The High Five Podcast Episode 38 – It’s All Connected Part 5

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This week, I catch you up on It’s All Connected 2021, the scare season scenario where every film I watch has to have a link to the previous one! For the full It’s All Connected 2021 experience go back and listen to episodes 29, 31, 33, 34 and the back half of 35.

Here’s the link for the Mensa article “Gay Coding In Hitchcock Films” I mentioned. Also, here are my original reviews for Jack’s Back and Dead Heat.

As always, you can email me at high5tj at gmail.com or follow me on Twitter and Instagram. Also feel free to subscribe to my YouTube Channel!

The Midnight Comic Club Episode 9 – Frankenstein Everywhere Else

Posted on by TJDietsch

Welcome to the ninth meeting of the Midnight Comic Club! In the third and final look at Frankenstein-related comic books we plunge into the waters of Dick Briefer, EC Comics, Warren, Image, Dark Horse and a variety of other companies. In this episode we see writers and artists experiment with all kinds of variations on the theme ranging from setting and sex to superheroics!

As always, I mention a lot of titles in the episode. I’ll link to them here and also show off some images below to help create a fuller experience. Frankenstein: The Mad Science Of Dick Briefer, The Monster Of Frankenstein By Dick Briefer, the Jack Davis-drawn “Mirror, Mirror On the Wall ” can be found in glorious black and white in Fantagraphics’ ‘Taint The Meat…It’s The Humanity, Creepy Archives Volumes 1 and 2, Eerie Archives Volume 1, Top Cow Monster War, Doc Frankenstein, Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein: Prodigal Son Volume 1, Madame Frankenstein and Frankenstein Underground!

80s Odyssey Double Feature: Teen Wolf & Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

Posted on by TJDietsch

While reading Ready Player One, I felt the urge to watch some 80s movies, as I’m sure plenty of other people have since the book came out six years ago. With that in mind, I took to both Netflix and Amazon Prime to make that happen. I didn’t wind up with films directly mentioned in the book (if memory serves, which it doesn’t always), but did come up with a pair of favorites: Teen Wolf and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Continue reading 80s Odyssey Double Feature: Teen Wolf & Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

Halloween Scene: Universal’s Wolf Monsters

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chaney-wolf-manI might have to rethink my position on werewolf movies. For a while, they just didn’t click with me, but after loving An American Werewolf In London and four Universal Monsters movies revolving around lycanthropes, I might be changing my tune! And thanks to picking up the big UM DVD set, I’ve been able to do a pretty deep dive on all (or most) things wolf from that era. Continue reading Halloween Scene: Universal’s Wolf Monsters

Halloween Scene An American Werewolf In London (1981)

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american-werewolf-in-london-poster-1As I mentioned on Twitter last week, I’m embarrassed to say I’ve never seen John Landis’ An American Werewolf In London before. I mean, it’s considered one of the best werewolf AND horror comedies around which immediately makes it a must-see movie, even if I’m not a big fan of that particular monster. But it gets worse because I not only saw the Paris-set sequel from the 90s, but also own the soundtrack. As if that wasn’t bad enough, I actually interviewed Landis in person at one of the first New York Comic Cons (more on that in a future post this month). Continue reading Halloween Scene An American Werewolf In London (1981)

Halloween Scene: The Trade Pile

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wytches vol 1Even with all the Halloween-related work I had going on this season — which included healthy doses of Warren’s Eerie comics and Marvel scare books — I still had some time to read a few other things leading up to the big day. I’ll hit these up in a quick hits fashion, but still wanted to call out a few fun aspects of each book. Continue reading Halloween Scene: The Trade Pile

Halloween Scene Movie Roundup: The New Style

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creep posterLike I said in my previous post, I was pretty busy with horror-related work leading up to this most glorious of holidays. I was actually able to reverse-engineer a binge on new horror movies into some lists which made the whole thing feel a lot more productive. Continue reading Halloween Scene Movie Roundup: The New Style

Halloween Scene: The Self-Promotion Post

Posted on by TJDietsch

I think it’s pretty obvious to anyone who reads this blog on a regular basis or knows me personally that I love a good scare (as long as its in book, comic or movie form, not real life). Since I don’t currently write for a site with a horror focus, that means I save up a lot of my best ideas for October. Luckily, I had a lot of ones that my editors also thought were good, which means I’ve been busily reading, watching and writing scary things since September. Now that Halloween’s hitting tomorrow, it’s time to toss out all the links for wider consumption!

My biggest project this fall by far was a series of posts at Marvel.com called Marvel Spooklights. Last year I did four of these shout outs leading up to Halloween. This year, I did 22, one for each weekday of the month. It was a lot of work, but also a lot of fun and I got to check out a lot of books I hadn’t read before. Particular favorites include the Juan Doe-drawn Legion Of Monsters mini, Steve Gerber’s last Man-Thing story and the surprisingly good Journey Into Mystery #1. I read them all on Marvel Unlimited, which is an awesome Netflix-like service for comics.

In other reading news, I went way back to my earliest days with the genre and did a list for Geek.com about the best stories from the three Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark books that I got a few months before from my parents’ house. The stories themselves are fairly simple, but those damn drawings still made me wince every now and then when I turned the page.

I also pitched a few lists for The Robot’s Voice that got approved. First, I tackled The 10 Best Stories From The Early Days of Eerie, a companion piece to the one I did about Creepy not too long ago. Reading these books is always a treat, I’d like to get them all. I also watched all the Nightmare On Elm Street movies and did a list of the scariest nightmares perpetrated by Mr. Krueger. Aside from Dream Warriors, I wasn’t much of a NOES fan going into this re-watch, but I actually really enjoyed the franchise for reasons I’ll get into in a separate post probably next week.

Finally, I tried focusing much of my post-NOES movie watching on newer horror movies so I could do a few lists for Spinoff. One focused on new takes on familiar genres, while the other was about the subgenre du jour these days, supernatural flicks. I’m planning on doing a movie roundup post that will get into this in more detail, but Babadook shook me to my core, What We Do In The Shadows reminded me of my all-time favorite show the UK Office and It Follows is problematic…depending on what you want from your horror movies.

And now, with all that out of the way and a super busy month behind me, I’m going to collapse into a little ball and watch scary movies until my kids come home.

Buffy Season 8 Trade Post: Volumes 1 Through 8 & Fray

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buffy season 8 volume 1 the long way home

It’s vampire week here on UnitedMonkee! Let’s kick things off with one of their all-time biggest enemies, Buffy The Vampire Slayer! Like most of the internet, I loved the series (yes, even the first season). Even so, when Dark Horse first announced they were continuing the show’s adventures with Season 8, I was a bit skeptical, even though series creator Joss Whedon was acting as executive producer of the whole thing. See, back in the day, I bought a ton of Buffy comics from Dark Horse until I realized that they were just kind of filling in holes and playing with the mostly un-chronicled summers. Later on I picked up the Buffy Omnibus volumes and read in the intro that that was part of the whole deal because they didn’t want the comics to step on the toes of the show. As a reader, though, I got a bit bored reading about Season Three characters when Season Four was in full swing, but that’s old water under an old, far more crankier bridge.

The timing thing was obviously no longer an issue with the show being off the air. And, adding to the “good” column, Whedon would have an unlimited budget to work with and some of the best names in comics, TV and film like Brian K. Vaughan, Brad Meltzer, Georges Jeanty, Drew Goddard, Jane Espenson and Karl Moline.

Really, there was no chance I wasn’t going to start reading this book because I was working at Wizard at the time and free comics were everywhere. Like my fellow Buffy fans in the office, we got to reading and really enjoyed it. I might have been a little taken aback by the whole idea of this army of Slayers working around the world S.H.I.E.L.D.-style, but once I got used to it, I was all in. Continue reading Buffy Season 8 Trade Post: Volumes 1 Through 8 & Fray

A Feast Of Friday The 13th Frights!

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abbott and costello meet frankensteinI was looking at the calendar last week and realized that there wouldn’t be another Friday the 13th until November. I celebrated last month’s by watching Funhouse and The Shortcut, but wanted to go all out for this one. So, here are a review I’ve been thinking about for a few weeks along with a few new ones! Continue reading A Feast Of Friday The 13th Frights!