Monday, July 27, 2009

Universal Monsters Monday III






I'm beat for some reason, the evening kinda folded into me, or vice versa. Its in the low 80s and its almost 1 AM (don't ever go by my blog and its South Pacific time), and there are times when the humidity makes the rods in my head start sliding in and out of their sockets of their own accord. So its like my brain is telling my right tricep to bebop. It never does that. Ah, well.

Nope. Just like I'm taunting you all everybody with the Sixteenth Street Bridge, I'm doing the same with Bela.Before I get to Dracula, I should point out that I had discovered that I own fifteen or so cards from the 1996 set of Universal Monsters of the Silver Screen. Yea, I know! Crazy stuff indeed! These things are straight-fwd, like collecting baseball cards. Monster's Mate on the front, Info the the film BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN on the back. Henry Hull as the Werewolf of London. The incredible Rondo Hatten with Gale Sondersgaard in THE SPIDER WOMAN STRIKES BACK, a film where she pretends to be blind to attract young men, she poisons them with a plant in some scheme to drive farmers off her land. Green Acres Noir. There's a scene, the necklace one, from THE CAT CREEPS, the cat in question not being Sammy Davis Jr. THE LEECH WOMAN is by far one of my favorite films of all time, starring Colleen Gray in the title role and Gloria Talbot, my person favorite 50s hottie, as the scheming BFF who causes...well, just Wiki the film. I think the first word that will come to mind is Botox. Way ahead of its time.

THE MAD GHOUL. 1943. George Zucco turns David Bruce into a zombie to scare Evelyn Ankers, the same chick Larry Talbot chased after in THE WOLF MAN. She later married 50s B-movie stud Brian Denning and then he became mayor of Honolulu or something. The two of them had cameos in several episodes of HAWAII 5-0. By the way, Gloria Talbot also starred in I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE, but that wasn't made by Universal. You'll have to look that up while you check out the collagen monster of 1957.