we wuz scumbags...

Here's my new comic. This one is "based on a true story," mostly. Click the pics for larger, easier-to-read images...





Hope you liked it. More stuff later...

comix (by me)...

Damn, it's been a couple of weeks since I posted. Where does the time go? For real. Anyway, one of the projects I've been working on lately is drawing comics. I don't really have any training in illustration, not to make excuses, this is just sort of something I thought I'd try for fun. Well, not just for fun, for like being creative and stuff, or something. Anyway, here are the first few pieces I've done, some one-pagers. I've got another longer story that I've done that I'll post here soon, probably later in the week, and a couple of more in the works. Enjoy...




More to come....

murder by contract...

I find it much more difficult to write about things that I like rather than things that I dislike. When I don't like something, it tends to be for fairly concrete reasons. It's fairly easy to pick out a film's flaws, they tend to be right on the surface, or very near it. And disliking things is funny, and funny. Who doesn't enjoy taking to task a work of art or media that doesn't manage to live up to what it promises? Especially when that work gives off a sense of self-importance, or otherwise just seems to take itself too seriously. Over the 2 or 3 years I've been doing this blog, that's mostly what I've found myself drawn to, the ridiculous and the sublime.


With things that I like, the reasons tend to be more ephemeral and harder to specifically pin down. At the heart of many of these things is an aura, an essence, a certain purity (sometimes maybe an impurity). It's hard to establish a standing criteria of what makes these things work. In a way, it's almost better to leave them not so thoroughly examined. Left alone, they seem mysterious and magical. I mean, things are wonderful specifically because they inspire wonder. It's sort of like pinning down a live butterfly. You could do it, but in the process, you'd probably kill it, and that just doesn't feel as good as watching it fly around. I mean, that isn't always the case 100% of the time, but I think in a great many cases it hold true (I'd just like to take a second to note that, as far as I can recall, I've never purposefully killed a butterfly).


This is all kind of a roundabout way of saying that I absolutely fucking loved the movie MURDER BY CONTRACT. From 1958, this is a late-period noir and a fascinating cathexis of the evolution of cinema style from the 1940s and 50s into the 1960s. In many ways it reminded me of another later noir, BLAST OF SILENCE, from 1961, which has enjoyed a bit of a revival over the past couple of years. MURDER BY CONTRACT is tough and mean like many of the best of the genre, but it's also smart, not just intelligently written, but intelligently made. It's elusive and at times somewhat confounding, not everything about all the characters is revealed, some things are left to mystery. The dialogue splits the difference between the stylized back-and-forth banter of earlier noir and a more natural style that certainly wasn't the norm in mainstream film for many years to come. Even in non-mainstream film, MURDER BY CONTRACT predates the extreme naturalism of John Cassavetes SHADOWS by a year. Despite the confluence of styles, it never feels especially stilted, the different qualities blend together well.


The story is fairly simple. Vince Edwards plays a fledgling contract killer who's sent out to kill the witness in an upcoming trial. Edwards seems like a real cool customer, very calculating if somewhat eccentric. He's also a bit of an understated egomaniac, clearly believing himself to be above it all (one of his handlers sarcastically refers to him as "Superman"), yet he's thrown for a loop when his discovers that his target is a woman. The hit begins to appear jinxed when several of Edwards' complex murder plots prove unsuccessful. By the end, his character is a bit more desperate than even he thought possible, and naturally things go from bad to worse.


Perhaps it's a personal failing, an inability or unwillingness to really show enthusiasm, but I feel kind of uncomfortable going on about MURDER BY CONTRACT's beautiful, yet simple, black and white cinematography (shot by Lucien Ballard, of Otto Preminger's LAURA and Sam Peckinpah's THE WILD BUNCH), or how great its unusual music score was (by Perry Botkin). Maybe I'm just an asshole who likes taking potshots at easy targets but blanches at the thought of actually expressing admiration for a work of art that has moved me in some way. I dunno. Director Irving Lerner made about a dozen films between the 40s and the 60s, then worked in TV and later became an editor. One of his last credits is as supervising editor on Scorsese's NEW YORK, NEW YORK, which was dedicated to him (he died in 1976, before the film came out). He also worked with Anthony Mann on GOD'S LITTLE ACRE and MEN IN WAR (one could draw a connection between Mann's noir films and MURDER BY CONTRACT).


So anyway, that's my uncomfortable attempt at writing about something that I liked. Something that I loved. See MURDER FOR CONTRACT, it's out on DVD.

t-shirts...

I don't really remember a lot of the t-shirts I wore as a kid, but looking back at these old photos, I guess I was pretty pop culture forward even then. Anyway, thought it would be cute to share these...

Superman...

Superman...

Superman...

The Incredible Hulk...

Cookie Monster...

Star Wars...

Ewoks (also, how totally 80s is that girl in the photo with me? I think she was our across the street neighbor, one of my child hood best friends. She looks like a kid version of Pat Benetar in that outfit)...

Ewoks...

Mickey Mouse (that's my dad in the photo with me, I like the safety orange trashcan behind us, also note the vintage Diet Pepsi can in the foreground)...

Anyway, I'm finally over the flu or whatever it was that I've had for the past month, and I have a bit of time on my hands, so hopefully I'll be able to write more often, last month was kind of a blur. I'm sort of dying to write and do more creative things. Stay tuned...

more halloween...

I found these old pictures and figured I'd share...

I'm seriously considering getting this haircut again.



This looks like a knight costume, but I'm pretty sure this is the year I wanted to go as "god." There was some debate as to what god looked like, but I guess ultimately we settled on shiny. Probably at some point in the night I just started telling people I was a knight because I got tired of explaining the real costume to them. This was also probably the only time in my life I voluntarily did anything even remotely religious. Back to the picture, I like the smile I'm giving to the devil, and the bored expression of the face of the girl standing behind us...

I'm sure it appeared in some comic in the 50s before I ever thought of it, but I'm really impressed that as a little kid I came up with the idea of "Superman-cowboy." Seriously, the fact that I'm not more of a professional success is staggeringly depressing giving how long I've been toting around this arsenal of good ideas...

Technically, this isn't a Halloween picture, although I'm wearing a funny hat, I just thought it summed up the past 30 years fairly well...

Happy Halloween!

creepy 67 "the raven"...

And finally, from December 1974, Edgar Allan Poe's the Raven, as adapted by Richard Corben...










Happy Halloween!

halloween treat sack...

Here are the horror films I watched this month that either didn't merit a review, or that I didn't get a chance to write about, or forgot to write about, or something. I'm still sick.

1. End of the Line- Dreary, shot-on-video junk with weird religious content. Unremarkable and uninteresting.

2. Son of Frankenstein- Very worthy sequel to FRANKENSTEIN and THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN. Expressionistic visuals and a wry sense of humor highlight a fun film with Basil Rathbone as the Doctor's son, plus Karloff and Lugosi as the monster and Ygor, respectively.

3. The Ghost of Frankenstein- A dull sequel to the above.

4. The Thaw- Gets all it's good ideas from John Carpenter's version of THE THING. Val Kilmer is in it, I should have known better.
5. Edges of Darkness- Another depressing shot-on-video cheapie. I'm all in favor of low budget movies, amateur films and movies that are shot on video, but I wish there was a better filtering process for what makes it out of the basement and into my DVD player. This one was all over the place. I guess it was about zombies but it also had some vampires, or something, and some kind of robot DEMON SEED virus that took over a plant, or something. Like, a houseplant. I don't know. It was lame.

6. The Legacy (1978)- Fun, fun flick that's light on the horror but heavy on the 1970's smooth. THE GRADUATE's Katherine Ross heads to England with sweet 'stache having boyfriend Sam Elliott and winds up stranded in a creepy mansion where some black magic shit is going down. Really just very snappy, stylish and entertaining, plus Roger Daltrey is in it, basically as himself. Has kind of a Hammer/Amicus vibe that neither Hammer nor Amicus still had in 1978.

7. SSSSSSS- Dirk Benedict from BATTLESTAR GALACTICA (the 70's one) and the A-TEAM (he's no Perry King) turns into a snake man verrrrrrrrrrry slooowwwwwwwllllyyyyyyyyy in this booooorrrrrrrrrring movie. The correct spelling of the title is seven S's.

8. Drag Me To Hell- This was a lot better than I expected but Sam Raimi just isn't special anymore (maybe it was finding out he donated money to the '04 Bush campaign), although to be fair, aside from the first two Evil Dead films, Raimi's technically never really been a horror filmmaker, if anything the majority of his filmography is action with a occasional bit of slapstick. That he happened to apply that vision to horror films his first time out, it's almost incidental, y'know? But, I mean, he's a good director, I mean this film has more style and personality than most Hollywood films of any genre, but it's lacking the depth or sincerity that could make it something more than a slight entertainment. Raimi doesn't have the wit he used to, nor the willingness to let a gag play out, everything happens so quickly, it's never really satisfying as, for instance, the long battle between Bruce Campbell and his own hand in Evil Dead 2, which builds both humor and tension by going on for a near-uncomfortably long time. So, yeah, it was good enough that I wanted it to be better.

9. Bug (1975)- After the success of producing ROSEMARY'S BABY, William Castle's filmography really starts to loose focus. Previously, as both director and producer, he was the model of efficiency, capable of turning out simple, but stylish (and deceptively smart) films in any number of genres. There might have been nothing groundbreaking about these films (aside from their inventive promotional campaigns), but flicks like THE NIGHT WALKER, I SAW WHAT YOU DID and THE HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL really get the job done. The later Castle, by contrast, is typically kind of sloppy and, even when it's good, just pretty weird (witness his last film as director, SHANKS, starring famous mime Marcel Marceau). This was his last film as producer, and it's really kind of all over the place, starting off as an apocalyptic monster movie, then becoming a totally different kind of monster movie, and then ending. Star Bradford Dillman fared much better a few years later in Joe Dante's PIRANHA.

10. R.L. Stine's Mostly Ghostly- The kids in this movie sure were whiny and annoying. Before writing preteen horror novels, R.L. Stine and his wife wrote preteen horror comics with Rick Veitch and Stephen Bissette.

11. Infestation- At a certain point, vaguely clever but ultimately shallow horror comedies reach their saturation point. There's nothing really wrong with INFESTATION, except maybe that most of its plot points seem very familiar, but there's nothing really right with it either, except that it's fairly ambitious and Ray Wise is in it. Not totally terrible.

12. The Four Sided Triangle- Smart if somewhat dry sci-fi from Hammer. Not as good as, say, the Quatermass films, but not bad either.

13. Dracula (1931)- Don't know how I managed to go 30 plus years without ever seeing the original DRACULA, I think I could never remember if this was the one I hadn't seen, or FRANKENSTEIN, so I just kept watching FRANKENSTEIN again. Anyway, now I've seen it. It's good, Bela Lugosi is in it. It's DRACULA.

14. It's Alive- This remake of Larry Cohen's classic is kind of like the original, as well as the recent film GRACE, only instead of being thoughtful and suspenseful, it's stupid and boring. Remaking a Larry Cohen movie is like trying to remake of John Cassavettes movie or something, insomuch as I'm sure it could be done, but why would you want to? It's like cooking without the seasonings, y'know, Cohen's films are so unique, so filtered through his own strange vision, unless you have someone with their own weird vision remaking them, they're just monster movies, which could be fine, but this is a pretty boring monster movie. Bijou Phillips, the lead actress, even kind of looks like the actress from GRACE, by the way.

15. How to Be a Serial Killer- This is a rip off of the 1992 Belgian film MAN BITES DOG. I'm all in favor of ripping off other people's movies if you can do something cool with their ideas, but it makes the results particularly dire when nothing new is brought to the table. How to Be a Serial Killer doesn't even have the brazen antisocial offensiveness of MAN BITES DOG, it's like the bland, watered-down version, made almost 20 years after the fact. Lame.

16. Dark Country- Actor turned director Thomas Jane's first film is just like bad film noir mindfuck style over substance student film 101, which is too bad, because I like him as an actor, and I wanted to like his movie, but it just isn't good, at all, even with Ron Perlman in it. Seriously, just like an ambitious but immature student film, right down to the warped-reality-within-a-dream-within-reality or whatever ending. Lame.

17. Oral Fixation- Dental horror is universal, yet underexploited, enough to make for the occasional grisly cringer, ala Brian Yuzna's THE DENTIST films. This promised that, but delivered a shot-on-video FATAL ATTRACTION clone instead. Why is the female stalker so endlessly fascinating to filmmakers? And what do people think they can bring to a story that's been done so many times before? Anyway, this totally sucked and watching it depressed me.

18. Staunton Hill- George Romero is not only one of the most significant horror filmmakers of the past fifty years, I'd say he's one of the most important American filmmakers as well. His son's directorial debut is unwatchable, though. Seriously, unwatchable.

19. Ghost Cat- The Animal Planet network produced this family-friendly horror flick. If it doesn't sound promising, that's because it's not, but I like the idea of different television networks producing different genres of film relating to their own individual niches. It'd be pretty cool if every Halloween all the different networks rolled out their own batch of viewer-specific fright flicks. Anyway, this is further proof that I'm an idiot and I'll watch any stupid movie that Ellen Page is in. Some guy from Degrassi is in it too. Even the cats weren't that great.

20. Orphan- I really liked this movie. It reminded me of early DePalma, like SISTERS, especially the outrageous twist ending. I was rooting for the Esther the orphan, though. It always bothers me when the parents turn on their adopted children in films like this. Like, you adopted the kid, that's a commitment, you can't start hating them just because they're weird and scary.

21. Spine Tingler- the William Castle Story- This was full of good information and great interviews (with Castle's kids, his sister-in-law, various collaborators, plus fans like Joe Dante, John Landis, Stuart Gordon and Leonard Maltin, and contemporaries like Roger Corman, who's somewhat respectfully dismissive), but thematically and chronologically, it's kind of all over the place. I think as efficient a filmmaker as Castle would be flattered but not entirely impressed.

22. Wind Chill- This one starts out pretty strong, with two college kids trapped in a potentially horrifying situation- trapped in a car in subzero weather, then it turns into a ghost story that doesn't really make any sense, everything gets pretty stupid, one of the kids dies, and then it's over. Martin Donovan from Hal Hartley movies is the ghost.

And that's how I pissed my month away! Happy Halloween.

Creepy 66 "Pinball Wizard"...

Our penultimate Halloween comic, by Doug Moench and Rich Corben, and named after a Who song (a year before Ken Russell's TOMMY movie) no less...

creepy 63 "demon in the cockpit"...

Another great Richard Corben story, written by Rich Margop0ulos...

creepy 61 "terror tomb"...

Written and illustrated by Richard Corben....