Dangerous Universe

My favorite book about things clipped from newspapers

As a kid I used to clip ads for movies out of the newspaper — Sundays were the best since the ads that day were in color. While I gave up after a while, Michael Gingold didn’t and spent much of the 1980s snipping ads for horror movies from papers in New York and New England, of which became basis of his brilliant book Ad Nauseam: Newsprint Nightmares from the 1980s that collects more than 450 of these ads in one place. One thing I found fascinating about the ads were that the film promoters had to create different ads for different papers. What might fly in the New York Post wouldn’t be acceptable in something more conservative like the New York Times where artwork would have to be toned back, altered and sometimes completely changed to fit their standards.

My favorite fictional occult investigative reporter

I’ve been obsessed with the character of Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin) for many a year now, but had to settle with DVD versions of the two brilliant 1970s made-for-TV movies until now. Last fall Kino Lorber released both Kolchak’s first appearance fighting a vampire in The Night Stalker (1972) and the next a ghoul The Night Strangler (1973) in glorious HD. If you’ve never seen these movies that went onto inspire things like The X-Files before, here’s your chance since made-for-TV movie or not, these two films are superb.

My favorite shows that woke me at 3AM in a cold sweat

Over the last few years there’s been a spate of really good horror series on TV, be it Hannibal from a few years ago or more recently things like Stranger Things, Black Mirror and The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix. And while there’s been horror on TV for years now, I can’t think of another time when there’s been so much horror on TV that’s all been so good, or scary. Yes, I really did wake up at 3AM last October after watching the first episode of The Haunting of Hill House that gave me a serious case of the heebie-jeebies.

My favorite comic book about one of the greatest unmade movies ever

Last fall Dark Horse Comics began releasing a comic book adaptation of the unmade movie Alien 3. “What,” you say, “Alien 3 was made, David Fincher directed it and it was released in 1992 you imbecile!” And you’d be right, except before the Fincher version saw the light of day there were quite a few different scripts for the movie that were developed and then abandoned before producers settled on the version that finally made it to theaters.

This unmade Alien 3 was written by cyberpunk pioneer William Gibson and would’ve been a more direct continuation of Aliens with Ripley, Hicks and Newt being the stars of the movie rather than just Ripley in the theatrical Alien 3. The script has been floating around online for years now has been called one of the greatest unmade movies ever. “Greatest” or not this Alien 3 never went into production because it was so big it would’ve been too expensive to produce back in the early 1990s. But because there’s no budget for special effects in a comic book we’re finally seeing this version of the Aliens story come to life.

My favorite show about superheroes punching people really hard

There aren’t too many superhero TV shows that I’m into, one of the exceptions is Daredevil on Netflix. I think where Daredevil is so good while other superhero shows are so bland, is that the characters of Daredevil feel like real, breathing people. Whereas the characters of most other superhero shows, I’m looking in your general direction The CW, don’t feel real but instead feel like artificial characters constructed to be a part of a superhero show. And I think that makes all the difference for Daredevil. Unfortunately, because of a contract dispute with Disney, Netflix cancelled much of their Marvel superhero TV series, Daredevil included meaning the third season of this show was also its final, which was a bummer of a way to end 2018.