Bill Gaines and EC at the Horror Hall of Fame-1990's

Here's the story of EC comics capsulized and leading up to Bill Gaines receiving a much deserved award from the Horror Hall of Fame for the classic 1950's line.

Raquel Welch Sci-Fi Dance

We all thought the world of Raquel Welch during our formative years but I look at her often now and wonder why (other than the obvious hormonal issues). Her delivery was often terrible and on talk show appearances her breathy attempts at serious topics showed her to be not the smartest sex symbol of all time. When she started her musical career (where I aaaalmost saw her at the legendary Beverly Hill Supper Club in 1976) it became obvious her talents didn't lie there either. There are still plenty of iconic photos of Raquel that I enjoy seeing but I rarely think of her the way I once did. All that said, she danced pretty well in this 1970 sci-fi strangeness!

Little Lulu Cartoon-1990's

LITTLE LULU is yet another of those "childish" comics I avoided in my adolescence that I've come to appreciate over time. Been reading a lot of them lately (by the great John Stanley!) Here's an odd mix of classic and modern in one of Lulu's 1990's HBO appearances.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith

I just joined a Yahoo group devoted to the classic comic strip character BARNEY GOOGLE and I'm being inundated by emails featuring scans of wonderful daily and Sunday strips! This is NOT one of those dormant groups that's for sure! Here's one of the SNUFFY SMITH TV cartoons from the early sixties featuring Barney. He had been so long absent from the strip by my time that I had never actually seen anything but his name in the Sunday papers as I was growing up!

Will the Real Gene Roddenberry Please Stand Up?

Orson Bean asks "What's a 'Ray Bradbury?' One of the two--both terrible--fake Genes says he was "an early producer of the show." When asked, "What else is Leonard Nimoy known for?", I'm not certain if they were expecting the answer that he sings or does photography or writes poetry but what they got from a fake Gene was , "He also acts." WTF?

Movies That Fell Through the Cracks # 58

THE HOUSE ON SKULL MOUNTAIN from 1974 was just about the most generic horror film of its day. If not for the African-American angle, there would be absolutely nothing to distinguish it from dozens of grade B and lower potboiler melodramas from the 1940's through the 1950's. There's a creepy old house on a scary mountain, a dying woman with mysterious secrets, the gathering of the relatives (IE: suspects), voodoo and a series of unexplained murders.

The writer has not a single other credit in films. The director is credited as having done just about everything behind or in front of the camera...but rarely more than a handful of times. This was his sole directorial credit. The lead in this mostly black cast list is oddly given to reliable character actor Victor French, a mainstay of Michael Landon's various TV series and star of his own racially themed (but unfunny) late seventies sitcom, CARTER COUNTRY. Mike Evans from ALL IN THE FAMILY and THE JEFFERSONS is the only other familiar face. The rest of the cast are all either unknowns for whom this was their only credit or small-time character actors whose later roles included credits such as "Zombie # 3."

THE HOUSE ON SKULL MOUNTAIN is certainly not a bad film but by no one's definition is it a good one either. It's just kind of there. If you do catch it anytime soon, the memory will no doubt quickly fade.

Rare Blair

Here are a few pictures of the ever-popular Linda Blair that I ran across on the Net recently that I had never seen before. Most are from the seventies but the one with her then beau Rick James (Yes, THAT Rick James) dates from the early 1980's. I've seen a couple other shots from that shoot but I'd never seen this one.

To find out what Linda Blair's up to these days, don't forget to click on the link to the lower right for the Linda Blair WorldHeart Foundation.