My Monster Family Car Stickers | $9.95

It’s a set of family car stickers shaped like monsters! The My Monster Family Car Sticker set from the NeatoShop features Franken-dad, Mummy mom, Werebrother, Vampsister, Baby from the Black Lagoon, Dogberus and Cyclop Cat, ranging from 4″ tall down to 1.5″ tall. Simply peel and stick the vinyl stickers, and you can remove them with no residue mess. Monsters designed by artist Mike Jacobsen. My Zombie Family car stickers are available, too, at the NeatoShop!

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Cookie Monster Stainless Steel Water Bottle - $11.95

The New Year is here! The resolutions are made! Will 2012 be the year you get your inner cookie loving monster under control? Get inspired to stay hydrated and get active with the Cookie Monster Stainless Steel Water Bottle from the NeatoShop.

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more fun Water Bottles! Oh, and once you are over all the exercising be sure to come back and check out all the exciting Food & Drinks!

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This is the real reason people sleep with teddy bears. They don’t let you down, no matter what. This great image titled Sweet Halloween Dreams is by DeviantART member begemott. Link -via Buzzfeed

This funky Frankenstein sculpture looks good enough to eat! Created as part of the It’s Alive Project, this is one of 80 busts created by different artists striving to show the monster in a different light. Look out for the FrankenBieber, and the hilarious FrankenSpock!

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This neat, albeit gory, illustration by Chris Schweizer shows Dr. Frankenstein hard at work on his monster. Pray he gets it right this time!

Link –via ComicsAlliance

We’ve posted art from more than one person who takes everyday paintings or iconic images and adds fantastic monsters to them. It’s neat, but it’s not new. Back in the 1970s, Yokopro in Japan published postcards that did the exact same thing. The monsters are called pachimon kaiju. See a collection of them at How To Be a Retronaut. Link -via Everlasting Blort

Toilet Monster – $16.95

Are you a prankster who loves potty humor?  You need the Toilet Monster from the NeatoShop. Simply attach this hilarious green monster to the toilet and wait for someone you know to lift the lid.

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more hilarious Gag Gifts & Pranks.

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Monsters Magnetic Figures – $14.95

Are you looking for a monsterrific toy for a monster-loving boy or girl? You need the Monsters Magnetic Figures from the NeatoShop.  This great mix and match set comes with 4 creepy backgrounds and 3 sheets of monster body parts.  Think of all the scary monsters you they could build.  This is the perfect toy for a summer road trip.

More Magnetic Sets available.

Be sure to check out all the fantastic Toys & Games available at the NeatoShop.

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There are bad movies…and then there are BAD movies. Years ago the Medved brothers reintroduced stinkers like Plan 9 From Outer Space to the public in their groundbreaking books, The 50 Worst Films of All Time and The Golden Turkey Awards. The “Mystery Science Theater 3000″ gave us a chance to watch the best of the worst on TV. Today there are millions of bad movie buffs… and Uncle John is one of them. Here’s one of his favorite stinkers.

ROBOT MONSTER (1953)
Starring George Nader, Claudia Barrett, Selena Royle, John Mylong, George Barrows.

Background: Director Phil Tucker made this opus for less than $20,000. He couldn’t afford to rent a real robot costume, but (fortunately for bad movie lovers) he knew a guy named George Barrows, who owned his own gorilla suit. “When [moviemakers] needed a gorilla in a picture,” Tucker explained to the Medveds in The Golden Turkey Awards, “they called George. [He] got like forty bucks a day… [but] I thought, ‘George will work for me for nothing. I’ll get a diving helmet, put it on him, and it’ll work!’”

It did work. Years later, Tucker’s robot even won an award. Okay, it was a Golden Turkey Award for “The Most Ridiculous Monster in Screen History.” But it was well-deserved. “Unlike many other cinematic robots,” Ken Beggs writes in Jabootu’s Bad Movie Universe, “[this one] has the appearance of a morbidly obese man in a shaggy gorilla costume, adorned with a deep sea diving helmet over his nylon-stocking bedecked noggin” -and the helmet was topped with a rabbit-ears TV antenna. You have to see it to believe it.

(YouTube link)

Note: Strange anomaly for such a seat-of-the-pants production: Robot Monster was filmed in 3D, and the music recorded in stereo. Even more surprising: the score was written by Elmer Bernstein, later one of Hollywood’s most accomplished composers (he wrote the music, for example, for The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape).

The Plot: Ro-Man, from the planet Ro-Man, arrives on Earth. His mission: wipe out all human life with his deadly Calcinator Ray. He unleashes a barrage of cheesy-looking death rays, then reports to his master -the “Great One”- via a bubble machine, that the entire human population is dead.

Wrong. Ro-Man’s boss -who looks suspiciously like Ro-Man (with a different diving helmet)- informs him that there are still eight people left alive …and six happen to be hiding behind a force field right near Ro-Man’s cave. Who are they? The Professor, Mary Ann, Ginger… oops, wrong castaways. A German professor, his hunky helper (Roy), a mom (Mom), her two little kids (Johnny and Carla), and her grown daughter (Alice).

Ro-Man’s job is to wander around the desert and find them, then figure out why they’re not dead -and then kill them. But the shaggy robot runs into a little problem: he falls for Alice. The Great One is pretty ticked off about that.

Meanwhile, Alice and Roy are inspired by the apocalypse, and fall in love. (Lucky for Alice, since “he’s the only man alive not related to her.”) They kiss, Roy takes his shirt off, then they get married. The Great One gets a bit upset at Ro-Man and vaporizes him …along with the Earth.

The end? Not exactly -turns out Johnny has hit his head and dreamed the whole thing. Ha-ha! Now The End.

Watch For…

* Ro-Man (Barrows) walking…and walking…and walking in the desert. It must have been 120° in that suit -it’s amazing Barrows survived. You gotta feel for they guy -and he was doing it for nothing!

* The Cave. Why is Ro-Man, who has wiped out everyone Earth and can take his pick of locations, hanging out in a cave with a bubble machine?

* George Nader gratuitously taking his shirt off. Nader was apparently on his way to becoming a star in the late 1940s when he got caught doing something he …umm… wasn’t supposed to be doing. He was relegated to tripe like this, but he still had the bod.

* Ro-Man kills the little girl. This was actually pretty strange and out of place. At least one reviewer speculates it was unplanned -the girl who played her was just so annoying that the rest of the crew insisted on getting her off the set any way they could.

* Ro-Man’s moment of indecision. “I need guidance, Great One, for the first time in my life, I am not sure.” What’s confusing him? He’s hot for Alice, and it doesn’t compute.

* The “surprise” ending.

Memorable Dialogue:

Ro-Man: (informing his master that he has wiped out the human race) “All are gone now. The way is clear for our people.”
Great One: “I want facts, not words!”
Ro-Man: “Fact A! My pulse has been reduced to plus zero zero.”
Great One: “Reject! Error! Error!”
Ro-Man: “Error? But Great Guidance, I have proved it! My energizer has scan-checked by square feet! No life above lepidopteron level exists!”
Great One: “My calculator is more accurate! In the twenty-second category there is an error of sixteen billionths!”
Ro-Man: “The Great One is never wrong. Then there are perhaps eight people left on Earth.”
Great One: “Not perhaps! Precisely! Find and destroy them!”

Roy: (arguing with Alice, who accuses him of being bossy) “I’m bossy? You’re so bossy you should be milked before you come home at night.”

Ro-Man: “Calculate your chances! Negative, negative, negative… is there a choice between a painless surrender death and the horror of resistance death? Show yourselves!”

(Uncle John’s favorite)
Johnny: “I think you’re just a big bully, picking on people smaller than you are!”
Ro-Man: “Now I will kill you.”

(YouTube link)

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The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John’s Absolutely Absorbing Bathroom Reader, a fantastic book by the Bathroom Readers’ Institute.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you’ll love the Bathroom Reader Institute’s books – go ahead and check ‘em out!

The costumes depicted the monster of the local "namahage" tradition, where people dressed as the monsters visit houses and admonish naughty children.

Keeping with the tradition, the event was also meant for parents struggling with children who constantly fight each other, watch TV and won’t study, or otherwise cause child-rearing headaches.

Three families totaling 11 people participated in the event. Parents brought their children to the inn to stay the night without telling them about the surprise to come. Suddenly, a namahage monster burst into the room, growling and thrashing around.

"Will you listen to your father?" asked a namahage monster of one child. Amidst sobs, and with all the power the child could muster, came the response: "Yes!"

The event is also designed to let families experience the traditional namahage culture and to deepen familial bonds by letting parents "protect" their children from the monster.

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John Kenn of Don Kenn Gallery, who writes and direct TV shows for kids, has quite the unexpected and fantastic hobby. He draws monsters … on Post-It Notes! As he says, "It is a little window into a different world, made on office supplies."

This one above, of Cthulhu rising from the sea, is my current favorite.

Link | Interview at My Modern Met – via Ectoplasmosis!

More: Cthulhu stuff from the NeatoShop

Actor Ben Chapman didn’t get a credit in the movie The Creature from the Black Lagoon. The studio wanted to leave the possibility that the creature was real! Link -via TYWBIWDBI

Remember Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus? The sequel is going to be even sillier! Bonus: starring Jaleel White, whom you may remember as Steve Urkel. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Wouldn’t you love to browse a shop like this? Hoxton Street Monster Supplies in London is a Ministry of Stories project that gives children a place to go for inspiration and where they can write and get help with their school work. It was inspired by Dave Eggars’ 826 project responsible for the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Store in New York. The Hoxton Street store shelves are filled with items like brain jam and organ marmalade, pickled eyeballs, human snot, and my favorite, a canned vague sense of unease. Link -via b3ta

Those Photoshop geniuses over at Something Awful forum are at it again – this time, they imagined what movie monsters and baddies do for fun.

Geeks Are Sexy has the highlights: Link | more at Something Awful

Move over cute, lovable plushies – here comes gruesomely cute, loveable monster plushies from the NeatoShop. They’re the perfect gift for your fellow B movie lovers: Link | More Fun and Unusual Plush Toys

In the late 1950s, teenage culture was big business-Elvis, James Dean, and rock’n'roll were bringing in the bucks. That’s when (not so coincidentally) a brand new kind of exploitation film appeared-the teenage monster movie. Today it’s just a cliche, but “I Was a Teenage… (fill in the blank)” was hot stuff for a while. Here’s Uncle John’s salute to the best (and worst) of them.

I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF

Starring: Michael Landon, Whit Bissell, Yvonne Lime, Barney Phillips, Joseph Mell. Director: Gene Fowler, Jr.

The Plot: Tony Rivers-played by Michael Landon in his first feature film-is a hot-tempered teenager who’s always getting into fights. (In fact, the first scene is a fist thrown right at the audience.) But when he accidentally hits his girlfriend, Arlene, he realizes things are out of control. So he decides to see Dr. Brandon, a local psychiatrist.

Bad move. Brandon doesn’t want to cure Tony… he wants to experiment on him. Using “retrogression therapy”, he injects Tony with a serum and hypnotizes the teenager to bring out his “primitive” side. Now whenever Tony gets startled, he grows body hair and fangs and suddenly gets the urge to kill. After killing at least one person and scaring the hell out of everyone in town, the creature is gunned down by the cops. Of course, he kills the crazy shrink just before he dies. Inevitable final line (delivered by the cop): “It is not for man to interfere in the ways of God.”

Commentary: Not a bad film, as ’50s schlock goes. Legend has it that after seeing the poster, American International Pictures’ (AIP) head Samuel Z. Arkoff declared it “A million dollar title in a hundred-thousand dollar movie.” AIP knew how to exploit teenagers, but by today’s standards, they kept it pretty tame. In her website, “And You Call Yourself a Scientist!“, Liz writes:

Astonishingly, I Was A Teenage Werewolf provoked the ire of politicians and moral crusaders alike, who accused the film of “promoting juvenile delinquency.” One can only assume that-as is often the case with politicians and moral crusaders-they hadn’t actually seen the film they were attacking.

It is quite clear that at first AIP underestimated the cash crop their adolescent audiences represented. Later, when the money began pouring in, the executives pitched their films more and more to teenagers, and cared less and less about upsetting the adults; but this early effort is not only a moral little film, it is populated with some of the best-behaved teenagers and the most caring adults ever put on screen. Cops, teachers, parents-they only want what’s best for the kids. There’s even a subplot about the perils of parental neglect. As for the kids themselves, well, you should see what constitutes their idea of a hot party. Warning: before you get to the good part of the film, you have to sit through some of the most painfully embarrassing teenage party scenes ever committed to film, which cause Tony’s girlfriend to announce that “I’ve never had so much fun!” -sad, but probably true.

IMMORTAL LINES

They don’t write ‘em like this anymore.

D. Brandon (the Mad psychiatrist): “At last, after years of searching, I’ve found a suitable person for my experiment! His record at school, what the principal told me, and what I learned through Dt-Sgt Donovan gives him the proper disturbed emotional background. And with what I found out from the physical examination, this boy’s my perfect subject! There were certain tell-tale marks on his body only I would recognize…”
Assistant: “But you know what might happen!”
Brandon: “‘Might’? In science, one must be sure!”

Brandon: “Mankind is on the brink of destroying itself! The only hope for the human race is to hurl it back to its primitive dawn, to start all over again. What’s one life compared to such triumph?”

Brandon: “Through hypnosis, I’m going to regress this boy back… back into the primitive past that lurks within him! I’m going to transform him, and unleash the savage instincts that lie hidden within!”

Janitor: “I know what killed him. He was killed by… a werewolf!”
Policeman: “A what?”
Janitor: “In the old country, in my little village in the Carpathian mountains, there was a story…”

Assistant: “Alfred, you read the paper! You know what happened!”
Brandon: “There’s a difference between a newspaper story and a scientific report!”
Assistant: “Aren’t you wasting your time? Or do you have a second victim in view?”
Brandon: “I’m not wasting my time, and I don’t like to hear the subject of a world-shaking experiment referred to as a ‘victim’!”

Brandon: “We’ll have it all on film, from the time I give him the injection to through the transformation! Even the most exacting, the most sceptical of of scientists will be convinced that I have penetrated the deepest secrets of creation!”

MORE TEENAGE MONSTER-MANIA

I Was A Teenage Frankenstein (1957) “Herman Cohen’s sequel to I Was A Teenage Werewolf, with Whit Bissell reappearing as a mad doctor-a relative of the infamous Baron. Ludicrous as its title, with severed limbs graphically offered up for their shock value (and severed limbs in 1957 were an onscreen rarity)  …You, too will be a teenage zombie if you sit through this.”

-Creature Features, John Stanley

Teenage Caveman (1958) “After …I Was A Teenage Frankenstein, American International Pictures further mined the youth market with-what else-Teenage Caveman. Robert Vaughn stars as a boy (he would later become the man …From U.N.C.L.E., that is), who defies his elders by venturing… into the forbidden land… where he finds ‘the monster who kills with a touch.’ Directed by Roger Corman in ten days on a $70,000 budget.”

-Cult Flicks and Trash Pics

Teenagers From Outer Space (1959) “‘They blast the Flesh off humans!’ claimed the ads. A young alien falls for a teenage earth girl and ruins the plans of his invading cohorts by blowing them up. The invaders, who arrive in a flying saucer, carry deadly ray guns and breed giant lobster monsters for food. Only the shadow of one of the creatures is shown in this extremely low-budget feature.”

-The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, Michael Weldon

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The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader.

This special edition book covers the three “lost” Bathroom Readers – Uncle John’s 5th, 6th and 7th book all in one. The huge (and hugely entertaining) volume covers neat stories like the Strange Fate of the Dodo Bird, the Secrets of Mona Lisa, and more …

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. Check out their website here: Bathroom Reader Institute

They certainly don’t make monsters like they used to! BibliOdyssey has a few neat scans of hairy satyrs and other monsters as drawn by 17th century French engraver François Chauveau:

It’s as though he has travelled forward in time to select elements from Chewbacca / Planet of the Apes & Star Trek (Worf) to combine with the motif popularised during the Renaissance, the grotesque. So there’s a certain charming naivety and abstraction to the works suggesting they may be early versions for a later, more sophisticated, suite of prints perhaps.

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This amazing animation is a wonderful combination of real public space & cardboard animation filmed stop-motion, by Dutch animator Sjors Vervoort with audio by Steven Aerts.

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by JKirchartz.

Raise money for charity and support indie artists? What can be better than that? Joe Alterio has relaunched his website Robots + Monsters, where you can order a very cool custom drawings – the ones above are our very own Neatorama monster and robot.

Your drawing will be made either by Joe himself or one of the site’s contributors: John Martz, Travis Pitts, and Adam "Apelad" Koford. Portion of the proceeds will go to support a charity (right now it’s Water.org which provides safe water and sanitation to communities in Africa, South Asia, and Latin America) and to help support the artist.

Here’s how to get yours: Link

Neatoramanaut and artist extraordinaire Nathan Mazur (he’s the awesome creator of the Neatorama Squid and the I Love Teuthology T-Shirt) is having a solo show at the Zombo Gallery in Pittsburgh. The show will run till Oct 16th, so visit soon if you’re nearby, mmkay?

The show is titled Mini Monsters and Tiny Terrors, which sound suspiciously like my children, and features a collection of pint-sized (2" x 3") paintings of monsters, ghouls, cryptids, and other things that go bump in the night. The pieces are available for purchase, and you can also order yourself a commisions at a reasonable rate. Take it from me, Nathan is one heck of an artist.

More info (just in time for Halloween!) on his website: Link

Melissa Sue Stanley’s Etsy shop is full of creepy plush creations like this armless monster.

Photo from: Black is the New Black blog (I won’t pretend to know my Japanese monster, so can someone point out what it is?)

Oops – I’ve been so busy that little did I notice we haven’t posted a Caption Monkey game in a while (sorry, Adam!). So here it is!

The game is simple: come up with the funniest caption, and win an original Laugh Out Loud Cat comic by artist extraordinaire Adam Koford. One entry per comment, but you can enter as many captions as you’d like.

For inspiration, check out Adam’s blog (and new Kitteh and Pip wallpaper!)

Update 2/28/09 – Adam has picked the winner: congratulations to MadMolecule who came up with this gem: “Family reunions were always tense after cousin Toshiro married an illegal alien.”

Alex CF creates ghastly artifacts. Previous creations include an antique vampire hunting kit, and a werewolf corpse. His latest specimen is this rather toothy “taxidermied corpse of an extra dimensional entity known as ‘The Cheshire cat.’” It’s for sale.

*Previously: Alice Chess Set.