"The Most Fun You'll Ever Have... BEING SCARED!"

The brainchild of a collaboration between horror legends George A. Romero and Stephen King, "Creepshow" was an 80's campy horror classic. Inspired by the infamous horror comics from the 1950's such as "Tales From The Crypt", "Haunt of Fear" and "Vault of Horror", "Creepshow" was an anthology consisting of five shocking tales of monsters and zombies, with a wrap-around story to tie it all together.

The beauty of the anthology film was that if you thought the plot or the acting stunk, you only had to wait about ten minutes, and you'd get a brand new movie. My favourite of the five stories involved a horrible wolf-monkey monster that's found in an ancient crate under the stairs of a university. Somehow, it's stayed alive without food since 1834, and eventually it's utilized to get rid of a professor's obnoxious wife.

Besides that gem, we get a villainous Leslie Nielson, two seperate stories involving the vengeful walking dead, a Stephen King starring story where he gets infected with plant life from a meteor, cockroaches by the thousands, and some wicked animation to tie everything together. If you grew up with some of those vintage horror comics like i did, you owe it to yourself to see this movie. It's just a lot of fun.

Check out the trailer here!

"If you've never seen a melt movie before.... be prepared!"

"Street Trash"! "Street Trash" is something else, man. One of the sleazier and weirder horror comedies to emerge from the 80's, "Street Trash" concerns the homeless population of New York City, and the trials and tribulations they face. Whether it's avoiding Bronson, the insane Vietnam-vet who rules over the local junkyard, or just dealing with getting their next meal, life is tough.

Unfortunately, it's made quite a bit tougher when a local liquor store clerk unearths a crate of Tenafly Viper in the walls of his establishment. He sells the stuff to the local homeless at a dollar a bottle, not realizing that one sip of the rancid booze is enough to make a man melt into a pile of technicolour ooze!

Surprisingly competent, given the subject matter, "Street Trash" is pretty damn entertaining. It's never boring, often very funny in the vein of South Park or any of the Troma films, and the melt sequences are wonderfully realized.

If you've ever wanted to see a man melt into a neon mass of screaming flesh and then flush himself down the toilet, this is the film for you.

You can check out the trailer here!

"Kill one and two take its place!"

What starts as an eerie police procedural in the New Mexico desert, turns into an impressively shot and acted creature feature. It's revealed that nuclear bomb tests in the desert have mutated ants into gigantic crawling monsters, ravenous for human blood! It's up to the local authorities, and later, the army to stop them before it's too late.

Released the year after "The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms", it may not have been the first irradiated giant monster movie, but it's influences were to felt for years. The influence of "Them!" can be seen in "Aliens" and "Starship Troopers", among others. The special effects hold up today, and were in fact nominated for an academy award in 1955.

Anyway, if you haven't seen "Them!", now's a good time! It's great fun.

Check out the trailer here!

Happy New Year!

Hey guys, i hope everyone had a wonderful holiday and is ready for a new year. I, for one, am excited about what possibilities the year may hold in store. I'm eager to get back on schedule with the "Feature Creature" updates, and i hope you are all excited to see some new monster art. I really appreciate all the followers i have on both Blogspot and Tumblr, it really does mean a lot to me.

I did a painting for my all time favourite creature feature, The Thing, partly as a warm-up excercise, and partly to try out a slightly different style. I went into this illustration to see if could do a painting for a children's book retelling of John Carpenter's "The Thing". Because, why not? I had the idea that the thing has to focus REALLY hard on whatever it's imitating, otherwise it just falls apart into a mass of tentacles and limbs. Hence the thought bubble.

Anyhow, i hope you like it, and i'll see you guys soon with a new illustration.

Thanks!

"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!)

"And you will face the sea of darkness, and all therein that may be explored. "

A couple weeks back, i painted an illustration for Lucio Fulci's "Zombie", an incredibly violent horror film that was Italy's answer to "Dawn of the Dead". While i love that film, my favourite film by the director, Lucio Fulci, is "The Beyond".

Part of the three films that make up Lucio Fulci's "Gates to Hell" trilogy*, "The Beyond" focuses on a woman who inherits a hotel built on one of the seven cursed gateways to hell. Pandemonium ensues, in the form of ghostly blind girls, flesh-eating spiders, acid baths, crucified painters and more horrible things happening to eyeballs than should ever be contained in one film.

This one, like a lot of Italian cinema of the time, is not really about plot, or even characters. It works hard to put together a compelling and unsettling mood through the use of incredibly gruesome set-pieces, and iconic imagery. The vision of hell that is showcased towards the end of the film, and the character of Emily with her stark white eyes are most notable in this department. The score is one of my favourites, though the same composers' score for "City of the Living Dead" might barely beat it in my books.

If you haven't watched many Lucio Fulci films, this is a great place to start.

Check out the trailer here!

* The other two films in the "Gates to Hell" trilogy being "City of the Living Dead", and "House by the Cemetery", another couple favourites.