Month: November 2017

Kamandi Challenge no. 11

KC11.cover

Cover by Nick Bradshaw and Steve Buccellato

“Enter . . . the . . . Misfit!”
Writer: Rob Williams
Artist: Walter Simonson
Colorist: Laura Martin
Letterer: Clem Robins
Editors: Brittany Holzherr and Dan DiDio

Things are coming to a head: after the Death Worshippers stormed the Tower and shot Kamandi’s mother (who turned out to be the Commander of the Tower and leader of the robot forces who are trying to wipe out all animal life) at the end of last issue, she dies trying to tell Kamandi something about his still-missing father. However, she turns out to be a robot (I knew it!) with a secondary mission. The Tower is not only a building, but an actual rocket, and as the Death Worshippers continue to fight with the robots, the rocket launches into space, taking Kamandi to a final confrontation with the true power behind-the-scenes.

Kamandi continues to fight the robots alongside the Death Worshippers, joined by the shark crew from last issue (now wearing jet-packs: ah, comics!). Although the fight goes against Kamandi and his comrades, he is given a jet-pack by one of the sharks and, after wiping out some more of the robots, makes his way to the control room of the rocket. There, protected from the robots, he sees his friends cut down and realizes that he is once again alone.

Until, that is, one of the screens in the control room comes to life and the true commander of the rocket reveals himself: the Misfit, a genetic freak with a brilliant intellect, who has summoned Kamandi in order to extract the secret that lies in Kamandi’s genetic code. The Misfit, enthroned on his “Tek-Moon,” an armed space station, plans to launch the Anti-Cortexin from space!

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Examining a map, Kamandi sees that the ship is heading over an area marked “UFO activity” and hatches a plan: “Maybe if I press these controls I can somehow uncloak the ship so others below can see it and destroy it,” he says to himself. “A suicidal hope, but what other choice do I have?”

Soon after Kamandi disables the rocket’s cloaking device, a squadron of flying saucers attacks! Not only that, they are being flown by gorillas! (Sharks with jet-packs! Gorillas in flying saucers! Although Kamandi was a Bronze Age creation, there’s more than a little of the free-associative qualities of the Silver Age in this chapter.) The simian saucer pilots, led by the enormous ape Silverbeck, succeed in boarding the rocket with the intention of destroying the Tek-Moon once and for all. An orangutan named Royer (undoubtedly a nod to Jack Kirby’s long-time inker Mike Royer) discovers Kamandi and convinces Silverbeck not to kill him. Kamandi reveals the projected image of the Misfit to Silverbeck and Royer (“By the Severed Paw! What horror!”), who exchange threats.

The Tek-Moon opens fire on the rocket; when the Misfit lets slip that he could reunite Kamandi with his still-living father, Kamandi commandeers the rocket controls and prepares to ram into the Tek-Moon (suicide missions are a theme in both this chapter and the series as a whole), determined to find his father or die trying.

Fighting against the ape warriors who would pull him back, Kamandi flies directly into danger, set on learning the truth about his parents; but the Tek-Moon’s weaponry is too much for the rocket, and the bridge is blasted open and exposed to the vacuum of space just before it reaches the Tek-Moon. Kamandi is flung into space and the last shot we see is him tumbling toward the Earth below. To be continued?? (Yes, two question marks are needed to convey the uncertainty of this cliffhanger!)

KC11.space

“Enter . . . the . . . Misfit!” has a bit of a Star Wars vibe, at least visually: the command center of the rocket ship resembles the bridge of the Death Star in Return of the Jedi, and of course there is the armored space station, poised to rain death on an unsuspecting world below. Such doomsday weapons are a staple of science fiction, but the Death Star is the most obvious example. So, too, the Misfit (a Kirby creation who first appeared in Kamandi no. 9, with a similar germ warfare scheme) reminds me of Emperor Palpatine: a fitting antagonist to introduce at this point, warped physically and mentally, but holding out the tantalizing promise of solving the mystery of Kamandi’s origins and destiny. (Walter Simonson, the artist, worked on a number of science fiction comics over the years, including Marvel’s Star Wars adaptation, but he is best known for his long run on Thor, and the combination of far-out, alien places and weird characters is a good fit for him.)

The map that Kamandi studies aboard the rocket ship is, of course, modeled after the map that Jack Kirby provided during the early days of Kamandi, and which was fleshed out by later writers. Greg Pak, who wrote last month’s chapter, mentions in his afterword in this issue (in which he describes how he would have gotten Kamandi out of the cliffhanger if he had continued writing it) that he was assigned sections of the map to include in his chapter. I hadn’t realized that the challenge included specific territories, but in hindsight it explains the thoroughness with which Earth A.D. has been explored in this series. Some have been returns to places Kirby and his successors already visited in their series; others have been freshly revealed glimpses of places that were only names on the map up until now.

KC11.map

Over the course of this series, it has been interesting to observe how different writers treat the influence of Jack Kirby. Some have used Kirby’s characters and settings to tell stories more or less within their own style, while others have either emulated Kirby’s dynamic (some might say bombastic) manner or turned their stories into direct tributes (if Royer in this chapter is an homage to Kirby’s collaborator Mike Royer, does that make Silverbeck Kirby himself, I wonder?). In this chapter, writer Rob Williams seems to delight in some old-school comics techniques, most notably the use of play-by-play dialogue that describes things as they happen (“The talking human fights like a three-armed ape! We are wiping out the robot crew!”).

Nobody talks like this except comic book characters, and here it takes the place of verbose caption boxes, which otherwise appear only at the beginning and end of this chapter. It frequently turns toward the goofy (Kamandi says of the Misfit, “Indeed, he is truly a pumpkin-headed toad!”), but Silverbeck and the Misfit are especially prone to the kind of over-the-top rhetoric that Kirby deployed regularly (and which my regular readers know that I am powerless to resist). Whether it is the “Misfit majesty” giving orders to “Open fire with every weapon upon this bountiful and deadly Tek-Moon!” or the gorilla UFO commander calling Kamandi “a fool and not of the Silverbeck wisdom!”, “Enter . . . the . . . Misfit!” is, from its title on down, a story that oozes an affection for the comics medium and its more whimsical expressions.

KC11.kamandi

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Spooktober: The Aftermath

It is November first, the day after Halloween. The candy has been handed out, and all that remains is to put away the costumes and take the decorations out of the yard. Elsewhere online, people are already gearing up for Noirvember or NaNoWriMo or “No-Shave November.” As I write this I am watching a compilation of horror movie trailers to keep the mood going, after having hit the Spirit Halloween Store to check out the after-holiday sales.

I usually like to post this October summary on the 31st, but the holiday itself turned out to be busy with work during the day and taking the kids trick-or-treating in the evening (this year I went as my namesake, celebrity chef Guy Fieri), not to mention cramming in a few last-minute horror movies. As always, I kept track of my viewing in the last month: the results are a little less varied than in some years, partly because I watched more series and sequels this time. I had a pile of movies set aside for this month, and watched quite a few of them, but since I bought more movies during the month, the pile I have left is almost as big.

Blade Runner 2049 was the only film I watched that isn’t horror, but in the past I’ve included movies that are better described as fantasy or science fiction or that belong to horror-adjacent genres such as thrillers or kaiju eiga; I’m not much for splitting hairs. (It was good, by the way.)

There were also theatrical screenings at the Warren Oldtown Horrorfest (formerly October at the Oldtown), organized by local filmmaker and presenter Leif Jonker (and shown nationwide by the Regal Cinemas chain, which purchased the Warren theaters earlier this year). The only Horrorfest film I skipped was Jaws, which is great but feels more like a summer movie to me. In addition to the Horrorfest screenings, my viewing included films on VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, YouTube, and cable television (thanks, TCM!). (I’m not really a VHS collector, but I appreciate a bargain, and when I found a copy of Saturday the 14th at a church flea market on Saturday the 14th, how could I not pick it up?)

1. The Awakening (Mike Newell, 1980)
2. Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb (Seth Holt, 1971)
3. Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977)*
4. Fright Night (Tom Holland, 1985)*,**
5. Blade (Stephen Norrington, 1998)
6. Blade II (Guillermo del Toro, 2002)
7. Blade: Trinity (David S. Goyer, 2004)
8. Frankenweenie (Tim Burton, 2012)
9. The Dead Zone (David Cronenberg, 1983)*
10. Pet Sematary (Mary Lambert, 1989)*
11. The Monster Squad (Fred Dekker, 1987)*
12. Slave of the Cannibal God aka Mountain of the Cannibal God (Sergio Martino, 1978)
13. At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (José Mojica Marins, 1964)
14. This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse (José Mojica Marins, 1967)
15. Embodiment of Evil (José Mojica Marins, 2008)
16. Saturday the 14th (Howard R. Cohen, 1981)
17. Saturday the 14th Strikes Back (Howard R. Cohen, 1988)
18. Blacula (William Crain, 1972)
19. King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933)*, **
20. Them! (Gordon Douglas, 1954)*, **
21. A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984)*
22. Scream, Blacula, Scream (Bob Kelljan, 1973)
23. Society (Brian Yuzna, 1989)
24. The Mad Executioners (Edwin Zbonek, 1963)
25. Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017)*
26. Vampires (John Carpenter, 1998)
27. Cat People (Paul Schrader, 1982)*
28. Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1983)*
29. Torture Dungeon (Andy Milligan, 1970)
30. The Phantom Carriage (Victor Sjöström, 1921)
31. Salem’s Lot (Tobe Hooper, 1979)
32. The Ghost of Frankenstein (Erle C. Kenton, 1942)
33. The Vault of Horror (Roy Ward Baker, 1973)
34. The Whip and the Body (Mario Bava, 1963)
35. The Crimson Cult (Vernon Sewell, 1968)
36. House of the Long Shadows (Pete Walker, 1983)
37. The Secret of the Mummy (Ivan Cardoso, 1982)
38. Night of the Living Dead (George Romero, 1968)*, **
39. Theater of Blood (Douglas Hickox, 1973)

* theatrical screening
** rewatch

Best movie: It’s hard to pick a clear-cut winner out of so many films. Aside from rewatches, Suspiria, Theater of Blood, Frankenweenie, and Blacula were all very solid films. I was also very taken by A Nightmare on Elm Street after years of thinking I wouldn’t like it. In fact, I enjoyed most of the movies I watched for the first time this month, with only a few duds.

Ultimately, I think David Cronenberg’s prescient media fantasia Videodrome (which, admittedly, I had seen bits and pieces of previously) is going to stay with me the longest. In addition to its Philip K. Dick-like meditations on perception vs. reality and weird body horror (an element Cronenberg is obviously known for), Videodrome captures and anticipates the reality of lives half lived through screens and the attendant social changes. I hadn’t realized just how much Max Headroom and The Matrix owed to Videodrome, from the analog futurism of hand-delivered videotape messages (maybe we could call it . . . “v-mail”?) to the overwhelming importance of television for people’s spiritual well-being (the “Cathode Ray Mission,” where the homeless could get a meal and some precious screen-time, being an obvious example, and one that Max Headroom borrowed almost verbatim). And, as in They Live (another film that could almost fit in the same universe), the question of who is ultimately behind the signals the TV stations broadcast, and what impact they have, has an answer that is anything but reassuring.

Scariest movie: I had waited to see Dario Argento’s giallo-inflected supernatural mystery Suspiria until I could see it on the big screen, and my patience wasn’t disappointed: the colors were vibrant and the story suitably suspenseful and frightening. And I’ve come to look forward to performances by lead Jessica Harper, who around this time seemed to specialize in movies that made use of her uneasy brittleness. However, the most surprising revelation of all was finding an Italian horror movie with a plot that makes sense!

Goriest movie(s): Two movies are tied for this category. The first, Slave of the Cannibal God, has many of the hallmarks of the Italian cannibal genre, including an emphasis on realism (although unlike many cannibal films, Slave does not pretend to be a documentary) that extends to filming the real deaths of animals in both native rituals and in (staged) fights that purport to show the cruelty of the jungle. No thanks. There is also a tremendous amount of (hopefully simulated!) human gore once the fearsome cannibal tribe is reached, and a third-act sequence of horrors that gets hard to take long before it is over. No wonder it was included on the infamous “video nasties” list by censors in the United Kingdom.

The other contender is Embodiment of Evil by Brazilian writer-director-star José Mojica Marins, who has made an industry of his character Zé do Caixão, better known in English as “Coffin Joe.” The evil undertaker, who began his career in the 1960s with At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul, demonstrates a cruelty and indifference to conventional morality that makes him a unique antihero for a conservative society, with many similarities to the characters of the Marquis de Sade. Embodiment of Evil, Coffin Joe’s 2008 “comeback,” bears that comparison even more than his earlier films, since sophisticated special effects and more relaxed mores make it possible for Joe to terrorize his victims with much more graphic punishments (the cast also appears to include a number of body-modification practitioners, so it’s not even obvious to me that all of the piercings and other mortifications are strictly fake). I found the Coffin Joe movies interesting (and I liked the second one, This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse, quite a bit), but ultimately Embodiment of Evil was as close to “torture porn” as I care to explore.

Dumbest movie I will probably watch again: Several of the movies I watched were either comedies or included frequent humor. Saturday the 14th was the most obviously jokey, a spoof of all kinds of horror movies thrown into a blender of a story about a book that will release all the evil in the world if read on the titular date. Jeffrey Tambor (in one of his first movie roles) appears as a vampire who appears to be going through a mid-life crisis, and the comedy really takes off when the monster hunter Van Helsing (Severn Darden) shows up as an “exterminator.” Silly stuff, but amusing for what it is and I could see it becoming an every few years tradition.

Worst movie: The first movie spawned a sequel, Saturday the 14th Strikes Back, a few years later, so of course I had to watch it. The good news is that there is no narrative connection or continuity to the first one beyond the simple idea that bad things are going to happen on the date in question. Also, while researching this, I discovered that none other than Gahan Wilson created the poster for the film, so there’s that. The bad news is that the movie is cheaply made and even dopier in its humor than the first one. It’s a candidate for weirdest movie, but the substitution of wackiness and off-the-wall behavior for actual jokes feels desperate. It also doesn’t make much sense: the premise of the film is that an ordinary family starts acting strangely when a crack in the basement begins releasing evil into the world, but they’re pretty nutty to begin with, eating candy for every meal and going through OCD-like precautions to protect themselves from germs. It feels like a movie straight from the imagination of the little boy in “It’s a Good Life.”

Actual Weirdest movie: In addition to the Saturday the 14th movies, there was quite a bit of weirdness in Videodrome and the similarly ooky Society; The Crimson Cult was frankly not weird enough for a film supposedly based on H. P. Lovecraft’s “Dreams in the Witch-House,” and its Scooby-Doo-like ending bummed me out. I have in the past made a distinction between movies that are weird in themselves and movies that appear to have been made by weirdoes: The Secret of the Mummy, by Brazilian provocateur Ivan Cardoso, qualifies as both. Jumping between black and white and color and incorporating stock travelogue and newsreel footage, as well as impressionistic montages and rapid cuts between isolated details, The Secret of the Mummy tells the story of an obsessed scientist who recovers an Egyptian mummy in order to test out his elixir of life and revive it. The fact that the young Pharaoh was a sex-crazed serial killer in life doesn’t faze the scientist, and once the mummy is up and about he resumes his favorite pastime. It feels like a collision of a Universal monster movie (as well as the sexed-up mummy, there are shades of Frankenstein, including a hunchbacked lab assistant) and a Carry On sex comedy. The Secret of the Mummy is unapologetically kinky, but extremely stylish, and Cardoso reminds me (based on this single film–I have three more to watch) of a straight, Brazilian John Waters.

Horror on a Budget: The crudeness of The Secret of the Mummy‘s production also reminds me of another outsider filmmaker I encountered this month, Andy Milligan, who in Torture Dungeon attempts to stage a medieval “epic” with a shoestring budget on Staten Island. One of Milligan’s techniques is to hide the paltriness of his sets by filming in tight close-up–so tight, in fact, that I didn’t realize until halfway through the movie that a main character only has one arm. Torture Dungeon is as raw as I was led to expect–the titular dungeon is onscreen for not more than three or four minutes, and the gore is of the Herschell Gordon Lewis papier-mâché variety–but was mostly enjoyable. It helps that I enjoy movies in which the seams show. By far the worst parts were the walk-on characters who do nothing to advance the story but deliver community theater-style stage business.

Finally, for the first time this year I took part in an October horror movie challenge, watching films to match specific categories. I generally just follow my whims when choosing what to watch, but it was fun expanding my horizons with some of the requirements. The Spooktober Challenge consisted of 31 categories, voted on from a list of nominees by members of The HORRORS . . . of THE DISSOLVE! Facebook group, with one movie counting for each category. Here are the categories and the movies that satisfied each one:

1. A horror movie by a female director: Pet Sematary (Mary Lambert)
2. A black and white horror movie: King Kong
3. A horror movie from a country other than your own: The Mad Executioners (Germany)
4. A horror anthology: The Vault of Horror
5. A horror movie marketed to kids: The Monster Squad
6. A horror-comedy: Saturday the 14th
7. A silent horror movie: The Phantom Carriage
8. An avant-garde or experimental horror movie: Videodrome
9. A horror movie featuring a non-white protagonist: Blade
10. A classic Universal monster movie: The Ghost of Frankenstein
11. A horror movie by an LGBTQ writer or director: Torture Dungeon (Andy Milligan)
12. A Hammer horror movie: Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb
13. A horror movie involving a non-Christian/Satanic religion: Scream, Blacula, Scream (Voodoo)
14. A horror movie from the year you were born: Theater of Blood (1973)
15. An “all-time great” horror movie that you’ve never seen: A Nightmare on Elm Street
16. A giallo: Suspiria
17. A horror movie starring Vincent Price: House of the Long Shadows
18. A horror movie from Latin America: The Secret of the Mummy (Brazil)
19. A Mario Bava movie: The Whip and the Body
20. A made-for-TV horror movie: Salem’s Lot
21. A horror movie that terrified you as a child: Them!
22. A John Carpenter movie: Vampires
23. A Lovecraftian horror movie: The Crimson Cult
24. A horror movie by a non-white director: Blacula (William Crain)
25. A slasher movie that is not part of a franchise: Corruption (Robert Hartford-Davis, 1968)
26. A video nasty: Slave of the Cannibal God
27. A body horror: Society
28. A horror movie featuring a witch or witchcraft: Embodiment of Evil
29. A horror movie where someone turns into an animal – but NOT a werewolf: Cat People
30. An animated horror movie or short: Frankenweenie
31. A horror movie by a typically non-horror director: The Awakening (Mike Newell)

The terms of the challenge allowed for movies viewed in September to count, but I only needed to count one: Corruption is something of a proto-slasher, with Peter Cushing as an increasingly-unhinged surgeon who kills women to supply his disfigured girlfriend with the pituitary gland extract that keeps her beautiful. I’m not a huge fan of slashers, anyway, so this was close enough for me.

In addition, there were three “bonus challenges” that I successfully completed: at least one movie from each decade, 1920s to 2010s; no more than five movies that you have already seen (King Kong and Them! were the only rewatches I counted toward the challenge); and only one movie per director (it was lucky for me that Blacula and its sequel Scream, Blacula, Scream didn’t have the same director!).

I hope you had a happy Halloween and saw something good or at least surprising in the past month. Let me know if you recommend anything else based on what I’ve listed here or if you just have a horror movie you’re enthusiastic about. I’ve already got my list for next year started: after all, it’s only twelve months until next Halloween!

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