Joe Palooka as a Weird-Menace Vehicle, by Michael H. Price
One connection leads to another and then another, whether via the proverbial Six Degrees of Separation or by means of random-chance Free Association. Which explains how the moviemaking Coen Bros., Joel and Ethan, and Ham Fisher’s strange trailblazer of a comic strip, Joe Palooka, come to be mentioned in a single sentence.The Coen Bros.’ current motion picture, No Country for Old Men, took Best Picture honors the other day in a vote amongst members of my regional (Texas) society of film critix. A re-screening seemed in order, particularly because the film – an unnerving combination of crime melodrama with Existential Quandary – contains a bizarre murder gimmick that had triggered a vague memory of some other movie from ’Way Back When. I figured that a fresh look might complete the connection between the lethal device in No Country for Old Men and whatever other picture I was recalling.
And sure enough: The compressed-air cattle-slaughtering implement that Javier Bardem wields in No Country proves akin in that respect to Charles Lamont’s A Shot in the Dark – a fairly conventional whodunit from 1935, rendered weird by the use of industrial machinery in lieu of conventional weaponry. George E. Turner and I had devoted a chapter to A Shot in the Dark in our first volume of the Forgotten Horrors movie-history library, figuring that although murder per se might or might not render a film horrific, murder by unconventional means is a strong qualifier.
That slight recollection, in turn, pointed toward a batch of other weird-gizmo murder pictures, leading at length to 1947’s Joe Palooka in the Knockout, part of a series of movies spun off the Fischer strip. When odder random associations are made, the Forgotten Horrors franchise will make ’em.
After having been tracking it for some time, we are pleased to announce we have finally found the beginning of the end. Ladies and gentlemen, today in 1955, the very first presidential news conference was filmed for television and newsreels. All that business with the media skewing coverage for political gain these days really couldn’t have started without the help of Dwight Eisenhower, his 33 minute conference, and the cameras of NBC, CBS, ABC and the Dumont Network (the 50’s version of UPN or WB before the CW merge).
Think of it as Battle of the Planets, round one.
Over at Marvel.com, the second-tier heroes are getting a first-class treatment with "
IFMagazine
Since his debut in 1971, Swamp Thing has remained the king of the hill when it comes to comics’ heroic muck-monsters. Granted, there hasn’t been too much competition in that category, but there’s something to be said for the fact that DC’s sad story of a scientist-turned-swamp creature has spawned not one, but two feature films, as well as a relatively successful television series. On January 22, Shout! Factory will release Swamp Thing: the Series on DVD, collecting all three seasons of the Swamp Thing television series that aired on USA Network from 1990-1993, with the episodes organized in the order they were intended to be viewed.
