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I remember this one! This was the Christmas novelette where The Spider saved Santa Claus after Pitch invaded his gold and crystal palace in outer space. The Devil's big mistake was interrupting The Spider and his girlfriend at their naughty time. Yay, Friday! Watch something stupid this weekend. I can help with that, actually.…

Back to pulp covers tomorrow. When I returned to work yesterday, I had forgotten that I had bought a ticket for last night to finally see Princess Mononoke. I had seen Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind a few months ago (allowing me to finally get a hilarious joke sequence in Bocchi the…

The Spider was a more homicidal The Shadow knock-off. It tended to feature a typical mix of madmen, gangsters, yellow perils and the like, which a fairly small number of more fantastic foes. However, there's always metaphors, and as we know, few things sell as well as cover art featuring skeletons. I like to…

SPOILER ALERT: Above image telegraphs the resolution of the film's extremely hard to predict romantic triangle. Unsurprisingly, all the best stop-animated monsters from the '50s came courtesy of Ray Harryhausen. (Well, and Willis O'Brien.) The rest of the movie is a snooze--you definitely doing something wrong when Kenneth Tobey can't elevate your film*--but man,…

Hmm. Serviceable, I guess, but kind of boring. Doesn't even really establish the giant scorpion thing. Not sure this would have gotten me in the cinema, sans a trailer or something. Luckily, we always have lurid, painted foreign poster art to properly exploit the monster and..... Huh.

Well, this one is of rather lower quality than Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, that's for sure. It's 90% oater, and 10% dinosaur. Still, if you hang in long enough, you get a pretty fun rampage from a dino with a Gene Simmons tongue. I give them credit for going stop-motion anyway, kind of a…

Who doesn't love stop-animated animation? Sure, there was the occasional prop-created monsters that were terrific, like Them! Or fantastic suits, like in The Land Unknown. (Actually, Land Unknown had both great suit monsters *and* great prop monsters.) Still, stop-animated monsters just really scratch an itch like nothing else. I can't imagine any kid of…

"No! My fiancee! He's bald!" Anyway, let the bowling puns begin! Happy Friday, everyone. Watch something stupid this weekend.