TEENAGE STONE AGE

There have been some sad showbiz passings recently: RIP to Ron Glass, the ever-acerbic Detective Harris of Barney Miller, departed at 71, and Napoleon Solo himself, Robert Vaughn, departed at 83.

This week…

Monster-of-the-Week: …the nod goes to the behemoth in this Reynold Brown poster for Roger Corman’s 1958 epic Teenage Caveman…

…one of Vaughn’s first starring roles. This beast is far more impressive than any of the creatures actually seen in Corman’s hilarious, endearing saga—most of which are stock footage cribbed from earlier movies like One Million B.C.

HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE SUCH A FREAK? [EIGHT-LEGGED, THAT IS]

Congratulations to the great Bob Dylan on this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature. Earlier this very week I had been singing along with “Like a Rolling Stone” in my truck and thinking what a really great poem it is. Nice to know I was right.

Anyway, in honor of one of Dylan’s less-celebrated works, his 1971 stream-of-consciousness tome Tarantula…

Monster-of-the-Week: ...here’s one of our favorites, the title character of Jack Arnold’s 1957 Tarantula… 

ANGRY BIRD

In honor of the entertaining Olympics, winding down this week, a Brazilian monster would seem in order, so…

Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s award this magnificent painting by the great Reynold Brown of Curucu…

…supposedly a legendary bird-beast of the Amazon that menaces the ever-fabulous Beverly Garland in Universal’s 1956 Curucu, Beast of the Amazon…

Unfathomably, this art went unused in the poster in favor of this…

I can only imagine that this was because Brown’s full-view realization of the monster was so infinitely superior to what was revealed in the course of the film, Universal may have feared rioting in the theaters.