HYPNOGORIA 268 - Kaiju History Part VI - The Lost World

In this episode, we take an in-depth look at The Lost World (1925) the first screen adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic novel, and learn how Willis O'Brien brought dinosaurs to life in this silent blockbuster.

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FROM THE GREAT LIBRARY OF DREAMS 113 - The Horror of the Heights by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Another tale of giant monsters from the great Sir Arthur Conan Doyle! In this chiller we learn of the monstrous creatures lurking in the upper stratosphere! 

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HYPNOGORIA 266 - Kaiju History Part IV

In this chapter we discover assorted monsters from lost worlds created Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and encounter the first dinosaurs on the big screen! 

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HYPNOGORIA 265 - Kaiju History Part III - Monster Tales

In this chapter we meet the earliest examples of dinosaurs, colossal beasts, and giant mutant monsters in fiction!

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FROM THE GREAT LIBRARY OF DREAMS 111 - One Prehistoric Night by Philip Barshofsky

A vintage science fiction tale from the golden age of pulp magazines, a story which pits dinosaurs against Martian invaders! 

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FROM THE GREAT LIBRARY OF DREAMS 108 - The Monster of Lake LaMetrie by Wardon Allan Curtis

Another early tale of a surviving prehistoric monster, but this story about a lake-dwelling dinosaur takes a very bizarre turn... 

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HYPNOGORIA 259 - Kaiju History Part II

In this chapter we explore the discovery of prehistoric megafauna and dinosaurs and the wave of dinomania in popular culture that followed. We investigate the dubious but highly influential report of a surviving pterodactyl, and find the first kaiju in fiction courtesy of Mr Jules Verne!

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FROM THE GREAT LIBRARY OF DREAMS 107 - The Lizard by CJ Cutcliffe Hyne

As a little crossover with the Kaiju History podcasts on our other show, we have a Victorian tale of a chap who discovers a living fossil. But unfortunately, this surviving saurian is extremely large and very hostile... 

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HYPNOGORIA 258 - Kaiju History I - Ancient Origins

A new monster-sized podcast series begins!  We explore the origins of the kaiju movie, and in this first chapter delve into ancient Japanese legends and folklore and discover the forebears of our modern cinematic titans - the yokai!

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COMMENTARY CLUB 089 - Gamera: Guardian of the Universe

For our cult movie selection, we are sticking with kaiju movies, and revisiting Gamera: Guardian of the Universe (1995), the first movie in of the Heisei series for Godzilla's great rival monster! You will believe a giant fire-breathing turtle can fly!   

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Commentary Club 088 - King Kong (1933)

First show of a new year and we are looking at an all-time classic - the original King Kong from 1933!

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COMMENTARY CLUB 064 - Pacific Rim

For our cult movie this time, once again we cancel the apocalypse and revisit the glorious mecha-kaiju smackdown that is Guillermo del Toro's Pacific Rim (2013)

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COMMENTARY CLUB - Easter Special 2022 - Gamera Vs Jiger

Thanks to a random search involving the word "egg", we've ended up with a kaiju movie from 1970 - giant radioactive turtle Gamera takes on grumpy devil dinosaur Jiger!

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COMMENTARY CLUB 012 - Space Amoeba (1970)

It's crap movie time again, and as Godzilla is on the loose in the cinemas once again, we thought it would be fun to watch an old kaiju movie! Hence we settle down with Space Amoeba (1970) from Toho Studios which features not one, but three giant monsters!

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MICROGORIA 68 - Godzilla King of the Monsters

In the first of a few little mini-casts sprinkled on the feed while The Mound runs, Mr Jim takes a look at the latest chapter of the Monsterverse, Godzilla King of the Monsters

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Inktober 2018 - Week 1

Well, it's that time of the year once again, so here are my collected scribbles for #inktober! This year, I thought it would be fun challenge to produce drawings every day using the official list of prompt words pictured above. And so far, it's working out rather well! Whether I stick with it, remains to be seen... Tune in next week to find out! Anyway, here's the first week's results! 

Day 1 - "Poisonous" - fairly straight-forward this one!

DAY 2 - "Tranquil" - This is my Mum's dear old little dog Penny, who went to her permanent rest aged 17 not long ago 

DAY 3 - "Roasted" - I went for something with an old school RPG vibe for this one! 

DAY 4 "Spell" - I stuck with the white on back and D&D flavours for this one too

Day 5 - "Chicken" - Toughest word so far... And I couldn't bring myself to do some doodle of an ordinary fowl so went for intergalactic space-bastard, the cyborg kaiju Gigan... who looks a little bit like a chicken...

Day 6 "Drooling" - I stuck with the big monsters vibe, and created this chap who may be a distant relation of 2000 AD's Satanus!

Day 7 "Exhausted" - Another tough one, but I thought I'd even up the odds with this one...

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 #09 - Devil Priest Pack Part IX

Welcome once again to the dark and dubious world of Tomb of the Trumps! This week our investigations of the inspirations of the infamous vintage Horror Top Trumps, first dumps us in a very dank dungeon, the domain of Killer Rat! 

Now this was a very tricky fellow to track down! Indeed many of my predecessors who have probed the mysterious and arcane origins of the Horror Top Trumps concluded that this was a rare example of a wholly original piece by our Unknown Artist. And in all fairness, there seemed a reasonable assumption as there was no relevant rat-man in any monster movie that could have served as a model for this beastie. However there was something naggingly familiar about him, something I recognised even when I had these cards as a nipper, but could never quite place... That is until now! 

First up, the whole rodentine thing is something of a red herring, for what we have here is a bit of artistic collage. Yes, this is actually a rather better known monster disguised with a new head. Now the actual rat bonce could have been copied from almost anywhere - not wanted to sound rat-ist here, but they do all look alike! However given our Unknown Artist's usual selection of sources for images to copy from, I'd reckon a still for either killer rat flick Willard (1971) or its sequel Ben (1972) as the model for the rat head itself. But the main figure comes from a rather less obscure source. 

Now the key clues here are the barred window and the ripped white shirt. Ring any bells yet? No? Well, how about this... The bars suggest a scene in a prison cell, while the style of the shirt, one of those floppy affairs favoured by Romantic poets, suggests a ye olden days settings. Furthermore the fact it is torn rather suggests a violent bodily transformation has occurred. And the image of a rodent headed man does in itself conjure the words 'wererat'. So then, given that the rat head is paste-on job, we should be looking to werewolf cinema! 

Now then, can you name a movie in which a man transforms into a werewolf while in jail? Well, if you are in anyway acquainted with cinematic lycanthropy, I'm sure you know the answer - Hammer's 1961 classic Curse of the Werewolf. So then, I began scouring stills from that movie, and just for good measure it's demi-remake from Tyburn Legend of the Werewolf  (1975), which also features a floppy shirted wolf-man. However rather frustratingly I could not find a photo that matched, and it looked like the trail of the Killer Rat had gone cold...

...Until I remembered our Unknown Artist' previous form for cribbing from 1970s monster mags. Then it clicked - and I knew why this image had always been oddly familiar. In 1976, British comics maestro Dez Skinn launched the House of Hammer, a monthly mag devoted to the legendary horror film studio. And as well as articles and features on classic horror flicks, each issue boasted a comics adaptation of a classic Hammer movie by some of the finest creators working in the field at the time. Now Issue #10, published in March 1978, saw a gorgeous comicstrip version of Curse of the Werewolf, with art by the great John Bolton, and flipping through my aged copy, I found at last the template for the elusive Killer Rat! 

Note the pose and the distinctive shirt tatters - large drape on the left, and a pointy shred flapping out to the right!  On a purely personal and utterly self-indulgent note, I must say it's so satisfying to finally find the origin of Killer Rat - this one has been bugging me literally since I first got the Devil Priest pack three decades ago!

Thankfully the next exhibit in our rogue's gallery is far easier to identify!  

Now I'm sure this chap needs no introduction to kaiju fans, for "The Living Gargoyle" is in fact one of Godzilla's famous foes - the intergalactic space bastard Gigan. In the original cycle of Big G movies, the Showa series, this cyborg kaiju was first summoned to earth in Godzilla Vs. Gigan (1972) by aliens from the M Space Hunter Nebula, and called in once again by undersea miscreants from Seatopia the following year in Godzilla Vs. Megalon (1973). He would later appear again in more recent times in the third cycle of Godzilla movies, the Millennium series, in Godzilla: Final Wars (2004), actually the final Big G movie from Toho (well, at least for now). In this flick, which features a whole array of famous kaiju, Gigan got to appear in two forms - in his original incarnation, and then later resurrected with new cybernetic enhancements, most notably twin chainsaws replacing his hook hands! Fun fact - Gigan was the first of Godzilla's foes to make the Big G bleed! And he was an utter bastard too - aside from some distinctly dirty fighting techniques, twice the big cyborg abandoned the monster we was allied, fucking off back into space when Godzilla was winning! Yes, there was a large element of chicken in Gigan, and not just in his design! 

However we do have a further possible mystery in this card. As we have discovered previously, our Unknown Artist was prone not just cribbing the monsters but also their victims. And given  the prone chap on this card has a very distinctive hand shape on his out-thrown arm, I rather suspect he has been copied from a movie still. But so far I've been unable to place the poor disemboweled sod... But if you recognise him, do drop me a line!