From the Associated Press: "Store manager Jay Jacoby displays a two-headed red slider turtle at Big Al's Aquarium Supercenter in East Norriton Pa., Wednesday, Sept. 26, 2007. The rare turtle is on display at the store." (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
One of my heroes, Marcel Marceau, has died at age 84, after a performing career that lasted more than fifty years.
I'd been saving this for October, but was inspired to share this now because of the latest cool entry at the Frankensteinia blog! T. S. Kuebler, the discoverer of the Monster's skull, has a great website (which is listed in my links, as well as links for the Classic Horror Film Board and Frankensteinia.); check 'em all out. But not before you see this x-ray of the Monster's skull (done before Frankenstein's creation was completed), which I found at a medical website:
I wonder if dadabigelow has ever sent off for these:
Amazingly, I found some X-rated x-rays at a website ! No kidding-- really! If you're over 18 (and you take all responsibility for your own actions by clicking), here's a link to the URL:
If this event was any indication, they have thoroughly succeeded.
Of course, none of these guys had the nicknames I put on their photos, but somehow it just seemed the schlockily-right thing to do. (Beats nicknaming someone "Pooty Put" or "Turd Blossom" as our Chief Executive has done.) I'm truly grateful to these three men for staging an event that made me feel sixteen and at the drive-in again. Except this time I actually watched the movies!
One of the most interesting people I know is Verne Langdon. A born entertainer, he has been a musician all of his life. But, multi-talented as he is, he has also been a makeup artist, mask-maker, circus clown, and professional wrestler. All of this is covered in an in-depth interview with Verne I just stumbled across here.
_________________Max, Robert Taylor, and "Cousin Sara" Waugh
_____________The crew: Ray Castile, Terry Ingram, ____Inebriated Noggin, and Howard Harris. Not pictured: Elizabeth Haney (behind camera)
__The display contents being rolled in. (The Drunken Severed Head has been rolled before.)
__UMA Commander-In-Chief Terry Ingram seems trapped in a display during set-up.
The first official night-- Friday-- was both the zenith and the nadir of the whole experience. The Voodoo Queen and I had booked a "parlor suite" (no bed, extra chairs) so that we could throw a dinner from friends in horror fandom from around the country.We'd invited 20 to 25 people, expecting roughly half that number to show up. Well, they all showed up, and some brought friends! (And, in hindsight, there were people I didn't think to invite and now wish I had.) That was fine; we'd brought tons of food and I love to meet new people. But it almost didn't come off.
-----John Cozzoli, Raymond Castile of "The Gallery Of Monster Toys", and Gord Shriver
--------------------John Cozzoli and the unbalanced Drunken Severed Head
Above: Raymond Castile (as Coffin Joe) poses with display visitor Richard Sheffield, a friend of Bela Lugosi's. Sheffield is wearing German Robles' cape from the film El Vampiro.
________________A large assortment of folks came to see the display.
Scarlet Street publisher Richard Valley, having fun, enjoys playing hand model to the display.
The above photo shows Jim, a fan who had bought the pants Bela wore in The Raven and, I'm told, in other pictures . I'd introduced myself Friday night in the UMA display room. He seemed to me a little bit shy and glad to be welcomed. We chatted awhile, and he told me he had something he'd like to show-- Bela Lugosi's pants. This intrigued and amused me. He asked for help bringing them in from his car, saying he had a bum shoulder that made it difficult for him to carry them, as they were framed. So, donning my prosthetic robot body, we left to get them. The hotel was at the bottom of a hill, and as parking spaces there were less than ample, he'd had to park at the top. So off we trudged. I introduced Jim to some other UMA members and gave Jim the chance to talk about the pants. He'd bought them from uber-collector Forrest J. Ackerman who had bought them from Richard Sheffield, a friend of Bela Lugosi's. (A handwritten letter of authentication from FJA is in the frame.) I asked to take a picture of the pants with the display, since they certainly were a classic horror movie collectable, and he posed with this item he was proud to own. I told him I'd want to get a more detailed picture of these "trousers of terror" in the daylight. No problem! Then I helped him return the pants to his car.
Scott Essman of Universal Studios shares this video of makeup whiz Kevin Haney recreating a famous Monster of filmland! As Essman wrote, "Kevin Haney created this Glenn Strange Frankenstein Monster prosthetic likeness makeup in 1999 for the original Jack Pierce tribute which was never staged. As such, this makeup was only applied one time, with assistance by Kenny Myers and Bill Corso. Eventually, Haney created a Boris Karloff Monster makeup that was used several times for tributes to Pierce and Frankenstein (1931)."
Porfle's MySpace journal has been added to the links section here. He earned it.
As they begin appear on the shelves of stores, I enjoy taking pictures of Halloween items that I like. Here are some items from last year that amused me or reminded me of Halloween items I'd seen in my childhood.
Canion and some of her neighbors discovered the 40-pound bodies of three of the animals over four days in July outside her ranch in Cuero, 80 miles southeast of San Antonio. Canion said she saved the head of the one she found so she can get to get to the bottom of its ancestry through DNA testing and then mount it for posterity.
She suspects, as have many rural denizens over the years, that a chupacabra may have killed as many as 26 of her chickens in the past couple of years.
"I've seen a lot of nasty stuff. I've never seen anything like this," she said.
What tipped Canion to the possibility that this was no ugly coyote, but perhaps the vampire-like beast, is that the chickens weren't eaten or carried off — all the blood was drained from them, she said.
Chupacabra means "goat sucker" in Spanish, and it is said to have originated in Latin America, specifically Puerto Rico and Mexico.
Canion thinks recent heavy rains ran them right out of their dens.
"I think it could have wolf in it," Canion said. "It has to be a cross between two or three different things."
She said the finding has captured the imagination of locals, just like purported sightings of Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster have elsewhere.
But what folks are calling a chupacabra is probably just a strange breed of dog, said veterinarian Travis Schaar of the Main Street Animal Hospital in nearby Victoria.
"I'm not going to tell you that's not a chupacabra. I just think in my opinion a chupacabra is a dog," said Schaar, who has seen Canion's find.
The "chupacabras" could have all been part of a mutated litter of dogs, or they may be a new kind of mutt, he said.
As for the bloodsucking, Schaar said that this particular canine may simply have a preference for blood, letting its prey bleed out and licking it up.
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Here's a picture of another dog (found dead in Maine last year) that was being touted as some unknown monstrosity (one message board called it a chupracabra):
You can read more about this beast here. At least most descriptions of the carcass describe it as a dog-wolf hybrid, or seem to think it's a deformed dog. Doesn't seem too monstrous to me-- it seems to have been a "Hound Of The Baskervilles" scenario where fear and rumor make something slightly-out-of-the-ordinary into something seemingly supernatural.