FF: The 80s Slasher Librarian

DIY audiobooks to novelizations and tie-ins of 80s slasher franchises, including Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, and Final Destination (which is neither 80s nor slasher, but might as well be).  These books are stupid expensive to find and will probably never be reprinted. Truly the Lord's work.

Give him a listen, and support on Patreon if you can.

Coweb aka Ninja Masters (2009)

Coweb aka Ninja Masters (2009)

Jiang Lui Xia starts work as a bodyguard only to have her charge kidnapping on her first day.

Not a good movie, and worse yet, a very frustrating one for the missed opportunities.  90s Hong Kong action mixed with modern direct to streaming editing and camerawork.  The DTS stuff points the camera at anything except the action to hide the fact that people are just waving their arms around.  Here, we see just enough to know that there was competent martial arts direction and stunt work somewhere, most just out of frame.

The whole thing is currently free with ads on YouTube.  There are no Ninjas.

Grand Funk Railroad - Into the Sun

Filmed at Pirate World by auteur Barry Mahon, the artist behind the Ice Cream Bunny

FF: Paperback Warrior

Eric and Tom at Paperback Warrior have put in a monumental effort covering men's adventure fiction, for the couple dozen of us out there who are into this kind of thing.  Their site, Paperback Warrior, has tons of reviews.  I'm deeply jealous of their output, but even more jealous that they have the time to read all this stuff.

In addition to covering the usual vigilante and war series books, they cover noir and westerns.

They run a weekly podcast, the only one on the subject I'm aware of.

They have a Facebook and Twitter presence as well, but mostly links back to their website.

C.O.B.R.A. 2: Paris Kill-Ground by Joseph Rosenberger

C.O.B.R.A. 2
Paris Kill-Ground
by Joseph Rosenberger
1987, Critic's Choice

Jon Skul and his intergender team of operatives investigate the subjects of KGB blackmail, with scenes alternating between them planting bugs and murdering every cop in Paris.  Killing innocent bystanders in the name of anti-communism is a running theme in this series, and Rosenberger pulls out all the stops for this one.

Some variety in this one, with shootouts on the city streets, Parisian bars, during a boat chase, a car chase, and finally at an abandoned airstrip.  The goal, kind of, is to stop a KGB plot to assassinate a NATO general and frame the IRA.  Jon Skul and COBRA accomplish this by killing scores of French cops and special agents, mostly in the name of keeping a low profile, and framing Libya.

Rosenberger gets in a sex scene early on, continuing the budding romance with Deborah Miles we saw in the first book, but that angle is promptly forgotten.  There's an ounce of character development with Skul's drinking problem, but the other four agents are a blank slate.

Paperback from AbeBooks

FF: THE UNITED RONIN NETWORKS

I've been digging into the world of YouTube amateur audiobooks lately.  Personal tastes in speaking styles vary more than writing styles, I find.  Based on comments, some folks have very high standards for audio quality.  As long as nobody's strangling bats in the background, I'm usually good.

Ralph at The United Ronin Networks has been going through the Donald Goines bibliography.  I haven't listened to a full one yet, but his voice matches well with the material.

The Accursed Tower - The Crusader 1 by John Cleve (Andrew Offutt)

The Accursed Tower
The Crusader 1
by John Cleve (Andrew Offutt)
1974 Dell

I was expecting some spicy historical fiction with a few sex scenes.  What I got was cover to cover ass porn with a little bit of historical fiction.

A young crusader Guy foils an assassination attempt on Richard the Lionhearted and becomes his squire and no-homo threesome partner.  There's a bit about spies and a tower siege which make for some good action, and sex scene make better padding than the usual political intrigue.

The sex scenes get rapier and more rectal as the book goes on, culminating in a traitor being tied up into a ball, having her vagina sewn up with sand, and butt raped to death by a whole battalion.  Pretty strong stuff for Dell, but historical fiction has always been a good cover for exploitation.

The whole series is available for Kindle from Amazon

Epcot Preview Center

It says a lot about me that I'd probably enjoy the preview center more than the actual rides being previewed.  The video presentation looks amazing, despite it sounding like they hired the narrator from a YouTube ad about which foods doctors say you must not eat to avoid belly fat.

And I see that Rocket Raccoon has gone full Iago, interrupting the show to prove that Universe of Energy (Under New Management) is not your grandpa's roller coaster.

I want a house made out of the attraction posters, even if they are calling every restroom and water fountain its own pavilion.

Victims by Shaun Hutson

Victims
by Shaun Hutson
1987 WH Allen

A sleazy special effects expert is nearly blinded in an effect gone wrong, gets a cornea transplant, and gains the ability to see murder victims, which is convenient as there's a serial killer on the loose. Add in a reporter with a creepy boss who's stalking her.

There are a lot of dropped threads in the story, but it's tied up so nastily it makes up for it.  The whodunit elements are secondary to the gore and sleaze, giving the book a good giallo vibe.

I don't know if Hutson usually does this, but the book is full of referential names: Frank Miller, Sam Loomis, Det. Chandler, etc.

Paperback from AbeBooks

Men's Adventure on Kindle

Below are links to Men's Adventure paperback series currently available in ebook format for Kindle.  Some are full series, some partial, sometimes only single titles.  Buying ebooks often benefits the authors or their estates more than used books, and the affiliate money keeps me in bad habits. Titles currently available for Kindle Unlimited or Audible are listed, but please check before you click.

You may be eligible for a free trial with Kindle Unlimited or Audible - signups support the site.

.357 Vigilante aka The Jury(Ian Ludlow) - KU

Ashes (William J Johnstone)

The Assassin (Peter McCurtin)

Big Brain (Gary Brandner)

Black Samurai (Marc Olden)

Butler (Philip Kirk)

CADS (John Sievert) - KU

Captain Shark (Richard Silver) - KU

Casca (Barry Sadler)

Chant (George C. Chesbro)

Cherry Delight / Sexecutioner (Glen Chase) - KU

Chopper Ops (Mack Maloney)

Cody's Army (Jim Case)

Coxeman (Troy Conway)

Crime Minister (Ian Barclay)

C.A.T. (Crisis Aversion Team) (Spike Andrews) 

Cross (Andrew Vachss) - Audible

John Crown (Terry Harknett) 

Dakota (Gilbert Ralston) - KU

Death Wish (Brian Garfield) - Audible

Deathlands (James Axler) - Audible

Defender (Jerry Ahern)

Destroyer (Warren Murphy & Richard Sapir)

Dog Teams (William Johnstone)

Doomsday Warrior (Ryder Stacy) - KU - Audible

Dracula (Robert Lory) 

Endworld (David Robbins)

Executioner (Don Pendleton) - Audible

Fox (Adam Hardy) - KU

Glasshouse Gang (Gordon Landsborough)

Handyman (Jon Messmann) - KU

Hardman (Ralph Dennis) - KU - Audible

Hardy (Martin Meyers)

Hawk (Dan Streib)

Hawker (Carl Ramm) - KU - Audible

Heller (Frank Roderus) - KU

The Hook (Brad Latham)

Jason Striker (Piers Anthony)

Lady from LUST (Rod Gray) - KU

Last Ranger (Craig Sargent)

Lone Wolf (Mike Barry) - KU

Mac Wingate (Bryan Smith)

MacMorgan (Randy Striker)

Malko / SAS (Gérard de Villiers) - Audible

Man From Pansy (Don Rico)

Max Donovan (Riall Nolan) - KU

MIA Hunter (Jack Buchanan) - KU - Audible

Mission of Alex Kane (John Preston) - KU

Mystic Rebel (Ryder Syvertsen) - KU

Nolan (Max Allan Collins) - Audible

Outlanders (James Axler)

Owl (Robert Forward) - KU

Quarry (Max Allan Collins) - Audible

Penetrator (Lionel Derrick) - KU - Audible

Phoenix (David Alexander)

Point Team (J.B. Hadley)

Simon Rack (Laurence James)

Rat Bastards (John Mackie / Len Levinson) - Audible

Revenger (Jon Messmann) - KU

Rig Warrior (William Johnstone)

Sabat (Guy N. Smith) 

Satan Sleuth (Michael Avallone) - KU

Scorpion Squad / Vietnam: Ground Zero (Eric Helm) - KU

Sea Wolf (Bruno Krauss) - KU

Sergeant (Gordon Davis)

Seventh Carrier (Peter Albano)

Shaft (Ernest Tidyman) - Audible

Soldier of Fortune (Peter McCurtin) 

The Specialist (John Cutter) - KU

The Specialists (Chet Cunningham) - KU - Audible

Stony Man (Don Pendleton)

Strike Force: Falklands (Adam Hardy) - KU

Surgical Strike (Jerry Ahern)

The Survivalist (Jerry Ahern) - Audible

Survivor of Nam (Donald E. Zlotnik)

Takers (Jerry Ahern)

They Call Me the Mercenary (Alex Kilgore) - Audible

Veil (George C. Chesbro)

Warbots (G. Harry Stine) - KU - Audible

Wingman (Mark Maloney) - Audible

The Zone (James Rouch)

Daughters of Satan (1972)

Daughters of Satan (1972)

Tom Selleck buys a painting of witches being burned at the stake because one of them bares an uncanny resemblance to his wife.  Figures start disappearing from the painting and entering their lives.  Has the vibe of made for TV combined with Filipino exploitation.  Slow moving and not much happens, then all of a sudden there is nude torture and a creepy as scene of a mortician taking spicy photos of a corpse.



Available in multiple formats from Amazon

Rockabye Baby by Stephen Gresham

Rockabye Baby
by Stephen Gresham
1984 Zebra Books

Stephen Gresham writes contemporary swamp magic fantasies under the cover of horror.  Rockabye Baby has more horror than most, but even here it feels like there's just enough to barely justify the cover.

We learn in the opening that an abled man pretends to be disabled during the day and pretends to be a woman while killing children.  He calls himself the Bloofer Lady, which is a reference to Lucy Westenra in Dracula.  A boy learns to harness the Darkness to give him the power to stop him, while a big city detective questions the locals.

The book ends with a long enough epilogue as to make the bit about the serial killer a minor subplot - as much as I'd like to see Grehsam do full-throated horror, I prefer Dew Claws where he doesn't even bother.

There's a bit about the kid's bookshelf filled with adventure fiction, including the Powers of Matthew Star, which sent me on a wild goose hunt to see if there was a novelization or even a comic book adaptation.  Guess this goes down with the Necronomicon or The King in Yellow as a classic mythical book.

Available in ebook from Amazon

Tie-Ins: Halloween II by Jack Martin (Dennis Etchison)

Halloween II
by Jack Martin (Dennis Etchison)
1981 Zebra Books

I read this novelization and saw the movie as a teenager, and all I remembered was the hot tub scene and that Night of the Living Dead was playing throughout the film.  I recently rewatched the film and listened to the audiobook, and this time I don't even remember the hot tub scene.

The story follows directly after Halloween, with Laurie Strode going to the hospital, to be followed by the Shape, Micheal Myers, in turn pursued by Sam Loomis.  Not much happens in the movie, and those bare bones are padded out with characters' internal monologues between each line from the script.

The rich can buy a used copy from AbeBooks,  while us cheap folks can listen to the reading from Audiobooks For the Damned

The Unseen (1980)

Some journalists stay at a creepy house and get pulled into heating vents.  Sydney Lassick is like a psychotic Joe Besser and the back story is creepy as hell, but not a ton going on here.  The first half is Barbara Bach breaking up with her boyfriend and the second is her crawling around in a basement.

DVD from Amazon

TM Galley: Omen: The Final Conflict

The Omen: The Final Conflict

The novelization of the final film, thought the book series continued

Paperback from Amazon

And the Undead Sing by Carter Brown

And the Undead Sing
by Carter Brown
1974 Signet

I have a weakness for Aussies and Brits doing hard-boiled American detective fiction, something about how they overdo the slang.  I've read one Carter Brown before and enjoyed it - it was a light, funny, fast moving detective story.

This one, not so much.  This was the last of the Mavis Seidlitz stories.  Mavis is the ditsy secretary of a private eye who stumbles her way to accidentally solving cases, while getting kidnapped, beat up, and sexually menaced along the way.  This kind of thing doesn't age well, and even by 1974 I'm sure it was wearing thin.

Here, Mavis is pretending to be a reclusive singer to lure out the mob figures who want to force her to sign a recording contract.  Most of the plot involves her panties being pulled down to see if she has or doesn't have a tattoo.

Doesn't work as a mystery, not particularly funny, and didn't even have the charm of leaning into the "pop-speak" of those way-out rockers.

Paperback from Amazon

RIP Rip Taylor

The Night Seasons by J.N. Williamson

The Night Seasons
by J.N. Williamson
1991 Zebra Books

This started life as a novella length Steven King parody before it was padded out to 400 pages.  I don't know if the parody part was written out, unless the joke is that it's padded out to 400 pages.

Alcoholic, failed writer Rich Stenvall gets arrested for DWI.  The Sheriff has left town for a conference and left the jail in control of a psychiatrist, who recruits the writer to help with his experiments involving plants.

The plant causes a fungus to take over its victim's bodies and emerge from every pore and orifice in a relatively calm and ungory manner.  There's no "destructive orgy of bloody violence" or "savage jailhouse violence", just some blooming mushrooms.

The novel is in first person and jumps point of view to a few other characters in the first few chapters, but this doesn't get developed and goes nowhere.  There are also hints that Stenvall's alcoholism is wait makes him immune to the fungus, but this gets forgotten too - it's not as if he'd be the only alchy in jail, on either side of the bars.

The novel has a dreamlike quality, but I think that's less a stylistic choice and more the result of being so removed from reality.  Jails are not isolated places.  Shifts change, cops show up to book new prisoners, families come to visit.  You can't really have the entire jail, staff and all, die without someone noticing.

The novel ends with everyone dying except Stenvall, who walks out of an unlocked, unmanned jail.  He comes back a few days later to find the jail still unlocked, unmanned, and completely empty scrubbed clean.  Except for one room filled with fungus, dun dun dunnnn!  So a government conspiracy covered it all up but left one room for dramatic purposes.

Williamson's anthologies, such as the Masques series, tend to be better received than his fiction, which at least here failed to deliver on the promises on the back cover.

Paperback available from Amazon

Tie-Ins: Good Burger by Ray Garton as Joseph Locke

Good Burger
by Ray Garton as Joseph Locke
1997 Pocket Books

Keenan and Kel were a teen comedy duo on Nickelodeon, and Good Burger was a film based on a recurring sketch on the show All That.  I never saw the movie, but I remember at the time a reviewer raving that this was the return of the comedy duo and that Keenan and Kel were the new Abbott and Costello and would be the driving force of film comedy for decades to come.  That didn't happen.

The story has basic comedy film bones - two lovable losers work at Good Burger against the efforts of evil corporate Mondo Burger's efforts to shut them down.  I read this as a goof but it was surprisingly entertaining.  I say surprising because comedy almost never works for me in fiction.  It worked here because the gags and jokes come fast, while most comedy fiction telegraphs the jokes with long setups.  Here I can pace the timing to suit my own tastes, and I'm curious how the well the movie would do, though probably not curious enough to watch it.

The writing is geared towards young adults and has little more than dialogue and blocking, which works for the material.  I wouldn't think a lot of interior monologues and back stories would improve the pace.

You can check out the book for free at archive.org, and give Ray Garton some love at his kindle store - I promise I'll review a book he's proud of some day.

In a Dark Place by Ray Garton

In a Dark Place
by Ray Garton (ghostwriting for Ed and Lorraine Warren and Carmen Snedeker)
Villard 1992

In a Dark Place is a fiction novel.  By that I don't mean the events described didn't happen (we'll get to that), that's what format the writing is.  Other than the intro and epilogue, the book is written as a full fictional narrative, with interior monologues, descriptions of facial movements, etc.  At best it's "based on a true story".

The story is based on the Snedeker family, who move into a converted former mortuary to be closer to their son's medical providers.  The son has cancer, Mom is stressed out by apartment hunting, Dad has a long commute and is drinking too much.  Son starts hanging around with bad company, starts listening to heavy metal, wearing the t-shirts, reading the magazines.

All the while mysterious goings-on go on.  Things that can't possibly be explained, like how a whole case of soda can disappear in a home full of kids.  Then things start to get real when the son molests the girls in their sleep.

Junior gets arrested, gets locked up in juvi, is diagnosed with schizophrenia, and pretty much disappears from the rest of the book.  There's a hint that demons influenced the youngster, but Garton goes out of his way to drop a line about him definitely being organically disturbed.

Then came the butt raping.  Both parents were repeatedly raped by invisible ghost penises.  Eventually they got the help of Ed and Lorraine Warren, who investigated and held an exorcism on the house.  They psychically determine that the house is possessed by demons, who came into the house when the former undertaker molested the corpses.

The book serves a very specific fetish of alternating rape scenes with bible readings, until eventually they they read bible verses during the rapes.  Demons pretend to be the souls of the molested corpses and repeatedly proclaim how much they loved "all the sucking and f*cking".  The house gets exorcised, the end

Taken as fiction it's a sleazy, nasty piece of work.  More sex than horror.  As far as the "based on a true story" bit goes, I don't know what happened at the Snedeker house, but I have no reason to believe that any of this happened.  The book has been disowned by both Ray Garton and the Snedekers.  The Warrens didn't seem to have a problem with it, as the book is in their name and remained in print.

The only claims I've seen directly from the Snedekers come from this appearance on Sally Jesse Raphael on October 30th, 1992, three days after the book was published (though likely recorded earlier)  

The story is different here, with mysterious ghost hands replacing actual teenage metalhead hands doing some of the molesting, and the girls changing from family friends to nieces.  The Snedekers were here promoting the book, but later disowned it as inaccurate.  The author Ray Garton says the Snedekers couldn't keep their story straight and Earl Warren told him to make it up and make it scary, along with some other allegations.

The same story later became the basis of the inexplicably popular The Haunting in Connecticut, and the fictional Warrens became the centerpiece of the billion dollar Conjuring franchise.  The fictional Earl Warren is some kind of Christ figure, while the real life one is an obvious bullying conman.

Nobody comes away looking good.  All the parties either can't keep their story straight or don't mind promoting a book full of falsehoods.  The Snedekers come across worse if the house actually was possessed.  In the book they say they stayed in a house where everyone was ghost raped because they were sick of house hunting and maybe something about Jesus.  In the Sally version, they were afraid that if they moved the demons would follow them because weird things happened at work.  This contradicts the book, as well as not making any sense that they wouldn't even try getting the kids out of the house.

The most distasteful thing for me was how the Snedekers disclosed their son's mental health history and juvenile criminal history - they at least used a pseudonym in the book, but then revealed his name in the promotion.

Ray Garton is at least a professional fictioneer and he's expressed his distaste for the enterprise.  In this Monstertalk interview he says it was "the lowest point in my career, and I wrote the novelization for Good Burger."

Next week: The novelization for Good Burger

TOEI Kyoto Studio Park

Beneath Still Waters (2005)

Forty years ago a Spanish town is flooded in the creation of a reservoir in order to bury the supernatural forces awakened by an evil cult.  Now there are a series of deaths and disappearances around the reservoir, accelerating until the entire town goes mad.

Good concept, pretty original and unpredictable, unfortunately ruined by poor dubbing and overambitious CGI.

Good enough to make you imagine a better mad movie with the same material.  On the plus side, I'm looking forward to reading the book by Matthew J. Costello, which you can get on kindle from Amazon.

Pray For The Wildcats (1974)

Pray For The Wildcats (1974)

Some all star casting with this one.  Andy Griffith as a psychopathic businessman, William Shatner as a suicidal adman, Robert Reed as the sellout, former child preacher Marjoe Gortner as the creative, and Angie Dickinson as the hat-wearing cheating wife.

Griffith forces the others to go on a motorbike trek across Baha, Mexico before he'll give them his advertising account.  Shatner's in the process of being fired and upped his life insurance, Gortner's girlfriend is pregnant and he needs a steady job, Angie is married to Mike Brady but sleeping with Captain Kirk.

Andy goes rapey on a hippie chick, fights her dude, and leaves them stranded in the desert.  I was expecting more of a thriller, with Andy hunting the others through the desert, but it's more moral quandary than chase scenes.

The film ends on a downer, with the men meeting their wives, their wives dropping soul destroying news, and everyone driving away in silence.

I'm getting hooked on the ABC Movies of the Week.  Mid or post-career stars chewing scenery with a $50 budget, and they're almost all on Youtube.

Free Stuff: Nolan 2: Blood Money by Max Collins

Nolan 2: Blood Money by Max Collins

Paperback from Amazon

Check out for free from archive.org

Free Stuff: Not of This World by Peter Kolosimo

Not of This World by Peter Kolosimo

Check out for free from archive.org

Free Stuff: The Six Million Dollar Man: The Secret of Bigfoot Pass by Mike Jahn

The Six Million Dollar Man: The Secret of Bigfoot Pass by Mike Jahn

Check out for free from archive.org

Paperback from Amazon

Free Stuff: Blood Snarl by Ivor Watkins

Blood Snarl by Ivor Watkins

Check it out for free from archive.org

Free Stuff: Strange Monster Stories by D.J. Arneson

Strange Monster Stories by D.J. Arneson

Check out for free from archive.org

Garfield's Nightmare - Kennywood

Truly nightmarish, more for the repetitive, overlapping audio clips than the visuals.

The Executioner 79: Council of Kings

The Executioner 79: Council of Kings
by Chet Cunningham and Les Danforth
1985 Worldwide Library

Through the decades and hundreds of books, Mack Bolan has gone through several phases.  After Don Pendleton's original run of his war against the mafia, Bolan got recruited by the government to fight terrorism.  At some point he avenged the death of a love interest, burning his bridges with the government as he went, so he's back to fighting the mob, supported by his brother Johnny.  I may prefer this era of the Bolans, with Mack as a stone cold sociopath moving from target to target.

Council of Kings is set very much in Oregon, with shootouts at Multnomah Falls and Mount Tabor Park.  Bolan's target is a mafia lone sharking operation, which spins off into prostitution and arms running.  There's a little bit of him working with the sister of a women killed in the operation, but Bolan is so uniquely horrible at keeping women alive that she's soon dispatched and forgotten about.

There's a bizarre sequence of Bolan going through a series of deathtrap rooms in a warehouse before he can confront a pimp.  There's a room full of cobras, another room covered in sand full of landmines, etc.  I can't see the pimp having to run the gauntlet every time he wants to leave his office, and I wonder who feeds the snakes.

The book ends with Bolan telling Johnny a story from his 'Nam days as an excuse to include a short story to fill out the page length.  I don't know how common this practice was, but this particular story was one of the darkest in Men's Adventure.

Bolan has a buddy who, after getting a Dear John letter, shaves his head into a mohawk, signifying that he didn't intend to come back from his mission.  He doesn't, but Bolan's convinced that he managed to swallow a canvas map before being killed.  He becomes obsessed with the idea, and breaks into a mortuary to cut open his buddy's corpse to find it.  Instead, he finds a stash of heroin.

Here Bolan learns that the US military is controlled by a cabal of organized crime, the titular Council of Kings, who use war to push drugs.  And we learn that female VC spies would kill GIs while screwing them, via toilet paper tubes lined with razor blades secreted in their hoo-hahs. 

Bad Influences: This Is Horror

This is Horror and related releases were a late 80s series of repackaged video press kits, showing movie clips, interviews, and behind the scenes footage.  John Simmons is the name that comes up the most as the responsible parties.

It started with Stephen King's World of Horror, a straight to VHS release.  Some sources have this as 1986; the copyright of this version is 1988.  Note that many uploads with this title are actually the later This is Horror.



This was expanded into the syndicated series This is Horror, which uses the King interviews as bookends.  I believe there were 13 episodes, copyright 1989, and they were all over cable TV.  I saw them on MTV.  This exact version isn't readily available on the internet - the closest thing is a two DVD set with Dutch subtitles.

These were re-edited further into a three VHS set title This is Horror.  I believe only the first was released in the US.  All three are currently available on YouTube.








There was another release under the title Encyclopedia of Horror - I don't know if these are exactly the same or another re-editing.

Finally, the same clips with the same narrator was repacked as Shadow Theater, with host clips by Robert Englund.

Romon U Park - Euro Express

Real Evil: The Torture Gang

I'm reading a 60s Sexton Blake novel that has a gangster who nails his victims' knees to the floor with six inch nails.  I was reminded of Monty Python's Piranha Brothers sketch:




I figured that must have been a Kray Brothers thing, but it turns out it was their rival the Richardson Gang, also called the Torture Gang, who would also cut off toes with bolt cutters and pull teeth with pliers.  One collector caught skimming spent two days nailed to a warehouse floor while his associates would occasionally take a piss on him.

Apache Kid (1987)

Apache Kid (1987)
Dir: Bruno Mattei, Claudio Fragasso

Mattei and Fragasso made a couple of very late westerns in 1987, this and Scalps.  Both are brutal and gory for westerns, but neither really cross the line into horror like Cut-Throats Nine.  Apache Kid is some silliness about a blonde boy saved and raised by natives.  It does contain Mattei's patented "small child awkwardly slumps to the ground after being shot" scenes like in Hell of the Living Dead.

Currently on Amazon Prime.

The Destroyer 1: Created, The Destroyer by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

Created, The Destroyer
The Destroyer 1
by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir
1971, Pinnacle

Remo Williams is a Newark cop framed for murder and sent to the electric chair.  His death is faked by the super secret organization CURE.  CURE is dedicated to wiping out organized crime through non-violent means: manipulating politics, fixing juries, etc.  They've decided to expand into assassination, starting with Remo.

Remo is trained in the martial arts and other areas of espionage before being sent on his first mission: murder his own recruiter.  Remo refuses and uses the opportunity to get drunk and considers going on the run.  Instead, he finishes his mission to infiltrate the building of a mafia enforcer by seducing his virgin feminist daughter.

Remo kills a bunch of mafia goons with his bare hands, including a pretty gruesome scene involving a thug's legs being cut off by a car crusher.  The novel ends with him banging the virgin daughter some more, which comes across a bit dark given that Remo said earlier that he was planning on killing her to not leave witnesses.

The 1988 reprint I read began with an introduction written by Chiun, Remo's Korean martial arts instructor.  Chiun is barely in the novel and has not developed into the comic relief he is in later books.  From what I can tell, the series gets increasingly comedic and over-the-top as time goes on.  1971 was still early for Men's Adventure, and the novel had a vibe more similar to Donald Hamilton or Andrew York.

The quality of the writing is good but you can feel that there were problems finding clear direction or sense of tone.  I'll need to give a later novel a try.  Some fans don't like the movie, but I actually preferred the film over this installment for having improved training sequences and having more charm.

The first men's adventure book I ever read was a Destroyer novel - a page of it, anyway, and I hated it so much I didn't touch the genre again for another 20 years.  My tastes have gotten more sophisticated over the years, but it's still taken me this long to crack open a Destroyer title.  Chiun seems funny in small doses, but would get real annoying real fast.  I've also read that the series later tends towards mean-spirited humor, reactionary politics, and a smug disdain for the genre, but none of that is evident in this installment.  I'll find out for myself later.

TV Obscura: Half Nelson (1985)

Starring Joe Pesci, Victoria Jackson, Fred Williamson, Bubba Smith, and Dick Butkus.  Had celebrity guests such as Rod Taylor and Dean Martin.

Top Secret/S.I. - Double Agent #1

Top Secret/S.I
Double Agent #1
Web of Danger by Aaron Allston
Acolytes of Darkness by Flint Dille and David Marconi
1988 TSR

Top Secret was TSR's contemporary espionage role-playing game, originating in 1980.  The system was updated in 1987 with Top Secret/S.I., which had a variety of game settings, which in turn had tie-in novels.

Web of Danger is similar to The Man From UNCLE.  The good guys work for ORION, an extra-governmental espionage agency, who fight the bad guys, the Web.  The plot: the web has a knockout gas, which they plan to use on an attack on the New York Stock Exchange, which in turn is cover for spreading a computer virus into the world's financial computer systems.

The novel has the feel of an RPG campaign, with different characters having different specialties, and you can almost feel the rolling dice as they attempt different tasks.

Acolytes of Darkness is set in the 1930s and is pure pulp homage, with beats lifted from the Shadow and the Spider.  Agent 13 is a former member of the Brotherhood, which is led by the sinister Hand Sinister.  The Brotherhood is functionally a yellow menace threat, but it also incorporates ancient South American priesthoods and European monks.  There is a supernatural element, with formulas for eternal life and a vampire.

While Web of Danger had the feel of a fictionalized rpg session, Acolytes of Darkness was more of a series of scenes stitched together.

There are two more Double Agent novel collections with different writers, and at least a couple more standalone Agent 13 novels.

Romon U Park

Chinese copy of Lotte World, though with fewer rides.

Blank That Ate Blank

It's been a running joke for decades to have monster movies with titles like "The Thing that Ate Pittsburgh" or "The Monster That Stepped On Cincinnati".  The joke started sometime in the 1950s - monster movies were common on TV and the whole thing has the feel of the quasi beatnik comedy albums of the time.  The earliest use I could pin down was December, 1959's The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, beginning the running gag of Maynard G. Krebs watching "The Monster That Devoured Cleveland".  Sid Ceasar had "The Creature that Ate the Monster", probably earlier but I don't know when.

The late 60s saw a musical variation of giant food items eating cities, spinning out of "The Eggplant That Ate Chicago" by Dr. West's Medicine Show and Junk Band.

Growing up I always assumed that the joke was based on films of similar names, and also that there would be parody films using that name construction, but it turns out there's not much of either.

There may be more, but the only actual scifi movie coming to mind that has this title setup is "The Monster That Challenged the World" from 1957.

Even later parody film titles are slim: the only two I could find were 1974's "The Car that Ate Paris", and 1996's "The Cockroach That Ate Cincinnati", which wasn't a scifi parody.  The movie that should have had this kind of title but didn't was "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes" in 1978.  Around 1974 or 1975 there was filming on "The Tomato That Ate Cleveland", but I'm not sure it was releaseded or finished.

Free Stuff: The Colonel by Donald Zec

The Colonel by Donald Zec

A fascinating study of weakness, cruelty and bizarre sexual tastes

Paperback from Amazon

Borrow for free from archive.org

Robowar (1988)

Robowar is a Bruno Mattei copy of Predator starring Reb Brown from Space Mutiny.

Free Stuff: Smear Job by James Mitchell

Smear Job by James Mitchell

Kindle ebook from Amazon

Borrow for free from archive.org

Tie-Ins: Flash Gordon

Flash Gordon began life as comic strip, a cash in of Buck Rogers, they couldn't get the rights for John Carter so they made their own.  Flash is best known today for the incredible 1980 film.  The property was last used in a 2007 TV series - from memory it had people running around a forest in street clothes, and a quick peek on youtube largely confirms this.

The classic era produced two pieces of prose in 1936:
Flash Gordon in the Caverns of Mongo by Alex Raymond (likely ghost written)
Flash Gordon Strange Adventure Magazine - the sole issue had the story The Master of Mars by James Edison Northford

Avon started a series in 1974, all under the Alex Raymond name but written by Ron Goulart and Bruce Cassiday:
1974:
The Lion Men of Mongo (Ron Goulart)
The Plague of Sound (Ron Goulart)
The Space Circus (Ron Goulart)
The Time Trap of Ming XIII (Bruce Cassiday)
The Witch Queen of Mongo (Bruce Cassiday)

1975: The War of the Cybernauts (Bruce Cassiday)

1980 saw the novelization of the film by Arthur Byron Cover

1980 also had a book series by David Hagberg that seemed unrelated the comics, movie, or Flash Gordon itself.  Probably still better than the TV show.
1980:
Massacre in the 22nd Century
War of the Citadels
Crisis on Citadel II

1981:
Forces from the Federation
Citadels under Attack
Citadels on Earth

Free Stuff: Creature! A Chrestomathy of Monstery ed Bill Pronzini

Creature! A Chrestomathy of Monstery ed Bill Pronzini

Available to borrow free at archive.org

Byron Preiss' The Secret

Byron Preiss is best known, to me at least, for editing the Weird Heroes and Ultimate monster anthologies.  In 1982 he published The Secret, a book of art and poetry which were to be clues to unearthing a dozen boxes hidden in public parks.  The boxes contained a key which could be exchanged for a $1000 jewel.  Only two of these have been located, in 1984 and 2005.

Like everything else, there's a podcast about it.  https://12treasures.com/

Criminally overpriced kindle ebook from Amazon

Tie-Ins: Buck Rogers

Barely known today, and mostly for the annoying "beedie beedie beedie" robot, Buck Rogers began life as the novella Armageddon 2419 A.D.  in Amazing Stories, August 1928, followed by The Airlords of Han in the March 1929 issue.  Written by Philip Francis Nowlan, the original novellas were strictly earthbound, with Rogers waking to a world of future gang warfare after 492 years of suspended animation.

Buck Rogers mostly took off in comic strips in 1929, where the name became synonymous with science fiction.  He also appeared in comic books, movie serials, two television series, and RPGs.  The character has been slipping ever deeper into obscurity, with multiple failed revival attempts over the last couple decades.

1933: Buck Rogers in the 25th Century by Philip Nowlan - a retelling of Buck's origin story, issued as a breakfast cereal premium.

Two novelizations based on the of the TV series by Addison E. Steele (Richard A. Lupoff)
1978: Buck Rogers in the 25th Century - novelization of the pilot theatrical film
1979: That Man on Beta - based on an unproduced script for a sequel to the film

There were a series of authorized sequels based on an outline by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle:

1981
Mordred by John Eric Holmes
Warrior's Blood by Richard S. McEnroe
Warrior's World by Richard S. McEnroe

1982: Rogers' Rangers by John Silbersack

TSR released a board game in 1988 and an role-playing game in 1990, with a series of books covering both:

1989:
Arrival (anthology)
Rebellion 2456 by M.S. Murdock
Hammer of Mars by M.S. Murdock
Armageddon off Vesta by M.S. Murdock

1990
First Power Play by John Miller
Prime Squared by M.S. Murdock

1991: Matrix Cubed by Britton Bloom

1992
The Genesis Web by Ellen C. & Theodore M. Brennan
Nomads of the Sky by William H. Keith, Jr.

1993: Warlords of Jupiter by William H. Keith, Jr. (TSR, Feb 1993, ISBN 1-56076-576-3)

1995: Buck Rogers: A Life in the Future by Martin Caidin - produced by TSR, but may have a different back story than the above.  A reboot of sorts by the creator of the Six Million Dollar Man, with Buck being placed into suspended animation by Cyberdine Systems.

Legendia - Lech Coaster

Nice integration with theming and water for an outdoor coaster

Where the Chill Awaits by T. Chris Martindale

Where the Chill Awaits
by T. Chris Martindale
1991 Warner Books

Wendigooooooo!

A corporate hunting trip goes horribly wrong.  The first half does well building tension and atmosphere as the boss goes slowly insane, haunted by memories of childhood abuse, and threatens to completely flip out like Leslie Neilsen in Day of the Animals


Instead, he becomes a flesh eating Wendigo.  A couple members of the trip survive, only to start becoming Wendigos themselves, growing taller with stretched out faces.  In my head I pictured them like Ents with the faces of Bruce Campbell in Army of Darkness and couldn't shake the image afterwards.

The end gets bogged down in details about what kind of Indian magic will reverse the process and a bunch of explosions.

I'm looking forward to reading Martindale's Nightblood - uzi-toting 'Nam vet against a town of vampires!

TV Obscura: Homes & Yo-Yo

Another robot buddy cop show, one that not even Harlan Ellison bothered to try suing.