Monster of the Day #1176

This seems a rather logical follow-up to our recent Alternate Dracula week, while also affording us another opportunity to fete Sir Christopher.

  • Eric Hinkle

    I remember seeing this one after seeing most of the Universal Frankenstein movies. I expected the monster to be misunderstood — here he kills that old blind man and the little boy right off the bat. And the monster is still less evil in the end than Dr. Frankenstein himself, who becomes arguably a bigger Hammer horror villain than Dracula in the end!

  • Beckoning Chasm

    Are there any good biographies of Christopher Lee available, or in the works? Because I would really love to know how a guy who killed Nazis with (more or less) his bare hands decided he wanted to be an actor, and play pretty mute characters in his first couple of main features.

  • Not a giant fan of this movie, though the last time I watched it I found it better than I remember it being.

  • I have not read it yet, but his most recent autobiography is “Lord of Misrule”. Yes, I did say ‘most recent’.

  • ‘Course it isn’t on Kindle and copies are now going for 150 bucks a pop, but it does exist.

  • Gamera977

    It seems almost insanity to cast Lee in a silent role and not take advantage of his magnificent voice. Even more so than dubbing over Caroline Muno’s lovely accent in ‘Starcrash’.

  • bgbear_rnh

    Kind of a precedent for that if you consider Boris Karloff’s great voice.

  • Gamera977

    True!

  • Rock Baker

    Well, I think he was still coming up the ranks when he did CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN. It was the next year’s HORROR OF DRACULA that really launched him into stardom.

  • Rock Baker

    This is a great idea, Ken! There are so many Monsters that you could easily get a month out of them and not even cover some of the more obscure versions!

  • zombiewhacker

    Or dubbing over Harvey Keitel’s lovely accent in Saturn 3. Um… wait…

  • zombiewhacker

    There was a Sherlock Holmes film starring Lee as Holmes some years back, but I believe for the US version they dubbed his voice. (And didn’t they also dub over Karloff’s voice for the Italian version of Black Sabbath?)

  • Luke Blanchard

    That’s SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE DEADLY NECKLACE (1962). It was an international film with German producers. Apparently the actors performed their roles in English but the English soundtrack was done after it was filmed.
    The IMDB tells me Lee also played the role on TV in two TV movies, in 1991-92.

  • Eric Hinkle

    This will be very OT, and I apologize, but does anyone here know anything about a pair of movies I’m thinking of picking up? The first one is THE TAKING OF TIGER MOUNTAIN from China (Chinese warlord and his bandit army versus the heroic forces of the Peoples’ Liberation Army; hey, that’s the plot) and THE ADMIRAL: ROARING CURRENTS from South Korea (covers Admiral Yi Sun Sin and the battle of Hansando, 13 Korean warships against 333 Japanese ones). I wondered if these were good movies, so bad they’re good movies, or just plain boring ones. Though given the plots it’s hard to see how they could mess them up.

  • Rock Baker

    Well, both are out of my sphere. First I’ve heard of them, in fact.

  • Gamera977

    Same here but ‘The Admiral: Roaring’ sounds fascinating. I’ve been reading about Admiral Yi and the turtle ships- it’s amazing stuff.

  • Eric Hinkle

    Yeah, I really want to see that one. Been intensely curious about Admiral Yi ever since my brother was stationed in Korea and he sent me a model of one of his turtle ships as a kid. Got broke in shipping though.

    And as for the other, the cover to the DVD looks amazing (swordfighting, men on horseback, guys with trained killer tigers, etc.) that I just want to see it. That and there’s the sheer weirdness value of seeing a movie about the “heroic exploits” of the People’s Liberation Army. (I bet Mister Begg will be quirking an eyebrow Mister Spock style at those words!)

  • Eric Hinkle

    The Admiral was apparently a big movie over in South Korea. Given that it’s about Koreans beating the daylights out of evil invading samurai (real history yet!), I can only wonder how it did in Japan.

  • Gamera977

    I picked up three S. Korean movies a little while back, ‘Brotherhood of War’, ‘Frontline’, and ‘My Way’. The first two are fantastic, ‘My Way’ is somewhat fanciful but still a good movie- just not too realistic.
    I wonder if ‘TA:R’ ever played in Japan, though I have leaned from history- don’t honk off Koreans! The Japanese tried to invade twice in the Middle Ages and got the snot beat out of the both times! In fact only the Moguls were successful in invading Korea before the 20th century.

    ‘Tiger Mountain’ sounds interesting but not sure I’d like a movie from the Maoist side. Funny I’ll watch a movie about the Soviets killing Nazi’s but hey they were on our side at the time!

  • Eric Hinkle

    Agreed on the Koreans! It’s a rough land — winter conditions are literally Arctic — and it bred some rough people.

    And wth the other film, looking at Wikipedia, I see that ‘Tiger Mountain’ was directed by Tsui Hark. Not being up on Chinese directors, does anyone know if he’s one of the good ones or not?

  • Eric Hinkle

    Rock, I seem to recall that you like old-school superheroes; today I’ve seen a collection of The Fighting American by Joe Simon and ‘King’ Kirby from 1954 for sale in the bargain books at Barnes & Noble for about $6. Incredibly weird stuff, with some of the goofiest Commie villains I’ve ever seen (Hotski Trotski? Rhode Island Red?) and a terrific sense of humor. It’s 200 pages of classic comics for six bucks, you might like it if you ever shop at B&N.

  • Rock Baker

    I certainly like what they stood for. Good for the sake of goodness, that sort of thing. That’s not a bad price at all. But the closest Barnes & Noble is clear in the next State… Oh well, truth is I don’t read a lot of comics (ironic, is it not?) because there just isn’t enough time in a day!

  • Eric Hinkle

    It’s a lot better than the stuff they have on the shelves over in their comics section. Yeesh! How can they sell so much trendy nihilism and hamfisted politics? Is the modern comics audience really that fond of low and nasty writing? Seriously, it’s like they’re peddling 100 versions of the same story — “Life sucks; slit your wrists and die already!”

    Heck, I saw a comic of ‘Archie meets Predator’, with the characters all done in the traditional DeCarlo style getting eviscerated and slaughtered in graphic fashion. Who is this supposed to entertain?

  • Flangepart

    Eh, likey see it as a form of gang war. Sopranos Vs. Corleones, kinda thing.

  • Flangepart

    ‘Tiger Mountain’ sounds interesting but not sure I’d like a movie from
    the Maoist side. Funny I’ll watch a movie about the Soviets killing
    Nazi’s but hey they were on our side at the time!
    Hey, dueling predators…pretty much most of world history.

  • Flangepart

    It’s for the Post-Modernist crowd…which makes up most of the comic industry. Fashionable bitterness at life not being what it could be, because people are too often stupid…except them of course. They would never have been like those mean folks…they wish…

  • Eric Hinkle

    I’ve heard that part of it is because the writers and artists tend to think of their audience as oversized manchildren who will love anything provided you stick enough ‘boobs and blood’ in it. Which is their privilege, though I think it makes them sound like utter jerks. And unfortunately it does seem to sell to an ever-decreasing audience.

  • Rock Baker

    I have no idea who finds that entertaining. My work has always been geared toward feel-good, optimism, and fun. I wouldn’t even draw for one of the majors anymore.

  • Eric Hinkle

    That makes it sound like the current generation of Chinese view Mao and his pals as a bunch of glorified bandits themselves. Attitudes over there seem to have changed quite a bit.

  • Luke Blanchard

    Until the 80s standard US comics were a mass market product mostly aimed at children. (In the 60s-80s there were also B&W magazine format comics theoretically aimed at adults.) The 70s/80s saw the emergence of specialty comic book stores, which became the medium through which comics were sold as their US mass market distribution died off. The people who patronised specialty stores were predominately long-term readers who were superhero fans, so Marvel’s and DC’s output shifted to being aimed at long-term, older readers. Gold Key, Harvey and Charlton, whose output didn’t appeal to them, folded. Archie kept going, partly by selling digests in supermarkets.

    Now, in the pre-specialty shop days comics were distributed on a returnable basis, like other periodicals. (I don’t have details on what the arrangements were.) So whether a comic was successful was an issue of what proportion of its print run sold. The specialty shops bought comics on a non-returnable basis. So the 80s saw the emergence of new companies that aimed their comics at comics fans and put out comics with smaller print runs, which they could do because they didn’t have to absorb the cost of those unsold issues. This material tended to have a creator-owned, alternative character. Sometimes it appealed to geek sensibilities, sometimes arty sensibilities.

    The pioneer company here was Pacific, which published the comics in which the Rocketeer appeared, on which THE ROCKETEER (1991) movie was based. Another company that emerged at this point was Dark Horse, which evolved into a company based around licensing things like STAR WARS and is still with us, but has just lost the STAR WARS license as Disney now owns Marvel and has moved it there. (Marvel was the first STAR WARS publisher but Dark Horse got the license in the later 80s.)

    Meanwhile the price of old comics kept going up, and many people got the idea that current comics were also going to be worth a lot of $$$ some day. This fuelled a speculator boom in the 90s. Under the conditions of the boom the market rewarded excess of various kinds. Some of Marvel’s hot creators left and founded Image. Then the speculator bubble popped and the industry crashed. Today Image has evolved into a company that publishes creator-owned titles of all kinds.

    Some of the superhero comics from the 80s that got the most praise were ones that appealed to long-term fans looking for something new and envelope-pushing, like Frank Miller’s BATMAN: THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS or Alan Moore’s and Dave Gibbons’s WATCHMEN. These days instead of doing out-of-continuity comics in which taboos get broken the creators break them in the ongoing series. For example, when Captain America was revived in 1964(1) it was established that Bucky, his kid sidekick, had been killed. For decades Bucky’s returning was a never-going-to-happen, although some stories teased it. But in the 2000s he did come back, in a well-received storyline written by Ed Brubaker that was the basis of CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER. But with ongoing comics what happened last year gets superseded by what’s happening now, so the stories tend to be ephemeral even for fans.

    Other comics that one might see in a bookstore include comics that have appeal to non-geek alternative sensibilities or that got good reviews in mainstream publications, such as MAUS, most of which first appeared in a comic called RAW. Then there are the mangas (Japanese comics), which are of all kinds.

    A lot of older comics, including Marvel and DC ones, have been reprinted in recent years. Marvel and DC have both published a lot of cheap B&W volumes, collecting material from the 50s-80s. Marvel’s are titled ESSENTIAL and DC’s SHOWCASE PRESENTS. Both companies have also published hardcover colour collections. Marvel’s are titled MARVEL MASTERWORKS and DC’s ARCHIVES. I think DC has only published older material in this format, but Marvel has published 70s-80s stuff as well.

    There have also been many recent volumes reprinting newspaper strips from such publishers as Hermes Press and Titan Books. These include collections of the old Superman and Batman strips, which were handled by people who also worked on the comics.

    We may be entering a new period in which comics are sold digitally. But I don’t know if the industry will reach children again this way. Will parents give children an allowance they can spend online? Also, the current editors and creators at Marvel and DC also aren’t experts at selling to the children’s market but the fan market. And it may be that what today’s teen readers want is sex and violence.
    Marvel and DC each put out an enormous number of comics, so they put out all kinds of things, including kid-friendly titles. (A few years ago there was a series of comics starring Franklin Richards from FANTASTIC FOUR that played him just like Calvin from CALVIN AND HOBBES.) But it’s a mistake to suppose that if a feature was kid-friendly in the 70s it’ll be kid-friendly today. They also put out kid-friendly and non-kid-friendly comics with the same characters. I think this a mistake: how are readers supposed to find what they might like? But they’re the characters they’ve got, I suppose. Some of the other publishers do kid-friendly comics.
    (1) In AVENGERS #4, which is where the frozen in suspended animation aspect of the 2011 movie comes from. The sequence where he talks to Peggy Carter over the radio while he’s flying the craft struck me as based on the opening of A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (1946).

  • Luke Blanchard

    DC is reprinting several characters’ feature chronologically in its CHRONICLES colour paperbacks. It’s also reprinted 70s Legion of Super-Heroes and 80s NEW TEEN TITANS stories in Archives.

  • Eric Hinkle

    Thank you, Mister Blanchard. I’ve heard this in bits and pieces elsewhere from other people, but never so concisely or in one place before, thanks.