Weird Public Domain Stuff

I sat down and read this old W.F. Harvey story expecting some cheap ghost bullshit, but damn, it got under my skin worse than a week-long hangover. It's mean, pointless in the best way, and strangely funny in that ugly way life usually is when it decides to screw you over for no good reason. Not bad for 1919.

If you want to read or download the FREE story directly (public domain):

Project Gutenberg Australia (full text): https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0609231h.html

“Famous Modern Ghost Stories” on the regular Project Gutenberg site: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/15143/15143-h/15143-h.htm

Imma be honest, I have no idea what the fuck is going on here. It's a stop-motion freakshow called The Grasshopper and the Ant. It's a 1911 film by Ladislas Starevich who would collect real insects, kill them, stick bits of wire and wax in their legs, and jerk them frame by frame so the grasshopper fiddles and drinks and kicks the hardworking ant while the summer burns away.

Then it looks sorta like winter hits and the grasshopper and his drunk stag-beetle buddy start to freeze and starve, the beetle croaks first, and the grasshopper begs at the ant’s door only to get told to go dance some more before the door slams shut and the bug drops dead in the snow.

This glorious 1965 Italian (english-dubbed) sleaze-fest Bloody Pit of Horror feels like the whole damn thing was gift-wrapped in baby oil and bad intentions just for me. A dude struts around in shiny red tights as the Crimson Executioner, flexing his oiled-up muscles and ranting about purity while he ties half-naked models to rusty torture devices that look like they crawled out of a carnival junkyard built for perverts.

Idiots break into his crumbling castle to shoot trashy horror book covers, ignore every warning, and get picked off in the most ridiculous, badly dubbed ways possible while the movie pretends it’s delivering pure Gothic terror. In the end it’s nothing but sexy, brainless B-movie trash.

Sweaty beefcake bullshit wrapped in cobwebs and screams. And goddamn if I didn’t love every pulpy, over-the-top minute of it. :)

The 1968 Roger Corman quick-buck job Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women is pure drive-in garbage and I mean that in the best possible way. Astronauts smash down on foggy Venus, accidentally fry some flying lizard the local blonde Venusian broads treat like God himself, so the telepathic sea-shell-bikini girls turn their psychic powers loose and try to wipe the Earth men off the map.

It doesn’t work. The boys blast off, ditch their busted robot in a volcanic mud pit, and leave the planet behind while the women keep staring at the sky with murder in their eyes.

Corman grabbed big chunks of a 1962 Soviet sci-fi picture, painted over the red stars, dubbed it into bad English, then hired Peter Bogdanovich to shoot fresh scenes full of Mamie Van Doren and other stacked blondes wiggling around in clamshell tops just to juice up the American market.

The whole thing is cheap, obvious, and shameless, exactly the kind of trash that makes a man smile in the dark. And yeah, it’s goddamn awesome.

The Vampire Bat from 1933 is a cheap, fog-soaked creepy little pre-Code bastard. Lionel Atwill plays the brilliant but completely cracked Dr. von Niemann, smiling like a man who just figured out how to turn blood into poetry while the whole village drops dead with every drop drained out of them.

Fay Wray and Melvyn Douglas run around looking pretty and panicked in the middle of it all, shadows thick as cigarette smoke, laboratory sets dripping with that perfect low-budget dread that actually works. It’s pure B-movie trash from the early thirties, the kind you put on when you want to feel something cheap and real without all the Hollywood horseshit.