 Nature is red in tooth and claw. Then there's its romantic side. 
We found this rather nice Thai promo poster for the 1980 sexploitation flick Tanya's Island and were reminded what a bizarrely interesting film this was. We talked about it a while ago. It stars Vanity—yes, Prince's Vanity from the sex-pop music group Vanity 6—as an often nude woman who gets involved with an apelike creature on a tropical island. She performs pre-Vanity under the name D.D. Winters, and while she's no Susan Hayward she gives her all, and that's the most you can reasonably expect in a movie in which her love interest is a furry primate. Thanks to her performance Prince decided to pluck her from b-moviedom and make her a star, though from a purely selfish perspective we'd have enjoyed a few more low budget romps from her. But what can you do? We don't have a Thai release date on this, but figure sometime in mid-1980s. You can check out our earlier write-up and see some amazing promo images at this link. 
 Brooks opens for trading, market expresses approval. 
Leslie Brooks gives the stock market a boost in this promo image from 1945. We don't know if this Sunshine Graph image is associated with a movie, but we checked her output from ’45 and ’46 and nothing seems to fit. It could be just a one-off. We'll keep an eye out for more info. Meanwhile, see another Brooks promo here.
 I guess we've answered the question of whether your so-called practical learning is as good as my master's degree, haven't we? 
What's the quote about people believing resistance to facts is just as valid as acceptance of facts? Fact is, the cowpoke who just got shot dead on the cover of Ford Pendleton's western adventure Gunmaster serves as an example that expertise is good. We slay people like this all the time—with words, heh. Speaking of which, “dier” is indeed a word. It's in Merriam-Webster. Use it in Scrabble. Gunmaster is from Graphic Books, 1956, with cover art by Roy Lance. If you want to see him in a more contemplative mode, check here.
 Upon close inspection everything looks ship shape. 
Model and actress Mara Corday, née Marilyn Watts, captains this nautical 1953 Corp. A. Fox Technicolor lithograph. Corday is one of those vintage actresses who has a cult following today, which in her case mainly derives from starring in three cheesy sci-fi films—Tarantula, The Giant Claw, and The Black Scorpion. She also appeared in some thrillers and noirs, but her stardom was truly cemented when she was Playboy magazine's Playmate of the Month for October 1958. That centerfold may be one of the most demure the magazine ever published, but the issue sold well, owing to Corday's status as an established movie star. She's still with us at age eighty-eight, and these images are nice mementos from a time when legions of fans were willing to sail anywhere with her.
 Kanô and company are still Crazy after all these years. 
Today's deep dive into the pinku pile has produced this two panel promo for Sukeban: Tamatsuki asobi, aka Girl Boss: Crazy Ball Game, which starred Yûko Kanô and premiered today in 1974. Not every pinku movie had these types of posters but we've acquired quite a few. We'd upload others, but we don't know what films some of them are for. We'll get around to sharing them anyway, though. Looking below, you'll see we've grabbed some promo photos. These came from an online auction. The last panel shows Yûko Kanô's co-stars Ritsuko Fujiyama, Emi Jô, Harumi Tajima, Rie Saotome, and Ryôko Ema having some wild and watery fun. Sukeban: Tamatsuki asobi has it all—violence, sex, violence, Yakuza, violence, and more. You can read a bit more about it at our write-up from some years ago, located at this link.
 Reports of his death are greatly anticipated. 
Octavus Roy Cohen's The Corpse That Walked is an interesting book. A man who wants to help his fiancée with a debt takes a shady but well-paid job doubling for a millionaire investor. He's instructed to be highly visible to press and public in Miami Beach while the rich man goes quietly to South America, where his newly rented anonymity will allow him to ace competitors out of a profitable minerals deal. The only problem is it's all a lie. The rich man is about to be indicted for various financial crimes and faces years in prison, so he's found a double with the intent of having him murdered. Thus freed from federal pursuit, the rich man plans to adopt an entirely new identity. Plastic surgery figures prominently in the narrative, so if you accept that one man can made to look like another, this is reasonably entertaining stuff. The copyright on this Gold Medal edition is 1951 and the cover art is uncredited.
 You have to know when it's time to branch out.  
Andrea Dromm is wearing a jumpsuit, which is fitting because she's going to have to jump if she ever wants to get out of this tree. A model and actress, she had one of the shorter careers, appearing in two movies and one television show. But one of the movies was the hit comedy The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! and the television show was Star Trek, so she's better remembered than someone with such a small filmography normally would be. After acting she went on to devote her time to modeling, and has been stuck in this tree since posing there in 1966.
 During my time in the city I learned those folks have some depraved and immoral ideas. Wanna try a few? 
When you read a lot of vintage crime fiction of varying quality it's useful to occasionally return to a trusty author like Charles Williams. He's a solid stylist, which makes all his books decent reading experiences. Big City Girl isn't his best, but it's interesting just the same. It's about an escaped convict who, if he accomplishes nothing else while free, wants to murder his wife—the big city girl of the title. She's living with his family on an isolated farm and, in pure femme fatale fashion, is causing more than her share of trouble with her hosts. What Williams attempts to do here is write an entire collection of characters that aren't very smart, and as we've noted before, that's more difficult than you'd think. You have to credit how well the feat is pulled off here. Some of Williams' books we've read have been great, others merely decent, but none have been close to disappointing. You can purchase anything he authored with confidence.
 In space there are no Happy Days. 
The gap between the quality of a poster and the quality of the film it promotes is often large, but rarely so much as with the infamous sci-fi b-movie Planet des Schreckens, better known as Galaxy of Terror. We're showing you the West German poster because the movie premiered there today in 1982 after originally opening in 1981 in the U.S. The art is signed by Charo, not the hip shaking dancer-singer, but rather someone who we found no further info about online. This is a spectacular comic book style effort and a rarity that costs a hundred dollars or more to acquire. If you've seen the movie you know the art depicts the death of Taaffe O'Connell's character Damela, who falls victim to a giant maggot. Galaxy of Terror boasts b-movie stalwarts Robert Englund and Sid Haig, plus Erin Moran from television's Happy Days, but O'Connell's slippery demise is the reason it's a cult classic. It's no Star Crash, but it's pretty close. We'll circle back and talk about it in detail later.
 Need a service animal? He's happy to do the job. 
Harold W. McCauley is responsible for this simple but effective cover for 1961's Lover. His image captures the main character Johnny Wells' aura of unhappiness. Johnny is a young New York City hustler who decides to become an uptown gigolo. Starting with a few hundred dollars of ill-gotten gains, he transforms himself into a cultured, hotel-dwelling manhooker who services upper class women. While great at his job, his sexual misadventures take a toll. These include being spurned by a favorite customer who realizes she prefers women, being the unwilling centerpiece of an orgy, and more. The most curious bit is how Johnny's main love interest is a 14-year-old girl from around the way. Author Lawrence Block, hiding behind the Andrew Shaw pseudonym, makes no comment about how strange and possibly illegal this relationship is, and after a while you realize he never planned to. Block can write, so in general Lover reads smoothly, which is about the most you can hope for with this genre. Does that mean it's worth checking out? Well... we wouldn't go that far.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1921—Chanel No. 5 Debuts
Gabrielle Bonheur "Coco" Chanel, the pioneering French fashion designer whose modernist philosophy, menswear-inspired styles, and pursuit of expensive simplicity made her an important figure in 20th-century fashion, introduces the perfume Chanel No. 5, which to this day remains one of the world's most legendary and best selling fragrances. 1961—First American Reaches Space
Three weeks after Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to fly into space, U.S. astronaut Alan Shepard completes a sub-orbit of fifteen minutes, returns to Earth, and is rescued from his Mercury 3 capsule in the Atlantic Ocean. Shepard made several more trips into space, even commanding a mission at age 47, and was eventually awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor. 1953—Hemingway Wins Pulitzer
American author Ernest Hemingway, who had already written such literary classics as The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novella The Old Man and the Sea, the story of an aging Cuban fisherman who struggles with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream. 1970—Mass Shooting at Kent State
In the U.S., Ohio National Guard troops, who had been sent to Kent State University after disturbances in the city of Kent the weekend before, open fire on a group of unarmed students, killing four and wounding nine. Some of the students had been protesting the United States' invasion of Cambodia, but others had been walking nearby or observing from a distance. The incident triggered a mass protest of four million college students nationwide, and eight of the guardsmen were indicted by a grand jury, but charges against all of them were eventually dismissed. 2003—Suzy Parker Dies
American model and actress Suzy Parker, who appeared the films Funny Face and Kiss Them for Me, was the first model to earn more than $100,000 a year, and who was a favorite target of the mid-century tabloids, dies at home in Montecito, California, surrounded by family friends, after electing to discontinue dialysis treatments.
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