Sandy Ferber | Fantasy Literature: Fantasy and Science Fiction Book and Audiobook Reviews

Isle of the Dead: “Vorvolaka! Vorvolaka!”

Isle of the Dead directed by Mark Robson

The history of the American horror film in the 1940s can practically be summarized with two words: “Universal” and “Lewton.” Throughout that decade, megastudio Universal pleased audiences with a steady stream of films dealing with Frankenstein, the Invisible Man, the Mummy and the Wolfman, culminating with the finest horror comedy ever made, 1948’s Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Meanwhile, over at RKO, producer Val Lewton was taking a wholly different tack, and between the years 1942 and ’46, brought to the screen no less than nine wonderful,

October 19th, 2015. Sandy Ferber´s rating: 4.5 | Film / TV, Horror | SFF Reviews | 4 comments |

The Crater Lake Monster: An amateur effort, but a very skilled one

The Crater Lake Monster directed by William R. Stromberg

My bad, and all that, but for some reason, I had long assumed The Crater Lake Monster was a product of the late 1950s – a black-and-white cousin of such other films dealing with thawed-out critters returning to harass modern man as The Monster That Challenged the World (1957) and The Monster of Piedras Blancas (1959). Of course, I was incorrect in that surmise, and the picture in question turns out to be from the year 1977,

October 17th, 2015. Sandy Ferber | Film / TV, Horror | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |

Film: Night of the Creeps

Night Of The Creeps directed by Fred Dekker

Though something of a highly regarded cult item today, Fred Dekker’s first film, Night of the Creeps, was an unqualified flop when first released in August 1986, only recouping a little more than 1/10 of its $5 million budget. A highly amusing yet genuinely jolting mixture of comedy and horror, the film combined any number of disparate genres – the zombie film, the alien invasion film, the depressed/suicidal cop-seeking-redemption film, the frat house comedy – into one highly satisfying stew, and yet, for some reason,

October 16th, 2015. Sandy Ferber´s rating: 4 | Film / TV, Horror | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |

The Blood Island Trilogy: Filipino horror cinema at its “best”

The Blood Island Trilogy directed by Eddie Romero

Surely one of the most beloved horror offerings in the history of Filipino cinema, Eddie Romero’s so-called Blood Island trilogy has been flabbergasting audiences for almost half a century now. Here, for your one-stop shopping pleasure, I offer three mini-reviews to help guide you through these remarkable sci-fi/horror outings:

BRIDES OF BLOOD: Wow, does this flick make for one wild and woolly experience! Brides of Blood (1968), the first adventure in the Blood Island trilogy, must be deemed, along with 1959’s Terror Is a Man,

October 15th, 2015. Sandy Ferber´s rating: 3.5 | Film / TV, Horror | SFF Reviews | 4 comments |

The Undying Monster: Film vs. Book

The Undying Monster by Jessie Douglas Kerruish

It was around five years ago that I had the pleasure of watching the 1942 horror thriller The Undying Monster on DVD. I was moderately impressed with the film, enough to write the following:

“B material given A execution” is how film historian Drew Casper describes 20th Century Fox’s first horror movie, 1942’s The Undying Monster, in one of the DVD’s extras, and dang if the man hasn’t described this movie to a T. The film,

The Rim of the Morning: Great old school cosmic horror

The Rim of the Morning: Two Tales of Cosmic Horror by William Sloane

New York Review Books Classics has just packaged two novels by renowned author, editor and teacher William Sloane into a single offering, The Rim of the Morning: Two Tales of Cosmic Horror. Sloane is not an author I’d previously known, probably due to the fact that these stories are two of only three novels that he ever published. Stephen King contributes a short but impeccable introduction,

The Lady of Blossholme: A rousing historical novel with traces of the fantastic

The Lady of Blossholme by H. Rider Haggard

The Lady of Blossholme was Henry Rider Haggard‘s 34th piece of fiction, out of an eventual 58 titles. It is a novel that he wrote (or, to be technically accurate, dictated) in the year 1907, although it would not see publication until the tail end of 1909, and is one of the author’s more straightforward historical adventures, with hardly any fantasy elements to speak of.

The story takes place in England during the reign of Henry VIII,

Film Review: Dracula’s Daughter

Dracula’s Daughter directed by Lambert Hillyer

Released a full five years after the classic Universal horror film Dracula, the sequel, Dracula’s Daughter, yet picks up a few scant seconds after the original left off. When we last saw our favorite Transylvanian neck nosher, he was lying dead in his coffin in the crypts beneath Carfax Abbey, a stake impaled in his heart courtesy of the intrepid Prof. Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan, the only actor who would go on to appear in the sequel). As the latter film commences,

October 2nd, 2015. Sandy Ferber | Film / TV, Horror | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |

Tower of Glass: Enough ideas for several novels

Tower of Glass by Robert Silverberg

Tower of Glass (1972) is another of Robert Silverberg’s ambitious novels from his most prolific period in the late 1960s/early 1970s. In that time he was churning out several books each year that were intelligent, thematically challenging, beautifully written stories that explored identity, sexuality, telepathy, alien contact, religion and consciousness. At his best, he produced some masterpieces like Downward to the Earth and Dying Inside,

The Crack in Space: Off the mark by 72 years

The Crack in Space by Philip K. Dick

Although he displayed remarkable prescience in many of his books, cult author Philip K. Dick was a good 72 years off the mark in his 18th sci-fi novel, The Crack in Space. Originally released as a 40-cent Ace paperback in 1966 (F-377, for all you collectors out there), the novel takes place against the backdrop of the 2080 U.S. presidential election, in which a black man, Jim Briskin, of the Republican-Liberal party, is poised to become the country’s first black president.

Author: Sandy Ferber

Isle of the Dead: “Vorvolaka! Vorvolaka!”

The Crater Lake Monster: An amateur effort, but a very skilled one

Film: Night of the Creeps

The Blood Island Trilogy: Filipino horror cinema at its “best”

The Undying Monster: Film vs. Book

The Rim of the Morning: Great old school cosmic horror

The Lady of Blossholme: A rousing historical novel with traces of the fantastic

Film Review: Dracula’s Daughter

Tower of Glass: Enough ideas for several novels

The Crack in Space: Off the mark by 72 years

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