Horrors! Enough to Wake the Living Dead

Also in this issue is an interview with Caroline Munro, a beautiful British actress who made a career playing terrified and/or dead women who wear extremely low-cut outfits in such movies as "The Abominable Dr. Phibes" and "Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter." Munro has nothing but nice things to say about legendary horrormeister Vincent Price:

"He was so gentle and so funny, and what a fantastic cook! He used to come into the make-up room at about seven o'clock in the morning with some of his homemade paté, so the make-up girl, the hair-dresser, Vincent, and myself stuffed ourselves with paté. Then I sort of lay there in the coffin, trying hard not to burp."

Apparently, Price wasn't the only gourmet cook in the horror movie community. Filmfax reviews a new book called "It Came From the Kitchen" -- a collection of recipes by scary-movie celebrities that includes Rod Serling's German potato pancakes, Bela Lugosi's stuffed cabbage rolls and Janet Leigh's lamb shanks. Martin Sheen declined to send a recipe, but he did sent a photo of himself with a revealing three-word phrase scrawled beneath his autograph: "Cream of Wheat."

Filmfax doesn't just focus on the actors and directors of schlock movies. It also covers makeup artists and special-effects wizards and the composers of the ominous music that lets viewers know that the girl is about to get eaten by the monster.

Here, for instance, is how Filmfax's reviewer summed up the career of Herman Stein, who composed music for "Creature From the Black Lagoon" and "The Incredible Shrinking Man" and "Abbott and Costello Go to Mars": "Stein was a bit of a chameleon, capable of turning his hand to various musical genres, even turning out drivel when the occasion demanded."

Turning out drivel when the occasion demands is a big part of success in any field, so I think we should pause right here for a heartfelt salute to Herman Stein.

Every once in a while, Filmfax writers remind you that Filmfax readers are not your average Americans. Such a moment comes in David J. Hogan's review of a DVD containing four movies by schlockmeister Sam Katzman -- "Zombies of Mara Tau," "The Werewolf," "The Giant Claw" and "Creature With the Atomic Brain." "Filmfax readers are well familiar with the four features," Hogan writes, "so the pictures need not be detailed here."

What kind of man reads Filmfax? "I am a steady reader of your great mag," writes Jim Monaco of Cliffwood Beach, N.J., in a letter to the editor. "I have one of the largest (if not the largest) collections of Dean Martin memorabilia in the world . . . including Martin and Lewis puppets, comics, cigarette lighters, money clips, tape dispensers."

Of course, you don't have to be an obsessive pop-culture collector to love Filmfax. No red-blooded American could fail to be moved by the pure poetry contained in the titles of the movies advertised in Filmfax for the low, low price of only $8 or $15 or $20:

Don't Open the Door,

Don't Look in the Basement,

Beware the Blob,

Things From Another World --

The Worm Eaters, The Corpse Grinders, The Ghoul --

They Came From Beyond Space.

Run, Angel, Run.

When Worlds Collide,

I Bury the Living,

and Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things.