Tom Baker

Joined June 2018

855 stories

Bio

Author of Haunted Indianapolis, Indiana Ghost Folklore, Midwest Maniacs, Midwest UFOs and Beyond, Scary Urban Legends, 50 Famous Fables and Folk Tales, and Notorious Crimes of the Upper Midwest.: http://tombakerbooks.weebly.com

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The Road to Nowhere
Reviewing a record album is always a difficult prospect, as music, unlike cinema, has intangible aspects that cannot be easily quantified and assessed. Music is an intensely personal experience, and each vocal or sound can mean something entirely different to each individual. Indeed, a piece of music will recall a particular era or even a certain moment in time, each experience remembered peculiar to the individual listener.
By Tom Baker2 years ago in Beat
The Outer Limits: "Corpus Earthling"
Picture if you will a man completely possessed by an alien force, one that has an echoey voice soaked in reverb, and that force is one one of the most horrible things you can imagine in all of the world: a half-baked FUDGE BROWNIE WITH CLAWS.
By Tom Baker2 years ago in Futurism
Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks
Given that it has one of the best titles in bad movie history, Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks mostly fails to deliver the goods, as far as sheer horror. However, it nonetheless delivers the camp, and that may be the most important thing here. Sans blood, sans nudie titillation, sans even a stitched-together, green-skinned, rotting reanimated cadaver (which is what one generally expects from a Frankenstein picture), the film still manages to be entertaining, and, at the end of the day, that's really all that matters.
By Tom Baker2 years ago in Horror
Frozen Scream
Frozen Scream is a dull, thudding turd of a movie, and that's being charitable. Frozen Scream is, above all else, aptly titled: the movie has all the warmth, depth, and excitement of a long, slow fecal rope, carefully preserved in cellophane, and put into a Frigidaire turned up to the max. The long, rope-like, icicle poop could be retrieved the next day and, I don't know, used to spear small, pesky, repellent vermin. (Is this getting a bit much?) Either way, the fecal offings would still hold more appeal to the average viewer than this rancid, slop-like, ill-conceived celluloid torture device.
By Tom Baker2 years ago in Horror
Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn
Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn is a rather rank, if entertaining mid-Eighties sci-fi apocalyptic sort-of Mad Max with one-eyed alien baddies and an evil wizard flick, that has Jeffrey Byron ("Dogen," a name borrowed from "Kung Fu" lore) rolling around in a souped-up dune buggy cum ATV futuristic psycho car, cruising around the California desert which is supposed to be the inhospitable surface of some other planet, randomly fighting dusty, rugged Duneites that have weird plastic breathing masks; and, well, one eye ("Cyclopians"). There's all kinds of really cool action and lots of armored vehicles getting blown up and rolling over and dudes with sort of rotting blue zombie faces getting creamed.
By Tom Baker2 years ago in Futurism
Terror on Tape
Terror on Tape is a straight-to-video sleazoid relic from 1985 featuring Cameroun Mitchell as a haunted video store clerk with bad televangelist hair and greasy Halloween makeup, who narrates clips from dozens of bad, bad, exploitation horror and T&A flicks nobody ever heard of. One of them, Vampire Hookers, stars the redoubtable John Carradine.
By Tom Baker2 years ago in Horror
The Cyclops
The Cyclops is a black-and-white giant mutant monster flick from 1957. It stars a raspy-throated Lon Chaney Junior, grinding out the last of his unfortunate, drunken days, and Gloria Talbott, as "Susan Winters," who heads off into the jungles of Mexico to find her lost boyfriend, whose plane went down over an island.
By Tom Baker2 years ago in Horror
Superman "Space Age"
Superman: Space Age is a graphic novel collection of a limited series by Mark Russell and Michael Allred (Laura Allred was the colorist), which details the "Crisis on Infinite Earths" decade by decade, rebooting the Supersaga decade by decade, updating it from the Fifties forward.
By Tom Baker2 years ago in Geeks
Junji Ito's "Frankenstein"
Junji Ito is the master of horror manga responsible for Uzumaki and other modern classics. His adaptation of Frankenstein is rather workmanlike and truncated but does feature the requisite grotesque imagery and is as absorbing as his other work. However, coming at the beginning of the book, as might be expected, and comprising the largest section of it, it is rather less impressive than the stories that follow, the first several of which comprise the story of Turo Ichikiri, who lives in a massive stone edifice of haunted and horrifying aspect and supernatural menace.
By Tom Baker2 years ago in Geeks
Welcome to the Kali-Yuga, Have a Nice Day
I'm going to keep this short and sweet. Words fail me, but not from despair, but from a sense of elation. I've been proven correct, my central thesis is determinately, manifestly, and demonstrably true. Presently, the world burns. This does not disturb me. I'd be more disturbed if human beings weren't ready to kill and destroy each other en masse. It would seem so out of character. What? Does the entire human race have a headache or something?
By Tom Baker2 years ago in Critique
The G.I. Executioner
G.I. Executioner is a political action thriller filmed either in the late sixties or early seventies (various dates are given) in Singapore, directed by Joel M. "Bloodsucking Freaks" Reed. It stars Tom Kenna, an unknown, and Angelique Pettyjohn, who had a tiny career in television and the sci-fi convention circuit, having starred in the "Star Trek TOS" episode "The Gamesters of Triskelion," as well as playing transexual agent Charlie Watkins in the old show "Get Smart" with Don Adams. (She also appeared in films such as Repo Man [1984], Fred Olen Ray's Biohazard [1985], and The Wizard of Speed and Time [1989], as well as some very naughty XXX features, all the while working as a stripper in Vegas. She died in 1992 of cervical cancer.)
By Tom Baker2 years ago in Horror
House of Dark Shadows
"Dark Shadows," as almost everybody knows, was a short-lived though wildly successful cult gothic television soap opera that aired in the late sixties, getting canceled comfortably one year before this feature film was made. It was the immensely long and rambling saga of the Collins family, who were haunted by an endless variety of gothic horror tropes, from the iconic vampire Barnabas (played so excellently by the quintessential bloodsucker Jonathan Frid) to the green-skinned Frankensteinian Adam (Robert Rodan); to werewolves, ghosts, demons, witches, and what-have-you. "Shadows" danced all the gothic, Lovecraftian, Stokerian, and Poesque skeletons out of the closet, played with them awhile, got bored, and then put them back before moving on to a new story arc. Stephen King, in the pages of his horror monograph Danse Macabre, called it a "Mad Hatter's tea party." He was not far off.
By Tom Baker2 years ago in Horror

Tom Baker

Bio

Stories .css-1svwz57-Text{display:inline-block;color:var(--text-default-mute);}(855)

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The Road to Nowhere

The Outer Limits: "Corpus Earthling"

Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks

Frozen Scream

Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn

Terror on Tape

The Cyclops

Superman "Space Age"

Junji Ito's "Frankenstein"

Welcome to the Kali-Yuga, Have a Nice Day

The G.I. Executioner

House of Dark Shadows

Stories (855)