The Justice League Of Adams!

I don't want to forget some of my favorite Neal Adams covers in my year-long look back at the great artist -- the ones he created for the Justice League of America.  My absolute favorite of them is above. What a masterful composition, it's a fab cover that screamed at me from the spinner rack. Here are some more from the Master's hand. 

A few years past and then Adams returned to offer up a few more blockbuster cover efforts. 

These covers have potency and drama, the very stuff that Adams excelled at. 

Rip Off

Jack H. Harris Presents Dark Star!

If ever there was a movie about entropy it's Dark Star. Some of its creators refer to it as a version of Waiting for Godot but in space. It's not quite that, but it's close. It's a movie in which space travel has become so mundane and commonplace that the thrill of being among the stars is lacking from most of these astronauts. Their job in space is pretty thrilling really, exploding planets which seem unstable or pose some risk to potential colonizers. But they've been doing it so long, it's lost its romantic luster. The creators imagined truck drivers in space, but really these guys are more like bulldozer and crane operators. They plow the way forward and make the path smooth for those to come. 

When we encounter them, they have been twenty years in space in Earth time but for these blokes only about three years have passed thanks to the mysteries of faster-than-light travel. They have blown up eighteen planets using intelligent talking bombs which trigger a chain reaction on the planet in question shattering it to smithereens. We see them drop "Bomb 19" and then speed out of the way of the result. After this momentary thrill the ennui of unchanging experience traps them once again inside their flawed personalities. The excitement heats up when they try to drop "Bomb 20". We worry about A.I., well this movie shows that dilemma off in spades. 

"Captain Powell" has "died" though they keep him on ice for extreme emergencies. The second in command is named "Dolittle" and lives up to his name, constantly shirking his responsibilities and pining for home. There's "Talby" who lives apart from the others aboard a ship which is bigger than it appears (Tardis anyone?) and is the only one of this sordid batch who looks to the stars for inspiration.  "Boiler" is a taciturn ogre who is just trying to live minute to minute with pointless and violent diversions. And finally, there's "Pinback" who is not really Pinback but a low-level service tech named "Froog" who stumbled into the mission when the real Pinback committed suicide in front of him. Pinback is a constant whiner who bemoans most all aspects of his fate and reads romance comics. But weirdly he's the only one who still cares about the mission. There's an alien too, but it has to be seen to be believed. 

I find Dark Star a delightful satire which uses men in space to showcase men and women on Earth who approach life with different strategies and most of which are ultimately of little comfort. Made by John Carpenter and the late Dan O'Bannon with much help from their friends this is a student movie that escaped the USC campus (with some help from Carpenter himself by raiding the USC film vault it seems) and with some doctoring by the ubiquitous Jack Harris tiptoed into theaters and made little money. Harris is the only distributer who showed any interest in the movie, and while he and Carpenter have different reflections of their time together, Carpenter admits the movie and possibly his career might have taken a different turn. All you folks who love Halloween the movie, tip your hat to Jack H. Harris. 

Cal Kuniholm (Boiler) and Brian Narelle (Dolittle) above 

Dan O'Bannon (Pinback) and John Carpenter kneeling

O'Bannon who played Pinback seems to be the heart and soul of this project and it's due to his efforts that the movie has remained viable long enough for a cult audience to discover and cherish it. I'm among that number.

Be back next week for another John Carpenter project (of sorts) which Jack H. Harris was instrumental in -- The Eyes of Laura Mars. 

Rip Off

Jack H. Harris Presents Schlock!

Schlock is not really a good movie except in places here and there. It's a wannabe comedy send up of monster flicks (especially the movie Trog) but it's done on a micro-budget over a long stretch of time. The director is John Landis who would eventually find fame with Animal House and American Werewolf in London among other films, but this is his first. The costume of the "Schlockthropus" is the main reason this little lowest-budget flick has a standing. It was designed and constructed by Rick Baker in his Mom's kitchen and is quite threadbare by the movie's final shot. Baker of course would go on to work on many a feature film including the 70's remake of King Kong. 

(That's Landis in the suit.)

I want to say nice things about this movie, and I've been curious about it for years. But seeing it, I was charmed by the gumption it took to make some of the scenes happen, but the cast is almost all amateur and the pacing of the gags is just plain too slow almost all of the time. Some of that is that while made in 1971 the movie was not released until a few years later when Jack C. Harris saw Landis on The Tonight Show with a few clips and saw a chance to make a few bucks on what seemed to be a nifty critter or something like that. A few new scenes were added for length and that's the core problem. There's not enough here, as this is essentially a ten-minute gag routine expanded into a feature.

(That's Forry Ackerman next to Schlock.)

It's worth your time for sure, especially anyone who is a fan of this genre, but adjust your settings down. Some would argue that Trog could not be parodied, but I'm a fan of Trog for all its silliness and this movie is treading a bit on holy ground for me. 

We go into space next time, aboard Dark Star. 

Rip Off

Jack H. Harris Presents Son Of Blob!

The Blob was a successful monster movie from the late 50's, and no one suspected it mild yield a sequel until Larry Hagman (yes THAT Larry Hagman) thought it might be a grand notion. He lived in the Malibu Colony, a high-rent collection of homes belonging to a gaggle of folks, many in the film industry. So, Hagman looking for a gig after I Dream of Jeanie came to a close chatted up his chums, which included The Blob producer Jack H. Harris, and they made a movie. Beware! The Blob or as it was otherwise known Son of Blob is a monster movie with a decided difference, a light breezy tone. 

Like the original movie, the sequel focuses its attention on two young people (Robert Walker and Gwynne Gilford) who are the first to encounter the threat, at least the to encounter it and survive. Godfrey Cambridge is the culprit who unwittingly brought back with him from the frozen north a specimen which required freezing. It of course thaws and the Blob is back to its old tricks of rolling around and absorbing animals and people. Like the original the youngsters are seen as the problem for a long time before the true threat is fully understood and the town's forces are marshaled against it.

This is a fun movie and at many junctures quite funny. It's actually more a parody of monster movies than a straight fright flick. Burgess Meredith plays one of a trio of hobos who fall victim to the Blob, and they are quite humorous (Hagman is a mute part of this trio). Shelley Berman apparently runs an all-night barbershop and that makes him vulnerable. It can easily be argued that the humor in the movie undercuts the tension, but really by 1972 monster movies needed more juice than the Blob could provide to really give folks a chill. (The later 80's remake of The Blob did find some ways to make the threat feel more palpable.) But this is still a fun movie and I'm glad to have it in my library thanks to the Kino-Lorber folks.

Make room for Schlock in our next installment. 

Rip Off

Jack H. Harris Presents Equinox!

See if this plot sounds familiar.

Four teenagers head into the country for some fun and relaxation and end up at a cabin in the woods which comes under attack by the dark forces of Hell. The youngsters fall victim one by one to the various attacks which include intruding monsters and demons who invade the spirits of the kids themselves. The violence seems to be centered around a mysterious book filled with ancient lore. Eventually all the kids succumb save one who is left to tell the tale, though his ultimate fate has little doubt.

Generally speaking, that sounds a lot like Sam Raimi's Evil Dead movies. But it's not a description of those, rather it's a brief overview of the movie Equinox. This movie began as an amateur effort put together by Dennis Murren and other talented special effects "Monster Kids" and some aspiring young actors (including a future Rose Parade queen and Frank Bonner star of WKRP In Cincinnati). 

The movie tells the story of penetrating a barrier to Hell. They even got Frtiz Leiber, the famous science fiction and fantasy author and creator of Fafhrd and Grey Mouser, to do some acting work in this one. Forry Ackerman shows up in a voice cameo.

The movie was completed on weekends with minimal equipment and rough stop-motion effects and then sold to a local producer named Jack Harris who got the cast together again and shot new material to make the film a bit longer for release. This resulted in two versions of the movie, the later one with more overt sexual content. The movie got released into the theaters and has since become a cult favorite.

Some years ago Criterion Collections put together a somewhat pricey but a very entertaining package with both versions of the movie and lots of background information including interviews with the many of the cast members and the creators. It's a very nice collection and it might will be well worth the investment, especially for anyone interested in horror movies, stop-motion animation, or cult movies. This one has something for everyone who is not afraid to watch less than slick Hollywood production.

Next time Harris returns to his roots with Beware! The Blob.    

Rip Off

Jack H. Harris Presents Some Nudie Cuties!

I rather doubt that many people have gone bankrupt betting on whether men like looking at naked dames. Hugh Hefner got so rich doing it, that he only ever had to wear pajamas the rest of his life. Hefner's success was the envy of many a young hustler in the 60's and I have no doubt that Jack H. Harris was among them. He made his stab at filling that niche with 1962's Paradisio, the first of his "Nudie Cuties". 

Nudie Cuties were films featuring looks at naked flesh minus the offbeat and strained rationale of the practice of Nudism or Nudist Colonies. Russ Meyer's The Immortal Mr. Teas from 1959 is considered the first installment of this kind of movie. Ed Wood's Orgy of the Dead is also a later addition. Jack Harris entered the arena in 1962 with Paradisio, a movie about a professor chap who gets hold of some x-ray glasses and then gets swept up in a spy plot. When he's looking through his glasses it generates a 3-D quality to the nudity, and we are to use our own glasses for full effect. For more details check out this TCM link. To watch the movie, follow this link. At two hours it's pretty slow.

A later installment in the form was Playmates which as you can see from the poster above was presented in something suggesting "Deep Vision 3-D". 
 

With the movie Without a Stitch Harris movie into full-blown soft pornography. There was clearly money to be made in those days with this kind of faire. This one features a young girl who seeks sexual gratification and ends up in hands of a sadist. Now Harris had no creative hand in this one, he just arranged its distribution. 

Harris found product from overseas. France was a supplier for a few of the movies he distributed. The two titles I've found at the forefront of that are Les Biches and Erotique. 

Harris scored a real coup when he got his mitts on a softer core movie title The Oldest Profession. One of the stars of this bit of cinema was Raquel Welch herself, which came the after her breakout performances in Fantastic Voyage and One Million B.C. It's a weird movie with six directors each telling a separate tale of prostitution through the ages. Welch shows up in the section about the Gay Nineties. She was the sole American actress in the film.

Raquel was a stunning beauty, that's for certain. Now for a couple of movies of a different kind. 

Bone is a movie written and directed by Larry Cohen (the creator of The Invaders and Branded for TV and many other movies). For some reason Harris got involved with the distribution of his movie starring Yaphet Kotto. It's a pretty stunning movie for its time about a loveless couple who are set upon by a cruel drifter. Here's the trailer under a different name. 

In his book Harris indicated he was involved with the American distribution of My Son the Vampire, an English movie featuring Bela Lugosi originally titled Mother Riley Meets The Vampire. Allen Sherman created a daffy song to help promote this offbeat horror-comedy in the weird tradition of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. 

To listen to Allen Sherman's kooky song and get a glimpse of the movie check out this YouTube link. 

These are the kinds of films which Harris used to make his living through the 60's but things were about to change when even weirder monsters come to call. Next time we visit the Equinox. 

Rip Off

The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe!

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe buy C.S. Lewis was first published in 1950. It begins what is now known as The Narnia Chronicles. According to a note at the beginning of the book Lewis intended this story for one particular young person but the complexity of making it, meant that she was no longer within the target range of the audience. It tuns out that Lewis was wrong in that estimation, in that the novel has resonance for children of all ages. That's certainly helped by the charming illustrations by Pauline Baynes. This story and the ones that followed have been reprinted time and again over the decades. 

The story is set during World War II when children were evacuated from London due to the dangers associated with the German Blitz attacks on the city. The four siblings -- Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy Pevensie find themselves welcomed by an old professor into his large home. To pass the time they play the game of hide and seek and Lucy, the youngest hides in a big wooden wardrobe isolated in an upstairs room.  She discovers to her dismay and delight that it offers access to Narnia, a land frozen in ever-present snow. She is found by a faun named Mr. Tumnus who explains to her that she should go back to her home. She does and tells her siblings who don't believe her. Then one day she goes into the wardrobe again and the mischievous Edmund follows her. His meeting with the evil Queen really kicks off things. 

This is a story of sin and redemption. Edmund is a greedy and selfish boy who finds himself slave to his wicked impulses. To save him from paying the price for his sins, a great sacrifice must be made, but that sacrifice must made by free will. In the first novel, The Magician's Nephew we saw Aslan create the entire world of Narnia. In this adventure he functions as another aspect of the Trinity -- Jesus Christ. He is willing to lay down his life for another, someone who is far from hardly innocent. 

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is the first Narnia book to be written and published but is regarded as the second installment in The Narnia Chronicles, the first being The Magician's Nephew. I suspect Lewis had little idea he was creating an epic in children's literature, but this series has endured now for three quarters of a century. 

Next time we go out of publication order again to look at The Horse and His Boy. 

Rip Off