 Fulci goes full-on gruesome in Italian zombie epic. 
We're still looking toward Italy today, specifically at vintage Italian horror cinema, and simply put, these didn't mess around. Regardless of quality they tended to be unusually foreboding and grim. And that's just the poster art. Above you see a promo for Paura nella città dei morti viventi, which was known in English as City of the Living Dead. Lucio Fulci, who directed and received a story credit for this one, was particularly enamored of zombies, churning out at least five films touching on the theme, including ...E tu vivrai nel terrore! L'aldilà, aka The Beyond, and Quella villa accanto al cimitero, aka The House by the Cemetery. In all of them he used his trademark tricks—extreme close-ups, death-white make-up effects, and gore, gore, gore.
Italian genre flicks usually had international casts performing in both English and Italian, with the babel smoothed out later with overdubs. City of the Living Dead follows that template. U.S. born Christopher George and Brit actress Catriona MacColl are in the leads, with support from Italians Carlo de Mejo, Giovanni Lombardo Radice, Daniela Doria, the truly lovely Antonella Interlenghi, and Swedish star Janet Agren. The movie is set in New York City and Dunwich, a mythical town conceived by H.P. Lovecraft for his Cthulhu Mythos, where a priest's suicide has somehow opened the gates of hell and allowed the dead to walk the Earth.
Obviously, the heroes want to close these gates, but that's pretty difficult when you have to fight through a storm of maggots. Yes, Fulci throws everything into this—the ancient Book of Enoch, the Salem witch trials, seances, drifting fog, people regurgitating their own intestines, and of course head-crushing zombies. The low tech nature of Fulci's obsessive gore-nography just makes it that much more disturbing. On the other claw, the low quality of some of the acting is a definite detriment. Even so, if you can get into a zombie frame of mind, the acting becomes less important than the mood, and in horror, mood is everything. Paura nella città dei morti viventi premiered in Italy today in 1980.
       
 National Informer gets inside its readers heads. 
We mentioned a while back that we bought some waterlogged tabloids. Above is the latest example from that pile—National Informer, published today in 1971, dipped like a teabag in liquid sometime after that. Inside you get the usual wild sex stories, cartoon humor, and phony outrage. But the winner in this issue is the article, “The Sexual Implications of Your Dreams.” We're going to quote it at length, because it's pretty funny:
When a man dreams of seeing a woman's sexual organs exposed, it means that a woman will soon offer herself to him. If the genitals are covered with sores, this is a bad omen, and indicates a long, serious illness which will require long treatment or surgery.
Dreams of oral intercourse with a woman indicate that success and wealth will be obtained, but that it will be quickly spent. Dreams in which a man engages in anal intercourse with a woman indicate that he will be highly successful financially, and will amass a considerable fortune.
That's priceless, and the last prediction makes perfect sense, since so many rich men have obtained their fortunes by fucking people in the ass. But Informer is not to be trusted with something as important as predicting the future. If you're looking for real dream interpretation, buy a dream book. We recommend Madame Zodia. She's legit.
Elsewhere in the issue is a handout photo of fishnet stockinged Swedish actress Janet Agren. Informer uses her to illustrate a story called “How Girls Make It Hard on Guys When It Comes to Sexual Satisfaction.” It's basically a primer on how to get women in bed, with one clever horndog taking the opportunity of a cross falling off a wall to tell a woman God wants her to have sex. That's low. And ingenious. Sixteen scans below and more Informer here.                
 National Informer predicts a sex-crazed future but it never came to pass.               
Above, some scans from the sex obsessed U.S. tabloid National Informer, published today in 1968, with stories on penis size, nude models, spouse swapping, teen sex, and more. In fact, the editors seemed to believe the world was entering an era of sexual utopia. Which just goes to show people never appreciate the age in which they're living, because 1968 looks a lot more like sexual utopia to modern Americans than anything going on today. There are three highlights in this issue—Swedish actress Janet Agren, who we've memorably featured before, on the cover, an Aslan pin-up on page three, and visions of the future from Informer's resident soothsayer The (not so) Great Criswell. His craziest prediction is as follows: “I predict that African brides can be bought in the open market thru mail-order. These 12-year-old brides have been trained how to be a good, dutiful wife, a good mother, and a good black magician, fortune teller, and witch doctor. Over 18,000 are now in England alone!” There's really not much we can add to that. Except to say that if these 12-year-old fortune tellers actually existed we wish one of them would have taken Criswell's job. You can see plenty more from Infomer by clicking its keywords below.
 Building a better future through movies. 
María Baxa was born in 1946 in Belgrade, which in today’s deconstructed Yugoslavia makes her Serb. She appeared in a few Serbian-language films, then ascended into Italian cinema, appearing in productions such as Il commissario Verrazzano with Janet Agren and Patrizia Gori, and Incontri molto... ravvicinati del quarto tipo, aka Very Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind. According to Michele Giordano’s 2000 retrospective La commedia erotica Italiana: vent’anni di cinema sexy, Baxa left the movies in the late 1980s and became an architect. This shot is from 1970.
 You wouldn’t mind terribly doing my back, would you? 
Above: Swedish actress Janet Agren. She started as a model, but with her statuesque figure and Nordic looks soon turned to cinema and starred mainly in Italian sexploitation, horror, and giallo flicks, as well as the Hollywood sword and sorcery epic Red Sonja. Mixed in with her b-level movies were a few well budgeted if not entirely successful productions, including 1972's set-in-Malta thriller Pulp. The above photo comes from a 1976 issue of the Belgian movie magazine Ciné-Revue, and she's irresponsibly using more oil than is her right. Guess she didn't know we were running out. Another slippery shot from the same session appears below. Agren acted in more than fifty movies and also posed for dozens of magazines, often nude, which means, one way or another, we'll surely see her again down the line.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1934—Queen Mary Launched
The RMS Queen Mary, three-and-a-half years in the making, launches from Clydebank, Scotland. The steamship enters passenger service in May 1936 and sails the North Atlantic Ocean until 1967. Today she is a museum and tourist attraction anchored in Long Beach, U.S.A. 1983—Nuclear Holocaust Averted
Soviet military officer Stanislav Petrov, whose job involves detection of enemy missiles, is warned by Soviet computers that the United States has launched a nuclear missile at Russia. Petrov deviates from procedure, and, instead of informing superiors, decides the detection is a glitch. When the computer warns of four more inbound missiles he decides, under much greater pressure this time, that the detections are also false. Soviet doctrine at the time dictates an immediate and full retaliatory strike, so Petrov's decision to leave his superiors out of the loop very possibly prevents humanity's obliteration. Petrov's actions remain a secret until 1988, but ultimately he is honored at the United Nations. 2002—Mystery Space Object Crashes in Russia
In an occurrence known as the Vitim Event, an object crashes to the Earth in Siberia and explodes with a force estimated at 4 to 5 kilotons by Russian scientists. An expedition to the site finds the landscape leveled and the soil contaminated by high levels of radioactivity. It is thought that the object was a comet nucleus with a diameter of 50 to 100 meters. 1992—Sci Fi Channel Launches
In the U.S., the cable network USA debuts the Sci Fi Channel, specializing in science fiction, fantasy, horror, and paranormal programming. After a slow start, it built its audience and is now a top ten ranked network for male viewers aged 18–54, and women aged 25–54.
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