TOMB OF THE TRUMPS #14 - Devil Priest Pack Part XIV

Welcome back once again to the cavalcade of scary monsters and super creeps that is the Tomb of the Trumps! And this time we have some freaky folks that have proved over the years to be somewhat fiendish for students of Horror Top Trumpology to identify! First up we have this fishy fellow!

Now then, this weed-wreathed chap has foxed many folks, and this is down to a couple of key reasons. Firstly the still it is copied from doesn't appear to be anywhere online bizarrely - yes, hard to believe as it is, not everything is online! And secondly, although he (and indeed his weedy brethren) do appear in a reasonably well-known cult movie, he is never shown for very long on screen, and more importantly in the pose seen in the card. For the still the card is based on was a special publicity shot showcasing the creature design rather than a shot from an actual scene in the movie. 

But having seen the aforementioned publicity shot in a couple of horror movie tomes in the '70s, your humble scribe recognised him instantly - for this is a gill-man from City Under the Sea (1964) also known as War-Gods of the Deep in the US. City Under The Sea took its name from the Edgar Allan Poe poem of the same title, and hence fits loosely into AIP's cycle of Poe movies. Like the classic Corman productions that preceded, the movie stars the legendary Vincent Price, and was also was the last movie made by noted director Jacques Tourneur. Co-starring alongside St. Vincent was Tab Hunter, Susan Hart and David "Mr Banks in Mary Poppins" Tomlinson in a tale of Victorian folks who discover an undersea proto-steampunk kingdom of shipwrecked sailors run by Price, a Captain Nemo style maverick. It's a very fun slice of gothic SF, and the only downside to the movie really is that the wonderful gill-men costumes aren't ever seen quite to their full advantage - although they do look very menacing in the underwater sequences. However here he is in his full glory! 

So then, with that marine mystery wrapped up, let's move on to one of the most perplexing cards in the Horror Top Trumps world...

Alright, I appreciate that several pressing questions immediately spring to mind on seeing this card; ranging from the reasonable "what's the Norse god Thor doing in a horror themed deck?", to the more blunt - "what in the seven names of the fuck is that?!?"  And the answer to both these queries I'm afraid is that I have no bloody idea either! I can only assume that the fumes of the paints and pens used to create these cards were very potent indeed...

However, I do have a possible answer to that third question hammering inside your skull - why does in the name of Loki does he have four eyes?  Well, as we have already seen, and will see again, a favourite trick employed by the Unknown Artist who did these decks to disguise the fact that he was simply copying off various stills and pictures Top Trumps probably had no copyright clearance for whatsoever, was to add or subtract assorted ocular organs. Hence poor old Babs Steele went all cyclops when a pic of her from Curse of the Crimson Altar became High Priestess of Zoltan (see here for details).

So then, the quad-vision this strange figure is equipped with is a dead-giveaway that despite all evidence to the contrary suggesting that this is a product of a deranged imagination, "Thor" must have a basis somewhere in reality! Albeit a very heavily disguised one! For look closely at the card.... go on, I dare you! Observe the extremely shaky physique! And all those weird lines that suggest that our Unknown Artist was attempting something else before deciding to give up and just cover the lot with spikes and weird sketchy armour? Is it armour? Buggered if I know! However being no stranger to the pencil case and paint box myself, I can spot the signs of an artist improvising to cover-up a massive cock-up any day of the week! 

For "Thor" I believe began life as a copy of the famous Frank Franzetta painting "The Barbarian". Now I know that seems unlikely at first... but the more you look at the two images the more similarities you will see. Both have the same pose, and the sword hilts are identical. And their silhouettes are the same shape too - which is why Thor's head and helmet are so weird-looking. Indeed you can see traces of long hair underneath the helmet, and other signs that he was doing a more faithful copy but got the arms so wrong he decided to improvise wildly. Hence the Barbarian's spiky necklace becomes a weird goatee, and there's a liberal, almost frantic application of eyes and spikes in the hope that no one will notice he's attempted to rip off Franzetta and cocked it up royally!

Ah well, I suppose we getting near the end of the Devil Priest pack and I'm guessing a deadline was looming! And that might explain the lurid and bizarre offerings we're looking at at next time...     

TOMB OF THE TRUMPS #03 - Devil Priest Pack Part III

Once again we are back exploring the secret origins of the fabled Horror Top Trumps from the 1980s! And this time we will see how some cards, incredibly, actually managed to match an appropriate image with the right name...

So then, absolutely no prizes for identifying this one! For it is one of the all-time great movie monsters - the Gill Man! He was the last addition to the panoply of Universal monsters, coming when the original house of horrors was moving away from the gothic chills of Drac and Frank and into the terrors of atomic age SF. Surfacing in 1954, The Creature From the Black Lagoon is now recognized as a classic monster movie, and was directed by Jack Arnold in an extremely fertile period that saw him directing other classics such as Tarantula! (1955) and The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). In true Universal fashion, it was followed up with two sequels - Revenge of the Creature (1955) and The Creature Walks Among Us (1956), but of course also in true Universal fashion, the sequels did lessen in quality with each subsequent movie. 

A redesigned Gill Man would later appear many years later in Fred Dekker's homage to the Universal horrors, The Monster Squad (1987), and our amphibious friend would also make a guest appearance in The Munsters as Uncle Gilbert, where it was revealed he had a fortune in old Spanish dubloons and used to be a politician! Speaking of comedy capers, many folks think that as a late addition to the Universal canon, the Creature was spared a run-in with Abbot and Costello - however this was not the case. For while our fishy friend was avoided an appearance in one of the horror-comedy feature films that finished off the rest of the Universal horror crew, the Creature did appear in a sketch with the comic duo in the Colgate Comedy Hour TV show. 

While on the Creature trivia tip - the first movie was released in 3D, and indeed is still regarded as one of the best movies ever to utilize this cinematic sorcery. However contrary to popular belief, the movie didn't use the red/green anaglyph 3-D method - apparently like nearly all of the 3D flicks of the '50s, it used an earlier version of the polarised 3D system that modern-day 3D movies use! The idea that the movies in the 3D craze of the 1950s used the two colour system derives partly from movies like Creature From the Black Lagoon being reissued to the theatres in the 1970s with the anaglyph systems doing the 3D shenanigans. 

A remake of The Creature From the Black Lagoon has long been promised, but despite various projects being mooted since the 1980s, and assorted big names being attacked to the project, so far the Creature has not resurfaced. He was intended to have a guest appearance in the mega-turkey Van Helsing (2004) but our wily amphibious friend dodged that bullet... 

Our next card is slightly trickier, although the name is (sort of) right and the image has been faithfully copied from movie stills. Indeed despite being a huge fan of the classic fantasy flick from which this particular one-eyed horror hails from, it was a good while before the penny dropped. And that's largely because the card isn't showing the beast in all its glory. For this is no ordinary cyclops, this is actually the Centaur that appears in the finale of Ray Harryhausen's Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) - ah, you see it now, don't you! 

Look - the same swept-back hair-do, accessorized with an ethnic necklace and spiky heavy metal bracelet! Originally our mono-visioned My Monstrous Pony was apparently scripted to fight a Neanderthal giant, but in the end this was changed to the Griffin that now flaps in. Incidentally, the primitive brute would resurface as the friendly monster Trog in a later Harryhausen movie, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977).