Spider-Man (E. W. Swackhamer, 1977)

Spider-Man '77

"I heard that you were feeling ill / Headache, fever and a chill / I came to help restore your pluck / 'Cause i'm the nurse who likes to..."

So quoth Stephanie Blake (who, according to journal of record imdb would go on to star in the 1990 opus Invisible Maniac as well as having a small part in Ken Russell's Whore [steady on at the back: any jokes you're thinking I have already contemplated myself]) as the strippogram nurse from John Hughes' seminal 1986 design for living guide Ferris Bueller's Day Off.  Having had experience of the NHS of late, I have to be the bearer of the bad news that diligent and caring though the staff may be, I was not availed of any like services.  I knew I should have gone with BUPA.  In the remote vicinity of the topic at hand, though, whilst I was lollygagging around incapacitated I found my mind wandering to the strangest of places.  Movies, mainly, as per usual - hence the above thought idly worming my way through my head - and increasingly so drifting back ("Back, Doctor!" cried Morbius, luring me into the loving arms of Morpheus, "Back to your beginnings!") to the time I wrote a piece for the lovely website We Are Cult (right here: http://wearecult.rocks/the-original-dr-strange-and-other-stories-marvels-phase-zero) suggesting the existence (like the fabled 'Season 6B' of Doctor Who fandom) of a Marvel Cinematic Universe 'Phase Zero', comprising the initial run of made for television films showcasing the mighty heroes of Marveldom in the late 1970s and 1980s.  Oh, and into the '90s, too, including the last few Hulk outings and the Hoff-tastic Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD.  If we must.

And so we take a peek back into a webhead world pre-Sam Raimi (still presumably in Michigan with the idea dawning that this short Super-8mm horror flick he'd shot in the woods might make quite a good ultimate experience in gruelling cinematic horror, maybe).  Pre-Mark Webb's abortive attempts at a Sony-centric Spiderverse.  Pre-.... whoever did Homecoming (oh, all right, Jon Watts).  I speak, of course, of the wonderfully-monikered Egbert Warnderink Swackhamer's trailblazing 1977 opus Spider-Man.

(I'm slightly sad that I initially misremembered the release date as a year or two later than it was, as I really wanted to title this piece 'Spiderman '79' after the Veruca Salt song.  Ah, well.)

Opening to the driving strains of Johnnie Spence's funktastic horn-driven title theme, the energy of the movie feels as much like the '70s TV action thrills of Starsky and Hutch as comic book superheroics - a feeling that grows with the opening shots of the gritty streets of late 1970s New York: all grey concrete towers and yellow taxi cabs.  As the opening minutes pass, we see first a doctor's office in which the physician suddenly breaks off his consultation with a patient the instant the clock hits 10.45 a.m. and leaves the stricken man baffled with the blood pressure monitor still strapped to his arm (the doc's suddenly becoming a wordless, mindless zombie and striding out of the surgery will doubtless have done his hypertension no good at all); meanwhile, in a Manhattan courthouse, a lawyer freezes in the midst of his summation to the jury as the clock strikes eleven and he wanders out much to the fury and contempt of the judge.  This pair of under the influence pillars of the community wordlessly team up to rob a bank, the doc serving as getaway driver whilst Mr Attorney dons a gas mask and walks into the building with a gun, a gas grenade and a briefcase that he soon emerges holding now filled with liberated money.  All of this done silently and emotionlessly, they drive through the streets to an obviously preset destination where they drive the car straight into a brick wall.  A pair of goons (the lead one being played by the instantly recognisable angular-faced character actor Len Lesser) then emerge from hiding, taking the golden briefcase as well as the distinctive circular pins that each man is wearing on his jacket lapel, and disappear.

Don't you just love the personal touch of a hired goon?

Across the mean streets, at Midtown High University, science student Peter Parker (Friedrich Von Trapp himself, Nicholas Hammond) is trying both to control his allergic sneezes and gain his PhD along with fellow student ("Greetings, fellow students!") Dave (actor and professional magician Larry Anderson, who would shortly go on to make a cameo at the end of the aforementioned 1978 Doctor Strange movie and later be the original pre-shooting in the face Michael Knight [nee Long] in the pilot episode of Knight Rider before regenerating into the Hoff).  After a bizarre experimental laboratory task involving remotely manipulating an Erlenmeyer flask full of toxic waste (what sort of module did these guys pick?  How do you do a proper Intro-Hypothesis-Method-Procedure-Results-Conclusion write-up on that?) results in the spider who hangs suspended from his strand of web within the container getting nuked, the unfortunate atomic arachnid gets one good bite in on the oblivious Parker before crawling off to fade away and irradiate.

As Peter leaves to head home to his Aunt May, another robbery is in progress as a Cameron Mitchell-looking motherfucker (who soon turns out to be a high court judge) holds up an armoured car and makes off with the big bux in the same robotic manner as the previous miscreants, his kamikaze driving taking him straight towards Pete and pursuing him straight down a blind alley to plough into the cold cement at the end of the tunnel - prompting the panicked Parker to instinctively leap and crawl up the wall to safety before breathlessly staring at his hands (spider-hands, spider-hands, do whatever a spider can) once he reaches the top.  After trying to explain the circumstances of the crash  and subsequent disappearance of the cash to the gruff police captain Barbera (Michael Pataki, who has had a fist fight with Scotty as the boorish Klingon Korax in 'The Trouble with Tribbles', been the owner of Zoltan, Hound of Dracula and been the medical carer for the boogeyman in Halloween 4 in his long and varied career), Parker heads to the offices of that great bastion of the Fourth Estate The Daily Bugle.  Proprietor and publisher J. Jonah Jameson (David White, who played Darrin Stephens' boss Larry Tate in the long-running magicom Bewitched) is already at his bellowing blusterous best over the inexplicable rash of robberies when a television newscaster - played by "surely that's a porn star name?" Ivan Bonar - relays the information that in "one of the most bizarre crimes in the history of this city" (big words, pal.  This is Noo Yawk) a ransom demand is being made of New York City by the shadowy mastermind behind these events.  This mysterious supervillain is holding the city to extortion by stating that ten individuals throughout NYC have been pre-programmed to commit suicide unless he is paid the sum of FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS.

This being the case, neither the volcanic Jonah nor his more cool-headed editor in chief and moral conscience Robbie Robertson (Hilly Hicks) are minded to pay Parker the money he's asking for the photographs he took of the almost fatal crash ("A wreck is a wreck is a wreck!" J.J. growls in a Gertrude Steinian bout of solipsism), and are more interested in the tales of a so-called "Spider-Man" ("That's what these drunks call him") reportedly spotted scaling the sheer walls of buildings.  And so our friendly neighbourhood student-cum-freelance photographer begins to practise and hone his new-found spidery skills - waiting until Aunt May (Jeff Donnell, yes she's a woman called Jeff, so what?) is out, he climbs out of his bedroom window and scales the eaves, gables and balustrades of the house in a heartwarmingly nostalgic display of the naive '70s enthusiasm for {and belief in the abilities of) CSO / Chromakey / bluescreen.  After somehow managing to stitch himself together a pretty impressive costume for a homemade effort (perhaps his other major was in needlework?  At any rate, he'd be a hit a few decades later when the cosplay thing kicked in), our nascent Spidey utilises the preset timer function on his camera to capture a few happy snaps of his costumed self pulling some wall-crawling moves and gets them to the Bugle sharpish.

Whilst J.J., Robbie and Peter are in the newspaper office, a report comes in of yet another mystery crime following the zombified robbery/crash into a wall/cash goes missing template, the target this time being a factory payroll.  After Jameson orders Robbie to put their top snap-man MacNeill on the job only to be told that he's already out on an assignment, the eager Peter is dispatched to the scene of the prang to find Captain Barbera and his sidekick Monaghan already there ("A professor who steals a Payroll?  They don't make crooks like they used to!").  The "crazy lone wolf" - as Barbera calls him - semi-conscious behind the steering wheel is the respected Professor Noah Tyler (Ivor Francis), a teacher at the university, and Peter accompanies his daughter Judy (Lisa Eilbacher) to the hospital.  Watching on is Len Lesser's Chief Goon, who radios his shadowy boss - whose face remains unrevealed like a pre-You Only Live Twice Ernst Stavro Blofeld - to inform him that the plan has gone awry as Tyler has survived.

At the hospital, after Judy and Peter are asked to leave the amnesiac Prof alone to rest, the goon slips in disguised as a doctor to place another of the strange pins on the Tyler's lapel whilst the villain in his shadowy base manipulates whirring machinery with the inputted order 'NOAH TYLER - DESTROY'.  The frail academician suddenly finds himself clambering out of his sickbed and climbing to the window for a spot of leg-dangling upon the sill as he readies himself to hurl his body down, down to dash upon the ground down below.  This is Pete's time to rise, and so off he dashes to the bushes to strip into his red and blue union suit and scale the hospital wall to intercept the suddenly suicidal doc and carry him all the way up to the roof and hand him over to the cops before skittering away before the eyes of Barbera - "Who is that character anyway?" he asks.  I dunno, man.  Is it Ben Reilly, the Scarlet Spider?

When Judy later confides in Peter about a secretive self-improvement group that her father had joined and that she thinks the other group members might have information that can hep understand what's happened to him, Parker agrees to accompany her to the group session (well, she is very attractive... oh.  Not that kind of 'group session'.  Right).  There they meet the charismatic cult leader Edward Byron (Thayer David, the eminent Professor T. Eliot Stokes of long-running gothy horror soap opera Dark Shadows), who allows them to sit in on part of the meeting but politely asks them as they are not full members to leave before the private part of the conclave.  This is the part where they all throw their keys in a bowl, isn't it?  But, wait, no: it isn't.  This is the part when Byron darkens the lights and flashes disco strobes into the eyes of his assembly whilst intoning hypnotic suggestions over an echoing tannoy that makes his low bass rumble sound as though it were coming from beneath the sea.  Then he issues pre-programmed instructions for a number of them to kill themselves the instant they are issued the command.  Which, like, completely harshes the mellow that he had going on, man.

Paying a return visit later in his more comfortable clothes Spidey capers across the rooftops of nearby buildings, leaping o'er the chasms between them as if skipping over puddles to clamber into a high office window.  Ol' Webhead carefully makes his way through the silent and empty chambers of Byron's sanctum, searching for any evidence and then OMG NINJA ATTACK!!  Out of nowhere a trio of Kendo killers armed with heavy bamboo staffs and snarling threatening guttural warnings advance.  A man in a lycra gimp suit tussling with a large shaven-headed man with a moustache?  Nothing homoerotic here - move along.  Using his powers to his advantage, Spidey has the high ground as he scampers along the ceiling and walls to evade the "HAI!!" thrusts and swings of the mighty bo (Donatello's just can't get the staff these days) and leaves the martial artists encased in the sticky white goo he squirts over them (steady on, this ain't webbukkake.com) before making his egress from the roof by shooting a webline to a nearby flagpole and swinging to another building, and all without being made of CGI.

As the deadline of noon on Friday looms, Peter believes that he's made a breakthrough when his lab equipment picks up a strong microwave transmission sequence that he works out to be the method utilised by Byron to activate his somnambulist sleeper cells.  Hurrying to the police precinct to give this vital information to Captain Barbera, he is overcome by the hypnotic wave when the badge pin that Byron attached to his jacket earlier is activated.  As The Ten, all triggered and ready for noon doomsday, make their ways to their designated places of self-destruction (a man stops his car in the middle of a bridge and exits the vehicle to hurl himself over the side, a woman stands atop a skyscraper, the lovely Judy waits upon the edge of a subway platform ready to fall 'neath an oncoming train) Peter sleepwalks his way into the Empire State Building, makes his way into the lift, ascends to the eyrie of the viewing platform and readies himself to climb over the protective railings and drop into the abyss.  However, the caprice of fate intervenes and as Byron types in the 'PETER PARKER - DESTROY' command (perhaps 10 PRINT 'PETER PARKER - DESTROY' 20 GOTO 10 RUN would have worked better?) and Peter attempts to obey, the prong of a rail catches the pin badge and it falls off, snapping him out of Byron's spell.  Rushing in costume to Byron's base, just before the clock strikes 12 Spidey fires off a web that ensnares the broadcasting aerial dish atop the roof and tears it down - causing Byron's hypno-machine to start sparking and spitting like Kenneth Strickfaden arc generators and Tesla coils and turning the ray on him, reducing him to a zombified catatonic state.  Finding him in this more suggestible condition, Spider-Man prompts him to make his way to the precinct and hand himself in to Barbera, as the hypnotic victims snap back to their senses and make their way to safety.

As Byron and his goons are hauled in by Barbera and his officers, Peter meets with Jameson and hands over a sheaf of photos of Spidey standing alongside the now genial ninjas.  Amazed, the spluttering publisher can't believe his luck.

"How come you're the only one who can get a picture of him?"

"Simple," says Peter.  "I believe."

And as he takes Judy's arm and they walk off together into the bright Manhattan afternoon leaving the apoplectic newspaper man with all his questions behind them, you know what?  So do I.

The Fly (Kurt Neumann, 1958)

For the Vincent Price blogathon, 17th to 19th April.

Sweet genes, Vincent.

I may only (only!  I turned 41 two weeks ago!  Aeeeeiiii!!!) have been born in 1979, but - perhaps strangely - I was very familiar with The Fly by the time the David Cronenberg re-version came out in 1986.  Which I know, because I have quite a strong memory of watching a movie on VHS with my dad, and one of the trailers was for said upcoming Jeff Goldblum Brundlefly vomit-drop flavoured movie.

"Look, Dad - they're doing a new one!"  I cried with glee.  Because I had fond memories of watching the original, that said father had dutifully recorded for me during some late night airing a year or two before: that eerie title sequence intro with a sort of psychedelic honeycomb with a fly (or flies?) emerging through holes.  I'm so glad I didn't suffer from trypophobia - i'd probably have been traumatised instead of spookily intrigued.

I had also, in the interval between seeing the two films, read the original George Langelaan short story upon which the movie was based.  Perhaps those pulpy old paperback Pan and Fontana books of horror and ghost stories edited by Herbert Von Thal weren't the thing for parents to buy five or six year old children - but reader, I loved them, and my parents would pick me up second hand copies if they happened upon them.

(Slightly confusingly, I distinctly recall that another volume of one of those books contained a different story - by a completely different author - also titled The Fly, which obviously meant that this small child was baffled a bit.)

Penned by Langelaan - a fascinating character in of himself, being an ex-spy and acquaintance of infamous occult master of dark magicks Aleister Crowley - The Fly was first published in the June 1967 edition of the Hefmeister's Playboy magazine, back in the pre-Flynt aeons when porn was fancy.  With a screenplay by James Clavell (of King Rat, Shogun and Tai-Pan fame), the film opens in the eerie twilight hours of a dark, dark night in deepest Francophone Canada at a factory belonging to the Delambre Freres corporation where ageing night watchman Gaston (Torben Meyer) finds the fresh mortal remains of his employer Monsieur Andre Delambre crushed beneath a hydraulic press.

The mystery of this tragedy compounded both by his having heard the press operate not once but twice and seeing the newly-widowed Madame Helene Delambre (the delightful Redmayned red-maned Patricia Owens) fleeing the scene, Gaston reports these strange occurrences to the still-extant member of the Delambre brothers Francois (genre legend Vincent Price) - his message coming immediately after Francois receives a call from Helene calmly informing his that she has terminated their brother and sister-in-law relationship in a pretty final manner.  Attending the scene of the crime, Francois and police inspector Charas (Herbert Marshall, not a stranger to the sci-fi/horror genres, having starred in bizarro robots-run-amok shocker Gog for veteran schlock-helmer Herbert L. Strock four years previously) try to fathom what's occurred - Francois maintaining Helene's inability to have possibly worked the lethal equipment whilst the pair are baffled by the evidence of the late Andre's head and left arm being twice-crushed by machinery set to impact zero level with its base to utterly destroy the cranium and limb in question.

Visiting an almost preternaturally calm Helene, who happily admits to killing Andre - but not murdering him - the sleuthing pair find the circumstances growing curiouser and curiouser as Helene informs them how she operated the press and that Andre voluntarily placed himself beneath it while all the time being distracted to the point of obsession by a housefly buzzing around the room, before examining it closely and then suddenly losing all interest. Placing Helene under the watchful care of police nurse Andersone (Betty Lou Gerson - the voice of 101 Dalmatians' Cruella De Vil herself), Charas follows Francois down to the manse's mysterious basement laboratory where Delambre is baffled to find rooms filled with strange and unfamiliar equipment that appears to have been deliberately smashed and sabotaged. "This is the work of a madman!" he expostulates, whilst Nurse Andersone has to deal with a lunacy of her own when she swats at a fly causing Helene to drop her calm and placid demeanour and erupt into uncontrollable hysteria.

The mystery of her fly fixation deepens when young semi-orphaned Philippe (Charles Herbert), who's being looked after by Uncle Francois, asks how long flies live and conveys the information that his mother has been searching for a very particular insect: one with a white head and one white leg.  When Francois goes to Helene with the ruse that he's found and captured the errant bluebottle, she begins to unfold her tale in flashback - wherein we finally meet Andre (an immediately engaging and reliably likeable performance from David Hedison [but you can call him Al, as he was still trading under his first rather than middle name at the time] - still one of only two actors to have played Felix Leiter in the Bond franchise more than once - in a role originally considered for Michael Rennie and turned down by Rick Jason).

"This is not a confession.  Although I killed my husband, I am not a murderess.  I simply carried out his last wish."

The Delambres' happy family life is interrupted the day that Andre excitedly leads Helene down to his lab to show her the fruits of the research that has kept him busy for weeks on end: the end results of the work he has been doing for the Canadian air ministry into faster forms of travel is his patented matter disintegrator-reintegrator - or teleporter to you and I - which he explains to his baffled spouse in the same terms as Willy Wonka explains the concept of television picture transmission to Mike Teevee.  Andre hopes in future to have a network of his machines installed around the globe - nay, where stop there?  The universe - to set up an instantaneous means of travel at the speed of light much like the transporters from Star Trek or the T-Mat system from Doctor Who's 'The Seeds of Death', not just as a method of conveyance for people but a cheap and instant means of moving food and other goods from place to place and perhaps end any future fear of famine or shortages around the world.  This Utopian hope is soon dashed, however, when Helene amusedly points out that the ashtray that he has teleported across the lab as a demonstration now has the 'MADE IN JAPAN' print on its underside reversed - prompting a suddenly despondent Andre to plunge back into his notes.

A further setback occurs when he attempts his first transmission of a living organism in the cuddly shape of the family cat, Dandelo, who vanishes in the disintegration module to never reappear in the reintegration receptacle, existing only as a haunting ethereal miaow ("Into space...a stream of cat atoms.  It'd be funny if life weren't sacred" he laments).  Certain that he's finally perfected the system, Andre celebrates by treating Helene to an evening at the ballet followed by an evening in sipping the finest vintage of chateau d' teleport: a chilled bottle of transmitted bubbly.  Life seeming back on track, after an idyllic summer morning in the garden Andre asks Helene to invite Francois over to show him the machine only for the two of them to later find Andre's lab door locked with a hastily-scrawled 'DO NOT DISTURB' note on the door.  Pinning it down to the doc's usually eccentric way of working, the pair don't listen to young Philippe excitedly telling them that he has caught a strange insect in the garden on his bug hunt: a fly with a strange head and leg, which he is casually - an tragically instructed to take back outside and let go.

When Andre's behaviour grows increasingly odder - remaining unseen and non-speaking whilst passing notes beneath the laboratory door asking for bowls of rum-laced milk and demanding that a white-headed fly be captured safely, and only showing himself to Helene silently and with a towel draped over his head and his arm tucked beneath his coat - Helene's increasing despair, fear and curiosity build up to the iconic scene reminiscent of Mary Philbin's unmaking of Lon Chaney in the classic 1925 Phantom of the Opera as she tears the cloth from him to be confronted by the visage of a monstrous fly, mandibles twitching,the image of her screaming face reflected and refracted in its golden multi-faceted eyes.

Not to attempt to post spoilers for anyone who may not have seen it, but it is a pretty famous plot point that Andre has transmitted himself without realising a housefly was inside the booth at the same time as him - leading to their hybridisation and swapping of noggin and hand.  Convinced that they will never again be able to locate the fly and terrified that his intellect is going, his mind being taken over by the savage impulses of the insect, Andre resins himself to destroying all evidence of his work and the monster he has become by leaving the wrecked lab under the cover of night and taking Helene to the factory - instructing her in how to operate the press to pulp him (especially his insectoid parts), an action that the agonised woman has the repeat after his monstrous limb slips out from 'neat the device first time.  As we return to the present and Helene has finished relating her fantastic tale, the disbelieving duo of Francois and Charas wonder what to make of such a strange story that still seems to fit the known facts - a wonderment brought to an end when Francois discovers the sought-for fly/human hybrid caught in a spider-web in the garden, it's miniature human head screaming "Help me"! Help meee!" as it is consumed by the web's arachnid inhabitant.  Price famously revealed in raconteur style how neither he nor Herbert Marshall dared to make eye contact during this scene as they kept cracking up throughout repeated takes, before the little creature is dispatched via euthenasia by means of brick.

Sumptuously photographed in CinemaScope and DeLuxe Color unlike its two monochrome sequels and sporting fine performances from Price, Hedison and Owens, The Fly stands as a great example of the silver age of science fiction and horror.  A Feast for the senses.  Just don't drink the milk - I think a fly vomited in it.

"He died because of his work.  He was like an explorer in a wild country where no-one had ever been before.  He was searching for the truth - he almost found a great truth - but for one instant he was careless... The search for the truth is the most important thing in the whole world.  And the most dangerous."

Frankenstein (David Wickes, 1992)

The Gothic horror tradition in both film and literature can ultimately trace, if not its genesis, then its apotheosis back to that legendary storm-wracked three day weekender on the shores of Lake Geneva at the Villa Diodati in the haunted summer of 1816 when the legendary 'Mad, Bad and Dangerous' George Gordon, Lord Byron gathered together the elements of himself, his fellow Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley's soon to be wife Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and Byron's personal physician Dr John Polidori - and together they infused the spark of undying life into the nascent Gothic genre.

The horror movie's debt to literature was recognised in James Whale's seminal 1935 The Bride of Frankenstein, which opened with a prologue set at the Villa (recast as the standard Universal Horror storm-lashed turret upon a craggy peak) with Mary (Elsa Lanchester) recounting her tale to Byron (Gavin Gordon) and Shelley (Douglas Walton), a scenario fully fleshed out on film by Ken Russell in Gothic (1986) - a superlative filmic fictionalisation of the epoch-making events of that eventful evening.

There have of course been many filmed versions of Frankenstein, from the Edison Company's silent 1910 short to the Boris Karloff-starring 1931 Universal Pictures classic and its many sequels, through the Eastmancolour Gothic chills of the Hammer horrors of the 1950s through to the '70s.  In the early 1990s a few Frankenstein films emerged blinking into the light including Roger Corman's 1990 Frankenstein Unbound and Kenneth Branagh's much-trumpeted lavish 1994 rendition that proclaimed itself to be Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.  Betwixt the twain nestled a largely ignored made for cable television movie directed by David Wickes, who had previously helmed the 1988 Michael Caine miniseries Jack the Ripper - noted for Armand Assante's scene stealing turn as Victorian thespian Richard Mansfield performing his famed transformation from Dr Jekyll to Mr Hyde - and had cast Caine again two years later in the titular role(s) of 1990's Jekyll & Hyde.

Beginning, as some adaptations do, in the book-accurate preamble setting of the wild and savage frozen North we open with a wild sled-chase across the ice as creator and creation pursue each other in a frenzy of destruction before encountering the pack ice-stranded ship of Captain Walton (Roger Bizley).  There, the rescued human contingent begins to unfold his tale in flashback to the University of Ingolstadt where the young Dr Victor Frankenstein (Patrick Bergin, who just the year before had starred as Robin Hood in a film my schoolboy self far preferred over the contemporaneous adventures of Kevin Costner's incarnation of said merry man) goes unrecognised by the chancellor (oh look, it's Vernon Dobtchef!) for his work in the field of anatomical medicine as the school prize goes to a theological professor for his feats in the field of the imaginary.

Ingolstadt is in the midst of a cholera epidemic, and Victor is berated by his friend Henry Clerval (Lambert Wilson, in a performance so wet as lettuce it's hard to imagine he screen tested for James Bond) for putting himself at risk by working to help the sick - you know, being a doctor.  They didn't have any Personal Protection Equipment back then, you see (topical!).  Victor takes Henry back to his lab, and shows him how he is trying to make life in the time of cholera - his lab contains cages filled with grotesque animal hybrids such as a snake with a cat's head and a rabbit's head upon the body and quills of a fretful porcupine, like creatures from a mediaeval bestiary made manifest in stitched-together flesh.  This of course - this being the early 1800s - brings Clerval out in a religious terror of foaming "You're not God!" proclamations.  Good thing, then, that he leaves the premises before Frankenstein unveils his ultimate creation, floating in a tank of primordial ooze (a vivarium vitae) like a monstrous embryo is a man that he has created in his on image and from his own very essence.

Of course, it's the same old story: the experiment goes awry and the newborn creature flees out in to the night of this strange new world abandoned and alone as the ill Frankenstein is taken home by Clerval to the arms of his beloved Elizabeth (Fiona Gillies).  As Victor recovers his health and wits in the care of his beloved and his family, the creature (Randy Quaid, in his intermediate period between being Cousin Eddie from the National Lampoon's Vacation movies and being an actual full-on mentalist) wanders in the wilderness harassed and hounded by humanity.  In a nice reversal of the classic "drowned little girl" (better known as "the flower that wouldn't float") scene from the Karloff classic, the monster actually dives into the water and rescues a drowning young girl called Amy (played by Quaid's real-life daughter Amanda) but is then shot and wounded by hunters and left be swept away down the river rapids.

A neat innovation of this adaptation is taking the "two sides of the same person" notion of the doctor and the daemon hinted at by previous films and making it literal - there is a real connection between Frankenstein and his monster, Victor feeling the pain whenever his progeny is hurt.  The standard meeting with the blind man De Lacey (Sir John Mills, who found out that he himself was going blind at around the time of filming) occurs, with some genuinely moving interactions between the old man and the sea creature as they help each other and the monster learns speech, only to be driven off again into solitude by the hunters (and neither of them even has the decency to be played by John Carradine).  The connection betwixt the twain drawing them together like magnets, it isn't long before creation finds the home of creator and begins his furious revenge, killing first a more aged-up than usual William Frankenstein (Timothy Stark, in his twenties at time of filming) - Victor's younger brother - then then father Alphonse (Ronald Leigh-Hunt in his final film role), Clerval and last of all Elizabeth.

Just as vengeance-consumed as his rage-filled genespawn, Frankenstein begins his pursuit vowing to follow the creature to the ends of the Earth if necessary in order to destroy him (sadly without a Feyd Rautha style "I WILL KILL HIM!", but close enough) which brings us back, back to our beginnings upon the icebound boat where Frankenstein father and son have their final confrontation.  Responding to the anguished cry of "Help me!" from the monster, Victor vows to help the both of them and then crashes into the bulky behemoth and throws both of them into the frozen Arctic beneath the cracking ice sheet and angel down they go together: two halves of of one man entwined, he dies twice in the ice.

Imperfect - as all adaptations are - this is an interesting version of the oft-told tale (with an interesting cast, including as the Arctic ship's boatswain the late Michael Gothard in his last role) that i'd recommend to anyone who's a fan of the original story and might be seeking out a version they haven't yet seen.

The Werewolf (Fred F. Sears, 1956)

"The word 'lycanthropy' is defined a human being having the power of becoming a wolf, or of having the power of turning another human into a wolf.   Some say lycanthropy stems from nothing but myth and superstition, yet the belief that a human can turn into a wolf has persisted since the Dark Ages to this very day.  It is a universal belief.   The ancient Romans and Greeks wrote of the phenomenon.  There are tales of such happenings in Borneo, Turkey, South America.  Everywhere.    The American Navaho Indians and other tribes tell stories about wolf-men.  The legends have persisted since the beginnings of Man's memory of Time.  Why?  Why haven't these tales died?  The tales that say wolf-men roam the Earth...?

From prolific cheapie producer 'Jungle' Sam Katzman (he of everything from the seemingly endless Dead End Kids/East Side Kids/Bowery Boys series of alleged comedies [actually, that's unfair: 1943's Ghosts on the Loose, co-starring Bela Lugosi and Ava Gardner - now there's a potent cocktail! - was a bit of a laugh] to horror B's to musicals to the Johnny Weissmuller starring Jungle Jim flicks) and director Fred F. Sears (helmer of the Bill Haley and His Comets vehicle Rock Around the Clock [1955] and well as genre fare such as the Ray Harryhausen-tastic Earth vs the Flying Saucers [1956] and the Mara Corday-tastic turkey The Giant Claw [1957]) comes this interesting SF twist on the well-worn werewolf genre.

From out out of the wilderness there stumbles a stranger (Steven Ritch - usually a competent journeyman actor in Westerns and thrillers, but also the co-screenwriter of the 1959 sci-noir City of Fear) into the small resort town of Mountaincrest.  This lone figure, a man without a memory, stumbles into the local bar to fortify himself and try to ascertain whether any of the locals know who he might be.  After he unthinkingly flashes his cash buying a drink before leaving, a local hoodlum named Joe (Charles Horvath) follows him outside with the intent of extorting money with menaces.  Dragging the stranger into an alley, his attempted assault ends with the mugger looking a right mug as the victim turns predator and the attacker having his neck nibbled to the sound of animalistic snarling, bringing the deputy sheriff Ben Clovey (Harry Lauter, It Came from Beneath the Sea [Robert Gordon, 1955], Superbeast [George Schenck, 1972]) running to the scene.

"Only an animal could do that to a man's throat!"

Heading in pursuit of the culprit, Clovey and two of the townsfolk arm themselves and head into the snowy mountains surrounding this ski-skate town that they forgot to close down to find a trail of footprints in the tundra that they follow only to find that at one point the human footprints end only to be replaced by the paw prints of an animal: an animal who walks on two legs.

These events of of course a concern to the town's sheriff Jack Haines (Don Megowan, who had already played the icon Black Lagoon resident the Gill Man earlier that year in John Sherwood's The Creature Walks Among Us and would go on to play the Frankenstein Monster in 1958's Tales of Frankenstein [review here ] as well as star in 1962's The Creation of the Humanoids) who has to spearhead the manhunt for the man-imal, torn between his instinct to shoot to kill and the advice of town doctor Jonas Gilchrist (Ken Christy) and his own fiance, Gilchrist's niece Amy (Joyce Holden, Terror from the Year 5000 [Robert J. Gurney Jr., 1958) to treat the fugitive as a sick man rather than a wild beast and bring him in warm rather than cold.

"Well do the best we can.  Doctors try to save people.  The law doesn't always have a choice."

As the truth gradually begins to emerge we discover that our lupine loner is Duncan Marsh, family man; husband to Helen (Eleanore Tanin) and father to Chris (Kim Charney) who was involved in a car crash and found and treated by unscrupulous doctors.  This mad scientist due consists of Dr Morgan Chambers (George M. Lynn, who had featured twelve years earlier in Universal's monster mash House of Frankenstein [Erle C. Kenton, 1944]) and Dr Emory Forrest (S. John Launer, who'd tangle with another lycan a year later in Gene Fowler Jr.'s I Was a Teenage Werewolf).  Dr Chambers' mad scheme involved using the wounded Marsh as a guinea pig for his theory of injecting humans with the irradiated blood of a wolf to create a canis lupus sapiens (a similar theory to that of George Zucco's Dr Cameron in The Mad Monster [here]) to survive his projected holocaust of WWIII.  As he tells his rueful associate Forrest:

"Radiation creates mutants - who who become monsters, no longer human.  They'll make the hydrogen bomb more powerful, then more powerful again.  Enough to change every person on the face of the Earth into a crawling inhuman thing through fall-out radiation."

As Marsh's wife and son make their way to Mountaincrest in search of him, and the shady medics responsible for his predicament also close in with the intent to kill him before his memory returns and he can implicate them, Duncan finds himself torn between his humanity and his inner beast.  Interestingly, his transformations are triggered not by the light of the full moon but by his animal instincts: fear and anger cause the change whether it be day or night.  I found myself wondering if Stan Lee saw this at the time, and thought, "The Incredible Wolf?  Y'know, with a tweak this could work.  Excelsior!"  The wolfman make-up is by Clay Campbell, and pretty much exactly the same as the job he did on Matt Willis in 1943's Return of the Vampire (clearly Duncan Marsh and Andreas Obry were both of the same strain of lycanthrophobia).

Released in the US in 1956 as the lower B-half of a double bill with Sears' Earth vs the Flying Saucers and in the UK as the upper half of a twin-spin with Edward L Cahn's Creature with the Atom Brain (starring Richard Denning, whose other half Evelyn Ankers knew about a lycanthropic trick or two having starred as Gwen in George Waggner's 1941 classic The Wolf Man), The Werewolf received a poor notice in Variety but a favourable one in the MFB (how I wish that were still a going concern as a publication as well as Sight & Sound).  Featuring a fine performance from Steven Ritch as the hunted and haunted Duncan Marsh fighting for his life and his own sense of self, The Werewolf stands as a curious collision of 1950s radiation-charged sci-fi and the classic horror of the previous decades.

Wolfman ([a.k.a.: Wolfman: a Lycanthrope] Worth Keeter, 1979)

Southern Gothic, or: Talbot... Daninsky... Glasgow... an eternal golden braid

Also known in Brazil by the rather wonderful Portuguese title of A Verdadeira Historia do Lobisomem, or The True Story of the Werewolf, this little gem of obscurity is another that I learned of years back thanks to Stephen Jones' Illustrated Werewolf Movie Guide (a real boon of a book - along with its Vampire compatriot - for those of us interested in delving deeply into the vast cinematic archives of the famous monsters of filmland).

Tool salesman turned actor/producer/mogul Earl Owensby (known as 'Dixie DeMille' and 'Redneck Roger Corman') did what many a cineaste kid years to do and established his own production facility in Shelby, North Carolina.  Spending most of the 1970s and '80s churning out low-tier grindhouse fare for the drive-in circuit that would rarely play north of the Mason-Dixon line, Owensby was a sort of Southern-fried Don Dohler - his films always making back their outlay and being profitable for him though rarely impinging upon the wider public consciousness.  That said, looking up his oeuvre (stop giggling at the back - that's not a euphemism) I realised that I had seen at least one of his films: 1983's Rottweiler: the Dogs of Hell.

Here, Earl has cast himself in the leading role of the hilariously-monikered Colin Glasgow (it somehow just doesn't have the same resplendent redolence of other lycanthropic legends as Leon Carrido, Lawrence Talbot and Waldemar Daninsky), scion of a Southern family who finds himself called back to his ancestral abode after spending years travelling the world - globetrotting which has done nothing to blunt his Aw-shucks accent.  Colin (which at least the cast pronounce correctly: i'd shuddered slightly in apprehension that we were going to be treated to a surfeit of "Coe-lin"s, a la a certain Mr Powell) makes his way back to stately Glasgow Manor - which sounds like the turf of a Gorbals gangster - too late to see his elderly father Edwin (Julian Morton, who like many other members of the cast has only one other acting credit to his name: another Owensby production) who is sped on his way when he is stabbed on his deathbed with a silver dagger wielded by the evil and sorcerous Reverend Leonard (Ed Grady, pretty much the only member of this ensemble to have any real kind of acting career, following the the footsteps of the screen's most evil churchmen such as Claude Frollo, Gregory Trask and Jack Hackett).

The diabolical deacon has dispatched daddy in order to ensure that the hereditary Glasgow curse (which I always thought was heroin addiction) passes down unto the latest generation, i.e.: Colin.  And so our befuddled hero's homecoming is to the bad news that his father is indeed dad dead, and he must contend with his somewhat sinister cousins Clement (Richard Dedmon) and Elizabeth (Maggie Lauterer) as well as the rancour of the village's local yokels who resent his family name enough to start impromptu fights with him in the tavern in the town (in the town).

Whilst by no means at all a remake of Curt Siodmak's classic script for 1941's The Wolf Man - the turn of the century Southern setting alone a world away from the fog-shrouded Euro-Gothic elseworld of Larry Talbot's Llanwelly - there are a few points of similarity: Colin's encounter with his love interest, the divorcee Lynn Harris Randolph (Kristina Reynolds, giving one of the movie's more competent performances) occurring in Harris's Curios & Notions, the shop belonging to her father much like Evelyn Ankers' Gwen in Conliffe's Antiques in the earlier film.

Obviously, Colin eventually succumbs to his cure and transforms via the magic of poor time-lapse into a furry-faced monster.  Being in the post-Universal, post-Hammer hinterland just before the modern horror boom of the Nineteen-Haties with such stuff as The Howling and American Werewolf, this feels slightly out of time.  The time is out of (Alf) joint.  It really feels like Dark Shadows meets Hammer, with a sub-Carpenter synth score.  If that idea warms your cockles like it does mine, then check it out.  It's on Youtube.

My name is Earl.

The Manster (George P. Breakston and Kenneth G. Crane, 1959)

"Tara, he's exactly the type I need!  Besides, this is for science - for human knowledge!  What happens to one man doesn't make any difference.  You didn't seem to care for the others, Tara."

"I forgot how to care about anybody a long time ago."

Yet another movie that I first came across in the pages of Alan Frank's mundanely-titled-for-a-great-book Horror Films (Hamlyn, 1977: go seek out a copy), I was intrigued as a kid both by the amusing title ("He's a man, see, but he's also a monster!") and the large monochrome photographic still used to illustrate it.  What was my young mind to make of this bizarre spectacle of a sort of simian Zaphod Beeblebrox throttling an Asian man?  What was this two-headed hominid?  Why was it?

Some kind of Manster, I expect.

Long before Anthony M. Lanza's The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant (1971) and the following year's double-dunced blaxploitation class ic The Thing with Two Heads from Lee Frost of Love Camp 7 infamy came The Manster.  Director George Breakston had previously made such films as 1951's Tokyo File 212 and Oriental Evil and 1952's Geisha Girl on Japan and returned to the Land of the Rising Sun to shoot this film based upon his own original story The Split - under which title the film would see release in the UK in a slightly edited version with a run time of 67 minutes as opposed to the US 72-minute version.

As well as a mostly Japanese crew and supporting cast - including Satoshi 'Yetsu' Nakamura as the mad scientist Dr Robert Suzuki, Nakamura having already appeared for Breakston in both Tokyo File 212 and Geisha Girl - the movie also had an international lead cast including , in the lead man-into-monster role of the doomed Larry Stanford, Anglo-Canadian actor Peter Dyneley who would go on to be best remembered as the voice of Jeff Tracy in Gerry Anderson's supermarionation classic Thunderbirds (ITC, 1965-1966) as well as it's film spin-offs Thunderbirds Are Go (David Lane, 1966) and Thunderbird 6 (Lane, 1968), as well as having a supporting role in John Kruse's claustrophobic character-based thriller October Moth in 1960, a film i've previously taken a look at here: http://psychtronickinematograph.blogspot.com/2015/09/october-moth-1960-john-kruse.html .  Making this a soon-to-be family affair, cast in the role of Stanford's long-suffering wife Linda was actress Jane Hylton (who has a long and varied career including taking over from Hazel Court as the second incarnation of Jane Huggett in Here Come the Huggetts [Ken Annakin, 1958] and as Queen Guinevere in ITC's swashbuckling William Russell vehicle The Adventures of Sir Lancelot [1956-1957], as well as being the mother - with her first husband Euan Lloyd, of the actress Rosalind Lloyd: Queen Xanxia aka 'the Nurse' in Douglas Adams' 1978 Doctor Who story 'City of Death' as well as playing Gail in Norman J. Warren's 1981 "let's push it a bit further than Alien did" SF horror Inseminoid).  After meeting on the set of The Manster, Dyneley and Hylton would marry - making this almost a family affair - only to sadly pass away within eighteen months of each other in August 1977 and February 1979 respectively.

Opening with what appears to be an attack on a young woman by a crazed gorilla (so far, so Ray 'Crash' Corrigan in his monkey suit from innumerable B-movies and serials of the '30s and '40s), we are soon introduced to the volcanic mountainside laboratory of Dr Suzuki (Nakamura) where he is engaged in bizarre experimentation relating to human evolution and the periodic genetic mutations that can accelerate the evolutionary process.   Having already tested his theory on his own brother Genji (Kenzo Kuroki in the ape costume) and devolved him to his current primaeval Gigantopithecus-style state, as well as turning his wife Emiko (Toyoko Takechi) into a malformed and befanged thing that he keeps locked up like the mutated cast-offs in the Delabres' barn in Curse of the Fly (Don Sharp, 1965), Suzuki plans to test his formula on a new subject.  The guinea pig presents itself in the shape of American reporter Larry Stanford (Dyneley getting a chance to utilise his North American accent).

Stanford is there to interview Suzuki about his somewhat radical new theories, but after a short confab finds himself spiked in more ways than one: his Mickey Finned whisky swiftly followed by a hypodermic chaser.  After returning to his head office in Tokyo to chat with his chief Ian Matthews (Norman Van Hawley, a likeable presence in his sole movie appearance) - presumably the Perry White-cum-J. Jonah Jameson of this American newspaper in Japan (let's call it The Daily Gaijin) - Stanford expresses his relief that his term in the East is almost over and that he will soon be returning Stateside to his wife Linda.  Things soon take a turn, however, as further meetings with Dr Suzuki see Larry lured into a whole new world for him of geisha evenings and visits to the hot baths with Suzuki's seductive assistant, the mysterious and alluring Tara (Terri Zimmern, another sole acting credit - a shame, as she brings a lot to the part of a woman tinged with regret and determined not to return to a secretive sordid past).

Suzuki's efforts to bring out the animal in him certainly work, as Matthews finds himself unable to wrap his head around the fact that his reliable employee has in the course of days become a drunken, violent and lustful Mr Hyde seeking the pleasures of the fleshpots of Tokyo.  When Larry returns from his latest raucous assignation with Tara to find his long lost Linda (Hylton) in his apartment he reacts by raging like a cornered beast instead of the contriteness of a man caught in an affair.

"You married me.  You knew I was a foreign correspondent!"

"I know, " replies his injured party of a wife, "but I figured one day you could settle down...."

"Settle down?!?" he seethes and spits.  "That's a grand way to put it.  To settle down like mud in a pond!  Bridge on Wednesdays, cocktails Thursdays, PTA Fridays?  I can't give you that kind of stuff, Linda.  Go home, and find someone else."

The manifold manifestations of his inner Manster go much further than a Neanderthal attitude and temper, however, as Larry finds his right hand taking on a distinctly anthropoid aspect - all gnarled and sprouting hair in a not at all bad lap dissolve sequence - but also his shoulder is becoming a problem, first a painful lump and then (in one of a couple of sequences in the film that I cannot believe Sam Raimi did not see before filming 1992's Army of Darkness) an eye.  As he finds himself unable to keep resisting his violent side that his ego can't override, Larry goes out killing.  After wandering into a Shinto temple and finding himself terrified by the monstrous visages of the oni demons depicted upon the temple walls, he butchers the lone priest kneeling in prayer there.

Returning to the seductive Tara (I guess the lust for the yoni is as strong as the oni), he almost attempts to confess:

"It was like a dream... or sort of a nightmare.  Only I don't know where the dream stopped and the real thing began."

Like a previous cursed Larry (a certain Mr Talbot, of Llanwelly, Wales), Stanford finds himself becoming a murderous creature but unable to stop the process.  Finally, the full change takes hold and Stanford not only takes on an apelike countenance but finds himself, like Richard E. Grant, discovering How to Get a Head in Advertising (Bruce Robinson, 1989) as another even more monstrous head sprouts from his right shoulder before he continues his reign of terror.

"Larry Stanford is going through the metamorphosis" Suzuki tells the remorseful and now-reluctant Tara.  "This is his new self - actually a different species of man... A species that's never walked the Earth before!"

Seeking out Suzuki in his mountainous eyrie of a laboratory, the Manster (George Wyman, rather than Dyneley on monster duties) fulfils the Oedipal urge of every modern Promethean by destroying his creator, before undergoing the titular 'Split' as Larry and his primitive half actually tear apart, like cross between Ash Williams in a windmill and Clark Kent in a car-breaker's yard.  After the beast-no-longer-within his attacked Tara and thrown her into the broiling depths of the active volcano, Larry does the honours by hurling his half-human half into said caldera.  And so into the mountain he falls, like Varney the vampire (ooh, spoilers for 1847!) and Larry is taken away by the police for the carnivorous lunar activities of his altered state as Ian comforts Linda by delivering the usual anti-scientific progress "didn't reckon upon Gahhhd" spiel required of Fifties monster movies:

"There was good in Larry, and there was evil.  The evil part broke through, took hold.  Call it an accident, or call it a warning... I'm a reporter, not a mystic, Linda, but there are things beyond us - things perhaps we're  not meant to understand...  Have faith, Linda.  Have faith in the good that's still in Larry.  And in all men."

Pffftt.  #NotAllMen.

The Warlock of Firetop Mountain: The Hero's Quest (Richard Fox, 2019)

"Zagor is a twisted soul.  He delights in setting traps.  To watch people suffer or die through the choices they willingly make."

And now, as they say, for something completely - or, at least, a little bit - different.  This blog has of course mostly covered the cinematic, and on occasion, televisual medium - but this time we're veering off into what probably won't be a very regular sideways trip to The Psychotronic Phonograph.  Yep, we're talking the audio medium here.

Audio, and radio especially, has long been a mainstay of genre product: from the old time radio pulp adventures of The Shadow on Detective Story Hour to the stentorian tones of Valentine Dyall's Man in Black on Appointment with Fear to the National Public Radio productions of George Lucas' Star Wars trilogy with its alternate universe cast such as Perry King's Han Solo, Brock Peters' Darth Vader and John Lithgow's Yoda.

Since the late 1990s, the UK's Big Finish Productions has been responsible for a lot of genre output (and for a long time, a lowering of my available bank balance!) with lavish full-cast audio stories from IPs such as Doctor Who, Blake's 7, Dark Shadows, Survivors, The Avengers and many others; providing additional stories that expanded and enhanced continuing fictional universes as well as giving a continuation of series and franchises long since gone.  These ranges have been a source of much entertainment, joy, frustration and more over the years for myself and many others and yet I never expected any of the personnel involved in crafting these sonic gems of the fantastique to delve (like a dwarf into the Dwarrowdelf in the vasty deep) into the demesne of Fighting Fantasy.

Context being king e'en in the realm of swords and sorcerers, let us go back (back, back to my beginnings!) to circa 1990: picture this, a day in December when as a small child of around ten years old I was standing at a bus stop with my mother in the rain waiting for a bus service that seemed forever, ever, delayed.  To pass the time, she suggested having a look in the shop that was behind us, which just inside the doorway had a display of cheap paperback books in various states of disrepair for low prices.  Even at that age, around ten years old, I had amassed a small collection of second hand books that I loved - mostly comprising various Pan and Fontana collections of horror stories being a youth of a fannish, geeky, gothic bent - and so my eye was caught by the green-hued spine of a tome entitled House of Hell credited to one Steve Jackson and featuring an intriguing cover illustration for my slightly warped young eyes of a daemonic creature reaching outwards towards  the reader.  Duly purchased by my understanding and indulgent parent, I gradually became slightly puzzled during the subsequent bus journey when I devoured the opening scene-setting prologue (so far, so short story to which I was used) to find a format that baffled me - the format of the Choose Your Own Adventure Role-Playing Game, or as I would come to call it the "pick-a-page book".

Thus began my voyages into Titan, the Fighting Fantasy world, and the gradual amassing of a quite sizable collection of these RPG books - which would include the very first (the original, you might say) of the Jackson/Livingstone collaborations, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain.  This battered old paperback contained a hero's quest against the wicked and powerful Zagor - the eponymous sorcerer - with many a travail during the travels into the wizard's mountainous lair ("Into the mountain / I will fall", as Black Francis crooned in 'Bird Dream of the Olympus Mons').  Fast forward, like a skipping record, to 2017 when I happened upon a post on a Doctor Who forum stating that Richard Fox and Lauren Yason (who had formerly worked on a number of Big Finish Doctor Who audios, so I was at least vaguely familiar with the names) had secured the rights to produce audio dramas based upon the Fighting Fantasy franchise.  I couldn't help but feel a bit of a tingle of excitement, yet there was a slight element of apprehension added to this admixture: what if, like other properties i'd revelled in as a youth (like, say, The Lord of the Rings for example) I found the dramatic interpretation of others clashing with the "proper" version that had long been in my own head?  Only one way to find out, I guess: let's pop in that disc, crank up the gramophone, and embark upon this tale of high adventure...

The first thing that I discover is that this, rather than being a dramatisation of a role-playing game - which is pretty much an impossible task, at least to do well: just look at the state of the Dungeons and Dragons (Courtney Solomon, 2000 [name and shame, and all that]) and Warcraft (Duncan Jones, 2016 [I expected better of you, Zowie!]) movies - is something of a prequel.  We are introduced firstly to kick-ass elven warrior Vale Moonwing (played by Rachel Atkins with a voice so huskily familiar that it's impossible not to picture Ms Moonwing as a pointy-eared Frances Barber) who is well on her quest towhence Zagor's mountain with her trusty bow 'the Giver of Sleep' and silver arrows to fell the wicked warlock (of the West).  Fighting through a snowstorm atop her trusty steed, she encounters an old man who turns out to be an astral emanation of Zagor himself, giving himself away be leaving no footprints behind him (how very Skywalker!) - then summoning a zombie which Vale quickly fells with an arrow.  presumably to the head, destroying the brain.  Zagor the necromancer can bend the dead to his will you see.  How very Nekromantik.

Stopping at an inn, as you do - questing being a thirsty beast - Vale meets the drunken adventurer Cassius Stormblade, which is so a name I can imagine a character in an '80s game like Golden Axe having.  Played by Tim Treloar, Big Finish's still-alive Jon Pertwee stunt double, Cassius is a sort of Welsh Boromir (one does not simply walk into Swansea) with a lilting voice and mighty sword.  He's on a quest of his own, to rescue his dwarf friend Gimorel who is trapped on the other side of Firetop Mountain.  Since the Tipsy Taff possesses a map of what lies under the mountain - a sort of Book of What is in the Duat for mystical mountain secret villain bases - Moonwing agrees to team up and enter the wizard's domain together.  And so into the mountain they will fall.

"There is a junction ahead!" says Vale.

"Ah.  Our first choice." replies Cassius.  ""Which way?  Left?  Or right?"

And there we have rendered one of the book's decision points.  Thankfully, they don't need to stop and take five minutes to roll dice and check whether their Luck Points are less than or equal to the result in order to arrive at their decision.  Though rounding the next corner, they do find themselves in a bit that I remember quite vividly, as they espy a sleeping sentry:

"What is that?  A goblin?"

"Too large.  See the tusks protruding from the lower jaw.  An orc."

Managing to pass via the usage of an invisibility potion, they proceed through a number of scenarios familiar from the book watched at all times by the all-seeing eyes of Zagor himself (Toby Longworth, another Big Finish veteran) who casts charms and curses and lays traps in their path, such as the choice between a brazen or iron helmet.  Vale refuses to choose, but Cassius in his arrogance - being the Fool of the cards that Zagor has cast - takes one for himself and finds the warlock whispering in his ear and getting inside his mind.  But this phantom doesn't want to teach him the music of the night, he wants him to steal away Vale's magical jewel: the weapon that she carries to use against the wily warlock.  Slanted and enchanted, Stormblade becomes an even more unreliable ally than he already was.

Coming to another very familiar point, the landing point for the ferry to cross the underground river that marks the boundary of Zagor's sanctum sanctorum much like the Borgo Pass traces the perimeter of Dracula's domain where the phantoms come to meet you, they have little choice but to ring the bell.  The old ferryman soon appears, as grouchy and haggling over the amount of gold pieces it will cost to cross the stream as ever he was (or, rather, will be in the future).  The voice of the ferryman is startlingly reminiscent of Ron Moody's zookeeper character from Freddie Francis' 1975 lycanthro-pic Legend of the Werewolf - which seems appropriate as it is he who informs Cassius that the rat bite he received earlier will corrupt his flesh and transform him into a were-rat, a process that will accelerate if he gives into anger.  Like the Hulk, but a rat, I guess.

Having moved, like God, over the face of the water - but not very gracefully - the dynamic dysfunctional duo find themselves fleeing from some Harryhausen-style reanimated skellingtons and arrive at another door (still, at least it's not another portcullis with a choice of levers to pull) only to hear some ominous sounds from within.

"There is something behind the door."

"That," Cassius replies in best Pink Panther style "is not a dog."

And so it it isn't, for just like me getting into the electro/intelligent dance music genres twenty years ago, they receive a sudden MINOTAUR SHOCK!

After escaping the clutches of Pasiphae's spawn, Cassius finds himself growing increasing agitated and ever more murine as he and Vale disagree whether to head East or West - he wanting to find his dwarven friends and she wishing to complete her mission to destroy Zagor.  After the parting of the ways, Vale finds that he has quite literally ratted her out, having pilfered her mystic jewel to trade to the warlock for the freedom of the dwarves.  You can't trust a warlock, though (I mean, it actually means "oath-breaker"), even when you've betrayed a friend for them, and the befurred and befanged Cassius finds himself greeting invisible ghost dwarves still digging in the mines of the mountain at the will of Zagor.  The despondent rodent manages to converse with the spectral voice of his late compatriot Gimorel, who is as Scottish as he is Welsh.  Are we "touring the regions" vocally?  Did Gammon Who Shouts Down Women On Question Time John Rhys-Davies set a precedent with Gimli?  Are dwarves Scottish?  I know some fair maidens who are.  And some ogres.

Anyway, as Vale faces the mighty dragon that Zagor has chained aside the mountain and Tramaloled on sleeping grass to guard the way out, Cassius finds a shred of inner humanity and takes on the Orc chief in possibly the world's first and certainly the world's finest Were-rat on Uruk-hai rumble. Resigned to his inhumanity and fate to never leave the mountain, he laments:

"I played the hero, but I was just a man with a sword.  Now, i'm not even that.  I'm a rat with claws."

"The game is over" smirks Zagor triumphant.  "You played well, but you have lost."

As Vale soars upon the freed dragon - tamed by an Elvish incantation - towards Darkwood (also known as the Forest of Doom) and the tower of the benevolent wizard Yaztromo (the Elphaba to Zagor's Galinda, to be all revisionist about things) she ponders.

"We can only hope that others will have the courage to face the warlock."

And so, the pieces are in place.  The die is cast.  Is your Skill less than or equal to the task?  Can you succeed where Vale and Cassius failed and take on the warlock of Firetop Mountain?  Then buy the book.