Death Mates for the Lust-Lost – Hugh J. Gallagher

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pulpfiction0125 stories for $.99; they must be good!  Part V of XXV.

Miriam Daly is on a launch to the island compound of Mr. Martinez.  The passengers are a diverse group including a lecturer, an aerialist, a singer, a dancer, a magician’s assistant, and a concert pianist — all female. There are clearly no rocket scientists in the group as they haven’t figured out they’re all going to the same place despite being on a small boat heading toward an island.

Martinez greets them at his mansion and pulls aside three of the women.  The other three are led to their rooms by a “half-nude” servant, although which half and which sex are not described.

Miriam is led into a bedroom and the door is locked behind her.  Soon there is a tapping at her window.  She opens the latch and lets in the aerialist, who is actually a man, man! He posed as a woman to investigate this disappearance of his sister who was last known to be heading to this island.

Hearing voices, Miriam and the aerialist Phil climb down a trellis and follow their three companions being dragged into the woods.  Turns out Martinez has brought women here to hunt for sport — the second time in five stories that this trope has been used.  To prove his seriousness, he brutally tortures and kills one of the women.

The next day, exploring the estate, Miriam and Phil (dressed as Phyllis again) discover what became of the other women, and of Phil’s sister.  Whatever torture and nastiness goes on in this collection, you can usually depend on scores being settle at the end.

A pretty straight-forward tale

Post-Post:

  • First published in Mystery Novels and Short Stories Magazine, July 1940.
  • Also that month: The first successful helicopter flight.
  • Same publication as Mystery Novels Magazine or least original rip-off ever?  I have no idea.

Tales from the Crypt – Fitting Punishment (S2E12)

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tftcfitting01Or, as it must have been known back in the day, “The One with all the Black People.” Aside from the occasional Voodoo witch, TFTC has been whiter than a Seinfeld reunion. Our politically-correct betters in Hollywood remedy this by gerrymandering all the African Americans into one episode whose key elements are a basketball and sneakers.  On the bright side, no watermelons were injured in making this episode.

The episode opens on the Thorntonberry Funeral Home.  For some reason, the owner is credited as Ezra Thornberry.  Bobby Thorntonberry’s parents have been killed in a car crash, so he has come to live with his uncle.  Ezra reluctantly takes him in, also as an employee offering only room and board.  He begins immediately showing him the tricks of the trade by prying open the lips of his latest customer.  She is sporting a gold tooth — naturally.

Ezra further displays his cost-cutting practices by embalming a corpse with tap water. Actually, he very reasonably points out that the dead man doesn’t know the difference and the chemicals cost money.  I’m kind of on Ezra’s side.  This slab of beef is going in a vault in the ground, who cares.

tftcfitting03Further, he orders his coffins from Taiwan.  The Chinese being 6 inches shorter, their coffins are are smaller, ergo cheaper.

When the wrong type of casket is ordered, Ezra blames Bobby and beats him with a tire iron.  The medical bills start to mount up so Ezra sells Bobby’s Air Jordans to cover some of the cost.  He tells Bobby, on crutches, that he doesn’t need shoes.  Bobby threatens to go to the police.  As Bobby is struggling to climb the stairs, Ezra nails him with his own basketball, knocking him down the stairs and killing him.

Ezra gives him the water embalming and plops him in the misordered coffin.  Being one of the Chinese coffins, and Bobby being tall kid, his feet are hanging out of the end of the box.  Once again, Ezra has a solution and breaks out the power saw, cutting Bobby off at the ankles.

tftcfitting02The night after Bobby is buried, Ezra is awakened by a knocking.  No one is at the door.  He thinks his disapproving former organist is doing this to him — until he sees a ball slowly bouncing one step at a time, down the stairs, rolling to a stop at his feet, just like in The Changeling — except with a basketball cause, you know, he’s black.  There really is a satirical level to the scene, which I can’t imagine they intended.

A pair of Air Jordans with bloody fresh cut-off feet in them kick Ezra in the ass. Fortuitously, he is standing at the top of the basement stairs and falls down the same stairs where Bobby died.  Then he sees the bloody shoes hopping down the stairs; followed by the footless zombie-Bobby crutch-walking down them, footless legs dangling like Bobcat Goldthwait’s dummy.

Moses Gunn is great as the hateful old mortician.  Jon Clair, the nephew, had a pretty short career, but effectively pulls off his role as a naive well-meaning kid.  Another good one.

Post-Post:

  • Hey, how’d those Chinese guys get in the shot?  Oh, I guess if you order merchandise from Taiwan, Chinese guys deliver it.
  • It took three people to write this — this is the only writing credit for two of them.  The third writer, Don Mancini wrote several Child’s Play / Chucky movies.

The Shrieking Pool – G.T. Fleming-Roberts

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pulpfiction0125 stories for $.99; they must be great.  Part IV of XXV.

Reporter Larry Corrin is driving to Black Stool, er Pool.  For the 3rd time in four stories, a car gets stuck in the mud, or “bogged” as it is described.  Also for the third time in 4 stories, a person has been beckoned by a letter from an old acquaintance  Sadly, the hat tricks do not continue with a 3rd occurrence of naked women in chains.  Or in hats.

Corrin receives a letter from Dean Wile, owner of the Black Pool Lodge.  He says Black Pool has fallen into ill repute, what with the lake having developed an appetite for human flesh.  After Corrin’s car is bogged, he stumbles through the woods until he sees the lights of the lodge.

Before he even gets to the lodge, he sees a boat on the lake.  It is close enough so he can hear a man and woman talking.  Also close enough that he can see a reptilian head rise out of the water, and an taloned arm capsize the boat.  The woman makes it to the shore, but the man is killed by a talon to the head which obliterates his face.

The other members of the generically-named Jordan Scientific Institute rush outside to see what the commotion is.  Questions are raised as to why Bernice was out in the boat with Frank, who was not her husband.  Also why they would have gone out on the lake which is consuming people like popcorn.

Theories on the deaths range from drowning to the existence of a Brontozoum in the lake.  Corrin has a different theory, that a human is picking off the staff one-by-one.  That night, in the lake, he almost finds himself to be the next victim.  He does at least find the bodies of the missing men.  They are trapped in the undercurrent of the lake, the cold water preventing their rise to  the surface.  How this small lake managed to have an undercurrent is not addressed.

Naturally, the deaths turn out to be the result of a love triangle.  Either Corrin’s investigation got a few more of them killed, or he saved all the poor saps from going out into the lake one by one to die like the slowest lemming parade in history.  I really hate to see the plot require scientists to be such dolts.

After the lurid action in the previous story, this one seems a little flat.  I would never recommend it to anyone, but it is just fine as a story between tent-poles; and I’m optimistically expecting another strong one is coming, not trapping me in a literary lean-to.

If nothing else, this collection still owes me an ape for my $.99.

Post-Post:

  • First published in Mystery Novels Magazine, February 1936.
  • Hitler introduces the Volkswagen, designed by Ferdinand Porsche.

Outer Limits – I, Robot (S1E18)

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olrobot03Dr. Link is working on his robot Adam.  Alone . . . at night . . . in a dark lab . . . all the standard markers for an Outer Limits cutting-edge research facility lab.  Whatever the doctor is doing, the robot suddenly takes offense and throws him against the wall, killing him.

Adam flees the scene of the crime — he thinks he’s people!  And is found by a uniform cop who pulls a gun on him, demonstrating that he might not be detective material.  The cop might be wearing Kevlar, but Adam is Kevlar.  As Adam approaches, the cop begins firing, managing to nail himself with a ricochet.  This is pretty stupid, but on the other hand, it is nice to see a TV show acknowledge that ricochets are dangerous for a change.

olrobot02

Cynthia Preston — The picture is actually from her appearance in The X-Files where she was so cute that I remembered her 20 years later.

Dr. Link’s hot daughter Mina comes to visit Adam in jail.  She grew up with him as a brother and wants to see him tried as a sentient being. To assist, her she recruits civil rights attorney Leonard Nimoy who is retired, playing mere 2-D chess in the park.

Nimoy reluctantly accepts.  The irony is that if he can convince the court that Adam is sentient, and therefore should not be dismantled, it also follows that he must then stand trial for Dr. Link’s murder.

The rest of the episode is an extended courtroom scene.  But given the subject and Nimoy’s excellent performance, it is all riveting.  Barbara Tyson is also very good as the prosecutor.  Unfortunately, Cynthia Preston as Mina is not not quite up to it.  Especially when she is testifying, it is not a joke to say she sounds . . . robotic.  I defy anyone to close their eyes and listen to her and not think “robot.”  Just re-watching, it is so unlike the rest of her performance that I think it must have been a choice by her or the director. Overall, another very good episode.

Post-Post:

  • Dr. Link’s lab was in Rossom Hall Robotics. That sounded familiar — it was the Rossum Corporation behind the titular Dollhouse.  Both are presumably references to R.U.R., Rossum’s Universal Robots, a company in the 1920 play by that name which introduced the word “robot” into the English language.  Or “robe-it” as Rod Serling used to say on TZ.
  • The episode is based on a 1939 short story by Otto Bender.  Asimov’s better known re-use of the title was forced on him by a publisher.  But he can’t avoid blame for the muttonchops.
  • Similar story to Star Trek TNG’s The Measure of a Man.
  • In a stunning coincidence, this episode was directed by Leonard Nimoy’s son.
  • Hulu sucks.

Fiancés for the Devil’s Daughter – Russell Gray

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pulpfiances0225 stories for $.99; they must be good.  Part III of XXV.  Sweet Jeebus, this is what I paid my $.99 for!

I was almost immediately derailed by this sentence which I had to read several times in order to make sense of it and the 1st-Person narrative that followed:

Helen, my wife, and I, Roland Cuyler, the author, and his wife Clara were standing near a window . . .

I was already intimidated that Kindle X-Ray said I had 18 characters to keep track of in this story.  It all worked out, though, and was a great read.

Literary agent Lester Marlin, and his wife are at a party where they spot an exotic woman enter who no one seems to know.  She manages to corner Marlin when his wife is chatting with an author.

Tala Mag — which would have been a great name on Barsoom — makes advances on him.  He blows her off thinking she just wants to use him to get published, and because he truly loves his wife.  The next day, he receives a note from his best client Portia asking him for a favor — to meet with Tala at Tala’s penthouse apartment.

She meets him wearing a blue negligee and nothing else; but also has a manuscript in her hand, so it is a business meeting.  He begins reading and finds it to be unspeakably vile and an offense to even his hard-boiled soul.  He tells her it is not publishable and prepares to leave when Tala calls her enormous servant Emil.

In no time, Emil has Marlin stripped and in chains.  Even in this position he will not submit to Tala.  In spite of the whip and the diaphanous negligee that is hanging open, he resists and fights back.  She tells him she has other plans for him, and he wakes up in the Warehouse District.

Some time later, having not learned his lesson, Marlin accepts an invitation from Roland Cuyler to spend a few days at his country home.  Marlin and his wife join four other couples from his literary circle.  Unfortunately, the invitation was a ruse by Tala Mag who is at the house with her goons Emil, Clops, Wick and Ringo (OK, I’m not sure the 4th was named).

What follows is both horrific and spoilerific, so be warned.  It really should be read to be appreciated.

I had no idea the WWII-era pulps got this brutal.  There is no hard-core sex, but there is a decent amount of torture and newdity.  As an example to the group, one woman is tortured to death with branding irons, and the effects on her body are maybe not graphic in words, but suggest some disturbing images in one’s mind — which is worse.  And by worse, I mean better.

This is only a prelude to the final act in which the women stripped naked and their husbands are forced to hunt each other’s wives for sport.  The men are issued guns that fire acid pellets.  In addition to the pain of being shot, the woman with the most hits / scars will be killed.

It is all pretty goofy, but would have made a good Russ Meyer movie.  You’ve got whips, chains, torture, and nude babes.  Really the only things missing are ape-men and Nazis to cover every trope.  Even if the other 22 stories are crap, I’ve gotten my $.99 worth.

Post-Post:

  • First published in Marvel Tales, May 1940.
  • Also that month: The first McDonald’s opened in San Bernardino.
  • How was this not the cover story?  That “Test Tube Monsters” must be incredible.
  • Everywhere else, this story is know as “Fresh Fiancés for the Devil’s Daughter.”