Thursday, October 23, 2008
Vengeance of the Undead
From the August 1951 issue of Web of Mystery #4 creeps this morbid monster mash of murder and mayhem. I guess after the last few days of intelligent Ace originals, this one comes off as merely a crypt kicker o’brainless fun. (Kind of like comparing a classy Hammer film with a balls to the wall El Santo production.) Enjoy!
the comparison to a Santo movie(Santo Y Blue Demon Contra Los Monstruos, oddly enough, springs to mind...)is apt indeed. this story was completely OUTRAGEOUS and i loved every second! they were just making it up as they went along, like a child's make-believe adventure- it took as long to write it as it took to read it, i'll bet. sublime!
ReplyDeletelooks like a great convention. i've always wanted to meet Tura Satana...
Lemme see… The sub-human criminal figures are Frankenstein, Vampire, Werewolf and... Conan?
ReplyDeleteThe lynchmob finish is the scariest thing in the piece.
Yeah i agree with Pierre,the whole story has a mean streak i really dig.
ReplyDeleteGhod, what a laugh-out-loud mess. Karswell, you sure know how to balance a week. The last two days were simply first-class -- sad and serious. What a perfect contrast this one makes.
ReplyDeleteThis story is proof that alcohol played a much larger part in 50s comic book composition than is generally supposed.
And the writer was obviously getting progressively drunker, rushing to finish before passing out. The last page just takes the cake, with one jaw-dropper after another.
"Only hanging by a snake-grass..." WHAT???
"COME HERE, YOU SKULKING BEASTS."
Yeah, I have to second Mr. Fournier's point about the terrifying crowd. "I heard rumors that it isn't a dummy at all...!" I'm always impressed when these stories slide right into their own alternate universe--honestly, if the villagers are going to swallow the fact of a rampaging werewolf, why not swallow the further facts of its waxwork genesis? Why not just go slaughter up all of Madam Tussauds' on a tincture of hearsay?
ReplyDeleteIn this way, the terrifying villagers are also stand-ins for the reading audience. Stand-ins for me. Without the shadow of any convincing suspension of my disbelief, under the influence of wilder and lesser-developed anecdote, the plot forces me to throw my hands in the air and assign plausibilities. "Of course," I murmur while reading, "the effects of the black widow venom can only be reversed with snake grass! The dog-intellect of the wolf-man presages the equal subservience of the caveman and the vampire! God, meeting Tura Satana sure would be super cool!"
Okay, so my mind wondered a little during the story.
All hail the snake-grass noose! For want of a snake-grass noose, everyone in every other story here might have survived.
ReplyDeleteThat must not have been a real werewolf, by the way, or the boy it killed would have been back for the epilogue.
I have to stock this snake-grass. You never know when the dreaded neandertahl murder strikes again.
ReplyDeleteOh boy, Zita really had it coming. If you put in some nudity it would read like the novelisation of an tv-episode of Tales from the Crypt :-)
Great stuff.
How ya like that, the wolfman actually got the dumb kid! (And the snake-grass bit is news to me. Gotta stock up on the snake-grass, man -- even if you don't get the monsters with it, you just roll a joint and light up! Good stuff, baby!)
ReplyDeleteALOT OF FUN, THIS HAS BEEN A GREAT SAMPLING OF ACE THIS WEEK AND I'M ALWAYS LOOKING FORWARD TO MORE.
ReplyDeleteThis story was built on an exceptionally strong foundation of crackpot comic book science.
ReplyDeleteGreat stuff!