Monster! #21: September 2015

Boasting moodily melancholy and macabrely beautiful original cover art by Jolyon Yates, MONSTER! #21 deviates somewhat from our regular format by containing less individual articles than usual; however, this is by no means to say that there is overall any less material in the issue, as the page-count is still a whopping 110-plus. As it says right in its title, John L. Vellutini’s giant (45-page!) feature article “Ties That Bind: The Pocong & Other Creepy Creatures in Contemporary Indonesian Horror Cinema” covers a whole slew of Indo monster movies while also alighting on other examples of Southeast Asian fantasy film fare in passing. In his article/review entitled “Cohen’s Creatures”, as well as delving into some key aspects of the filmmaker’s lengthy career, Stephen R. Bissette gives us his in-depth appraisal of the recently-revised/reprinted edition of Tony Williams’ essential reference work, LARRY COHEN: THE RADICAL ALLEGORIES OF AN INDEPENDENT FILMMAKER. In “No Strings Attached! (Part 2)”, Christos Mouroukis rounds out his film-by-film overview of Charles Band’s and Full Moon’s popular PUPPET MASTER series. Elsewhere, Steve Fenton expends a few thousand words about Ron Ormond’s jaw-droppingly out-to-lunch “Bigfoot” movie THE EXOTIC ONES (1968), better-known to many as MONSTER AND THE STRIPPER; while Tim Paxton covers a trio of ’80s Hong Kong spooky flicks, including one of the weirdest, THE BLACK MAGIC WITH BUDDHA (1983). Individual movies also reviewed this ish are WARLOCK (1988), NIGHT OF THE ZOMBIES (1981), DEEP BLUE SEA (1999), GHOST SHARK (2013) and FIEND (1980), and the other art/writing contributors to M! #21 are Andy Ross, Michael Hauss, Eric Messina, and Matt Bradshaw. All this plus tons of pics and detailed video availability info for films covered, too! What more could you ask for?!