THE CAREER
THAT DRIPPED
WITH
GORE

THE WALLOWING MAN

FOR 33 SHAMELESS YEARS I've wallowed in the blood of the cinema. For 33 years I have been up to my armpits in pools of gushing cinematic gore. Not to mention bug-eyed, flesh-ripping alien monstrosities, Frankenstein creations ripping apart laboratories and human beings, hockey-masked slaughterers, slouch-hatted cacklers of maniacal glee, gauze-enwrapped mummies and other entities of excruciating evil that have shambled ravagingly across the nightmarish landscapes of my twisted imagination. For 33 years I have been spared none of the graphic shocks and soul-wrenching terror presented in our modern cinema by the mild-mannered sentimentalists and weepy hearts in control of the movie business.

You see, life-long friends of the CREATURE FEATURES world, and new browsing, arousing visitors to THE CREATURE FEATURES SPIDER WEBSITE . . . my business in life (if I have any business at all) is to review each science-fiction, fantasy and horror movie, TV movie and homevideo as it is regurgitated from the maw of Hollywood, so that you fans-viewers-aficionados-intellectuals-historians will automatically know which ones will most appeal to the vicarious needs that roil and broil within your most singularly inexplicable life essences.

MY SOUL IS SUBMITTED

Thus have I come to you and the worldwide Internet with this bizarre "Site for Gore Eyes" where you can browse to your pumping-heart's (mal)content. It is not always a pleasant duty, this self-appointed task to submit my soul to each cinematic shocker charging out of the producing chutes. But someone had to face up to the blood-drenched task.

"What singular being is this, who doth submit his soul and destiny to cover movies so dark and disturbing in content?" A question you might well ask yourself upon arriving at THE CREATURE FEATURES SPIDER WEBSITE. Ah, allow me, acolytes of murder, mayhem and madness, to explain that I, the genteel, gentle John Stanley, worked for 33 years at THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, rising through the ranks of lowly ones to assume the mantle of entertainment writer.

MY MIND IS NUMBED

Avast! For 33 years I covered movies, television and other mind-numbing forms of media, specializing in the bizarre and the weird. During this time I had close encounters with, and interviewed, RAY BRADBURY, LEONARD NIMOY, STEPHEN KING, ROGER & JULIE CORMAN, WILLIAM SHATNER, CHUCK NORRIS, CHRISTOPHER LEE, RAY HARRYHAUSEN, JIM HENSON, CHARLTON HESTON, ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER, JOE DANTE, HARRISON FORD, CARRIE FISHER, STEVEN SPIELBERG, etc. etc. (Those loud THUDS you hear are the names I'm dropping.)

While all this was going on, I started compiling THE CREATURE FEATURES MOVIE GUIDE in the mid-1970s. After I became the host of "Creature Features," an enormously popular San Francisco horror series that ran from 1971 through 1984 on Channel 2, KTVU (I hosted the showcase from 1979-'84), I formed CREATURES AT LARGE PRESS and published the first edition in 1981.

A DRIPPING NEED

"M FOR MUMMY" and the Unicorn above are among 24 drawings in CREATURE FEATURES (4th edition) by Kenn Davis, a mystery novelist and surrealism painter.

To my shocked delight, I discovered there was a dripping need this singular book filled. Warner Books published the second edition in 1984 with many new reviews, but it wasn't until 1987 that REVENGE OF THE CREATURE FEATURES MOVIE GUIDE was unleashed on an unsuspecting world with a far more encompassing scope. And with THE CREATURE FEATURES MOVIE GUIDE STRIKES AGAIN (published in 1994, and still going strong in bookstores and other marketplaces, and available from Creatures at Large Press), the book continued in the same vein, exposing its vast readership to thousands of new reviews.

I now find myself faced with covering this field for an even greater audience. At this very moment, Berkley Books (under its Boulevard imprint) is unleashing a mass-market paperback version CREATURE FEATURES: THE SCIENCE FICTION, FANTASY AND HORROR MOVIE GUIDE for only $8, bringing it into the economic range of more readers than ever before. (And with 500 new movie reviews filling its already jam-packed pages).

Alas, THINGS, WRETCHED BEINGS and OTHER GIBBERING ENTITIES, you who have stumbled into THE CREATURE FEATURES SPIDER WEBSITE unawares ... this showcase is designed to bring you NEW MOVIE REVIEWS (this month you will find critiques on STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT, MARS ATTACKS! and STEPHEN KING'S THINNER), and expose you to the mindset into which I am trapped. And to inform you about how you can order products published by CREATURES AT LARGE PRESS, the imprint that has given the world so many movie guides of a horrific nature (and an unending case of indigestion)..

Soon, you too, friends and visitors to this unique INNER SANCTUM OF DOOM, will wallow in the same cinematic blood in which I have wallowed for so long. I hope this is the beginning of a bloody good friendship. Come back again--if you dare, if you have the intestinal fortitude.

Questions/Comments?