Very cool TV spot for Dracula has Risen from the Grave from 1968.

Hey, kids from America! If you haven’t already, don’t forget to exercise your right to vote on Tuesday. And fer chrissakes, let’s make the right decision this time!

For your election eve entertainment, here’s a really creepy William Castle pushing the “Punishment Poll” near the finale of Mr. Sardonicus

It’s not often that I link to National Review Online (in fact, I’ve never had), but this piece by John Derbyshire about his short stint as an uncredited thug in Bruce Lee’s The Way of the Dragon (or Return of the Dragon) is really quite fascinating. This cranky reactionary, who once opined that “Pop Culture is Filth”, is more than respectful when recounting the pure star frisson and charisma of Bruce Lee in Hong Kong, and gives us a rare look into the slap-dash world of HK moviemaking in the early 70s.

You can see clips of Lee kicking Derbyshire in the face here (Derbyshire looks sort of like James Taylor in Two-Lane Blacktop).

Interestingly, The Way of the Dragon was the only film written and directed by Lee. You can see some of his cinematic handiwork here in his climactic battle with a very young and hairy Chuck Norris here (Lee was not immune to the overuse of the zoom lens either like many a low-budget filmmaker of that epoch).

Like the music? You can download the soundtrack at The Manchester Morgue

A lost art form (if I may be permitted the stretch the definition of “art form”), the trashy newspaper ad mat found in the backpages of your local fishwrap probably figured in more last minute movie decisions than marquees or four-color posters, at least in the smaller towns and rural areas especially serviced by drive-ins. Excellent examples of these can be found at the ad mat collection of the The Deuce. More vintage newspaper movie ads (albeit not so trashy) can be found at Emulsion Compulsion (including one for Birth of a Nation.

Of course, ad mats are not a strictly American phenomenon. AV Maniacs has a series of Argentine exploitation ads from the mid 80s.

Nightmare fodder for many a 70s child (spoiled by USA, of course), usually first glimpsed on late nite TV, maybe a local spot on Carson, the CBS Late Movie, or ABC’s Wide World of Entertainment. Featuring Juliet Mills, star of the 60s family sitcom Nanny and the Professor, Beyond the Door was an Italo-horror sort of blatant Exorcist ripoff, this time with the mama and not the kiddo possessed by demons. The name of the film in Italy was Chi Sei?, which, translates to the TV preview’s skin-tingling catchphrase, “Who are you?”, which probably rendered many sleepless, shadowy nights back in 1974.

Ha ha… Hal Hartley:

“I used to co-own a video store and we had a “respected American directors” section. Hal Hartley was not in it. People wearing untucked dress shirts would always ask me why he was not in that section, and I would reply “Because we don’t respect him, his movies are over here with the Mike Leigh and Atom Egoyan stuff”.”

From Chunklet’s The Most Overrated Indie/Underground/Art Filmmakers of All Time! Yeah, the Chunklet dudes can be know it all pricks, but at least when the guy disses Godard, he urges the clueless hipster to watch Robert Bresson instead!

The halcyon days of VHS! — who knew that we would be nostalgic for those glorious hours spent in the mom-and-pop video store, with the oversized boxes, faded from constant plate-glass sunlight… and the boxes, empty and cellophane wrapped (the tapes shelved safely behind the counter), lighter than air almost, would tumble like hollow dominoes with the merest brush of an elbow. And the forbidden pleasures and horrors the box’s artwork would promise– as if you would never see a movie bloodier and and more debasing than Dr. Butcher, M.D. (Medical Deviant), until you run across a tattered box for Bloodsucking Freaks, and then, one step beyond, the non plus ultra of home video depravity, Faces of Death, where real people actually died on screen! What a world!

See glorious examples of VHS box-art with Critical Condition’s A Visual History of Video Companies in the 80s, a series that begins with examples of Paragon’s releases, and will update with examples of other video producers like Midnight Video, Gorgon Video, Media Home Entertainment and Wizard Video. 2 day rentals only $2.50! Free popcorn!

Found on YouTube– See it before the powers that be take it away. A video mashup with the title sequence of the new Casino Royale (very nice in its own right) set to the original Burt Bacharach penned Casino Royale theme from the 1967 spoof. Not earth shattering, but prety cool to watch. Anyway, more on Casino Royale this weekend.

R.I.P. Robert Altman… American Patriot, Filmmaker, Crazy Coot, Great Unique Talent, Dog Tattooist…

GA: …Is it true that in the forties you used to tattoo dogs?

RA: Absolutely.

GA: Can you explain?

RA: Well, in the forties, I tattooed dogs.

Right after the war I got a dog for myself, a personal dog. I don’t know why, it was a terrible Bull Terrier. The guy I bought it from had this thing called an identicode, which he would tattoo on to dogs for identification. I thought this was a terrific idea. Before I got out of the shop with my Bull Terrier, I was the vice-president of this company.

So, I became the tattooist. We would take the dog, and inside the groin, by the right-hind leg, we would shave and put on the antiseptic fluid and then with the tattooing machine I would do letters, and I got pretty good at it, and we’d put the number of that dog that was registered. We thought we were off to be millionaires. It turned out that I just got a few dog bites.

GA: I also heard that you tattooed President Truman’s dog.

RA: Yes, I did. We tattooed Harry Truman’s dog in Washington. That was a publicity stunt. Although the dog was actually tattooed. I also tattooed a waiter.

He was bringing drinks up to a hotel and he said, ‘What are you guys doing.’ We told him we tattooed and he said, ‘I always wanted to have that!’ So, we were a little drunken, I remember this guy took his shoe off and I tattooed on the bottom of his foot his army serial number and his name. His name was D W Stiles. I don’t remember his number.

GA: Do you regret having given that up for film-making?

RA: Well…they’re both about the same.

While we may marvel at Hitchcock’s artistry and crafty cinema, I’ve always been fascinated by Hitchcock the huckster, the self-promoter. I’ve often wondered when Hitchcock was first pushed as a selling point for his productions. In his his early days in Britain, he was touted as a “boy genius”, and, with his series of thrillers in the 30s, he was starting to wear the sobriquet of a “master of suspense”. But when exactly was the image of Hitchcock, the droll fat man in funereal black suit as we know him today and as we knew him forever, used to sell a picture? Was it this sort of ugly looking caricature on this poster for his 1942 movie Suspicion. And not to think that this is too much of an anomaly, here’s another poster for the very same film, now featuring a much more stylized impression of Mr. Hitchcock (and much more flattering to boot!). His distinctive physical appearance was one that Hitchcock used to separate himself from his peers. One can’t imagine seeing a picture of an eyepatch wearing Ford chewing on a handkerchief pushing Gideon of Scotland Yard or slim, gray Hawks pushing Man’s Favorite Sport? Of course, his sense of cinema was distinctive enough to set him apart as well.

Yes, this is a very modest and pissant addition to the Hitchcock blog-o-thon!