TOMB OF THE TRUMPS #20 - Dracula Pack IV

Welcomes guys and ghouls to the tatty old Tomb of the Trumps! Once again we are investigating the sources and inspirations for the now legendarily lurid original decks of Horror Top Trumps, and this week we appear to have a special déjà vu edition! Allow me to explain...

So then, here we have a famous villain who needs no introduction - Sax Rohmer's master criminal Fu Manchu!  And this likeness is very obvious based on a publicity still from 1932's Mask of Fu Manchu, where the evil mastermind was played by the great Boris Karloff. 

This was the only time Karloff the Uncanny played Rohmer's fiend in human form, and is widely considered the best of the Fu Manchu movies produced in the 1930s. However this is not the first time we have encountered the Devil Doctor in these packs of cards... For in the preceding deck, we had a card entitled Dr Syn, which as we discovered here was actually the man who inherited Boris' mantle as the big screen Fu Manchu - Sir Christopher Lee in one of the 1960s outings for the Lord of the Strange Deaths! 

And oddly enough, the next card in our deck features a return appearance too...

Now at first glance this appears to be one of those curiously rare cards - one with the right title showing the right monster! For in 1966, Toho, the home of Godzilla and all his suitamation chums, delivered a kaiju double-header in the form of War of the Gargantuas. Now weirdly enough, this flick is actually one of the more obscure movies in the canon of Frankenstein films... Allow me to quickly explain...  

Long story short time - when Toho got the rights to use King Kong in their movies, they also acquired the rights to another property developed by Kong's creator Willis O'Brien, namely the treatment for a movie in which the mighty ape was pitted against Frankenstein's monster. Toho loved the idea - and originally planned to replace Kong with Godzilla. But in the end, they not to add this to the Godzilla saga, deciding that King vs the Big G was a better bet. However the idea was still appealing, and so they jettisoned Kong from the concept as well, and thus Frankenstein Conquers the World (1965) was born. 

Now in this movie (as in the original treatment from O'Brien and screenwriter Richard Beck) thanks to the usual mad science involving radiation, the still beating heart of the original Frankenstein monster grows into a feral boy who won't stop growing, and eventually becomes a skyscraping caveman-like kaiju who wreaks havoc in the usual fashion. But as often is the case in these kind of movies, the kaiju Frankenstein ends up becoming the good guy (sort of) by whaling on another giant-size miscreant, in this case the hastily created Godzilla stand-in, Baragon. The movie ends with both monsters fall into a deep chasm. 

But of course, Toho could never let a good monster lie, and so the following year we got Frankenstein's Monsters: Sanda versus Gaira, which was renamed War of the Gargantuas in the West. In this movie, we learn that cells from the Frankenstein kaiju have mutated into two new monsters, one nice and one nasty. Needless to say, they end having lovely picnics together.... no, only joking! Of course, they end up causing massive property damage and having a massive punch up.

So with that background info out of the way, back to the card! Yes, at first glance we have a kaiju sized beast and a kaiju name, so we is done here then! But wait! Of course, nothing is that simple in the Tomb of the Trumps! The major issue here is that the beastie shown doesn't really resemble either Sanda or Gaira: it's missing a Beatle mop top for a start, and where's the Gallagher brothers style mono-brow?  

No, this so-called Gargantua is actually the monster from Mars featured in  It! The Terror From Beyond Space (1958) - see for yourselves! 

And this isn't first time this interstellar hooligan has made a crafty appearance in the old Horror Top Trumps! Previously we discovered him masquerading as "Lizard Man" (see here for details). Evidently this fella was a big favourite with the Unknown Artist! Whereas another famous monster he appears to have had something of a vendetta against... But more about that next time! 

TOMB OF THE TRUMPS #10 - Devil Priest Pack Part X

Welcome dear friends once again to the Tomb of the Trumps! Tirelessly tracking down the image sources that were ripped off, I mean, provided inspiration for the Unknown Artist who created the art for the two Horror themed packs of Top Trumps back in the late 70s. 

First up, we have quite a tricky one...

...which  has bamboozled many other searchers over the years, with some pointing to the bony-faced killer in 1964's The Phantom of Soho as the true identity of the Living Skull. However the source for this grinning ghoul is actually not quite that obscure, but is very easy to overlook all the same. It is in fact a character named Dr Death who appears in the 1974 AIP flick Madhouse which starred Vincent Price and Peter Cushing. In this movie, Vincent Price plays an aging horror star, Paul Toombes, who made his name appearing in a series of movies which had the character of Dr Death as the main hero/villain. However when the franchise is to be restarted with Toombes coming out of retirement to play the role, the good Doctor seemingly steps off the silver screen to commit a series of bloody murders... Anyhow the mystery killer appears in the movie like this - 

And you can hear more about this movie, alongside some other Vincent Price gems, on my podcast here

But moving swiftly on! We have another card that proved to be a bit of a challenge but for entirely different reasons!

Now this scaly fellow I more or less recognised straightaway back when I was a nipper, for I recognised it from a still I'd seen in a monster movie book I'd had out from the library. It was in fact copied more or less exactly, with the only artistic flourish on the card being the deliciously over-the-top dribbles of blood. The still in question was from the classic 1958 SF horror It! The Terror From Beyond Space. However when I came to write this week's edition of Tomb of the Trumps, could I find that picture anywhere? Could I hell! I was beginning to think I'd imagined it, when a good friend offered to go through his collection of monster movie tomes, and thankfully for my sanity, we discovered the elusive still in Dennis Gifford's A Pictorial History of Horror Movies, a fantastic tome that has many rare stills reproduced within. 

Anywho, what of the movie? Well, It! The Terror From Beyond Space is a smashing tale of some brave astronauts who after touching down on an alien world to mount a rescue mission, discover they have picked up an monstrous hitchhiker, which lurks in the bowels of the ship. The unwelcome guest proceeds to chomp down on the crew one by one. And it... I'm sorry, I mean... It! nearly scoffs the lot of them until our heroes come up with the cunning plan to blow the ugly bugger out into space through the airlock! 

And if you are thinking old Mr Jim is getting a bit befuddled and confusing a '50s monster flick with a certain Ridley Scott classic, think again! For It! The Terror From Beyond Space was indeed a prime influence on Alien - indeed I recall reading reviews of that movie back in 1979/80 which didn't hail Alien as a modern classic but actually dismissed it as merely a gorey remake of It! The Terror From Beyond Space. How times change! Anyhow you can hear more about the movies that were ripped off by, I mean, which inspired Alien here