MY MONSTER SCRAPBOOK: ULTIMATE ORGY OF EVIL!

"The only accomplishment of this shoddy trilogy... is to make Roger Corman's Poe pictures look awfully good in comparison."- Kevin Thomas, L.A. Times

In the summer of 1969, my Dad took me to see SPIRITS OF THE DEAD. I had been watching the very seductive adds in the local paper that promised "Edgar Allan Poe's Ultimate Orgy of Evil". EAP and an orgy? What was there not to look forward to?

It was playing the Art Theater at Topanga and Ventura boulevards. In those days, there were tons of movie theaters in the San Fernando Valley: The Topanga, Baronet, Holiday, Valley Circle, etc., all gave way to multiplex's in the 1970's.

The Art Theater was scoffed at by us kids because it was a dingy, tiny thing squeezed between other shops and had the reputation that nothing but "artsy-fartsy" movies were shown there. After watching it, it's no wonder that SPIRITS OF THE DEAD ended up being one of them.

Being the die-hard Monster Kid that I was, I cajoled my Dad (the same Good Ol' Dad that let me buy my first monster magazine off the newsstand rack outside the Owl Rexall Drug Store on Van Nuys Blvd. just a few years before) to take me to this R-rated movie.

Well, we sat there with our box of popcorn and cup of soda and got through the whole thing. Talk about disappointed! I wanted this to be a good movie, but instead I was bored to tears. Where were the monsters? Where were the spooks? Where was Poe? Fer chrissakes, where was the friggin' Orgy of Evil? I'm sure my Dad wondered why the hell I wanted to see this movie in the first place. Well, with a cast of high-brow actors like Jane and Peter Fonda, Alain Delon, Brigitte Bardot and Terence Stamp, and lensed by directors, Frederico Fellini, Roger Vadim and Louis Malle, SPIRITS OF THE DEAD certainly was a movie that deserved to be played at the "artsy-fartsy" Art Theater!

Here are my monster scrapbook pages, just as I pasted them up back in 1969, aged newspaper and everything.