The Screengrab : Tales From The Crypt

Night of the Living Dead Comedians: The Farrelly Brothers' "Three Stooges" and Its Predecessors

Phil Nugent — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 17:45:00 GMT

The news that the Farrelly Brothers are going ahead with their proposed Three Stooges movie, with a dream cast that includes Sean Penn, (probably) Jim Carrey, and (keep your fingers crossed) Benecio del Toro), is the latest sign that even the people who make movies think they don't make them like they used to. Especially since the official invention of "pop culture" at some point around 1967, moviemakers have found it harder and harder to leave well enough alone and resist the temptation to bring back their old favorites. This is the dark, deranged side of the comebacks that directors like Quentin Tarantino and Darren Aronofsky have deliberately engineered for actors they like, such as John Travolta, Pam Grier, and Mickey Rourke, who have slipped from the A-list or, as in the case of Grier, never really had the chance at a role worthy of them when they were cult favorites. It may also be the next stage of decadence after movies like Peter Bogdanovich's 1975 At Long Last Love, a nostalgic attempt to create a 1930s musical comedy with Cole Porter score, as if it had just been found in a time capsule where it had lain slumbering for forty years, even though it inexplicably starred Burt Reynolds and Cybil Shepard. In 1995, Robert Zemeckis, a director who never met a technological gimmick he didn't like, used what then seemed like exciting new computer wizardry to make an episode of the HBO TV series Tales from the Crypt "starring" Humphrey Bogart; Bogart had to play a corpse, though, because the computers that snipped clips of him our of his old movies and inserted him into Zemeckis's new footage couldn't get his frozen face to move. Voiceover narration was supplied by Robert Saachi, an actor whose whole career is based on his physical and vocal resemblance to Bogart: he starred in a 1980 period detective movie called The Man with Bogart's Face, whose plot and supporting cast of characters were derived from assorted Bogart classics. More recently, the movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, a period fantasy that wore its computer-generated artificiality on its sleeve, used some old footage to have Laurence Olivier "play" its villain, though once again the dead star was unable to interact with the rest of the cast while unknowingly and involuntarily having one more bad movie added his IMDB page.

Of all dead stars, it makes sense that comedians would lead the league when it comes to inspiring people to want to bring them back. Many a kid has taken the first baby steps towards full-blown geekdom by working up imitations of some performer who's made him or her laugh. And laughter can make you feel so close to a performer that it's only natural to want more from them than we can ever get, especially in the case of those who were in an advanced state of rigor before some of their current fans were even born. In his comic book series Cerebus, which ran for 300 issues from 1977 to 2004, the writer-cartoonist Dave Sim paid affectionate, parodic tribute to a vast array of pop culture figures, ranging from Rodney Dangerfield and Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to Oscar Wilde and assorted Looney Tunes characters, by basing supporting players on their physical appearances and capturing their speech patterns, mating the perfect pitch of a perfect mimic to a true satirist's gift for being funny in character. The first real sign that Sim might be possessed of genius came when he introduced "Lord Julius", a major Cerebus character based on Groucho Marx, and proceeded to demonstrate that writing convincingly Grouchoesque dialogue was well within his range. Much later, the roped the Three Stooges into Cerebus, too. But Sim--like Paul Gulacy, another comics artist, who attracted some notoriety in the '70s and '80s for his habit of drawing movie performers (including Bogart and Woody Allen) into his strips--Sim didn't have to worry about whether his collaborators could hold up their end, or about making his resurrected stars believable in the flesh. Others who have tried to pull off what the Farrellys are shooting for have been...not so lucky.

BRAIN DONORS (1992)

Jerry (Rat Race) Zucker and his brother David (An American Carol) Zucker were the big wheels behind this movie, back around the time when they were still regarded, as well, the way the Farrellys are apparently regarded in the industry today. The idea was to revive Marx Brothers-style comedy using the script for A Night at the Opera as a base. Among other things, this resulted in a script credited as having been written by Pat Proft, the scribe of Police Academy and Bachelor Party, and suggested by George S, Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind. (One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn't belong...) The film stars John Turturro in the Groucho role, called Roland T. Flakfizer, because although Proft, in his rsearch, failed to grasp anything about how the Marx Brothers' comedy worked or how their characters were shaped, he did pick up on the funny name motif. The English comedian Mel Smith is supposed to be Chico, and someone named Bob Nelson, who was either encouraged to mug his ass off or suffered from a galvanic facial tic, is a surprisingly talkative Harpo figure. (There's also Nancy Marchand, who was unable to seem out of it convincingly enough to remind anyone of Margaret Dumont.) Directed by Dennis Dugan, a man who has reason to be very grateful for the career of Adam Sandler, Brain Donors shows little interest in aiming for the level of surreal verbal with that made Groucho and Chico living legends; instead, it concentrates on sloppy, mistimed slapstick, making it one of the few films that make you think, "Leslie Nielson did this a lot better--in Wrongfully Accused!" Because Proft read somewhere that the Marx Brothers were anarchic and subversive, whenever Turturro and company execute some sloppy, mistimed slapstick, some guy who looks as if he's played a lot of bankers in his time stands up, gets red in the face, and says something like, "I'm gonna get those guys, Ngggghhhh-ghhh!" Maybe Proft and Dugan were confused and thought that the Marx Brothers were three of the Little Rascals.

THE NEW ADVENTURES OF LAUREL AND HARDY: FOR LOVE OR MUMMY (1999)

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy have always been one of the most fervently beloved slapstick comedy teams among real afficionados of comedy, though their profile among the public at large has shrunk a bit in recent years, maybe because their style and presence were so graceful and elegant that their work strikes modern audiences as slow and lacking in the energy that comes from real comic aggression. For the people who made this attempt to revive "Laurel and Hardy" as a trademark-- treating the performers as characters who could be incarnated by new actors, Gailard Sartain and Bronson Pinchot---that translates into family-fun innocuousness. What's missing, aside from the falling-domino intricacy of the real Laurel and Hardy's complicated routines and the ease with which they had learned to execute them after years of practice, is the real affection viewers come feel the two shared for each other: Sartain and Pinchot are just two talented guys who couldn't get a better gig and, between them, seem to have at least three eyes on the clock. As for what F. Murray Abraham is doing here, I'm not even sure I want to know. (I remember a time, back around his Oscar win for Amadeus, when you used to hear people snicker that Abraham was pompous and took himself too seriously. Maybe we should all go over to his house and apologize for that before he starts begging his agent to get him a job as a contestant on the next series of I Love New York.

STOOGEMANIA (1986)

This meager-budgeted comedy, starring the gifted Josh Mostel (who had one of his first high-profile roles standing in for John Belushi in Delta House, the "official" TV sitcom-rip-off of National Lampoon's Animal House), isn't actually an attempt to revive the Stooges but a "tribute" to them that doubles as the screen's major repository of Stooges imitations. Mostel plays a schlub named Howard F. Howard who seeks medical help for the Stooges fixation that is threatening to upend his life. Half-assed as the whole thing is, the movie has a few conceits--such as its visit to Los Angeles's dreaded "Stooge Row", populated with Stooge-imitating Stooges freaks who are on their last legs after having worn out their welcome in polite society--that might have been amusing if the thing weren't so underfunded and Mostel had had a little help to get it off the ground. It all plays out like a padded promotional video for Jump 'N The Saddle Band's 1983 novelty hit, "The Curly Shuffle."

The Stooges--comprised, in their glory years, of Moe Howard, Larry Fine, and Moe's brother, the protean Curly--knew something themselves about the joys and sorrows of repackaging. They had started out in vaudeville supporting the tall, abrasive comedian Ted Healy, who in both his dress and demeanor suggested Bill O'Reilly playing Popeye Doyle in The French Connection. Originally, the third Stooge was Moe and Curly's brother Shemp Howard, but Shemp found getting yelled at and batted about the face by Ted Healy--a practice that Healy reportedly expected his employees to put up with whether they were on stage or off--such a joyless experience that he departed before the Stooges went to Hollywood. (Shemp and Moe both made their movie debuts in the 1919 Spring Fever, a short film in which they supported the baseball legend Honus Wagner.) The Stooges made Soup to Nuts, their first movie as a unit, complete with Healy and Curly, in 1930, four years before splitting off on their own.

The Stooges' golden era, the time they were making shorts for Columbia with Curly on board, lasted a little less than a dozen years. In 1945, Curly began slowing down, showing signs of the effects of his drinking and Christ knows how many hits to the head, and in 1946 he retired from the team after suffering a debilitating stroke. He was replaced by Shemp, who after his death in 1955 was in turn replaced by Joe Besser, who destablized the universe by brazenly violating the accepted terms of Stooge Law: Besser, when hit by Moe, insisted on hitting back. Columbia let their contract lapse in 1957, and that should have been the end of it. But when the Stooges were rediscovered by a new generation that saw their classic shorts on TV, they were given the opportunity to cash in, and the boys, who had never received princely wages in all their time at Columbia, needed the money. Now augmented by Joe DeRita--christened "Curly Joe" for Stooge purposes--instead of the retaliatory Besser, Moe and Larry would appear in a string of feature films, such as Have Rocket, Will Travel, The Three Stooges Meet Hercules and The Three Stooges Go Around the World in a Daze. Compared to the shorts that made the Stooges beloved, they serve as cautionary examples for the Farrellys and their new Stooges, because they established certain new rules about just how long you can stand to watch people doing this stuff to each other. Not to mention just how long it's healthy for people to, you know, do this stuff to each other.

Unwatchable #47: “Creepshow 3”

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

I can’t say I didn’t learn anything from Creepshow 3. For instance, I learned that, at some point, there must have been a Creepshow 2. I also learned that, unlike the first two Creepshow movies, the third one is not based on short stories by Stephen King. This is a good thing for him, as it saves him the trouble of having to file a lawsuit to have his name removed from the credits as he did with The Lawnmower Man. It’s not a good thing for us, the viewers, because King is someone who knows how to construct a horror story in the EC Comics mold, and the makers of Creepshow 3 could not construct a successful dump if you gave them three extra assholes.

Pardon my crudity but, after all, I just finished watching Creepshow 3, which is so crude it should be selling for $45 a barrel. Like the previous Creepshows, it’s an anthology film consisting of five loosely connected tales o’ terror. This time it took five different writers to come up with the stories, and if any of them had even a passing familiarity with EC Comics, I’ll eat my complete run of Tales From the Crypt. In fact, I’m not convinced that any of these scribes has ever read anything more challenging than the back of a cereal box. As a group, they don’t seem to understand that a good story is usually not simply a series of random events punctuated by gruesome bursts of gore – that a good story should have some sort of, I dunno, point.

Take the Creepshow 3 opener, “Alice.” The title character is a snotty teen who comes home to find that her father has purchased a new universal remote. Apparently he bought it at the same store Adam Sandler shopped at in Click, because this is a crazy remote that does crazy things! When he hits the “hue” button, Alice’s entire family turns black! When he pressed the button for subtitles, they all start speaking Spanish. And when he tries to get a better signal, Alice sprouts unsightly blotches all over her face and body. I guess this is her comeuppance for being such a brat, but it seems just a little disproportionate and out of left field.

In “The Radio,” a schlubby security guard buys a portable radio from a flea market to listen to the game, but instead all he hears is a female voice bossing him around. The first thing you or I might think to do in this situation is to turn off the radio or throw it out the window, but this guy just keeps following orders until he gets himself killed by the pimp down the hall. It’s just a bit unsatisfying that there’s no sort of logical progression or sense of building tension here – just a dumb guy getting dumber until he’s dead.

One story, “The Professor’s Wife,” at least boasts a promising kernel of an idea: an eccentric professor invites two ex-students to meet his new bride-to-be. The students become convinced that the professor has built himself a robot wife, and when the prof steps out to run an errand, they decide to prove it. Again, in the hands of King and original Creepshow director George Romero, this could be a giddily squirm-inducing premise, but in the sweaty grip of co-directors Ana Clavell and James Glenn Dudelson (Day of the Dead 2: Contagium), it’s just a repulsive mess.

Clavell and Dudelson save the worst for last with “Haunted Dog” – the dog in question being a bad hot dog – in which they inexplicably allow Toad the Wet Sprocket bassist Dean Dinning to run wild with his nonexistent improvisatory skills as an ethically-challenged doctor. Physicians found guilty of malpractice should be forced to watch this on a continuous loop; anyone without access to large quantities of prescription drugs should avoid prolonged exposure to Creepshow 3.

Previously on Unwatchable:
48. Cool as Ice
49. Laserblast
50. Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace
51. Simon Sez
52. In the Mix

Remembering Amicus, the Other British Horror Movie Factory

Phil Nugent — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Anyone with an interest in horror movies probably knows something about "Hammer horror", the strain of movies put out by the English production house for some twenty years beginning in the 1950s, which produced its own versions of the classic Universal monster films and made cult stars of such actors as Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Hammer had its own wayward, dark cousin--the films made in the 1960s and 1970s by Amicus Studios, which might easily have been mistaken for Hammer product by twitchy-eyed buffs on a misspent matinee weekend, or later, by kids parked in front of the TV on a Saturday. As Will Hodgkinson recalls, Amicus was the result of a handshake deal between "a socially inept scriptwriter called Milton Subotsky and a fast-talking hustler called Max J Rosenberg". Subotsky was the hands-on, on-set presence during the company's salad days. Everyone who met him seems to remember him as a very sweet man and a bit of a social misfit and oddball--which kind of figures, very sweet men being in short supply in film production circles. Ironically, he is also remembered as a true horror buff, in contrast the the bosses at Hammer, who happened to find a commercial niche and beat it into an assembly line. "Had it dealt in garbage disposal," the director Freddie Francis once said, "it would have been just as successful." And Subotsky, Hodgkinson writes, was "driven by a deep-rooted hatred for Hammer. In 1956, Hammer had rejected a script he wrote called Frankenstein and the Monster, only to go on and have huge success with a similarly themed film called The Curse of Frankenstein. To Rosenberg, this proved there was money in British horror movies. To Subotsky, the gauntlet had been thrown down." It must have pleased him considerably to feel that he was eating into Hammer's market share, making films pitched to Hammer's audience that sometimes featured actors who were identified with Hammer, such as Cushing and Lee, while telling interviewers that his own stuff was better.

While Subotsky wrote scripts and hung out on sets overseeing the filming and driving the directors crazy, Rosenberg stayed in America, cutting distribution deals and shoveling money across the Atlantic. Not that he shoveled in great quantities; Amicus gave their movies a top-grade look while pinching pennies by hiring actors, ranging from horror stalwarts such as Cushing, Lee, and Vincent Price to the likes of Jack Palance, Burgess Meredith, Denholm Elliott, Terry-Thomas, and Joan Collins, by hiring them for only a few days at a time. Their first real production, the 1965 Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (directed by Francis and written by Subotsky), was an anthology film, with five short stories contained in a wraparound framework with Cushing telling the fortunes of a group of men in a train car. (Subotsky claimed the idea was an homage to the 1945 omnibus film Dead of Night, Ealing Studio's classic fling with the horror genre.) Amicus would later turn out a string of horror-anthology movies, including three with scripts that Robert Bloch adapted from his own stories--Torture Garden (1967), The House That Dripped Blood (1970), and Asylum (1972)--as well as one, 1973's From Beyond the Grave (1973), that was derived from the ghost stories of R. Chetwynd-Hayes, and two, Tales from the Crypt (1972), with Ralph Richardson as the Crypt Keeper, and The Vault of Horror (1973), based on classic EC horror comics. (Comics freaks might almost think of Amicus as the movie equivalent of Warren Publishing to Hammer's EC.) The company almost made one or two unsuccessful stabs at penetrating the art house market, hiring William Friedkin to film the Harold Pinter play The Birthday Party. But Subotsky also had his pragmatic, philistine-studio-boss side; he wrote an ambitious version of the Jekyll-and-Hyde story called I, Monster and demanded that the director, Stephen Weeks, make it in 3-D, despite the fact that "the sets had been built the wrong way round. The script called for the action to go from left to right, but the building lines went the other way." But when the money ran out with the picture unfinished, Subotsky "simply told Weeks to cut whatever scenes he had filmed into something resembling a finished movie. The film was released to terrible reviews - but, like most Amicus films, it made a profit."

According to Hodkinson, Subotsky ended up walking away from the company "for reasons that remain unclear", just when it was branching out into adventure fantasies based on the works of Tarzan's creator. "In 1975, the studio released an adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' lost-world adventure The Land That Time Forgot. It had proved a difficult film to shoot: its star, Doug McClure, was drinking heavily after the collapse of his marriage, while Subotsky was rumoured to be spending more time at Hamleys buying toys than running the studio. His only real involvement with the production was to turn up at a screening with his four-year-old-son, announce that the boy could tell there were men inside the dinosaur suits, and leave." Amicus produced a sequel called The People That Time Forgot (1977) as well as At the Earth's Core (1976), which is best remembered by some of us eternal adolescents for the way that the leading lady, Caroline Munro, really filled out her me-Jane costume, but by then Subotsky was long gone. After working as a producer on one more horror omnibus, 1977's The Uncanny (a linked series of story with the common theme that cats secretly run the world--I didn't know it was supposed to be a secret), the 1980 TV miniseries The Martian Chronicles, and a number of Stephen King-based properties (including King's sole directing job, Maximum Overdrive), he died in 1991. Rosenberg died in 2004. Two years ago, the company name was revived by producer Robert Katz; the first movie from the new Amicus Entertainment was last year's Stuck from director Stuart Gordon.

Take Five: HBO

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 30 May 2008 18:45:00 GMT

Sex and the City: The Movie opens everywhere that Cosmopolitans are sold today, and the odds are pretty good that it will make enough money to keep Sarah Jessica Parker in sundresses for the rest of her life. There is little doubt as to whether or not the movie -- based on the inescapable HBO original series -- will be successful; the real question is whether or not it's going to be any good. One thing is for sure: it will at least make more money than the other films that have been made out of HBO's original television programming. They're a pretty dismal set of money-losers and critic-displeasers, ranging from the not good (Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny) to the very bad (the Mr. Show movie, Run Ronnie Run) to the completely awful (the Tales from the Crypt spin-off Bordello of Blood). If the long-rumored Deadwood movie ever gets made, or if the Sopranos movie doesn't turn out to be a disappointment, this may change things, but in the meantime, HBO's television shows have yet to produce a movie worth watching. Less known, however, is that HBO has a production arm that has put out a number of worthwhile films, many of which had theatrical releases prior to their run on the pay cable network; some of them, in fact, were released exclusively for theatrical release through HBO Films or their sister company, Picturehouse FIlms. With their overseeing company, New Line Cinema, dead, the future of HBO Films is uncertain, but given the quality of their past releases, they're sure to find a new home somewhere with parent company Time/Warner. Here's five fine films that were released under the HBO Film distribution banner.

AMERICAN SPLENDOR (2003)

The first, and arguably the best, of a rash of terrific film releases by HBO Films in the mid-2000s, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's inventive (and sometimes elusive) documentary about underground comics writer Harvey Pekar stands alongside the remarkable Crumb as a compelling, if sometimes troubling, look at an American original. The comparison is by no means coincidental: legendary cartoonist Robert Crumb is a longtime friend of Pekar's, and the man he first recruited to illustrate his stories of the struggles, victories, humiliations and triumphs of everyday life. If it's a little disengenuous to claim that Pekar is the indestructably normal person he claims to be (and it is -- normal people, after all, do not compulsively and sometimes brilliantly catalog the minutia of their lives in autobiographical comics), there's nothing at all phony about Pekar, his everyday heroism, the skewed attitude and refusal to surrender to the diificultues of an ordinary life, or his irascible and cynical -- if never openly cruel -- sense of humor.

ELEPHANT (2003)

The first of a series of collaborations between HBO Films and director Gus Van Sant, Elephant is the best of the lot -- and may in fact be one of the finest films of the decade. Inspired by the horrific mass murder at Columbine High School, the fragmented, almost dreamlike story of a pair of alienated high school students who go on a shooting rampage is a meditation on violence unlike any other in recent cinematic history. Elephant is a quiet, open, almost meditative film, breaking off to follow one character after another in order to present the day of the shooting as resolutely normal; but its greatest trick is to constantly dangle in front of us tantalizing 'clues' to the motivation of the killers, only to have every one of them lead to an unproductive, uncomfortable dead end. After the final bloodbath, we have an almost tangible need to know the whys and wherefores of the senseless killing, but the movie is wise enough to deny us an easy solution to an impossibly difficult question, and is brave enough to believe in its director's vision and leave us hanging without a quick fi or an easy scapegoat.

DEATH IN GAZA (2004)

One of the least partisan -- and most tragically unbearable -- documentaries about the Israeli-Palestine conflict was the 2004 film Death in Gaza, which concentrated largely on the impact the war had on children in the area. Focusing on a quartet of Palestinian kids, all in their early teens or younger, who take up arms against their occupiers, Death in Gaza neither exculpates the bad behavior of the kids (their anti-Semitism is extremely uncomfortable, especially from children so young) or glosses over why they might be so driven to militancy and violence (we are constantly exposed to the insufferable living conditions into which they are born and raised, and every one of them has a jaw-dropping horror story about the death of a friend or relative). What makes the move especially harrowing is that its 34-year-old British director, James Miller, was himself killed by the Israeli Defense Forces while filming in Gaza at night, a typically stupid, futile, and enraging event that is captured on film and shown matter-of-factly during the course of the documentary. Powerful and sad.

MARIA FULL OF GRACE (2004)

Joshua Marston's feature about a young Colombian teenager who becomes a drug mule in order to raise money for her impoverished family is filmed in such an effective, simple neorealist style -- and manages to so effectively encapsulate one of the most degrading yet banal aspects of the dehumanizing aspects of capitalism -- that it's hard to avoid comparisons to De Sica's The Bicycle Thief. And while it's not even remotely in that film's league, it's still very much a movie worth watching, updating De Sica's themes for a post-socialist age, and it does at least have one advantage over its spiritual forebear: the presense of the heartbreaking, compelling, fascinating lead actress, Catalino Sandino Moreno. The then-17-year-old Moreno turns in one of the most watchable yet tragic performances in recent memory as a headstrong, intelligent girl who has nonetheless begun to move in circles who will shape her into something she cannot control; it's almost impossible to take your eyes off her from the beginning of the movie to the end.

THE NOTORIOUS BETTIE PAGE (2005)

The Notorious Bettie Page, a serviceable if never stunning biography of the legendary 1950s pin-up queen, was brought to us by the writer/director team of Guinevere Turner and Mary Harron. The duo also was responsible for the highly problematic American Psycho, and Harron also directed the truly discomfiting I Shot Andy Warhol. While its problems are different (a lack of depth and a somewhat flat visual style, neither of which were the difficulties with Harron's other movies), it does reflect the curate's egg nature of all three films. Clearly, it wasn't a movie made to do nothing more than titillate, but by the same token, we walk out of the theater knowing precious little more about the notorious Bettie Page than we did when we came in. That said, it shares with the other films a great deal of energy and feeling, and is supported by the sort of tremendous central performance Harron seems to coax so easily out of her stars -- Gretchen Mol is easily the equal of Christian Bale or Lili Taylor, and it's her charm and control in the role that makes this a movie worth watching.

Happy (Almost) Birthday, MAD! (a tribute by Andumb Osboring)

Andrew Osborne — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 18:00:00 GMT

According to the recent 286 glossy-page “green” issue of Vanity Fair, E.C. Comics was founded 60 years ago by William M. Gaines, kicking up an important early skirmish in the ongoing American Culture Wars by publishing influential, controversial horror, action, science fiction and fantasy titles like Tales From The Crypt, Two-Fisted Tales and Weird Science.

But Mad magazine, which premiered in 1952, would prove to be the company’s most iconic, longest-surviving contribution. Much has been written about the generations-deep influence of Alfred E. Neuman and “the usual gang of idiots” on American satire and popular culture in general...but, this being the Screengrab, I wanted to pay special tribute to six decades of Mad’s sometimes brilliant, sometimes sophomoric movie parodies.

According to our old friend Wikipedia, the first film spoof featured in Mad was 1953’s Ping Pong (get it?), followed shortly thereafter by Noon!, Sane!, From Eternity Back To Here!, Wild 1 (correction) Wild ½, Stalag 18 and approximately a zillion others over the subsequent decades, up to and including contemporary jabs like The Da Vinci Coma, Spider-Sham 3 and Harry Plodder & The Torture of the Fan Base.

I became familiar with the older parodies through repackaged, full-color mini-comic inserts in the Mad Super Special editions, but it’s the mid-‘70s Mort Drucker era that I remember most fondly, with its takedowns of movies I knew and loved (Star Roars, The Spy Who Glubbed Me), “grown-up” movies I experienced in Mad long before viewing the actual objects of ridicule (The Ecchorcist, A Crock o’ (Blip!) Now) and countless flicks I never bothered to see (The Eyes of Lurid Mess, The Calamityville Horror) figuring they’d never be as entertaining as the Mad versions.

Was I annoyed when, halfway through reading the gazillion-page Lord of the Rings trilogy Mad blew the ending of the epic for me with 1979’s The Ring and I, a parody of 1978’s animated Lord of the Rings (which only went as far as the Battle of Helm’s Deep)? Yes. Very annoyed.

But I had to give credit to the magazine for brutally savaging its own 1980 celluloid fiasco, Up The Academy (directed, curiously enough, by Robert Downey, Sr.). And, in addition to the laughs, attitude and cinematic sensibility it offered, Mad also provided my pubescent, pre-internet libido with any number of smokin' hot pen-and-ink fantasy girls to ogle (Undressed To Kill’s semi-clad Nancy Allen caricature, in particular) as fondly remembered now as any Playboy centerfold.

Eventually, of course, like an elder sibling cast out of Narnia, I drifted away from Mad in later years, never to return...but as long as there’s Bleccch in my Kaputnik, the usual gang of idiots will live forever in my Portzebie.