King of the Rocket Men, Chapters Four to Six (Fred C. Brannon, 1949)

Time for more Rocket Man!

Chapter Four: High Peril

...and Jeff returns to the realm of the senses just in time to get up off the floor and dodge outside, just before the chemist's shack goes up in a ball of flame, causing more harmacy than your usual pharmacy.

Back at the Science associates Administration building, Jeff and Burt Winslow discuss how the crooks gained entry - Jeff pointing out that they definitely had an inside man who gave them access.  Burt concurs, saying that "If Dr Millard were still alive" (which we, dear watchers, of course know that he is) he would say the same thing, as he was convinced that Dr Vulcan was a member of the board.  As they mull over which of professors Conway, Bryant, Graffner or Von Strum are the most likely candidate, the devious Dr Vulcan is listening in by hacking the radio in the boardroom.  I don't think even Hardison from Leverage could manage that level of techno-botch.

Via the power of flashback, Jeff recalls catching a glimpse of the hand of the inside operator and that he was wearing a distinctive signet ring.  Figuring that a criminal mastermind is unable to perform the fairly simple task of removing an item of jewellery from his person, he puts all his eggs in the basket case of using the ring to identify the culprit.  At the next day's S.A. general meeting, King asks his fellows to place their hands on the table so that he can inspect them - a somewhat strange request with which they comply.  Spotting the ring on the hand of Professor Conway, Jeff fingers him as the traitor; an accusation to which Conway responds by producing a pistol from under his hat (said titfer is resting on the table, so sadly it's not as ludicrous a scene as that may sound) and yells that Jeff is determined to pin Vulcan's misdeeds on anybody and that he isn't about to be made the scapegoat.  

Conway flees in his car, and King dons the Rocket Man suit to soar into the big blue in search of the errant academic only to lose track of him - as flyboy scans the rocky roads (not to be confused with pornographic performer Rocki Roads, nee Mary Ann Bradley, whom I have visually scanned a few times) the prof eludes him via the fairly simple method of parking 'neath a tree.  When the rocket recon proves a bust and he flies, off Conway heads to the nearest phone box and calls the shadowy Vulcan for help, being directed to the Hotel Mesa.  Here he meets with the man he was told will help him: Durken, who forces him at gunpoint to write and sign a confession taking the blame for all of Dr Vulcan's crimes.  When Rocket Man arrives through the tenth storey window and disarms Durken, Conway begins to spill the beans - telling him that the ring he wears is a marker of a scientific fraternity and that one other member of S.A. has one.  Just as he is about to confess Vulcan's secret identity, Durken knifes him in the back and knocks King out the window, sending him spiralling towards the pavement far below...

Chapter Five: Fatal Dive

...but his death dive past the rear projection screen is swiftly halted by igniting the rocket pack to re-orient himself and fly off as Durken has already fled from the scene of his crime.  Back at the Rocket Cave (i'm going to keep calling it that.  I am determined to make it A Thing), he consults with Millard and they come to the conclusion that the late patsy Conway (doesn't that sound like a dead Country and Western singer?  "The late Patsy Conway") was persuaded by the real Dr Vulcan to wear the ring to the meeting in order to take the fall.  Jeff realises that the only person at Science Associates with whom he's shared any of his intel is Burt Winslow, and begins to grow suspicious of the genial PR man.

Meanwhile, Burt and Glenda are listening to a radio bulletin which informs all that the police have accepted the confession found in the same apartment as Conway's corpse as genuine and are closing the books on the matter with the dead man painted as an agent in the employ of an unfriendly power.  Maybe he worked for Huawei or something (TOPICAL REFERENCE ALERT).  Glenda is adamant that Conway was the fall guy - and now I have that theme tune stuck in my head: "I'm the unknown stuntman..." - and reckons that Jeff King is the most likely suspect to be the genuine article, much to Burt's disbelief.

Back at S.A. HQ, Jeff locates the concealed transceiver in the boardroom's wireless and stages a phone call for the benefit of the listening-in villain to the effect that he is going to illicitly sell one of his own inventions - an experimental firing tube - at the old Barnes ranch at 4 PM that afternoon.  Also overhearing are Glenda and Burt, who have headed to the lab in order to ascertain Jeff's guilt or innocence and now think him at the very least a traitor in a misunderstanding of sitcom proportions.  Following him to the ranch with the intention of foiling King's un-American activity of selling his own property, the confused twosome wreck the plan to hand Durken a package containing not a firing tube but a homing device that would have made Jeff able to trace Vulcan's secret lair.  As the misguided Burt engages our hero in a dust-up in the barn, Glenda jumps into Durken's getaway plane with him as he takes off.  When Vulcan announces that he's detecting radio transmissions from the aircraft, Durken ditches the parcel out of the plane and attempts to make Glenda follow suit.  As Jeff, having finally managed to get a word in edgeways and persuade the punch happy Burt that he's a good guy, rockets to her aid, Durken grabs a parachute and bails out leaving the roving reporter and the airborne adventurer in a plane hurtling towards the rocks...

Chapter Six: Mystery of the Rocket Man

...but the quick-thinking hero manages to get Glenda strapped into the spare parachute and bundles her out of the aircraft before jetting towards Terra Firma himself, leaving the empty plane to sunder on the terrain below.

After ensuring our plucky gal reporter's safe landing and making sure he can make her way back to town, he returns to the Rocket Cave and commiserates with Millard that were it not for Burt's well-meaning but bullish interference they would know the identity of the dastardly Dr Vulcan by now.  Millard's pining to see the outside world including the sun and the moon, once again is tempered when King points out that until Vulcan is stopped knowledge of Millard's survival and of his work on the sonic decimator (now there's a coo, name for a sonic device - put that in your screwdriver and smoke it, Doctor!) must remain secret.

Durken's next communique to Dr Vulcan opens with the rueful henchman vowing revenge on Jeff King, to which the wily Vulcan replies by determining that King and the Rocket Man are one and the same (SPOILER: so are Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde), and that they can deal with two birds with one stone.  Meanwhile, the board at S.A. are discussing the fact that the boardroom had been bugged by a confederate of Vulcan, causing the members to stir uneasily (heh) since an experimental drone is due to be transported from their Eastern laboratory - a drone that would be valuable to any foreign power.  Citing King's good record thus far as Head of Security, Jeff is put in charge of oversight of the weapon's conveyance.

Waylaid by kidnappers outside his apartment building, Jeff struggles valiantly against them but even n appearance by Burt (who had arranged to meet Jeff to discuss the transportation), who is as per usual more than willing to wade into a punch-up, proves futile as Winslow is knocked to the pavement and King is bundled at gunpoint into his own waiting vehicle to be whisked off.  Struggling to his feet and cradling his jaw, Burt heads for his car and attempts to give chase only to be shaken off when the kidnap car jumps a railroad crossing in front of an oncoming express train which cuts Winslow off until they're out of sight. Prisoner in his own car, King offers his captor a cigarette as a pretext to activating the modified car lighter - now a secret radio transmitter which relays their conversation back to Dr Millard.  Overhearing the information that the new weapon is about to fall into the hands of Vulcan, Millard dons the rocket suit himself and jets in the direction of the Eastern Electronics warehouse where Jeff is being forced to sign over the truck containing the drone to Durken.  Surprised and undelighted at seeing the arriving Rocket Man and Jeff King in the same place, Durken and his goons begin a gunfight inside the warehouse culminating in King commandeering the truck only to be shot through the windscreen by one of the goons and the lorry crashing out of the building and into the river below...

The Legend of King Arthur (Rodney Bennett, 1979)

"Bright Caliope, come from Helicon[...]  Tell, Caliope, so that I might tell again as you relate; (whence the Britons came, what the origin of their name was, whence noble Britain had its kings); who Arthur was, what his deeds were, what his end - and how an unlucky nation lost its kingdom."
 - William of Rennes, Gesta Regum Britanniae (The Deeds of the Kings of Britain), c. 1236

I think, looking backward into the deep dark abysm of time, that my fascination with Arthuriana began when I was ten years old.  1989's 26th season of the BBC's Doctor Who opened with the story 'Battlefield', which was a tale of knights from a parallel dimension led by the witch queen Morgaine (a delightfully evil turn from the great Jean Marsh) and my youthful self was entranced with words and phrases like "the Forest of Celyddon" redolent of some kind of ancient mysticism - much as I would be later that same season with 'The Curse of Fenric' and its lexicon that included "the Well of Hvergelmir" that sparked my equal preoccupation with Norse mythology.  Seriously, that year's run of Who led to lots of trips to the library and much poring over of tomes.  Educational as well as entertaining, indeed.  Positively Reithian, dear boy.

I soon found myself pretty much wearing out an off-air VHS recording of John Boorman's 1981 Excalibur through repeated viewings, under the spell of Nicol Williamson's enigmatic Merlin and Helen Mirren's seductively evil Morgan, and over the years have accrued an Arthurian library encompassing everything from Thomas Malory to T.H. White to Chretien de Troyes and large (and expensive!) volumes of the mediaeval Vulgate Cycle.  Oh how my bookshelves yawn and creak like the ancient oak tree of some grove-dwelling Druid.  Obviously, i've also seen a great many filmic and televisual versions of the tales, from the high fantasy of Excalibur and Knights of the Round Table (Richard Thorpe, 1953 - notable mainly for Ava Gardner's Guinevere and Gabriel Woolf - "Neil before the might of Sutekh" himself! - as Percival) to the mud-soaked post-Roman grit of the 1972 HTV series Arthur of the Britons (recommended to any fans of archive telly) and Antoine Fuqua's 2004 Clive Owen vehicle King Arthur (disappointing).  I haven't watched Guy Ritchie's 2017 King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, because it looks and sounds rubbish.  You've burned me too many times, Ritchie.  Beep, beep.

Anyway, one TV adaptation that until now i'd never seen (but long wanted to, ever since I read about it in Mike Ashley's The Mammoth Book of King Arthur, which is well worth the purchase price) is the 1979 BBC eight-part series The Legend of King Arthur.  Like the coming of the rex quondam, rexque futurus himself - the time is finally at hand!

Adapted in serial fashion (rather than the episodic 'adventure of the week' format of Arthur of the Britons) in eight parts by none other than Mr Adaptation himself Andrew Davies - long before he was spinning Machiavellian webs with Francis Urquhart or bestowing us with the vision of a wet Darcy (though, personally, i'll most remember [and never forgive] him for Badger Girl) - the story follows all of the main story beats of Le Morte d'Arthur.  Filmed in the '70s BBC standard format of videotape for interiors and film for exterior shooting, the production nevertheless does not look cheap, being a co-production betwixt Auntie Beeb, Time-Life Television and the ABC (that's the Australian Broadcasting Commission, as opposed to either the American Broadcasting Company or the old Associated British Corporation).

Eschewing the mediaeval knights in anachronistic shining plate armour aesthetic of so many other Arthurian productions,  this is rooted firmly in a post-Roman Dark Ages waste land of broadsword-wielding Brythonic barbarians in bearskins and breeches; a realm where chieftains rule from timbered longhouses rather than faerie kings and queens reigning from dreaming-spired castellations.  Opening with the brutish warlord Uther Pendragon (Brian Coburn) demanding ownership of the lady Igrayne (Anne Kidd) from her husband Gorlois of Cornwall (the late genre veteran - and father of the next generation's genre veteran Mark - W. Morgan Sheppard) and triggering civil war, the stage is set for the tale to come.  After Gorlois is slain by Uther in battle, the ire of the young Morgan (a spirited performance from an eleven year old Patsy Kensit) is raised against both her new stepfather and Uther's spawn: her baby half-brother Arthur.  Pledging herself to the ways of magic under the wary tutelage of Merlin (a well cast Robert Eddison, who would ten years later play the aged Grail Knight in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade), Morgan le Fay grows into a red-maned witch clad in the robes of a nun (Doctor Who veteran Maureen O'Brien) with her sights still obsessively fixed upon her semi-sibling's ruination.  

When Arthur (Andrew Burt, memorable as Valgard in Doctor Who's 'Terminus' and lamentable as Jarvik in Blake's 7's cringe fest 'The Harvest of Kairos') reaches maturity as king, riding into battle against the rebellious chieftains fighting  under the banner of Jon Croft's Lot of Orkney whilst wearing a battle helmet strikingly similar in design to the famous Sutton Hoo helm, Morgan sets to work along with her dwarf minion Branic (Peter Burroughs) and the embittered knight Accolon of Gaul (Anthony Dutton) to destroy the incipient Order of the Round Table.  As the story follows the outline of the Malory tale, Arthur and Bors (Godfrey James) are slanted and enchanted by the witch in the woods and Excalibur stolen away and given to the treacherous Accolon who then challenges the king to a duel - with the recreant traitor wielding the blessed blade.  Though the trap is overcame and Accolon defeated, the Queen of Air and Darkness remains steadfast in her desire for Arthur's death and continues to weave her web of traps - including exploiting the love of the steadfast Lancelot (David Robb) for the fair Queen Guinevere (Felicity Dean) and turning the minds of Agravain (Niall Padden) and Mordred (Steve Hodson), brash and reckless younger sons of Lot, against the champion and his perceived infidelity.  When the fellowship of Camelot is sundered by warfare and Lancelot's dalliance with Eleanor of Escalot (Amanda Wissler) the lovesick and half sick of shadows Lady of Shalott which leads to her grief-stricken suicide, Morgan's plots comes to their fruition as Mordred frames the queen for murder and turns all the court against one another in a strife that leads inexorably to the carnage of the Battle of Camlann and the twilight of the Arthurian world.

A triumph of 1970s BBC television ingenuity and a valiant attempt to compress Malory's sprawling collation of tales into eight half hour episodes, The Legend of King Arthur surpasses - for my money, anyway - Boorman's Excalibur as the finest example of the Matter of Britain on film (and videotape, natch).

Now if you'll excuse me, i'm going to climb into my coracle and sail across the sundering sea to the misty vales of Avalon.

King of the Rocket Men, Chapters One to Three (Fred C. Brannon, 1949)

Time for another olde-time serial chapter play again kids.  Let's party like it's 1949 matinee mornings, after the Pathe newsreel and cartoon but before the main feature.  Having already tackled this serial's semi-sequel (try spraying that with a lisp) Radar Men from the Moon it seems high time to go back, back to the beginning to check out the onlie begetter of the Rocket man's jetpacked adventures, King of the Rocket Men.  Yes, to my fannish brain it seems crazy not to have done things in chronological order, but here we find ourselves.  I had at least partially seen this story a long, low time ago (when people talked to me) when it ran on weekday mornings on UK TV - either Channel 4 or BBC2, memory fails - and so lucked out on being ill for a week or so.  If i'd been at school i'd have remained oblivious of the joy of serials for years.

Directed, like the three sequel chapterplays, by veteran Republic serial helmer Fred Brannon it stars Tristram Coffin (replacing Kirk Alyn, who had incarnated the first live action Superman the previous year [and yes, i'll get round to covering that one too]) as the titular Jeff King - the first man to strap on the jetpack and helmet of the iconic Rocket Man.  And so here we go with the Secret Origin of the Rocketeer...

Chapter One: Dr. Vulcan - Traitor!

When a series of mysterious "accidents" - including a plane crash claiming the life of noted chemist Paul Kenyon and an explosion which wrecks an experimental nuclear fission laboratory - occur in rapid succession, the brains trust Science Associates (a clique of the top minds in various fields such as metallurgist Prof Bryant, atomic boffin Martin Conway, aerodynamics wizard Dr Graftner and Teutonic physicist Gunther Von Strum) begin to worry.  The grip of fear on the egg-headed backroom boys tightens when Associate member and cyclotron expert Dr Drake finds himself locked inside his own car and spoken to by a sinister voice over the car vehicle - a disembodied presence identifying itself as Dr Vulcan - and his car driven by remote control over a cliff edge in another manufactured tragedy.  When Professor Millard (James Craven) is also contacted by the mocking voice of the invisible menace whilst working in his lab just before a blast wrecks the building neither any trace of he nor any of his secret experimental work can be found in the wreckage.

Investigative reporter Glenda Thomas (Mae Clarke - Elizabeth from James Whale's classic 1931 Frankenstein of course, but she's perhaps less well known as Myra in the same director's pre-Code version of Waterloo Bridge earlier that same year; a role portrayed by Vivien Leigh in the better known [though less good, in my own opinion] 1940 remake) of Science Data Magazine is hot on the case, having her inquiries as to whether an outside party could have engineered these incidents fended off by Science Associates' PR man Burt Winslow (House Peters, Jr.) when she meets rocket propulsion expert Jeff King (the moustachioed and splendidly-monikered Tristram Coffin) who has been nominated by his peers to supervise the safe and secret transportation of a rocket for the group's next guided missile test.

When the unseen Dr Vulcan contacts his chief henchman Durken (Don Haggerty), he commands him to break into the files of Dr King (not that one - though this one does have a dream, too) and search for any notes that may have been passed on by Professor Millard - who is still though to have passed on.  However, they find nothing more than King himself who is happy disprove the scoffing assertions that "these scientist guys are all brain and no brawn" by engaging them in a two-fisted punch-up before they flee the scene with tails betwixt legs.  Next morning, King makes his way to the secret cavern where the not-so-late Millard has set up his new laboratory to report on his unwelcome uninvited guests.  Millard is eager to get out there, confident that he can unmask the true identity of the villain, but Jeff persuades him that for his own safety he must remain securely "dead" for the time being.  

Millard announces that he has finally completed work on the experimental rocket suit on which the pair had been working ("to change men into human rockets"), consisting of an atomic-powered jet pack attached to a leather coat and an aerodynamically-designed helmet.  Jeff takes the suit, vowing to test it himself out in the open, and stows it in the trunk of his car as he sets off for the top secret warehouse where the secret missile is being stored.  Or, rather, not that top secret, as he arrives just as Vulcan's goons hijack the truck carrying the rocket.  Swiftly donning the untested suit, Jeff takes to the skies in hot pursuit (he truly is King, of the Rocket Men, see?).  Manipulating the "nipple, nipple, tweak, tweak" chest-mounted controls, he shoots into the back of the van and brawls with a pair of thugs; yet a shove into the back of the missile's tripod mounting results in an unexpected launch.

"If that torpedo" says King, bizarrely not understanding what a torpedo is, "lands in a populated area, you'll be guilty of mass murder!"  He then blasts off in hot pursuit of the buzz-bomb as it hurtles towards the city, taking it out with a blast from the laser gun tucked into his belt - but the resulting explosion sends him falling to the ground far below...

Chapter Two: Plunging Death

...but just in the nick of time he tweaks the controls and fires up the rocket pack, righting his trajectory and flying off into the skies.  Returning to the safe haven of Dr Millard's cave lab, Jeff and the Prof listen to a radio bulletin about his saving the city from the so-called "aerial torpedo" wherein he is dubbed 'the Rocket Man' (and also described as a "strange human-like object" and speculated to be a visitor from another planet).  They discuss how only the members of Scientific Associates knew of the transportation of the missile, and arrive at the conclusion that the villainous Dr Vulcan must be one of the group.  Fearing that Jeff's life is in danger should Vulcan suspect him to be Rocket Man, Millard advises him to be circumspect at any board meetings.

King goes about this be arriving at the next meeting and immediately asking if anyone suspects him of being the Rocket Man.  Way to not draw attention to yourself, dude.  However any inklings are interrupted by Winslow arriving with news that lady reporter Ms Thomas managed to get a snap of the junior birdman in flight.  King advises that he will personally inspect her negative (I bet he will, the mucky sod) before granting permission for publication.

While Jeff and Burt head off to meet Ms Thomas, the shadowy Vulcan contacts Durken and grasses the address of Glenda's gaff so that he can get to her Piedmont pied-a-terre before them and grab the negative.  As the goons rifle through her stuff, they have to duck into an adjoining room as Glenda arrives with Winslow and they wait for the tardy Jeff.  Coming up with a bright idea, Durken grabs a telephone and gives the operator the address, asking to test whether the phone's ringer is broken.  When the unwitting operator complies and the phone in the living room rings, Durken is connected and atests to being King, unavoidably detained, and asks that Glenda bring the negative to the S.A. lab.  As she retrieves it from her hollowed-out book hiding place, the goons burst out and assail them.  When Burt goes down with a chair smashed over his head, Durken grabs the film and dashes for it with the dogged Glenda in hot pursuit.  

When the dallying real King arrives, Burt informs him of the situation and that Glenda is after Durken and the film in her car.  Grabbing the jet suit from his own auto, he dashes into a nearby alley for a quick change and soars skywards.  As Glenda burns rubber to catch up with the thief, the all-seeing Dr Vulcan (who is watching on his monitor that he can tune to focus on anything, anywhere, because SCIENCE) manipulates his magic remote control machine and causes her car to crash out of control.  As Rocket Man land son the roof of the vehicle and climbs inside to valiantly wrestle with the steering wheel the car careens over a precipice to crash and burn in the valley below...

Chapter Three: Dangerous Evidence

...only to survive via the method of pulling that hoary old trick that enraged me as a child - the footage that we didn't see last time of him yelling "Jump!" and the two of them bundling out of the car just before it soars Thelma and Louise-style over the edge.

Still feels like a cheat all these years on.  The flame of ire still burns brightly.

When Glenda follows thanking her saviour with an interview request she is swiftly spurned - Rocket Man informing her that in his quest to rid the world of the menace that endangers the nation he needs zero publicity.  He then informs her than the inter city bus runs along the road on which they stand and that one should be along shortly, before shooting off.  Back at the Rocket Cave, King and Millard muse that the villains cannot be allowed to enlarge and inspect the photograph - for even though the masked Jeff can't be recognised the rocket suit will be identifiable by all as the same prototype that they had been working on.  Since this will either finger Jeff or reveal that Millard is not as dead is everyone currently thinks, Jeff resolves to come up with a scheme to prevent Team Vulcan from blowing up that pic.

When Durken reports back to Vulcan that he is finding it impossible to find a supplier willing to sell the specialist type of film needed to develop the negative, the unseen menace replies that Science Associates has a small amount in stock and that he can arrange an inside job; Durken should get to the premises at 9.00 PM where he will find the gate unlocked.  The stooge and another man of hench slip in through the shadows easily, getting their grubby mitts on the coveted Micro-Film 247.  Confronted by an armed King who demands to know who allowed their entrance, the pair manage to catch him unawares and get away with their prize.

Blasting off after them, King follows their tracks to a remote cabin where Durken has a lab-coated science guy to process the photo.  Landing in the woods and for some reason deciding to strip off the Rocket Man outfit and stash it in the shrubbery, he approaches the hideout as his usual civilian self (and hold on a minute - it's weird enough that he he wears the whole tight leather coat over his business suit, but where the hell was he keeping his hat?).  Confronting Durken and taking on both him and the lab goon in a fist fight that quickly reduces the place to rubble, Jeff is knocked unconscious and left in the burning shack as a shattered jar of acid ignites a crate marked CHLOROMITE: DANGER - EXPLOSIVE...

Oh My Goddess! ([orig: 'Aa! Megami-sama!'], Hiroaki Goda, 1993-1994)

Kosuke Fujishima's manga series Oh My Goddess! (or the minutely different Ah! My Goddess! in some transliterations) began in 1988 as a serialised story in the anthology collection Monthly Afternoon, making the leap from the printed page to the screen at first in the form of a short series of OVAs (original video animations for the uninitiated: animated shorts created solely for home video - and later DVD - distribution rather than being aimed primarily at the television or cinematic market) beginning in February of 1993 and concluding with the fifth chapter in  May 1994.  The franchise would continue with a 48 episode anime TV series from 1998 to 1999, a cinematic movie (with the perhaps obvious title of Ah! My Goddess: the Movie in 2000, two further TV series (Ah! My Goddess! in 2005 and Ah! My Goddess: Flights of Fancy in 2006) as well as two more OVA runs (the two-part Ah! My Goddess: Fighting Wings in 2007 and the three-part Ah! My Goddess: Together Forever from 2011 to 2013), throughout all of which the original seinen manga continued to run before concluding in 2014 after almost a quarter of a century of publication.

Such a vast franchise is kind of beyond the purview of a blog that i'm already quite behind in updating, however, and we concern ourselves here with the original five-part series of OVAs from the '90s - which i'm pretty sure, after Devil Man, was one of the first OVA I ever saw thanks to the remarkably extensive set of anime in South Shields library.  Clearly a member of staff was a fan, and my young self shall forever be grateful since my other main source of VHS perusal (my local video shop: remember those?) had a pretty limited selection.

So, anyway, let's dive in!

Part One: Moonlight and Cherry Blossoms

It all begins so unassumingly on an ordinary day with student Keiichi Morisato stuck in his dormitory digs fielding phone calls and taking messages for his older and more senior dorm-mates (I don't think "Notice me, senpai!" necessarily means "Get me to be your answering service").  Growing hungry but unable to leave and frustrated at the restaurants he phones either not delivering during the day or not answering, Keiichi mis-dials and through the tangled lines of the Fates somehow gets a trunk call patched through the world-tree Yggdrasil to the Goddess Help Line.

When the goddess Belldandy (an understandable Japanese transliteration of Verthandi - the Norn of the occurring present) appears through his mirror, all wide shimmering purple eyes and bright expression, offering to grant whatever wish he desires, our boy Keiichi is understandably gobsmacked.  Believing himself to be being pranked (or Punk'd, if that's even still a thing?) by his roommates and embarrassed by his singleton status, he wishes that the radiant remain with him as his girlfriend forever - a blithely-spoken heart's desire that is quickly and irrevocably granted.  This, however, sets powerful and immutable forces into motion - such as his roommates quickly returning and throwing him out for violating the rule of never having a girl within the dormitory.  

Suddenly down and out and on the streets, the despondent lad is cheered by the effervescently upbeat magic dream girl that's landed in his lap.  Belldandy advises that fate will provide them with accommodation to the west, and so they mount Morisato's motorbike and continue stabbing westward through the nighttime rain until they reach an old abandoned temple; the crumbling edifice is soon restored to its former beauty by Belldandy reaching out to the building and asking it to remember what it used to be.  In the morning, as the new couple settle into their appropriate abode for an angelic occupant, Keiichi's younger sister Megumi arrives on their doorstep and announces that she'll be staying with them for a while until her college course kicks off.  Thus the stage is set for what I assume will be a Manga-style magicom along the lines of I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched - a magical girl, an ordinary boy and the hilarious consequences that thus arise.

Breezy and charming with some surprisingly touching moments (Belldandy's communion with the temple took me quite by surprise with how nonchalantly affecting it was), this first episode is a highly enjoyable scene setter.

Part Two: Midsummer Night's Dream

Having settled well in and enjoyed five months of domestic bliss - somewhat ameliorated by the friendly needling in ways only a sibling can of Megumi - in 'Morisato Mansion' (as the sign hung on the temple wall now calls it), Keiichi and Belldandy's still somewhat platonic relationship receives what could either be a shot in the arm or a bullet in the throat when Megumi convinces them that a holiday by the seaside would be a good idea.  Masking his fear due to his inability to swim because of Belldandy's enthusiasm at actually getting to see the ocean, Keiichi agrees to go and his day only begins to get entangled further in a web of weirdness and neuroses (I can so relate) when he receives a mysterious VHS tape in the post.  Waiting until Bel and Megumi have gone out shopping, he opens the parcel to find a VHS tape titled Goddess Films: Sexy Dynamite!! Part II.  Obviously, he immediately breaks out the box of tissues and puts it on.

Don't judge.  I'd do the same, and I suspect you would too.

Things begin to turn and face the strange when the sexy white-haired lady (no, it's not GILF stuff, she just has hair that's white) breaks the fourth wall be emerging from the TV, bare anklet-clad foot first.  Yes, this caters to my fetishes.  No, it's not a Tarantino movie.  This is Urd, the Fate of things past and Belldandy's older sister, who has grown tired of watching Keiichi's fumbling overtures and wants him to become a pouncer (though not of the Sylvia Daisy kind).  Urging him on to take Bel to the beach and make his move, she instigates a series of unfortunate events with hilarious consequences (which sounds rather like a bad pitch for a Lemony Snicket sitcom, now that I read it back) through her matchmaking efforts - including giving Keiichi a love potion that will make him fall hopelesslty in love with the first person that he sees upon awakening.  Alas, this turns out to be his rich spoiled bitch classmate Sayoko rather than Bel, who walks in on the scene of the hopelessly devoted to her Keiichi declaring his undying burns-hotter-than-a-thousand-suns amour for Sayoko.

Shakespeare could easily have written Three's a Crowd, you know.  There's always some kind of misunderstanding.

Thankfully, Keiichi's hunk o' hunk o' burning love for Bel gets him over the spell, but just as things appear to be getting on track as they finally admit out loud their feelings for each other, Urd is thrown to Earth with a thundercrack (I mean an actual crack of thunder, not that film) and a message from the All-Father declaring that "It is evident that the Ultimate Force system has crashed due to your tampering.  Until further notice, the goddess Urd shall be banished to the mortal plane."

And so Keiichi finds himself with another extra lodger.  Sharing a house with two sexy goddesses.  I wish I had that guy's problems.

Part Three: Burning Hearts on the Road

 Opening with a pre-title sequence introducing us to the younger sister of our trinity of Norns - Skuld, Fate of things yet to come - as she races around the heavenly realm frantically playing whack-a-mole with spider-legged leporine abominations with her trusty croquet mallet , the third instalment sees Keiichi in a bit of a bind as his fellow students have entered him as the Nekomi Tech contender in the intercollegiate drag racing festival.  Sitting amid the yet-to-be-assembled parts of the twin engined bike that he's meant to race on trying to put them together like Dave Lister with his space bike and being more hindered than helped by Urd (her attempted spell to bring the parts together on their own quite literally blowing up in both their faces), Keiichi resolves to take a bath.

This endeavour at simply relaxing goes as astray as all else, however, when the reflective surface of the bathwater acts - like the mirror and the television screen - as a divine conduit for Skuld to emerge much to the surprise of both parties.  Perhaps more so for Keiichi as the impetuous young Skuld's immediate reaction to a naked bathing male is to scream "Pervert!" and serve him up a concussive crack on the cranium.  Skuld is unhappy at having to manage goddess business on her own without her big sisters, and Bel's devotion to "K" makes him the unfortunate recipient of the tyro's ire.  After the temple abode (would it be wrong to want to call it the Goddess Cave?  Maybe.  I think i'll reserve that as a pet name for a paramour's genitalia) is paid an uninvited visit by Toshiyuki Aoshima, the equally vain and spoiled cousin of Sayoko who has set up his own rival college motor club and makes sickening overtures towards the lovely Bel replete with flowers and poetry that put even my own clunkiest fumbles at romance to shame, Skuld concocts a plan to make Keiichi lose the race in the hope that Bel's ardour will be doused - paving the way for her to return home.

As the gang assemble the motorcycle via the medium of a montage and get ready for the race, it seems that events will not transpire in Keiichi's favour until Bel openly rejects Aoshima's advances and makes a rousing speech to the race team about the goddess of victory (Nike: just do it) smiling not on the prideful, but on those with burning hearts.  Of course true love sways and Keiichi wins the race, garlanded not only with the winner's medal (by Urd, very fetching as a grid girl) but with Bel's love.  For a moment it seems like Skuld has been swayed over to team Keidandy, but she swinftly abandons that 'ship, declaring "You know, I really hate you!"

Part Four: Evergreen Holy Night

In which we begin with Keiichi finally pledging his love to Belldandy by giving her his ring (no, not like that - get your mind out of the gutter!), only for her to react by sprouting feathered wings and floating away on the winder wind telling him that the force of Destiny cannot be defied forever ad that she must return to her Heavenly home.  Which probably wasn't the reaction the guy was expecting.  Of course, 'tis all but an anxiety dream and he wakes screaming just like Jesse Walsh from Freddy's Revenge.  Bel is still by his side of course, but the thought that their "we shall never be apart" promise may not last begins to gnaw at him.

It is four days 'til Christmas at the Morisato Mansion, and going outside the star-crossed couple find the temple grounds completely bedecked with festive snow - and Urd and Skuld magically outdoing themselves in the sibling rivalry department when a snowball fight magically escalates into the creation of a gigantic living Ymir of a snowman.  Figuring he'll have to put snow chains on the wheels of his bike, Keiichi goes to see how blocked the road is only to find that the snow has fallen solely on the temple and its environs.  General bafflement at this mysterious and mystical weather phenomenon is disrupted when Skul espies a "bug" - of of the spider-legged rabbit creatures she had spent her time swatting in the nether-realm - and sets off in hot pursuit after it across the pristine snows before pummelling it with her trusty mallet: a pest extermination which results in the frozen tundra vanishing as instantly as it arrived.

Quickly determining that the infestation are quite literally bugs in the divine system (bugs which "aren't supposed to show up here in the surface world; something must really be wrong up there"says Skuld) and that they have to do something about it, things become curiouser and curiouser when a series of unfortunate events occur to Keiichi in rapid succession culminating in his suddenly becoming magnetic and drawing all the breakfast cutlery to his body including a Bottomesque frying pan to the face.  Skuld locates the portal facilitating the bugs' arrival to have manifested between Keiichi and Bel - any contact between the two of them is making things worse.

K has a nervous bug in his system, which makes him edgy and afraid as it looks increasingly like his dream was less pathetic and more prophetic: something which seems to become certain when Bel is contacted by her heavenly father and told that a Recall Notice has been issued and that she has only three days before the gate will open and she must return home.  Having to remain physically apart lest more accidents be caused by the system glitch an increasingly despondent K attends school without Bel and finds himself on the receiving end of Sayoko's unwanted attentions as she makes it abundantly clear that if Bel is no longer dating him then she'll be predating upon him.

This stressful day comes to a peak when Urd and Skuld identify the energy source that is the main attractor of the bugs - a tall and forbidding gnarled cherry tree by the temple, the sight of which causes Belldandy to recoil in abject atavistic terror.

Part Five: For the Love of Goddess

Another new dawn breaks, and with only two days until Bel is recalled Urd and Skuld are hard at work trying to find a festive miracle to get all of them out of this predicament.  Alas, the malfunction sin the Heavenly paradigm caused by the bugs is even ruining communications with the other side, as Goddess Second Class, Limited Licence Urd finds when she tries to place a call to their father (though the bored secretary voice that answers with "Heaven, can I help you?" is pretty damn funny even as she puts Urd on hold and refuses to connect Urd to the main office).  Determining that they have to deal with the cherry tree and the energy sealed within it to deal with the system imbalance, Urd encourages Skuld to aid her in utilising an Ultimate Magic Circle to negate the power that feeds the tree.

As a mutually heartbroken Keiichi and Bel deal with their enforced social distancing - Keiichi by staying away from the temple all day working a series of zero hour contract jobs that he was set up with by his college senpais (including window cleaning, directing traffic and pizza delivery) originally with the aim of earning enough money to buy Bel the engagement of of their dreams - Skuld is hard at work on the calculations needed to deal with the system bugs.  When K collapses of exhaustion after working from dawn til dusk he finds himself riding the night mare as some serious REM dreamscapes come during the night seemingly taking the form of flashbacks from long ago as though Bel were always with him since his youth.  I guess they'll at least be together forever in eccentric dreams.  As this occurs, Bel self-isolating in her room feels some kind of powerful movement in the Force, reacting with "His memory is returning... There's still time."

As Christmas Eve begins, Bel is busy sadly erasing all traces of her mortal life including all mementos such as photographs of her time with Keiichi, as she can leave him no reminders of the nine months they've spent together after her ascension.  Keiichi frantically rushes home with the promised ring just as the clock strikes the 10.00 A.M. deadline, to be met with the sight of Bel raising her pretty fists like antennas to heaven and the sky cracking asunder to welcome her as she floats into the firmament.  Luckily, Urd and Skuld are just finishing the ultimate circle incantation and the energy unleashed disrupts the sky portal just as Keiichi's buried memories of his childhood encounter with Bel and their youthful promises to each other return.  As a message from the All-Father arrives cancelling Bel's recall and also grounding Urd and Skuld to Earth for unauthorised meddling arrives, Bel finally wears the ring and they are together forever in love.

Because if a trio of goddesses can't bring about a Christmas miracle, who can?

A simple story well told with solid animation, a good English dub voice cast and a suitably upbeat yet emotive soundtrack, Oh My Goddess! is a great example of accessible anime recommended for any fans of the genre or animation in general.  Or even just viewers in search of something breezy and romantic.

(Hollywood) Scream Queen Hot Tub Party (Fred Olen Ray & Jim Wynorski, 1991)

"Had we known what we in for on that fateful day none of us would have accepted the strange invitation, but the letter I received seemed so intriguing.  It read: "My dearest Brinke Stevens, i've thrilled to you in so many frightening motion pictures such as Grandma's House, Teenage Exorcist and Bad Girls from Mars that I had to ask you to join me at my Hollywood home for an all-day seminar on how to make a good horror film.  Signed, Count Byron Orlock."

The late 1980s and early 1990s.  Fred Olen Ray.  Jim Wynorski.  Scream Queens.  The Late Show (the magazine, not the chat show).  If you understand the meaning behind these arcane words and phrases, then we understand one another.  For the uninitiated: tits.

When I was thirteen, I owned a magazine that had a full-page photograph of Brinke Stevens in vampire fangs, a thong and a cape and nothing else, and I almost destroyed my organs of generation before they had fully developed.  There's an admission.  We're all friends here, right?  I know what you're thinking: this isn't the most progressive of reviews that he could be doing in this current time of the #MeToo movement; for a progressive guy with feminist views he can sound objectifying at times... these are true.  But how else does one approach a flick like this?  I could deconstruct it and give it a slaughtering quite easily.  But where's the fun in that?  And in these trying times of trial, fun distractions are important.  Plus, nostalgia for one's early teens can be a powerful thing.

So here we have Scream Queens Hot Tub Party - or, as it was released on video on the UK, Hollywood Scream Queens Hot Tub Party (perhaps they didn't quite trust us to know precisely what a "scream queen" was) - an attempt by arch purveyors of horror smut Olen Ray and Wynorski (operating here under the aliases of 'Bill Carson' and 'Arch Stanton') to beat Roger Corman's Little Shop of Horrors record of making a movie in two days by gathering five top tier scream queens together at Fred's house and shooting some brief titillating linking material for what is essentially a clip show.  A peep show clip show.

Actresses Brinke Stevens, Michelle Bauer, Monique Gabrielle, Kelli Maroney and Roxanne Kernohan are all mysteriously summoned to the home of one 'Byron Orlock' (a great gag for anyone who gets the reference to Peter Bogdanovitch's Targets) on the pretext of making their own individual presentations on acting in horror movies - something these gals know a lot about.  Finding the manse strangely empty, they decide to stay on nonetheless and use a Ouija board to find out the lowdown on what's going down, which leads to this piece of classic comedy dialogue:

MICHELLE: "Okay, the first thing we do is you put a finger on my diviner."
ROXANNE: "Hey, I don't do lesbian scenes!"
MICHELLE: "No, silly - this is the diviner!  We all put a finger on it."
BRINKE: "And soon we'll be in contact with that dark, festering daemon who roams the netherworld in search of obscene and perverse pleasures!"
ROXANNE: "You want to call my agent?"

Some of it is quite witty and meta, mind, such as when Brinke says that what they're doing is in accordance with page 17 of the script (which she dutifully consults) "and it burns up a minute of screen time".  The ladies then change into their regulation bikinis and enter the houses' hot tub - the ideal place to begin their seminar and present their fateful findings (Neil Breen reference!  Back away!) to each other.

Brinke begins with a masterclass on shower acting, which segues into some quite long sequences of archive footage from her screen debut in 1982's Slumber Party Massacre and Sorority House Massacre II ("Here comes the Hockstetter / Turn it up! / He's a lyrical gangster / Turn it up!"), then treats us to a demonstration of the fine art of how to 'shower act' in a horror film - the trick being to accentuate soaping the breasts and buttocks whilst remaining oblivious to anything going on around oneself, such as a knife-wielding murderer approaching.  After this, Monique Gabrielle presents some clips from Evil Toons and Transylvania Twist before giving us a rendition of the hypnotic dance of the vampiress, which involves a slow striptease in which she peels off a leather corset.  I'd be lying if I said I wasn't giving this bit my full attention.

Next, Kelli Maroney shows a classic gun-wielding scene of hers from Night of the Comet and instructs us on the fact that before one can pump a shotgun, one must first pump iron.  This of course means her removing her clothes, oiling up and doing some weightlifting, ending with a wank-baiting wink to the camera and a knowing "Ready to pump boys?".  Then Michelle Bauer shows us her famous scene from Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers - a film I covered here - (a scene which shows much more than the original slashed by the BBFC UK VHS release did) and then demonstrates her skills using a throbbing tool (no, not that kind: this ain't one of her Pia Snow films.  Though I will get round to Nightdreams and Cafe Flesh at some point) and the importance of not wearing clothes for safety purposes when operating heavy machinery.

As the ingenue newcomer to the scene, Roxanne Kernohan has only a great scene of hers from Critters II to offer, but the follow up scene of her being molested by a monster whilst doing her laundry troubles the trousers as well as the mind.

I mean, this is a film that sports credits such as 'Bikini Wrangler: Hans Fhule', 'Lighting: Steven Wonder' and 'Dialogue: Joe D'Amato'.  We can't ask for too much.

The truly sad thing about this film (apart from my nostalgic enjoyment in watching it) is the fact that, after being presented as the New Scream Queen this is the last thing that the lovely Ms Kernohan did, being killed shortly afterwards in a car crash at the tragically young age of 32.  Which is a bittersweet note to end a review of a bit of fluff on.

Like a tearful, sexy wank.  Like Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive.

The Undying Monster ([a.k.a.: The Hammond Mystery] John Brahm, 1942)

"When stars are bright on a frosty night, beware thy bane on the rocky lane"

If you ever wondered whether 'the Hammond mystery' was "Why didn't Nicholas Hammond do more Spider-Man?" then you're wrong: it's actually the title of a novel by Jessie Douglas Kerruish - a writer that many fans of phantasie may have forgotten but who published many a short story and novel about such diverse topics as the Holy Grail and Arabian Nights-style high adventure before she turned her hand to horror (more specifically, the subject of lycanthropy) with 1922's The Undying Monster: A Tale of the Fifth Dimension.

Coming from Twentieth Century Fox, a studio that never joined in the Universal horror boom unlike Columbia and Paramount (in fact, as Famous Players-Lasky went on to become Paramount, they could be argued to have begun the tradition of the American horror feature film with the 1920 John Barrymore-starring Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) due to head honcho Daryl F. Zanuck's aversion to the genre - wait, does that make this a Fox werewolf?  A werefox?  ZOMG, is there a kitsune is this?  Squeee! - the 1942 film adaptation of Kerruish's novel has much of the lavish production value one might expect.

Released on a double bill with the Harry Lachman-directed Dr Renault's Secret (a J. Carroll Naish-starring remake of the 1927 silent The Wizard, itself an adaptation of the novel Balaoo by Phantom of the Opera scribe Gaston Leroux, concerning a Moreau-style mad scientist using surgery to transform a gorilla into a sentient ape man), the film opens with a great composite matte shot showing us stately Hammond Hall - "one of the oldest houses in England" - standing atop the cliffs over the dark moonlight-dappled ocean. Cutting to the interior, we get an excellently-executed shot as, from a single camera position, we slowly receive information as to the inside of the house via a forty-five second sequence of pans and zooms (windows, a suit of armour, the Hammond family crest above the roaring fireplace, the hand of a supine woman dangling in the firelight over the side of a couch, a sleeping bloodhound curled on the rug) that puts the "one shot" boasts of modern stuff like the CW's Arrow to shame in its artfulness - an opening shot that screenwriter Michael Jacoby would use again for famed Poverty Row director William "One Shot" Beaudine in 1946's The Face of Marble.

Our sleeping heroine is soon revealed to be Helga Hammond (the lovely Heather Angel, whose career spanned from playing  Beryl Stapleton in the 1939 classic Basil Rathbone rendition of The Hound of the Baskervilles to lending her dulcet tones to the eponymous character's older sister in Disney's 1951 Alice in Wonderland, via a number of entries in the ongoing Bulldog Drummond series).  Helga rouses herself and converses with the family butler Walton (the stalwart Halliwell Hobbes, who had played the role of Danvers Carew in the classic Rouben Mamoulian version Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde ["Indecent!  It isn't done!"] and would go on to play other retainers in Universal's Sherlock Holmes Faces Death [one of the better Rathbone/Bruce entries, based on Conan Doyle's 'The Musgrave Ritual'] and The Invisible Man's Revenge), and they both begin to fret that Helga's brother Oliver is outside in the dark on such a night.  Telephoning local medic Dr Jeff Colbert (Yorkshire actor Bramwell Fletcher, who so memorably laughed hysterically as Imhotep went out for his "little walk" in 1932's The Mummy), whom Oliver had been visiting, they find that they've just missed him and that he's making his way home via the coastal path: the "rocky lane" of the baleful family legend.

Dashing out into the night in a carriage to intercept her sibling, Helga braves the terrifying howls that fill the dank air to find not only Oliver (John Howard, Heather Angel's co-star as Sapper's Bulldog Drummond himself in seven pictures about the titular adventurer), wounded and unconscious from some animal's attack, but also his dog - turn asunder and broken by the mysterious beast - and local girl Kate O' Malley similarly slain.  Back at Hammond Hall, the injured Oliver cannot remember what happened, only that he was on the lane at night when he felt all about him some monstrous presence that "came rushing in" before he blacked out.  Scotland Yard sends in the inimitable duo of investigators Robert 'Bob' Curtis (James Ellison, who would go on to play Wesley Rand in 1943's Jacques Tourneur-helmed Val Lewton spooker I Walked with a Zombie) and his eccentric comic relief sidekick Cornelia 'Christie' Christopher (played by real-life eccentric monocle-sporter Heather Thatcher).

As the pair of dogged sleuths - who really could have spun off into their own series of supernatural investigations, with their likeably quirky Holmes/Watson or even monochrome proto-Mulder/Scully relationship - investigate the strange circumstances surrounding the Hammonds and their ancient curse which dates back to their ancestor Sir Reginald Hammond (whose statue stands in the family crypt alongside the effigy of some weird lupine creature), they begin to unravel a hex dating back as far as the Crusades of Richard I and rumours of the Hammonds having sold their souls to Satan.  Aided by Christy's unerring sense of spooky intuition (or "supercalaphegalus", as Curtis calls it in almost Poppinsian style) they discover that - far from being the victim of a physical assault by the monster - Oliver is himself the victim of the Hammond's lycanthropic malediction: his feelings of darkening terror when out at night were in fact the transformation coming over him before he rent asunder his own hound and young Kate O' Malley.  When night falls once again and Oliver's animal instinct takes hold of him once again and leads the werewolf to prey upon his beloved sister in an incestuous fashion, the beast must surely die...

Okay, it isn't Universal's The Wolf Man, but The Undying Monster is a fascinating little piece that's very well directed by John Brahm and thoroughly deserves further inspection from all connoisseurs of the supernatural whether they're wisecracking monocle wearers or not.

Blood & Flesh: The Reel Life and Ghastly Death of Al Adamson (David Gregory, 2019)

From prolific genre documentary maker David Gregory - the man behind the coverage of real (reel?) life madcap genius in 2014's Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr Moreau: a document of one visionary director's descent into insanity amidst the febrile conflagration of actorly egos that really must be seen and is highly recommended to anyone who has yet to see it - comes this intriguing insight into the career and subsequent murder of exploitation movie icon Al Adamson.

About a year or two ago, during one of my many nights of fitful sleep, I came across one of those American 'true crime' TV shows that air on obscure digital channels in the wee hours of the morning to fill airtime and found myself watching it.  Entitled A Stranger In My Home: Death's Final Cut, it was in the midst of detailing the lonely and gruesome murder of a man by a business associate on a ranch in the middle of the Californian desert.  My attention was gripped however when the name "Al Adamson" was mentioned.  The Dracula versus Frankenstein guy?

Featuring interviews with friends and colleagues of Adamson such as his longtime co-conspirator in Independent-International Pictures Sam Sherman, actors Russ Tamblyn, Robert Dix and the elusive Roger Engel (aka Zandor Vorkov himself!), cinematographers Gary Graver and Vilmos Zigismond and directors Worth Keeter, Greydon Clark and Fred Olen Ray the documentary paints a riveting picture of Adamson's life from his youth growing up in the film business as the son of Poverty Row Western actor Victor Adamson (alias Denver Dixon), a real life cowboy from New Zealand who travelled to the US and parlayed his roping and horse riding skills into an acting and directing career, through his early directorial efforts along with producer Sherman (his first effort Echo of Terror slowly transmuting via a long series of re-edits and reshoots through various mutations such as Psycho-a-Go Go, The Fiend with the Electronic Brain and finally Blood of Ghastly Horror as the years passed and a straight psychological thriller became a mad scientist flick starring John Carradine) and the formation of Independent-International.

We are also privy to Adamson's private life, from his obsession with actress Vicki Volante (which led Ms Volante to ask Greydon Clark to accompany her on set and pretend to be her boyfriend) to his deeply loving marriage to his muse Regina Carrol (the Lina Romay to Adamson's Jess Franco), tragically curtailed by her death from cancer in 1992 at the early age of 49 - leading to Adamson's gradual withdrawal to his desert holding where he would in turn be cut down too soon at hands of employee Fred Fulford in the summer of 1995 - though due to Fulford's concealment of the corpse and continued usage of Adamson's credit cards the crime would not be revealed until more than a month later.

A very good and intriguing release from Severin that i'd recommend to any connoisseurs of exploitation and horror films, or those interested in the life and tragic end of a man who lived to make motion pictures (even if the consensus on his output doesn't exactly put him in the same bracket as Werner Herzog).