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Saturday, October 19, 2024

Imagine watching Bela Lugosi perform on the stage

 



Welcome to Plan9Crunch. And share with us our celebrations for the great Bela Lugosi's birthday. The blog is posted on October 20. We are starting something new at Plan9Crunch. We are going to ask a cult genre question to a cult genre expert. Our first question is directed to writer Christopher R. Gauthier, author of Rondo Award-winning novel, "Dracula Never Dies: The Revenge of Bela Vorlock." Chris's sequel is planned for publication in early 2025, possibly on Valentine's Day. So, here we go, and enjoy readers!


PLAN9CRUNCH: What would have been your impression of watching Lugosi on the theatrical stage and what would you have thought of him to be in person?"


Christopher R. Gauthier:


"My instinctual personal impression of witnessing Bela Lugosi on stage would no doubt have lured me into the saturnine voracity of a question which enigmatically lingers on a need to be answered and furthermore explored- regarding cryptic mysteries cloaked in the supernatural- I do believe upon becoming aware of Lugosi I without question would have become ensorcelled by his dark mystique and enraptured by his command of theatricality which was unprecedented before.

"I would have been enchanted by this great savant who was living poetry for the theatre and mesmerized by the complete mystique of Lugosi, I would have become enshrouded within the black cape he wore so eloquently and my inner core would have replied to the dark spirituality that emanated from this great force of a man who seemed to have come from a realm entirely like none known to any, if not but for only an obscured few.

"I probably would have been compelled to engage a discourse with him, for how could one not in the presence of Bela Lugosi? I probably would have become a follower of this man like no other, but still respectfully remained proper and inhibited to establish formality and uphold a courteous, cordial diplomacy... And if by chance he would have granted me a conversation my impressions would have changed for the better. I would have come to the lucid realization that here before me was a man of supreme talents and with furthering in the getting to know him, an honorable compassionate humane human being, in fact one of the most generous and kindest, sincere most down to earth human beings Hollywood would ever see - a man of principal, morals and courage, a soul who knew and treasured the people in his life and took seriously and to heart the very meaning of friendship. A man who wore his gratitude like his Dracula creation wore his medallion, for he was grateful for the good in the world and anything beneficial that came in his vocational direction. I probably then would have felt somewhat like the rest of what his audiences felt upon the impressionable encounter of his Dracula incarnation and how everyone came to feel upon having a relaxed discourse with Bela the man- I would have realized that I was in no way an exception to being immune to falling beneath the spell of Dracula. Nor the rare charm of the real man himself, who appreciated and respected and genuinely cared about people, the world and humanity He would then have an adoring aficionado and friend for the rest of time."

Thanks so much Chris, for contributing. We appreciate you very much. Readers enjoy another photo of Lugosi on stage below.




Wednesday, October 16, 2024

Harlot and the Beast continues dark horror of Terra Drake saga

 

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In author Dean Patrick’s The Harlot and the Beast, TWB Press, large swaths of people move deliberately to a demonic gathering/concert. It’s a celebration of perversion and evil, presided over by the beautiful Terra Drake, once known as Lilith, Adam of the Bible's other wife.


In Patrick’s Terra Drake novels, this demon is with us in these latter times, and searching for converts. Grotesque images converge toward the crowd. Demons supporting Terra Drake – most with multi personalities and names – pay homage to her empire. Cain, Jack the Ripper, Adrian Kane, Rex Brody, Mr. Boogie, serial killers galore, an emaciated hag that haunts roadside gas ‘n gulps, and many other obscenities, all are there, entertaining the deceived, hyponotized-like masses.


That’s just one of many descriptive, intense scenes Patrick provides in this superbly crafted novel. To Patrick, a recovering alcoholic, Terra Drake’s empire is in league with modern-day depravities and horrors. It’s her goal to draw and suffocate people in these dysfunctions, and lose their souls.


Writer Patrick draws from terrible, dysfunctional episodes in his addiction past to convey to readers the horror of his tales. One of his settings is rural Duncan, Utah, which represents Morgan, Utah.


Terra Drake destroys people, families, communities, and the culture. A horrific mix of sex, peer pressure, addiction and violence fuels her bloody reign. Patrick’s two previous novels in the Terra Drake trilogy, The Lady Mephistoles, and Terra’s Sabbath, charted her path of enslaving humanity. In the first novel, a brave but doomed addict named Steve Paul gave his best effort against Terra.


When he died, his brother Marion Paul, a police officer, takes on the fight. Marion is a stronger man, and he’s full of righteous anger. He can cause wounds to Terra and her crew, but he’s still overmatched in numbers and power. In The Harlot and the Beast, he also has other major stresses. He needs to rescue the woman he loves, and his daughter, both captured by Terra Drake and lost in New Orleans.


Marion Paul is a strong, admirable hero to root for. He reminds me of Gary Sinise’s character in the TV adaptation in The Stand. In Stephen King’s novel, Sinise’s Stu Redman is ultimately the most influential adversary of Satan against those allied against him. So is Marion Paul is Patrick’s trilogy. Despite setback after setback to the “good people” in The Harlot and The Beast – including a memorable, heartbreaking scene outdoors among Paul’s extended family – Marion Paul never gives up fighting evil. His sanity is stretched, but never breaks.


You can purchase The Harlot and the Beast via Amazon here. You can follow Dean Patrick at Amazon here. Also Patrick’s author website is here. TWB Press website is here. A video teaser for The Harlot and the Beast is here. Chats with Dean Patrick are here, here, here, and here.


-          Doug Gibson



Wednesday, October 9, 2024

Plan9Crunch Review: Drakulon Creature of Doom

 



By Joe Gibson

 

Introduction

 

Every Halloween season, I watch a specific episode of Johnny Sokko And His Flying Robot/Giant Robo 1967-1968. I find it to be the perfect package of everything the show provides with an added Halloween festivity. I mean that, of course, in terms of tone and subject matter: this episode, Drakulon, Creature of Doom, released 03/25/1968 as the penultimate episode of the entire show, with the actual Halloween season occurring between the airing dates of episodes three and four. This episode introduces space vampire and definite Guillotine subcontractor (and likely fellow Gargoylian) Drakulon as he turns an entire town into vampires. Being the second to last episode, this premise necessitates high stakes and intrigue. Arguably, this is Johnny and Jerry’s greatest challenge up to this point in the series, and it is now time for us to explore exactly why.

 

The Cold Open

 

At the start of the episode, a frantic woman in a white dress emerges onto the road unexpectedly, interrupting a UNICORN agent’s patrol. This particular image is fairly common to horror scenarios, and, without knowing too much of its origin, the use of the trope is still worth recognizing. The UNICORN agent attempts to console her and interject rationality to her claims that the entire town is at risk of death, and his costume is just as important for different reasons. By this point, episode 25, in the show, we have witnessed many UNICORN agents dying in all sorts of horrific ways. While their brightly colored uniform is iconic to set our main cast apart, Johnny, Jerry and Azuma all regularly wear suits as well, so the UNICORN outfit is tantamount to the Star Trek Red Shirt. Since this agent is none of those three or Mitsuko or Mari, the tropes of Johnny Sokko condemn him to an early grave.

 

The woman leads him into the town, where a whole host of people remain on the floor, stiff and unmoving. The sudden camera zooms and merely decent dubbing duel over an atmospheric or goofy tone, but the agent examines the remains, turning his back to the woman and then returning to her for more information. She claims she woke up and found them all like this, and he trusts her as she clings to him when a door creaks.

 

Investigating the door, he enters a Gothic old dark house (I hope you understand why I call this the Halloween episode of the show), complete with cobwebs, miscellaneous set decorations, a secret passageway and, incidentally, a blue-faced vampire attempting his best Hungarian accent (I still find it more convincing than Gary Oldman’s Bela Lugosi accent in Coppola’s Dracula). The vampire has shaggy white hair and is dressed in a rather crude tunic. When the agent fires on the vampire, it has no effect, and the woman enters the house too. Determined to save the woman, the agent tells her to leave, and she cackles as she reveals herself to be another vampire with a slightly less blue face (most likely suggesting she was once human and not Gargoylian). The woman feasts on the man, returns him to his car for a young bicyclist to find, and our cold open is over.

 

This vignette introduces some key concepts we should keep an eye on for the rest of the twenty minutes. The vampires are not sensual, but repulsive (in the case of the older gentleman Drakulon) or deceptively sympathetic (the woman in white), the house has tricks up its sleeve with secret passageways and decorations, and, of course, there is not just one or two vampires but implicitly an entire undead town and maybe even a vampirized UNICORN agent.

 

The Town

 


After an autopsy during which Johnny and Jerry are in UNICORN garb, Azuma sends Johnny and Jerry to investigate the scene of the crime in plain clothes to see if it is the work of the Gargoyle Gang. Interestingly, Azuma’s objection to vampires as the cause of death is that it is 20th century Japan (“in this time and place?”), which could suggest some form of vampire is native to this Earth. More likely, it is a poorly chose expression or dub error, since Azuma assumes it is the work of Gargoyle anyways.

 

We get a brief interaction between Jerry and Johnny in the car of reassuring each other before they exit the car and begin talking to one of the main corpses focused on in the cold open, a man with glasses. The show is now engaging some level of dramatic irony for the tension, since we know he is a vampire, but the characters do not. He denies hearing of anything, and the shot lingers on his vampire neck mark. The woman in white now is wearing green and approaches Johnny and Jerry, seemingly to attempt a different play than last night to lure these agents to Drakulon. She refers to the vampire as her “daddy,” and says he heard a car around the time Johnny asks about. Of course, Johnny and Jerry respectively each gave a different time of occurrence to the woman and the bespectacled man (3:00 A.M. vs midnight). Though it does not pay off outside of the two being a bit more on their guard when entering Drakulon’s old dark house, it is nice to see that they do not make it easy for Gargoyle agents to confuse them.

 

I have been relaying the plot, but for the next scene to hit as hard, I should spell out the “oh crap” moment that I glossed over. It has been daytime the whole time Johnny and Jerry have been in this town, and two vampires have been walking around just fine. One of the few safety nets of vampire fiction is explicitly gone, so when Drakulon, in human guise laughs himself into blue form to attack our leads, escape is not as simple as breaking the windows in. Actually, we will see it takes quite a bit to kill our Drakulon.

 

The rotating wall secret passageway reveals the vampire woman, and the two back our heroes into a corner, where they correctly guess Drakulon’s Gargoyle leanings and the vampires taunt them. Both vampires express desperation to taste the blood either through a breathy pant (Drakulon) or a petulant statement of wanting the blood (his bride/daughter), but Drakulon reins himself in for a suave delivery.

 

Now, it is important to ascertain why this old dark house is even here if Drakulon is from space. I would argue the main reason is just for the Gothic atmosphere, as this episode isn’t even done milking this location for all the horror imagery it can provide, but if there has to be an in universe reason, this is one of the most elaborate plans of Guillotine for very little reason. It makes sense to keep his lieutenants secret from UNICORN; it keeps UNICORN on their toes, and we see how effective it can be in their little cold war to switch between subcontracting with Spider to Dr. Botanus to Fangar to Dr. Snake to Dr. Hydra to Metron to Terrorman, etc. But building lodging for Drakulon in a far off town raises all sorts of logistical questions. It is possible he truly fed on them one by one offscreen over the course of the show, but we get nothing more in this episode to flesh that out.

 

Drakulon himself resembles Dracula in more ways than just the name and accent. He first appears to Johnny and Jerry as a very slow, calculating but very weird old man, like the dynamic Dracula has with Harker in the early chapters of that book. The racial component of Harker’s discomfort with Dracula comes in with Drakulon turning out to be an inhuman of the Gargoyles (pinning down what the average Gargoylian should look like is difficult, but the Gargoyle Gang is, at the very least, a cultural identity). And, like Dracula, Drakulon first appears as this disgusting and unkempt old man but reveals surprising vitality as the story progresses. I called attention to the costumes of the major characters before this, and Drakulon is no exception since he will drop the shabby clothes and sport a full noble warrior getup during his battle with the robot at the end. We will get there soon.

 

A subtle moment for Jerry’s humanity creeps in as he refers to the fallen UNICORN agent as his friend and fires on Drakulon; Jerry is a simple creature, intensely loyal and brave but a little stupid. Jerry actually manages to push off Drakulon during a minor wrestling match but walks right into the vampire horde trying to warn them. Jerry fights to his utmost to protect Johnny from all these vampires that are moving so slowly and groaning like zombies. Once they get to shelter inside the house, the vampire horde pounds on the windows. Johnny phones for help, and Mari answers, but the vampirized UNICORN agent is in place to kidnap her, as the vampires start to break through the window.

 

The next “oh crap” moment happens when Jerry tells Johnny to call the robot, but it turns out the wristwatch came off in the tussle with the vampires. This is feasible given the distance they had to cover, the sweat that would be on his arm in that trench coat and the grabbiness of the vampires. With the vampires in the house, Jerry removes his coat and fights off the horde, leading to Jerry’s best moment in this entire series: Jerry tells Johnny to get the watch and sics the entire vampire horde on himself, referencing how he used to do the hundred yard dash. Dancing around casually like an idiot, Jerry faces the highest danger in this entire show just to buy Johnny some time, as the entire vampire horde chases him.

 

Drakulon confronts Johnny at the staircase with the watch on it, revealing the kidnapped Mari, threatening to turn her into a vampire if he calls the robot. From a writing standpoint, this is good, since it communicates that Drakulon is not as mindless and stupid as his minions and was working on his own plan while ordering them to chase the agents down. From a plot standpoint, this is bad since now the vampires have captured Johnny, Mari and Jerry, who runs back over once he sees that Johnny is near the wristwatch, bless his soul.

 

Drakulon’s daughter/bride is eager to drink their blood, but Drakulon stops her to launch into the next phase of his plan: making Johnny order the Giant Robot to obey Drakulon and destroy the UNICORN headquarters in Japan. If Johnny refuses, the UNICORN vampire will kill Mari, and, rather amusingly, the way the vampire chooses to administer this threat is by holding a gun to her head as if his teeth were not already the threat Drakulon had made. That and the Jerry chase scene from earlier tempt me to appoint this a horror-comedy, but in any case, there is no tonal issue because the humor is in character for a brain-dead monster and Jerry’s unique personality respectively.

 

Johnny has only five seconds to decide, and, as one of his best character moments in this show, he manages to outsmart Drakulon to win the day. Claiming to test the mechanism, Johnny speaks backwards to tell the robot not to obey the order and then relays Drakulon’s order. Jerry calls Johnny a traitor, because he is also misled by this. It is one of Jerry’s dumb moments, but we really should think of this from his perspective. He just risked his life to save Johnny after losing one of his other friends. Moreover, I would argue that Johnny is almost the reason for Jerry’s intense loyalty to UNICORN.

 


Obviously, Jerry is one of their best agents and was before the show began, but, in episode one, Jerry was rather irritated with Azuma, and the partnership with Johnny gave Jerry something to enjoy and protect. Their partnership also nets him at least twenty high-profile cases closed in this show to where Johnny and Jerry are the dependable agents to send out on these cases, the ones that survive everything Gargoyle throws at them, and, for a moment, it seems like Johnny is throwing that all away. If you think I am reading too far into Johnny’s role in Jerry’s loyalty to UNICORN, that is fair, but I will also remind you of UNICORN defector Hunter from an earlier episode who left due to disdain for Azuma and did not have a Johnny-like influence to temper his tempestuousness.

 

With Johnny, Jerry and Mari all tied up in coffins, the camera pans across the faces of the dead around them, and regardless of your views on the quality of this show, the idea behind this shot and the execution would not be out of place in a real horror movie. The dynamic cinematography style of a kaiju of the week show lends itself well to peril, and, as I hope to have demonstrated, this episode was uniquely focused on implementing horror imagery into its shots.

 

As Drakulon grips Johnny and pants like a dog, the Giant Robot arrives, and Jerry springs into action to free Johnny from his bonds, either quick to realize what Johnny actually was up to or just relying on muscle memory of “save Johnny first.” What happens next is interesting. Drakulon turns himself Giant and faces off against the robot with a sword and shield in a knight costume with a cape. The fight is actually unlike any that we had seen before. Drakulon fights like an acrobatic human, and his sword carries with it an explosion when thrown. Then, something baffling happens.

 


Johnny recalls that Drakulon should not be able to stand the cross, so, first, the robot T-poses in front of the setting sun, and then obeys Johnny’s order to “throw the cross,” at which point, a flaming cross appears and launches at Drakulon. If you are lost, I do not blame you. This seems like the most egregious Deus ex Machina in the entire show. However, I think I can mount a cogent defense of it.

 

The first thing to keep in mind is that this move is never used elsewhere, so the viewer does not know it is an option going into this episode. That’s why it is a Deus ex Machina (a literal God the Machine), but, answer me this: why would this move be used anywhere else? It is a time-consuming move to muster, and Giant Robo has both flame breath and Mega-ton punches to exercise far more readily and efficiently (not to mention the finger missiles and eye lasers). No other monster has a unique weakness to crosses, flaming or otherwise.

 

Okay, so the usage of the weapon makes sense, but why does it exist? People are quick to forget that UNICORN did not invent the robot; Guillotine did. Guillotine’s master plan in the show involves growing to giant size to threaten the Earth, but it takes a lot of energy to get him there. Drakulon is one of the only other Gargoylians that can grow in size, and he can do it so much faster. Guillotine baits the audience throughout the show by constantly saying his underlings will die for their failures but never delivering; by episode 17, he proves that, actually, he has no issue with killing his underlings for their failure. It seems like an obvious insurance policy to me to ensure that his most dangerous subcontractor cannot beat what Guillotine initially planned to be his main weapon. Is the flaming cross too fantastical for a sci-fi show? Too bad, the evil emperor pirate space squid probably ordered the robot that way, and frankly, it’d be dumber if he didn’t.

 

Okay, so why does Johnny know about it? By the beginning of episode two, UNICORN has studied Giant Robo and all his weapons and abilities. From there, Johnny spends at least five months on these missions with Jerry and the robot (if you use the airing dates), so Johnny would eventually discover that the robot can, for some reason, generate flaming crosses. But do you remember the start of the episode when Azuma assumed that any vampire activity was likely tied to Gargoyle? Or the middle of the episode when Jerry, upon realizing guns did not stop the vampires, told Johnny to summon the robot? Those moments make more sense if UNICORN knows the robot can do this, and then of course we see when Johnny remembers. I do not think I am reaching here; this feels like pretty basic inferences that do not cause any problems with the rest of the show. When I review media, regardless of if I love it or hate it, I intend to operate within the best faith possible, to steelman each stimulus because the flaws will win out anyway if it really is bad, and this is fine.

 

Conclusion

 

Especially given the contrivances one expects from this show, this episode stands out not only as an experimental episode of tokusatsu but as a pretty well written one for its high concept. The Deus ex Machina makes sense in context, Drakulon is legitimately a threatening character for his intelligence (unlike whatever Fangar was doing half the time) as well as his strength, and this episode shows off some of the best displays of the characterization of Johnny and Jerry that keeps me coming back to this show and this episode.

 


This is not the only Halloween-styled episode of Johnny Sokko; The Terrifying Space Mummy aired just a month earlier. (Maybe we should talk about that one next year). This is not the first time we at Plan9Crunch have discussed Johnny Sokko And His Flying Robot and hopefully will not be the last. Links to a blog post and podcast episode are below. Happy Halloween and Happy Johnny Sokko Day.

https://youtu.be/4G1jbizjHiY?si=BrhwylHKVy9fWTJw

https://planninecrunch.blogspot.com/2013/05/johnny-sokko-and-giant-robot-in-movie.html