"The good news is your dates are here. The bad news is... they're dead."

(Played around with adding some type!)

"Night of the Creeps". No other movie captures the same amount of nostalgia and fun that i had watching horror movies when i was a kid. It was one of the awesome covers i always glimpsed in the horror section of the local Wizard Video, or Jumbo Video. I saw it around the same time i discovered other horror films, like "Creepshow" or "The Thing", but it always stood out as being the most fun, if not the overall best. It's an absolute classic 80's b-movie, and it has everything you could ever want for a night of movies, pizza and beer. To this day, i feel it really holds up.

Directed by Fred Dekker, of "Monster Squad" fame, "Night of the Creeps" concerns J.C. and Chris, two nerdy college students who accidentally release brain-eating alien parasites while trying to get accepted into a fraternity to impress a girl. Really. Tom Atkins plays the bad-ass Detective Cameron (all the characters have horror or sci-fi movie director names), a man with a shady past, who is investigating the rash of murders. Before long, the surviving characters have to fend off hordes of alien slugs and frat-boy zombies. It's so great.

the film manages to combine tropes from 50's science fiction, zombie movies, wacky college movies, and even a little slasher movie goodness, all into one wonderful package. It just got released on dvd for the first time a couple years ago, so please, give it a watch!

Check out the trailer here!

Here's the poster without the type added!

MANGA MONSTER SPOTLIGHT!

(My apologies for the lack of updates, i've been working on a number of commisions lately.)

I thought i'd do something a little different this week, and start a mini-series of "Feature Creature" entries focusing on an interesting villain, creature or monster from the best of horror manga. This is an area that is ripe with under-appreciated stories and characters. Every once in a while i'll focus on a new manga monster to break up the numerous movie monsters and poster designs. I hope it brings some cool work to the attention it deserves.

This week's entry, and the first Manga Monster entry, is the character Cat-Eyed Boy from the manga series of the same name by Kazuo Umezu. The Cat-Eyed Boy series of books concerns various traditional Japanese demons and monsters, and their unfortunate victims. Cat-Eyed Boy is the son of a cat demon who happens to look too much like a human boy, thus disgracing himself from the world of demons. He wanders the world of mankind, hiding from humans, and living sporadically in peoples' attics.

He brings misfortune and disaster with him wherever he stays, and usually helps out if he can to stop whatever monster happens to be making trouble. He can see in the dark, talk to cats, and is well informed about the world of spirits and demons. He has all the agility of a cat, and his shadow sometimes tries to kill him. He also solves an alarming number of problems by pissing on people.

While not as good as some of the other series by Kazuo Umezu, ("The Drifting Classroom" is a masterpiece.) it's still a wonderful series filled with crazy monsters, definitely holding it's own against other creature protagonists such as Hellboy. Highly recommended!

Check out the beautiful editions released by Viz for Western distribution here!

(Thanks to Kazuo Umezu!)