain. Playboy would have to wait until somewhat later in life to fuse that fleshy obsession with his current fascination of the fantastic. Besides, Playboy costs a dollar, and that was all the boy had in his pocket, said crumbled bill of that exact domination and a some pennies for tax.
A dollar could buy a lot of fun in 1972, and he already picked out two comics from the spinner behind him. Especially cool was the Ditko cover for "Many Ghosts Of Dr. Graves". Two comics would cost him 40¢, that would leave him enough for either the newest issue of "The Monster Times". Its cover screamed GODZILLA FOR PRESIDENT! SEE Pg 15 and ATTACK OF THE PLANT MONSTERS!
He was dying to look through the magazine to see what the hell 'Zilla could do for the country. But, he looked around and saw Mean ol' Wrinkled eyeing him. The blue-haired hag took a drag on the menthol (yuck) cigarette and squinted at him. "This isn't a library," would be the tired and worn barely-audible utterance from the pharmacy's counter if he even attempted to flip thru the magazine. Even if he tried to sneak a peek, it didn't help that "The Monster Times" was a publication you had to unfold like a newspaper to read.
It was a good buy. Charlton never failed to deliver with some excellent artwork, and these two comics had both Steve Ditko and Tom Sutton.
"The Monster Times" was incredibly informative and held delicious secrets that he would uncover for weeks to come. There was also the The Monster Times Bookshelf that promised even more information overload at a price. If only he could convince his mother to order some of the books. Christmas was coming up in a few months. Or maybe his younger brother would ask for some. Despite being a pain-in-the-neck the that kid was sheer gold for picking out the very coolest of the cool.
That was my life as a child. Nothing much as changed, other than I am lot older.
The MONSTER! Blog will be the fifth time I've tried an internet/web page for Kronos Productions (named after the 1957 giant robot invasion film). After a few decades of this nonsense I think I may get it right.
Oh, but the past:
My first attempt to post articles and images out there in the "cloud" was back in 1988. For those of you who have been with the internet from its humble beginnings in the early 80s, you know how frustrating and SLOW it was. MONSTER! ONLINE was a series of articles and so forth that I tried to post on a weekly basis when I was a Compuserve consumer. Didn't work out so well. I had to dial-up Columbus, OH and log into a bulletin board. Not a pleasant experience, and after a few months of frustration and expensive long-distance phone bills I ditched MONSTER! ONLINE.
Hey, I tried.
Next came a few sites at AOL; the most successful was the page called The FrancoFiles: The Pure and Extreme Cinema of Jess Franco. This ran from 1993-96. It was fun, and I created various graphics and reported on sad events such as the death of Howard Vernon and Daniel White. This was also the time of MONSTER! INTERNATIONAL and HIGHBALL MAGAZINE. Both of those publications became increasingly harder to produce. When my co-editor Dave Todarello and I split and my grandmother died I shut down the FrancoFile and its sister site MONSTER! INTERNATIONAL.
I'm sure someone with some talent could dig those pages up by using Time Machine or the such.
For those interested here's the (sadly) DEAD link: members.aol.com/timothyp2/francofolder/francofile.html
In the meantime over the past 25 years I've tried my hand at hosting a few cable TV shows: "Late Night Video", "Late Night Video Double Feature", "Kung Fu Spaghetti Western Double Trouble Theatre", and "Hanuman Theatre". More about those projects at a later date.
Decades later I'm going to attempt this again. So, dear readers, at the beginning I'll start with the modest rate of 500-2000 words a week. Not much when you consider other folks who blog. AND for those of you who have read my 'zines from the past 30+ years know, you already I am not a great author of ground-breaking material. Nevertheless, thanks to a few fine folks out there (and Facebook for (re)connecting me with them) - Dave Zuzelo, Brian Harris, Dan Taylor, and others - I have been gently prodded back into the cloud. Last but not in least in any form, a hardy "thank you" to Steve Bissette who asked me to write a little something for one of his many project.
And to Cara who has offered to proof-read for any typos.
Enough for the intro. New entries to start in a week or so. Expect the absurd... because that's what I love the most about MONSTER! cinema.
