Todd’s Horror Movie Blog

Before helping William Shatner with his early Tek novels and his own mystery novels about a wise cracking Groucho Marx solving murders in 1940’s Hollywood, Ron Goulart wrote a bunch of sci fi satire mysteries featuring overly competent laser packing heroes contending with interfering female reporters, inept rival investigators and sarcastic robots (the Tek novels being an obviously more serious version of these earlier books).

One of his last PBO’s was a bit of a departure from his usual futuristic comedies.  Skyrocket Steele is set in the late thirties.  The hero is a pulp writer who gets hired by a film studio to work on their new cliffhanger serial, Skyrocket Steele, a Flash Gordon rip off about an earth man fighting aliens on another planet.

Things take a strange turn when the writer uncovers that the props for the film, like ray guns and rocket ships, actually work.  Further investigations reveal that the studio has been infiltrated by actual aliens who are using the prop department to build weapons so they can take over the Earth and use it as a base for their continuing war with another planet in their own galaxy.  The studio is also infiltrated by their enemy aliens who are trying to steal the weapons from the prop department and take over the Earth for similar reasons, leading to an all out fire fight in the skies over LA.

The book is a breezy read with such humorous touches as the hero’s writing partner never quite getting around to writing anything due to a myriad of excuses always ending with a “relax, it’s Hollywood” slacker attitude, a budding  romance between the hero and a studio secretary full of Thin Man-esque quips and a dim witted thug with the hots for the studio’s biggest star who keeps popping up at the wrong time, misreading what he sees and punching out the hero.

Underneath all this is a growing sense of paranoia, as the hero, and the reader, are never quite sure who is and isn’t an alien.  A little more light hearted than Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Who Goes There, the fast paced adventure is a pleasant mixture of comedy, romance and sci fi action.

Last Summer’s Super 8, a movie set in the 70’s about a group of kids making a movie with a super 8 film camera that become involved with an escaped alien and government cover up, could have been a story about Donald F Glut (without the alien part of course).  Back in the 60’s he made scads of horror and superhero super 8 films with his friends  that got him such notice that he made some with professional actors like Kenne Duncan and Bob Burns. In adulthood he has gone on to write comic books for Gold Key, authored books on serials, dinosaurs, and horror films, and directed straight to DVD films.

Back in the 70’s he also wrote several PBO horror books.  Frankenstein Lives Again was the first in what was to be a series of books about everyone’s favorite man made creation.  It starts out like a sequel to the original novel with a scientist traveling to the Artic to find the Frankenstein Monster, using the book by Mary Shelly as his guide. After finding him frozen in a block of ice and fighting off a tribe of natives who worship the creature as a  god, the scientist takes him back to Frankenstein’s castle to revive him.

At this point, about halfway into the book, it morphs into a Hammer Film, with the scientist and his buxom, blond assistant reviving the monster, who isn’t too happy about being revived and escapes from the castle, only to come under the hypnotic influence of an ancient magician who uses the Monster to revenge himself on town leaders who have wronged him. The book ends like a Universal Film as the torch bearing villagers (in 1970?) storm the castle while all the principals are fighting on the roof during a lightning storm.

Like many PBO’s from the time, Frankenstein Lives Again is a short and fast paced adventure that includes sevral bloody murders commited by the Monster, a knock down drag out fight between the scientist and the magician’s hulking assistant, and the obligatory ripping open of the heroine’s blouse by the lecherous villain.  A fun night’s reading all around.

One of my greatest heroes back when I was growing up in the seventies was Carl Kolchak, the rumpled, argumenative and perpetual loser who couldn’t cross the street without running into a monster and couldn’t get anyone to believe him.  He went through two tv movies, the first based on a novel by Jeffery Rice, and a short lived TV show before seemingly disappearing.

But like the supernatural creatures he constantly battled, the intrepid investigative reporter couldn’t stay dead.   The movies and show constantly turned up on TV and always garnered good ratings, something that couldn’t be said of the revamped X Files inspired remake that lacked the charm and humor of Darren McGavin’s original portrayal.

The original’s popularity has of course led to short story collections authored by prominant mystery and horror writers, graphic novels and of course the occasional full length novel.  The latest novel to feature everyone’s favorite hard luck hero by C J Henderson is The Black and Evil Truth.

Picking up from Mark Dawadziak’s Grave Secrets from 1994, Kolchak is still in LA working for the Hollywood Dispatch tabloid with, as always.  Tony Vincinzo as his long sufferiing editor and still fueding with perpetual foil prissy Ron Updike.  When a strange murder in West Virginia comes over the AP, the publisher, who can’t stand Kolchak, sends him to investigate just to get him out of the office.

After arriving in the small town Kolchak, for once doesn’t antagonize the police, mostly because they treat him like a real person instead of an unwanted pest and Kolchak reciprocates.  Which allows him to be on hand when a family and their entire livestock are the next victims, and also blows away any hopes Kolchak harbored that for once he wasn’t going to find a monster committing the murders.  After teaming up with a couple of X-File FBI agents, Kolchak uncovers a  conspiracy so vast that it reaches back to Kolchak’s first encounter with a vampire in Vegas and explains why he is always showing up in cities  just when something weird is about to happen.

The book deages Kolchak a bit, keeping him in his mid to late fifties, when by rights he should be in his late eighties, and brings him into the modern world, with him filing stories via internet from a laptop.  There is also a nod to the web community when a conspiracy buff reveals that Kolchak is a hero to conspiracy advocates and is well known around the world from his many mentions on web sites devoted to alien abductions and governemnt coverups.

Though a bit morose, self pitying, and bording on alcoholism from his many professional setbacks, Kolcak still has a lot fire left in him to discover and report the truth.  Its always good to know that Carl Kolchak is still out there taking on impossible odds armed with nothing but a belief in the public’s right to know and some sharply sarcastic onelines.