Horror Haikus 2011 - Part 4

Two great ones this time! (The movies, that is, not necessarily the haikus...)

Dr. Phibes Rises Again - 1972

Directed by Robert Fuest

Off to Egypt, Phibes!

Boy, does he have toys and a,

Babe to row the boat!

I've been wanting to see this one since I saw a still from it in Famous Monsters nearly forty years ago. It was worth the wait!

It! – 1966

Directed by Herbert J. Leder

Pimm’s got a golem,

A dead mama, a hot blonde,

And an A-bomb – BOOM!

The Mystery of the Muhlenberg County Masks!

Like just about any kid obsessed with the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland in the sixties or seventies, the ads for Warren Publication’s merchandising arm, the Captain Company, held about an equal attraction to me as the articles and photos in each issue. The Captain Company sold everything the well-heeled monster kid could want and certainly far more than one could afford on an allowance of two bucks every two weeks.

Many an issue of Famous Monsters would fall into my hands, and before long I’d be filling out the order form in the back for books, back issues, monster models, Super 8 horror films, and more.  And just as often those order forms would never get mailed, since my wants always exceeded my budget even after making carefully considered choices in an attempt to narrow it down to just those items that “I had to have.”

Quite certainly the holy grail of Captain Company merchandise had to be the deluxe Don Post Masks. Not only did these masks of Frankenstein!, The Creature from the Black Lagoon!, The Mole People!, The Werewolf!, and others look to be the best from their pictures and descriptions, but they even sold monster hands, and in some cases feet (!), to go with the masks. And with an astronomical price tag of $39.95 each for the masks and $19.95 for hands or feet the quality of said masks could not be doubted. In fact, while I can’t remember consciously thinking this, I’m pretty sure my assumption was that say, the Creature from the Black Lagoon mask would be virtually indistinguishable from the version in the movies. I mean, technology had advanced since the fifties, and it was forty dollars for gosh sakes!

The ads that caused thousands of kids to annoy the crap out their parents!

But while actually owning a Don Post mask remained an unattainable dream, dreaming of what I would do with them was another matter. I spent many an hour at school, home, and during church services daydreaming up ways to produce my own 8mm epic monster rallies with a legion of latex-masked monsters enacting tales of melodramatic fury.

By the late seventies, I was drifting away from reading Famous Monsters. In the wake of Star Wars, the magazine had lost its way, and a new generation of fantasy film magazines like Starlog, Fantastic Films, and then Fangoria had stolen its thunder. While the Captain Company may have been a thing of the past, Starlog knew a good idea when they saw it and started their own merchandise company that carried the Don Post Masks. Even though their ads may have lacked the superlative hyperbole of the Captain Company, they did have really nice color printing in most of their ads which showed off the masks really well. Especially the awesome new Human Fly mask and claw that Don Post introduced in the late seventies and which immediately caught my fancy in a big way.

Don Post in Color!

The masks were still tempting, and there was the fact that I was gradually coming into more income, especially when I started working part time after school at the IGA in the fall of 1978. But becoming a teenager also meant there were more varied interests and places to spend my money. So while the idea of owning a phalanx of Don Post masks, all arranged in rows on styrofoam heads in my bedroom, may have still had its appeal, it was not a  dream that I spent any real time pursuing. I mean, I had never even seen one these masks.

And then came Halloween of 1979.

The last half of 1979 was a really good time for me. I had turned sixteen in May, gotten my driver’s license as soon as possible after my birthday, and with a used 1976 Pinto in my possession, I had freedom of movement for the first time in my life. That October, word got out that the Central City Fire Department was running a really good haunted house. So one night, probably a Friday or Saturday, I and a bunch of friends headed out to see it.

Now, I had never been to a haunted house attraction before. Perhaps there had been some in Central City previously, but since it was 17 miles down the road from me, I had no easy way to go until I had my own means to get there. And that year, it was a very good haunted house. Someone with a knowledge of horror movies had obviously put a great deal of thought into its production. It was held in an old funeral home and each room presented a tableau drawn from one horror movie, including all the standards by that point – Frankenstein, Dracula, Wolfman, The Exorcist, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and more. 

But the first thing that caught my eye was the Don Post Masks. They were everywhere!  After years of lusting after tiny black & white photos, there were all the masks, right in my face – and worn by someone screaming their lungs out at me. Including the capper -- the awesome fly mask and claw that showed up in the last room of the tour.

"Help me!!!"

While my friends were all impressed with the haunted house experience, I was even more impressed with the masks, and I remember saying as we left, “Someone spent a LOT of money on this!”

The next year, when October rolled around I made sure to hightail to the Central City Haunted House as soon as it opened, mainly because I really wanted to see those masks again. But I was in for a big disappointment. Not only were Don Post masks nowhere to be seen, but the haunted house was a pale shadow of what it had been the year before. The planning and staging just wasn’t there. The mastermind behind the 1979 haunted house was obviously not involved in the 1980 offering.

I’ve often wondered just where all those Don Post masks came from. Who in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky could have had such an incredible collection? Perhaps they were rented, but from where?  I suppose if I had followed up at the time I may have found out, but it was awfully hard to stay obsessed about one thing for very long (excluding girls and being generally pissed off at the world) at the age of sixteen.

Whatever the answer to the mystery, I do know that a bunch of latex rubber and fake hair made one Halloween very special for me.

Lewisburg, Kentucky – Gateway to Adventure!

Let’s talk about drugstores. Yes, that’s right, drugstores. There was a time, not that long ago, when drugstores were full of wonderment and delight – doorways to all sorts of exciting worlds and  mind-expanding adventures, and it had absolutely nothing to do with pharmaceuticals.

I think about this every time I walk into the massive crackerboxes of crap that pass for drugstores now days. (Usually built at the busiest intersections possible to maximize traffic clusterf*cks and if possible, on ground where historic buildings previously stood – but I digress…)  Even though these miscarriages of modern architecture are ten, twenty times larger or more than the drugstores of my youth there is nothing in them you really want, stuff you need and have to have sure, but nothing that you want.

It didn’t used to be this way. Not only was going to the drugstore each week something I looked forward to with excitement, but any chance I had to go into a previously unexplored drugstore was even more exciting. The attraction of these pharmacies of yore, could be primarily expressed in terms of three – magazines, paperback books, and comic books.  Maybe you could find these in newsstands or bookstores in them there “big cities,” but out in the rest of America, drugstores were where it was at. For me, my primary source during the formative years of my life was Gower’s Drugstore in Lewisburg, Kentucky.

Like a lot of smaller towns in America, Lewisburg had been an “Average Deal” (not a “Big Deal” just “Average”) in the days of passenger railroads, but by 1972 the days of folks traveling by rail in western Kentucky were long gone.  The “main” street of Lewisburg was about three blocks long with the businesses still stuck in decaying building that all faced the train tracks and the empty field where the depot had once stood. In addition to the drugstore there was a bank, a barber shop, a hardware store, a feed store, and a few other businesses and that was it.  For a supermarket we had to drive another 10 miles to Russellville.

Although my parent’s original plan in having me take piano lessons was to make me the next Liberace (but without being gay, which of course, they had no concept of anyway…), the real result was that it fed my growing and eventual lifelong addiction for comic books, monster magazines, Mad magazine, and science fiction paperbacks. My piano lessons were on each Tuesday in Russellville, on the way there Mom would always make a stop in Lewisburg to go to the bank and drugstore. And that’s where my downfall began.

At Gower’s Drugstore they had wooden shelf racks (much like what magazines are typically displayed on today). The top section was magazines, the bottom section was paperback books stacked vertically with their spines facing out, but the middle section was all comic books. The very first comic book that I can remember buying with my own money was Flash #210 in September of 1971 – purchased at Gower’s of course. Although I loved it and re-read it many times, for some reason the funny book bug didn’t get a bite on me.

American history according to funny books! 

But the bug got another chance in the following April when I bought Justice League of America #99 and from then on I was off. Piano lessons didn’t really matter; it was getting to Gower’s each week to see what new comic books were on the stands. I had to have that fix! And even if I couldn’t afford to buy everything, there would be those days when I could at least look through, or maybe even read whole issues that I didn’t purchase.

Early on I realized that Jack Kirby's work was just too much for me.  His stuff was just too powerful and totally creeped me out in a way I couldn’t understand. I very rarely worked up the nerve to buy any of his books, but I looked at them. (Of course, now he’s my favorite comic book artist of all time, ah youth…) I can still vividly remember standing in Gower’s reading Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth #1 every week until it disappeared from the shelf.

But even though the local drugstore brought wonderment and joy it also brought frustration.  Comic book and magazine distribution back then was crazy and unreliable.  Even though I was in Gower’s every week, it was not unusual to miss issues, just because they never showed up for sale. This drove a kid crazy, because back then if you missed an issue it was gone, daddy-o. The only hope you might have finding a back issue was trading with someone else, or the coverless, three for a quarter packs you could pick up at country markets (and there’s a whole blog comin’ about those babies). That’s why anytime I had the chance to duck into a “foreign” drugstore I took it.  It was better than hopping over the Berlin Wall to check out the types of shampoo available in the West, you never knew what treasures you’d find. 

Not me, not Gower's, not 1973, but you get the idea...

This catch as catch can method of distribution also shaped my buying habits in a big way. For example Grower’s Drugstore never had a copy of Famous Monsters of Filmland on the shelf. So I was reduced to buying only the occasional issue when I would find one at a drugstore in Russellville or Greenville. My friend John Hudson’s regular drugstore was the one in Greenville.  They did carry FM  (but not every issue of course, grrr…), so his collection of monster magazines quickly exceeded mine.

The “golden age” of Gower’s came to screeching halt in the spring of 1975. One week I walked into Gower’s and noticed there was nothing new on the shelves. The books were the exact same ones as the week before. The next week it was the same. The next they were still the same. Panic really had me in grip its by this point, so I had to ask what was going on. They explained they were changing distributors and the new ones hadn’t started showing up yet. In the meantime I had to find another source and started frequenting drugstores in Russellville that I had only hit occasionally before. Even though Gower’s eventually did get some new product on the shelves, the bloom was off the rose. I had moved on.

Finally, all the comic books, magazine and paperbacks disappeared from Gower’s. In just a few years Gower’s would relocate out on the main highway that runs through Lewisburg, next to the new IGA supermarket and across the road from the new Lewisburg Bank building. Nowadays when I drive through Lewisburg on my way to visit my parents I pass right by these businesses without giving them a second thought. Now Lewisburg is just a small rural community where you make sure to slow down a bit and not get caught in the local speed trap, and perhaps stop for some gas and cup of coffee at the convenience store. But there was that time when it was my own private gateway to adventure.