Finally...FINALLY... got my hands on my subscription issue of MFTV #32 and read through it immediately.  What can I say?  Great.  Great great great.  This just might be the best issue yet of one of the great monster movie mags ever.

I don't have much to say about Greg Mank's FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN article or Tom Weaver's CREATURE  piece.  They're both nigh perfect.  I don't have even the slightest of quibbles about either.  Some of the best genre reading I've enjoyed in a very long time.  If I prefer Greg Mank's contribution to Tom's, it's only because I love FMTWM more than the Creech films.  Both articles make me impatient for the books from which they are lifted.  (And for Scottie's FMTWM book, too).  These articles are both top of the top shelf stuff.

Scott Essman's article on the Wolf Man makeup is also very good and suffers only in comparison to the two pieces it has to follow.  It's a nice history of Universal's werewolf makeups and of Jack Pierce's work.  It is a bit of a cheat, however, to advertise the piece on the cover as "The Evolution of Pierce's Wolf Man Makeup."  It's not really that.  Essman covers the proposed WEREWOLF OF LONDON makeup and the final, utilized makeup, and how the original idea more or less was used for Larry Talbot.  But that's just history, not really a look at how the makeup "evolved."  Essman really has only one paragraph in the piece that deals with (or even mentions) the evolution of the look.

Actually, that might make for a fun article too.  Maybe a little too picayune, but I'd like to read how "the ears were hairier in ...."  "the chin whiskers were longer in..." "the fur was darker in..."  something like that.  A genuine look at the "evolution" of the makeup as it was adjusted from film to film  But that's not really what this article was.

Unlike what's frequently the case, I don't even disagree with the reviews.  I haven't seen all the new DVDs or read all the new books, but I agree with all the general notions presented.  It was in the reviews where I found the only typos I spotted in the whole issue (reinforcing my belief that mistakes are more common in the later pages of books and magazines than in the early parts.)  But these errors were so incredibly slight that I hesitate to even mention them...Okay, that's enough hesitation. There are only two mistakes I have to report and, judging from them, I think somebody just put too much pressure on the "D" key.  "An" becomes "and" at one point, and "recognize" is mistakenly past-tensed as "recognized."  And that's it.  See?  Really nothing.

I do have a quibble with George Reis' review of the DRACULA VS. FRANKENSTEIN disc.  He writes, "This was, of course, Chaney's and Naish's last movie roles..." Not only is that phrase clumsy and grammatically garbled, it's mistaken.  Groton was NOT Chaney's last movie role.

And, finally, in Mark Clark's review of WEST OF SHANGHAI on disc, he mentions "undeniably racist overtones" in the movie just one sentence after tossing off a borderline offensive racist adjective of his  own.

But, as you can tell, those few tiny criticisms are the nittiest of picking.  MONSTERS FROM THE VAULT C#32 is just sensational.  One for the time capsule.


If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.                                                                                     Dorothy Parker