Kill the Snark posts an EPIC defense/appreciation of Ralph Bakshi--very long, but worth it!
Can't remember if I linked to this already, but Nurse Ratched's Place has a very groovy Mod Nurse post.
Zombo's Closet has an excellent interview with a great pal of Groovy Age, Bob Tinnell!
And returning once more to Sala-land, Cabinet of Wonders posts Les Vampires clips; Lady, That's My Skull has a nice post on Meddlesome Girls.
I decided to begin sharing some vampire manga with Groovy Age readers to follow up my previous post about Japanese horror manga. Vampire stories and films are popular in Japan and they often find inspiration in classic gothic tales from Europe and Britain.
This story was originally published in the popular Japanese shoujo ("girls") manga magazine Ribon in 1976. It's written and illustrated by a female artist named Akiko Jyo. I don't read or speak Japanese, but I've tried to translate the title as best as I could with the help of some trusty Japanese dictionaries. I believe the manga is called The Blood of Many Roses, but corrections are more than welcome!
Two important things to remember when trying to follow unstranslated Japanese manga:
1. Male characters are often extremely effeminate looking and it can be hard to distinguish them from the female characters.
2. Unlike American and European comic books, Japanese manga stories are read from Left to Right.
The Blood of Many Roses begins when a feminine looking young man traveling at night stumbles on a gothic castle surrounded by an overabundant rose garden. He's welcomed in by two attractive servant girls and invited to dinner with the castle's owner who's clearly based on Count Dracula, except he's got ridiculously long hair and looks even more feminine than our hero. During the meal the young man is surprised when the Count doesn't eat with him and he startles everyone when he lights up a cigarette.
After the meal he's offered a room for the night, but while he's sleeping he has some uninvited visitors. The sun comes up just before our hero is bit on the neck by two vampires. His girlfriend also seems to appear in his dreams. The next day he arrives for dinner a little early and finds a note there, but no sign of the Count or servant girls, so he decides to stroll around the castle and stumbles on a graveyard.
He hears a strange noise coming from one of the graves and decides to hide. From behind some rose bushes our hero watches the vampire arise from his grave and resurrect his dead servant girls just as the sun goes down.
Our hero manages to get away and he goes straight to his girlfriend's family home where a party is going on. He begins to tell the guests about the vampires he saw and the castle, but they just laugh at him. His girlfriend gets so embarrassed that she leaves the party and goes to bed. Thankfully a Van Helsing type character believes our hero’s story and he takes him into his library where they discuss various ways to kill vampires.
Meanwhile, our hero's girlfriend is attacked and killed by the vampires while he's busy chatting.
He's devastated by her death but with the Van Helsing character in tow, he decides to go back to the castle and take care of the vampires. Our hero's trip is interrupted when his dead girlfriend suddenly appears in the rose garden surrounding the castle and tries to bite him on the neck. At the last minute he's saved by the Van Helsing character who shoots the vampire with a silver bullet made out of melted crosses.
Our hero is pissed at the Van Helsing guy, but he realizes that his beloved had become a vampire when she just dissolves in his arms. After crying and screaming a lot, he finally arrives at the castle and finds the vampire coffins. He decides to burn the entire castle to the ground.
The vampires struggle but they are no match for the fire and they appear to die screaming as the flames rise.
Obviously there are many more pages that accompany this story but I'm just sharing a few samples for review purposes. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find out any more information about the creator of The Blood of Many Roses and web searches have shown that even Japanese fans of her work seem to know very little about the artist Akiko Jyo. I do know that she was published in Ribon as early as 1974 and I believe she was still contributing to the magazine in 1978, but her other manga stories seemed to have been romances. I think it's obvious from the samples below that Akiko Jyo had considerable talent and hopefully more of her work will surface sooner or later.
When I mentioned I'd be unable this July to post many paperback reviews, Douglas A. Waltz from Divine Exploitation generously offered to submit a few to help keep the pace going here. The books sounded interesting and somewhat off even my unbeaten paths, so how could I refuse? He'll be a guest paperback contributor for the month of July. Please welcome him aboard!
I'm about halfway through something right now, so don't worry--I'll still be posting the occasional review myself. After Horrorfind, I should settle right back into my Groovy groove again.
Hope everyone's weekend is going well!
Kansas City. A famous magician is displaying his tricks at a big party.
He gets upstaged by this drunk bastard, who can remove a woman's bra without even touching it.
"Hey Lady, wanna know where your necklace has gone? It's in the maid's pussy."
Yup, there it is. A perfect place for a pearl necklace.
"But where's my cigar?"
"Well, check the maid's ass!"
After a lot of shit happens, the drunk guy decides to take off the kid gloves and use some serious powers.
Die, die, die!
*giggle* 
Actually the guy is just a tourist. His flight had some mechanical troubles earlier, but when he finds out that the repairs have already been done, he gets back to his seat...
...and literally gets away with murder. Hmmm, now where have I seen that spaceship before...
Denver, Colorado. Dick and Peter have invented a teleportation machine. There's only one problem: the objects they've used for testing purposes have all disappeared for twenty hours while being teleported. Why? Peter decides that the only way to find out the truth is to use himself as a guinea pig.
The machine sends him to a place that looks like a perfectly normal American city...
...except that everybody seems to enjoy killing, raping and torturing.
Even the kids love it!
"Hey, wait a minute! That girl on the stairs... I just saw her getting raped and killed, but now she doesn't have a scratch on her! I'd better follow her!"
"Bwahaha, she went into a night club that only allows people with red armbands in, but that didn't stop me: I used my red tie as a fake armband!"
"Fucking hell, what's happening to me now?"
"Wait, all the people I saw getting killed were wearing red armbands. I think I've made a horrible mistake!"
You see, Peter had been teleported into a world where everyone can be resurrected from the dead. And the red armband means it's bearer is a masochist who likes to get brutalized and killed. Funky! Anyway, Peter survives his ordeal and lives happily ever after in this new world without death. The End.
They made a remake of this story, too, featuring a parallel Manchester called Munchester. I bet Munchester United would be a killer soccer team.
. . . it's because I'm working tons of extra shifts/hours at my day job, because I started saving just a leeeeetle late for Horrorfind. I'll be in pretty good shape, money-wise, by then, but it will mean working my real-world ass off a lot harder than usual. Plus, I'm trying to finish the next chapter for my novel, which is taking waaaaay longer than it should. Sorry, but I just won't be able to sustain my usually brisk reading schedule. Rest assured, I've got a lot of great stuff on deck, plus the other Groovy Age contributors are all doing bang-up jobs. Stay tuned, and stay groovy!
Richmond, Virginia. A brilliant inventor is getting no support from his wife, and no sex either. The woman just doesn't respect his work at all.
So the guy orders his new invention to kill her.
Then he sprays some artificial skin on the invention, and presto, he now has an identical copy of his wife.
And the copy is much better than the original!
But one day a couple of sadistic rapists capture the robot wife and start to torture her with electricity.
The machine goes mad, kills them and decides to go watch a nazi exploitation flick.
She doesn't have a ticket, but luckily there's a penis available.
"Take it in your mouth, ticket seller girl!"
Faster, pussycat! Kill! Kill!
Kill!
Our "heroine" then goes to an amusement park, puts on a skull mask and starts ripping tits off in a Horror House.
Kill!
The inventor sacrifices himself to destroy the robot...
...or so it seemed to everyone else. Actually he used a robot copy of himself to do the deed, and is now on a plane to Europe, ready to start a new life. The End.
Interestingly enough my computer seems to be suffering from the electronic madness, too: Windows starts reeally slowly, the firewall (ZoneAlarm) starts slowly too, and everything is generally much slower. I've tried defragging and all that, but nothing's working. I hope it isn't a hardware problem, because I really don't want my computer to go tilt on me in the middle of The Terror Blu Month.
Everyone who dug the Richard Sala posts I just did should head on over to Jahsonic for some silent serial arch-villain goodness, Les Vampires! Then over to Slate for an interesting article on classic vs. current Nancy Drew.
Final Girl will be hosting a Friday the 13th blog-a-thon on . . . uh, I forget the date, exactly, but some time soon. Groovy Age will be there!
Finally, rather than rant about the Libby thing here, I'll just direct you to Glenn Greenwald. He says it much better than I could, and without all the f-bombs.
Have a groovy day!
The Terror Blu Month starts now, folks! And surprisingly it doesn't start from the vacuum of outer space, but from the depths of salt water. The story even features lesbians, one of the most popular Italian scifi-elements. Too bad their survival rate is never very good.
Anyway, our tale takes place in England and begins with these two characters having a stroll on the bottom of the sea.
When they surface from the water, they are spotted by a diver...
...who immediately gets killed.
The odd couple then steals his memories.
Later, when the couple has found more normal clothing, they go to the nearest village to spy on people. They quickly find two young sisters, who are taking the concept of sisterly love to a whole new level.
The dark-haired girl, Liz, is not only an incestuous lesbian, but a real bitch, too. She has a boyfriend, but she has no intentions of ever having sex with him, even though some petting is allowed. And the poor guy is totally clueless about it.
Luckily an old fart abducts Liz and rapes her orally.
After that the odd couple immediately kills the old fart. But why? And why are they making Liz believe that her sister was helping the rapist? Don't they know that Liz will get angry at her?
Of course they know. You see, they are actually robots created to perform human sacrifice once in every hundred years...
...and the sacrifice always has to be a girl who is an incestuos and vicious murderer virgin. The End.
Believe it or not, but some years later Italians actually made a long remake of this highly illogical story. Maybe I'll tell you about it later... if anyone is still standing after this mad month of science fiction horror!
Every once in a while, something here attracts more notice than usual, and it was gratifying to see the WORLD OF RICHARD SALA posts and interview stir up a bit of a flurry of well-deserved attention for Sala, a cool creator and swell guy. In addition to the comments to those posts,
