THIS MODERN NIGHTMARE

HOTTIE OF THE WEEK: ALYSON HANNIGAN

You probably know her best as Willow from BUFFY, THE VAMPIRE SLAYER. She was probably my favorite character on the show, especially when she became a super-witch and had god-like powers. Willow was also one of the few lesbian characters on television at the time (although she did have a relationship with werewolf Oz (Seth Green) in the early seasons).

She was also the flute girl in the AMERICAN PIE movies. Right now, she’s got a pretty thankless role as one the married friends on the show HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER (she’s defintiely not one of the characters they focus on most, and she’s more of a sidekick, which sucks. This girl deserves her own damn show!)

It’s easy to overlook her in some of these roles (well, not Willow), but the truth is, she is a major hottie. As the photo above proves beyond a shadow of a doubt.

So today, we take this time to put the spotlight on Alyson Hannigan. Red-headed ball of fire. I know I for one won’t be taking her for granted.

WINTER WONDERLAND?

It seems to have been snowing non-stop in my neck of the woods for days now. It began on Friday afternoon and every time I've looked outside since it's still snowing. No idea how many inches we got all together, but it must be over a foot by now. I know a lot of people love the snow, but I would gladly live without it. It's just a gigantic mess. Luckily I haven't had any reason to go outside. The one upside of not owning my own home (one of the few upsides) is that the landlord's guys do all the shoveling and plowing. I also don't own a car, so I don't need to clean that off, either. I can just sit back in my warm apartment.

I always think it's funny how, when there's a snowstorm, people rush to the grocery store. I've heard horror stories about empty shelves and crowded aisles, and it just puzzles me. Do these people think that the plows won't be working? That they'll somehow be trapped forever? It's not the end of the friggin world; it's just a snowstorm. I was going to go out yesterday and get a few things, then realized it wasn't important and I didn't need to bother. Why go out if you don't have to?

Friday afternoon, while the snow was starting to cover the ground, I was inside a movie theater watching the movie LET THE RIGHT ONE IN. A haunting little Swedish vampire film. I'm finishing up my review of it now and it should be posted soon on FearZone. The funny thing is, there's a lot of snow in the movie, too. Seems to be a constant thing lately.

I think I'm going snowblind.

MORE NEW STORIES OUT!

Well, I've already mentioned two news stories I have out: one in the anthology TRAPS, as well as the holiday story online at NVF Magazine online. I've got a few more things online, if you want to check them out:

1) A review of the new Keanu Reeves movie, THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL. It was supposed to be a Cinema Knife Fight column, but an ice storm left Michael Arruda without power, so I had to review it solo.

2) A brief article (including a picture of the cover and the final Table of Contents) on FearZone about the anthology I am co-editing with Nick Cato for Novello Publishers called DARK JESTERS. This is coming out summer or early fall of next year.

3) A teaser for an upcoming poetry anthology (coming out next year) called DEATH IN COMMON. I have two poems in the collection and Laura has one. This link is a teaser for the collection on Horror World that includes three sample poems -including one of mine, called "Parched."

TRAPS IS HERE!

TRAPS, the new anthology from DarkHart Press, is out now. Edited by Scott T. Goudsward, this collection includes my story "Bright Green" as well as stories from such authors as P.D. Cacek, Paul Finch,and Del Howison, as well as an introduction by T.M. Wright.

You can get TRAPS directly from the publisher, or such traditional places as Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com

It's the perfect Christmas gift for anyone in your family who loves to read, especially for the horror fans out there.

"THE JOY OF GIVING" is Also Available Online

Speaking of Christmas, I also have a new holiday story up on NVF Magazine Online, called "The Joy of Giving." This one is free and online. All you have to do is go here.

GOODBYE, BETTIE PAGE

Sad news, indeed.
***

1950s pinup model Bettie Page dies in LA at 85

December 11, 2008


Bettie Page, the 1950s secretary-turned-model whose controverisal photographs in skimpy attire or none at all helped set the stage for the 1960s sexual revolution, died Thursday. She was 85.

Page suffered a heart attack last week in Los Angeles and never regained consciousness, her agent Mark Roesler said. Before the heart attack, Page had been hospitalized for three weeks with pneumonia.

"She captured the imagination of a generation of men and women with her free spirit and unabashed sensuality," Roesler said. "She is the embodiment of beauty."

Page, who was also known as Betty, attracted national attention with magazine photographs of her sensuous figure in bikinis and see-through lingerie that were quickly tacked up on walls in military barracks, garages and elsewhere, where they remained for years.

Her photos included a centerfold in the January 1955 issue of then-fledgling Playboy magazine, as well as controversial sadomasochistic poses.

The latter helped contribute to her mysterious disappearance from the public eye, which lasted decades and included years during which she battled mental illness and became a born-again Christian.

After resurfacing in the 1990s, she occasionally granted interviews but refused to allow her picture to be taken.

"I don't want to be photographed in my old age," she told an interviewer in 1998. "I feel the same way with old movie stars. ... It makes me sad. We want to remember them when they were young."

The 21st century indeed had people remembering her just as she was. She became the subject of songs, biographies, Web sites, comic books, movies and documentaries. A new generation of fans bought thousands of copies of her photos, and some feminists hailed her as a pioneer of women's liberation.

Gretchen Mol portrayed her in 2005's "The Notorious Bettie Page" and Paige Richards had the role in 2004's "Bettie Page: Dark Angel." Page herself took part in the 1998 documentary "Betty Page: Pinup Queen."

Her career began one day in October 1950 when she took a respite from her job as a secretary in a New York office for a walk along the beach at Coney Island. An amateur photographer named Jerry Tibbs admired the 27-year-old's firm, curvy body and asked her to pose.

Looking back on the career that followed, she told Playboy in 1998, "I never thought it was shameful. I felt normal. It's just that it was much better than pounding a typewriter eight hours a day, which gets monotonous."

Nudity didn't bother her, she said, explaining: "God approves of nudity. Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, they were naked as jaybirds."

In 1951, Page fell under the influence of a photographer and his sister who specialized in S&M. They cut her hair into the dark bangs that became her signature and posed her in spiked heels and little else. She was photographed with a whip in her hand, and in one session she was spread-eagled between two trees, her feet dangling.

"I thought my arms and legs would come out of their sockets," she said later.
Moralists denounced the photos as perversion, and Sen. Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, Page's home state, launched a congressional investigation.

Page quickly retreated from public view, later saying she was hounded by federal agents who waved her nude photos in her face. She also said she believed that, at age 34, her days as "the girl with the perfect figure" were nearly over.

She moved to Florida in 1957 and married a much younger man, as an early marriage to her high school sweetheart had ended in divorce.

Her second marriage also failed, as did a third, and she suffered a nervous breakdown.

In 1959, she was lying on a sea wall in Key West when she saw a church with a white neon cross on top. She walked inside and became a born-again Christian.
After attending Bible school, she wanted to serve as a missionary but was turned down because she had been divorced. Instead, she worked full-time for evangelist Billy Graham's ministry.

A move to Southern California in 1979 brought more troubles.

She was arrested after an altercation with her landlady, and doctors who examined her determined she had acute schizophrenia. She spent 20 months in a state mental hospital in San Bernardino.

A fight with another landlord resulted in her arrest, but she was found not guilty because of insanity. She was placed under state supervision for eight years.
"She had a very turbulent life," Todd Mueller, a family friend and autograph seller, told The Associated Press on Thursday. "She had a temper to her."
Mueller said he first met Page after tracking her down in the 1990s and persuaded her to do an autograph signing event.

He said she was a hit and sold about 3,000 autographs, usually for $200 to $300 each.
"Eleanor Roosevelt, we got $40 to $50. ... Bettie Page outsells them all," he told The AP last week.

Born April 22, 1923, in Nashville, Tenn., Page said she grew up in a family so poor "we were lucky to get an orange in our Christmas stockings."

The family included three boys and three girls, and Page said her father molested all of the girls.

After the Pages moved to Houston, her father decided to return to Tennessee and stole a police car for the trip. He was sent to prison, and for a time Betty lived in an orphanage.

In her teens she acted in high school plays, going on to study drama in New York and win a screen test from 20th Century Fox before her modeling career took off.

RECENT CELEBRITY DEATHS AND OTHER ENDINGS

I know, I've been really slacking off on my blog lately. But at least a lot of the reasons have been good ones. I have two novellas to write (one for an anthology I was invited to be part of), a couple of short stories that people asked for, and I've been reading the submissions for DARK JESTERS, the upcoming humorous horror story anthology I am editing with Nick Cato for Novello Publishers. DARK JESTERS will be coming out sometime in 2009. The deadline has passed, and we're reading the final batch of stories that made it to the final round trying to decide which ones get in, and which ones just miss the mark.

So yeah, I've been busy.

Dark Jesters has been fun, but editing an anthology sure is a lot of work. And I'll be relieved when we post the final Table of Contents.

In the meantime, a lot has been happening. First off, a few celebrities died recently who I want to mention:

FORREST J. ACKERMAN - Known to his legion of fans as "Uncle Forry" (as well as "The Ackermonster" and "Dr. Acula"), Mr. Ackerman more or less created horror movie "fandom" back in the 1960s with a little magazine called FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND. If you were a kid in the 60's and 70's and you loved horror movies, there wasn't a better time to be a kid. There were tons of Creature Feature shows and horror movies airing all the time on television (where I was, there were shows from Friday night, all through Saturday up to Sunday morning), and for some of us this was our horror movie "education." Well, Ackerman's magazine celebrated all this stuff, with lots of photographs. I've picked up a few issues of FAMOUS MONSTERS recently, and there's not a lot of substance to a lot of the articles (more pictures than words at times), but when I was a kid, this magazine was solid gold. I remember going to Giger's Pharmacy with my mother as a kid and picking up the latest FM as well as monster comics, and the old druggist with his hearing aid telling me how these things were going to give me nightmares. But they never did.

Aside from the magazine, Ackerman was famous for having one of the biggest horror and sci-fi collections around (he called his house - which was more like a museum - the "Ackermansion"), including rare books, tons of movie props and other amazing stuff. He also created the super hot comic book character "Vampirella" for Warren Publishing in the early 70s.

Ackerman was 95 and had been ill for awhile. Supposedly toward the end he received tons of cards and letters from fans wishing him well. He touched more lives than even he knew, and nurtured a generation of horror lovers. He'll be missed.

BEVERLY GARLAND - she was probably best known to some people as the woman Fred McMurray eventually married in the later seasons of the classic TV show MY THREE SONS, but for horror fans, she was a staple of low-budget films of the 1950s, especially Roger Corman classics like IT CONQUERED THE WORLD.

Also, 1950s pin-up icon BETTIE PAGE recently had a heart attack (her sexy photos and laughably dated short "bondage films" made her an underground idol for decades, and they even made a movie about her life starring Gretchen Mol a couple of years ago), and underground comic book icon S. CLAY WILSON (who was part of the comic book revolution in the 1960s along with R. CRUMB in ZAP! magazine) has been ill and suffered a head injury. Wilson was my favorite of that bunch and I even got a personalized pen and ink drawing by him years ago of his most famous character "The Checkered Demon."

I hope these last two get better, but they're both pretty old.

***

As for "other endings" the first season of the HBO show TRUE BLOOD ended on a high note, and even though I thought the first couple of episodes were uneven and a little annoying, I kept watching, and this became one of my favorite new shows. I got so I was looking forward to seeing it every week. The season was much too short, but it's already been renewed for another season. This little tale of a telepathic waitress who falls for a vampire from the Civil War era might sound like an adult version of Twilight, but it's pretty damn cool and satisfying in its own right. If you missed it or don't have HBO, defintiely check it out when it gets released on DVD.

And one of my favorite shows of all time, THE SHIELD, came to an end, as its final season wrapped up a week ago. Vic Mackey finally got his comeuppance, some character died, others moved on, and all in all it was a very satisfying ending to an amazing show. Michael Chiklis turned in one helluva performance as Vic, and the whole ensemble cast gave us superior entertainment every week. I am really going to miss this one. But it sure was fun while it lasted.