Poster art of The Neptune Factor (1973, John Berkey)

Behold this amazing visualization for the 1973 underwater sci-fi film The Neptune Factor: An Undersea Odyssey.

This is the work of John Berkey, who did equally impressive paintings for the 1977 killer whale film Orca, the '76 remake of King Kong (hey--both of those films are on my Movies That Made Me Cry list!), Star Wars, as well as the National Geographic book Our Universe.

As for the film itself, The Neptune Factor doesn't come close to realizing the awe and adventure promised in the painting above.

Despite its ambitious title (it's an "Undersea Odyssey"!) the simplistic plot can be condensed into a single sentence that goes something like this: a submarine team dives deep underwater to rescue a sunken sea laboratory and encounters giant tropical fish along the way.

That really is it.

Oh yea--on the way down, the submariners (among them Ernest Borgnine and Yvette Mimieux--who'd crew together again a few years later in Disney's The Black Hole!) argue a few times over whether they should turn back or keep going (spoiler alert: they keep going!)

But it's mostly long stretches of people staring out portholes...

...and even when they finally reach the monsterously oversized sea life, it never gets more exciting than watching a plastic toy floating around the aquarium of your dentist's waiting room (which I'm pretty sure is exactly how these shots were achieved).

Even as a five-year old seeing this film for the first time, I didn't buy it.

The Neptune Factor is available on DVD by itself or in a 4-disc set that includes Battle For the Planet of the Apes, The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Poseidon Adventure.

Halloween Treat: Haunted Air (Ossian Brown, 2011)

If I were a rich man, instead of handing out Tootsie Roll Pops and Jolly Ranchers to trick-or-treaters on Halloween, I'd hand out ridiculously awesome goodies like copies of this book, Haunted Air, A Collection of Anonymous Hallowe'en Photographs, America c.1875-1955.

From the collection of musician Ossian Brown (no, I am not familiar with his work...), Haunted Air is a 200+ page album of vintage black and white photographs of children in Halloween costumes. The photos are presented without commentary, and no attempt is made to date or identify them (although sometimes you might find a hand-scribbled date on the photograph itself.)

Oh yea, there's a short written introduction by director David Lynch, and a historical note tracing the cultural origins of Halloween, but the real draw is the photographs. Some of my favorites are posted below.

Be advised the book seems to cycle in and out of availability. You can nab a copy for under $30 when its in stock, but prices can climb four times that when it cycles out of stock again. Buy it here.

The Housing Market Is a Real Nightmare!

The Haunted Closet does not typically cover the real-estate market, but a couple items in today's news caught my eye.

First, did you know that someone had a house built whose exterior is a dead-ringer for Disneyland's Haunted Mansion? Well they did, and it's up for sale.

The house, originally built in 1996, is located in Duluth, Georgia, and was designed by a Disney contractor. Here's a pic:

Am I the only Haunted Mansion fan that was completely unaware this place existed? Now where's that $800,000 I had lying around...

Anyhoo, next on the market is a cozy little Colonial with a great lakeside view. With its black-goop toilets, bleeding walls and rickety staircase, it's a.... handyman's dream!

That's right, the original Amityville Horror house is back on the market! Considering the house's troubled history, the realtor may have to hustle a bit to close this sale (they've already had to drop the asking price by $100K).

Which reminds me (sequeway...) of a skit from a 1980 Steve Martin television special in which Martin buys a haunted house. The program was called Comedy Is Not Pretty, a collection of sketch comedy bits by then hot-as-lava Martin (his album of the same name was a hit the previous year).

One memorable sketch (so memorable, in fact, that I actually memorized it as a kid, although repeated plays of the audio from my open-air tape recording of the broadcast probably helped) has Martin playing new homeowner Arthur Fleschman, bragging about what a great deal he landed.

But it quickly becomes clear why the house was such a bargain. While Martin is talking up the property, a demonic voice booms from within the house, "Get out! Get out!" (a direct reference to The Amityville Horror, which was still very much an element of  the popular culture at the time.) Seems this house is haunted!

Martin concedes there are just a few things wrong with the house: "That step on the back porch needs to be fixed. We're getting estimates on stopping the walls from bleeding."

Other drawbacks? The house causes their pet cats to talk, grandma melts at the dinner table, and the kids sometimes turn into bats. Nothing a few trips to Home Depot wouldn't fix, no doubt.

Meanwhile, as Martin talks, his wife screams out an upper window before being tossed off the roof by a gorilla (although I must admit, even as a kid, I never did understand how gorillas became a stock haunted-house element. Is The Murders In the Rue Morgue to blame?)

I've heard of being upside-down on your mortgage but--- (okay, maybe I should leave the comedy to Martin).

The whole skit is played strictly for laughs, and yet witnessing this as a gradeschooler I couldn't help but feel the slight twinge of fear as Martin casually strolls into the house, completely oblivious to the hellfire lapping at the windows (and to the corpse of his wife, laid out in the yard!)

The sound effects playing over the background, a mix of wind, creaking trees and thunder, is a track ripped directly from the Disney sound effect record Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House (the same effects are used on The Story and Song from The Haunted Mansion.) The track is called The Haunted House, and the long out-of-print album is available for download on I-Tunes.

The special Comedy Is Not Pretty was finally released to DVD recently as part of a 3-disc collection of Martin's television work, appropriately titled Steve Martin: The Television Stuff.

Animated adaptation of Ray Bradbury's The Halloween Tree released to DVD!

Just a quick announcement, the 1993 animated adaptation of Ray Bradbury's The Halloween Tree, (narrated by Bradbury himself, and featuring the voice of Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Moundshroud) has finally been released to DVD this week as part of Warner Archives burn-on-demand program. (It had previously only been available on a long out-of-print VHS and has never been officially released to DVD before.)

I previously posted about the book itself, and as far as adaptations go, prefer the Colonial Radio Theater audiobook version which I mentioned in that earlier post, but this 1-hour, 10-minute Hanna Barbera animated production is still worth a look, and is a worthy addition to any collection of Halloween Specials.

I'm a big fan of the Warner Archive burn-on-demand program, which has brought several of my favorite "wish list" titles to market, including Bad Ronald, the original TV-version of Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, Two on a Guillotine, The Green Slime, The Last Dinosaur, The Phantom Tollbooth, The Power, the William Castle horror anthology TV show Ghost Story (aka Circle of Fear), Saturday morning favorites Thundarr The Barbarian and Valley of the Dinosaurs... sheesh, I could keep going!

Buy The Halloween Tree on DVD here.

Afternoon Matinees at Chris-Town Mall

Growing up in the 70s and 80s in Phoenix, AZ, there were two main malls close to my neighborhood: Metro Center, the newer, bigger mall with two floors of shopping excitement (you can see it in all its glory in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, where it served as the shooting location for the "San Dimas Mall")...

...and a few miles south from there, the older, smaller Chris-Town Mall. Even back in the late 70s, Chris-Town already seemed like a throwback to simpler times. If Metro Center was the trendy mall where you went to listen to the newest records, shop the latest fashions, and play the hottest videogames, Chris-Town was the mall your Mom went to sip a cup of coffee while getting her watch battery replaced.

Despite its slower pace and quieter ambiance making it the less desirable mall for youngsters, Chris-Town had an allure all its own, and in a case of not appreciating something until its gone (it was turned into a Wal-Mart over a decade ago) I recognize it now as something of a crown jewel among the local malls (check out these photographs of its charming fountains and "modern" hanging sculpture. All Chris-Town photos came from the excellent Chris-Town Retrospective.)

During summer breaks, from kindergarten on up through grade school, my Dad would sometimes take me to Chris-Town's UA Cinema 6 for an afternoon matinee on those occasional weekdays that he had off from work. The UA Cinema 6 box office sat in a self-contained island in the middle of the mall, a good distance away from the actual theater.

A short walk towards the end of the mall bought you to the escalator that took you over the food court to the theater above. The ride up lent a sense of excitement and anticipation, as if queueing for an amusement park ride. Hang on everybody! We're going to ride the movies!

Many of my earliest sci-fi/horror cinema memories were in that theater, among them Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977), The Cat From Outer Space (1978), At the Earth's Core (1976) and a quartet of genuine turkeys that, to this day, I still have a soft-spot for because of residual memories from those pleasant Chris-Town afternoon matinees. They are Godzilla vs. Megalon (1973), Great White (aka The Last Shark) (1981), Empire of the Ants (1977) and Food of the Gods (1976).


EMPIRE OF THE ANTS (1977) and FOOD OF THE GODS (1976)

Double-features were still common in those days, and the Empire of the Ants/Food of the Gods combo was one of the few occasions where we actually stayed for both the A- and B-picture.

Ant Misbehavin'.


Both Empire... and Food... are products of disaster king Bert I. Gordon, and each bears an attribution to H.G. Wells in the title (although what either of these films has to do with the guy who chased Jack the Ripper through time is a mystery.)

Aside from whatever tenuous connection the films may have to the source material, they both involve ordinary animals enlarged to monstrous size, with a tacked-on commentary on man's contamination of nature, making them a logical pairing on the double-bill.

In Empire... a group touring real estate in Florida, among them Joan Collins (Tales That Witness Madness) and Robert Pine (CHiPs) are terrorized by enormous, radioactive ants.

Eventually its revealed that the highly intelligent ants have a master plan to enslave mankind to toil in the sugar fields. But until then, they're presented as mindless, ravenous man-eaters.

The special effects are hit and miss, the giant ants realized through up-close photography of real specimens composited into the frame...

...supplemented by first-person "ant-vision" shots where You! Are! The! Ant!

This is a pretty silly film, but there is at least one effective vignette, the primal horror story distilled to its basic elements. An elderly couple, fearing they won't be able to outrun the attacking ants on foot, takes refuge in an abandoned shed.

After hunkering down in the dark for a few hours, they finally emerge...

...only to find the shed swarming with ants, their fate sealed. This grim reveal still gets me to this day.

In Food of the Gods, Marjoe Gortner (Mausoleum, Starcrash) is one of several folks terrorized by giant animals on an island in British Columbia.

A mysterious liquid food bubbling from the ground is causing wasps...

...chickens...

...and, most horrifying, carnivorous grubs, to grow several times their normal size.

A nightmarish sequence involves a pregnant woman giving birth in a cabin while giant rats are trying to bite and claw their way in from all sides...

...and one nearly gets through to the new mother's bedroom, repelled only at the last second when its head is slammed in the door.

The rat uprising is finally put down when a flood drowns them, leaving our heroes stranded in the middle of a giant disgusting soup.

GREAT WHITE (aka THE LAST SHARK) (1981)

Great White was an Italian Jaws knock-off, whose major selling point was that it featured a 35-foot shark that made the 25-footer in Jaws look puny by comparison. Great White was no doubt going to be 10-feet better than Jaws!

Of course, most of that yardage is kept out of view below the water, with only the head visible, bobbing at the surface like a giant shark-shaped buoy.

Great White turned out to be somewhat of an exclusive engagement, as Universal apparently sued successfully to have the film removed from theaters after opening week on the grounds it was a blatant rip-off of their successful franchise.

Having recently rewatched both films, I don't think anyone would confuse the two. Still, there are plenty of similarities. You have Vic Morrow (Twilight Zone:The Movie) as the Quint-essential gruff, shark-obsessed fisherman...

...the use of a tethered floating object to indicate the presence of the shark without having to actually show it (a floating red ball instead of a barrel)...

...the discovery of boat wreckage containing a floating body part...

...and a pier that gets pulled into the water after a couple of bozo fisherman tie a grappling hook baited with roast to it. Of course Great White ups the ante by loading the pier with people before it gets pulled out to sea.

Finally there's the shark's demise, an explosion (this one caused by the remote detonation of an ingested dynamite belt.) Smile, you son-of-a....

Okay, so maybe watching Great White was like flipping through a scrapbook of photographs from your half-remembered summer at Camp Jaws years earlier. But it has one memorable kill scene unlike anything Jaws has to offer, when our 35-foot friend bites onto the legs of a man dangling from a rescue helicopter...

...and somehow manages to detach them several inches above the point where his teeth actually make contact!

"So, they'll just grow back, then?"


GODZILLA VS. MEGALON (1973)

I have to warn you up front, despite poster promises of a World Trade Center nature, at no point does Godzilla, Megalon, or anyone else wind up standing atop the two towers, or anywhere near New York, for that matter. I can only guess someone decided to include the WTC Towers on the poster because they happened to open to the public the same month as the film, August 1973.

The actual film is set entirely in Tokyo... and, of course, the lost, undersea kingdom of Seatopia (duh!) where exotic ritual dances are held every hour on the half-hour.

I have never been one to take my Japanese monster movies too seriously, even as a Godzilla-worshipping kid. Which is a good thing, because in a genre that already lends itself to silliness, Godzilla Vs. Megalon is as silly as they come.

Symbolic representation of what I remember my early childhood to be like.

The Seatopians have decided its time to extend their kingdom above the surface, and towards that end summon the monster Megalon, who proceeds to level the city of Tokyo with his hood-ornamentish head-mounted laser weapon.

But for reasons never adequately explained, the Seatopians also need the aid of a human-like robot called Jet Jaguar.

Jet Jaguar is the invention of a pair of scientists who seem to live and work out of a small art-space loft...

We may not fully understand how the Seatopians know of Jet Jaguar's existence, much less how the flying, fighting robot is necessary to complete their plan of world domination, but one thing is certain: at some point, the robot and the monster are gonna fight!

Jet Jaguar is presented as a sophisticated robot, so complex it can actually program itself to expand its own powers, and yet it receives instructions through cardboard punch-cards!

And even though Jet Jaguar can move and think for itself, it lacks the power of speech, and is forced to communicate in clumsy hand-motions resembling football referee signals. Man, I wish I had a translation key so I could learn Jet Jaguar's arm talkin'.

Eventually Godzilla enters the picture, fighting for the good guys alongside Jet Jaguar, with cartoonish moves right out of a professional wrestling ring. And in what has to be one of the most outlandish moments in all of Godzilladom, the big lizard dispatches Megalon with a tail-sliding maneuver never seen before or since.

Empire of the Ants, Food of the Gods, Great White/The Last Shark and Godzilla vs. Megalon are all available on DVD as of this writing.