Human Monsters: The Bizarre Psychology of Movie Villains (1995) by George E. Turner and Michael H. Price

This is a blog about the comics Kitchen Sink published, and not about their other stuff, but as you can see from this last batch of posts, I decided to also do most (or all?) of the books Kitchen Sink suddenly started to publish in 1995. Because that’s not something Kitchen Sink was much involved with before, and then this mini-deluge…

Kitchen Sink had (at this point) been bought by the Ocean Group, which was a bunch of investors from Hollywood. So it’s natural for Kitchen Sink to start publishing books about movies, right? Right.

But what is this book, even? The cover seems to indicate that this is gonna be a book about monsters…

… and the introduction is about Fay Wray (mostly known for King Kong)…

… but King Kong isn’t even featured in this book. And that’s some selection of movies — I’ve seen way more than my share of films from this era, and these people have managed to pick almost exclusively films I haven’t seen. There’s basically only a handful of famous movies here — M being virtually the only classic.

One movie I have seen, though, is The Great Gabbo, which… is not great.

The image stills are magnificently reproduced in this book, though.

But here’s a typical entry: Who is Hope Schuyler? That’s a pretty obscure movie, and they give a plot recap, and then talk a bit about the people involved, and that’s it. Where’s the monsters? Where’s the psychology?

This is the kind of book that’s really just hard to grok who the audience would be. It’s a papery kind of blog thing — two guys just watching some movies and then writing a bit about them, and then publishing it.

They are a bit more expansive when talking about monster movies — it’s all B movies, anyway.

You can pick up copies for $5, so either Kitchen Sink flooded the market with these books, or nobody much liked it.

I can’t find anybody talking about this book on the interwebs, so I guess the latter.

This is the two hundred and thirty-seventh post in the Entire Kitchen Sink blog series.