Surely all horror movies fans love a good movie monster, but secretly I reckon that we all love a bad movie monster too.  Some are just straight out bad, but there are wonderful gems of movie monsters that are so bad that they are good, and inadvertently steal ever scene they are in, if not the whole movie because of their awesome awfulness. Here are my personal "top three" of the 1950s. (Other decades will follow!) 

#1. Gor the giant floating alien brain from The Brain from Planet Arous (1957).

#2. Ro-Man (Ro-Man Extension XJ-2) the gorilla suited robot from the moon in Robot Monster (1953).

#3. Zontar the shuffling cone shaped creature from It Conquered The World (1956).

See the top three movie monster list from the other decades... 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.

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I first came across Tatsumi's work in the late 80s, with the publication of an anthology of some of his early work, Good-Bye And Other Stories (1988). The stories of the foibles of ordinary citizens living in the big cities of postwar Japan fascinated and enthralled me. Cramped living, the hustle and bustle of daily life on the streets, and how one person trapped in this "new" Japan can so easily get lost. How beneath the surface of saving-face and correct customs of behaviour, there was a quite corruption of the traditional way of life. How men who had been through the war in particular felt emasculated, out of place in an ever changing cityscape, lonely, emotionally detached and desperate for love and affection. It was these insightful works of Tatsumi that started my life-long interest in Japan, and in particular the hectic streets of growing Asian metropolises like Tokyo. The heart-wrenching stories life's daily grind were it turned out wonderfully rendered snippets of reality, as I would later discover for myself when I was fortunate enough to spend many years living South Korea and had the opportunity to visit Japan. 

The name "Selwin" was supposed to give the character a sense of Britishness, which Sparenberg attempted badly to add to with a terrible fake British accent. He openly mimicked the make-up style of Zacherley, with added Zacherley style black cape, and a broad-brimmed hat.  And initially wore claw-like rubber gloves, which he had to drop because they became to cumbersome to wear. The character and the show was massively popular,  when the fan club Selwin's Society of the Shroud was formed, the station was swamped with requests for membership cards.

Haze's raw eccentric and offbeat style set him apart from the multitude of would be musicians trying to find a break in the explosion of rock music in the 1950s. Too wild both musically and in his personal life, Haze was an uncompromising character that would gain a cult status in his latter years.  Born sometimes around April 29th, 1937 in Boone County, West Virginia, coal mining was what most men in the area went into. Haze's father was a coal miner himself, but he wanted something different for himself. Picking up anything to make a noise, in a desperate attempt to escape from the drudgery of mining, Haze inadvertently developed his raw dynamic style. When he took to the stage in towns around where he lived in the 1950s, people didn't know how to react to this frenetic sonic attack and whacked out vocals, all played himself. People were amazed and confused at what they saw, seeing Haze playing guitar and singing while crashing hi-hat cymbals and thumping a bass drum with his feet. 

Much of Haze's early recordings were done on a tape recorder in his shack in the the Appalachian mountains, adding to the mythology of the man as being a true outsider musician and the godfather of not only Psychobilly but the whole garage/punk movement that would follow in the decades after Haze first built his own guitar, and stomped his feet on the floorboards of his shack. Haze gained recognition finally when The Cramps recorded his song She Said, which appeared both on their first live album Smell Of Female and their first compilation album ...Off The Bone, both in 1983. Erm... It appeared on their second compilation album Bad Music For Bad People in 1984. The Cramps must have really loved that song. 

What promises to be a typical prince and princess fall in love tale quickly spirals into a darkly psychological tale, full of nasty unremitting creepy characters. There's the charming prince who turns into a horrible and angry kidnapping bear, that makes the Beast from Disney seem like a big soft cuddly teddy-bear. The shallow, cruel, arrogant and spoilt princess who turns into a hag. Oh and not forgetting the evil dwarf, that wouldn't seem out of place in a David Lynch movie. Oh and there's a giant flapping fish, that seems friendly enough (for a fish) but the animatronics giving it a freaky quality that just another level of weird to the already quite frankly mad movie. All presented in over saturated Technicolor, the Singing Ringing Tree has become legendary among those of a certain age who only whisper of it and shudder with the fear of repressed memories afterwards. Think a hardcore piece of German expressionist cinema for kids!

Weird Retro Fact: The BBC put an English voice-over narration track directly over the original soundtrack. The whispers of the original German could be heard throughout. Could they have made this thing any more creepier than it already was? The answer is yes! This is creepy kids TV turned up to 11.

Marvin's assistant was his wife, known only as Dear, her face rarely seen as she has her back to the camera or obscured in some way, he would perform gruesome experiments on her.  Dear was played by Bennett’s real life wife Joy Bennett. Bennett would play Marvin mostly for laughs but every now and then would try to scare his audience. The Shock Theater he presented became so popular that the station produced a spin-off show that ran directly after called The Shocktale Party. Presented as a demented wrap party to the earlier show, guests included classic horror characters like Orville the hunchback and Shorty the Frankenstein monster, as well as the live band the Deadbeats. The band would often accompany Marvin while did musical parody numbers or beat style poetry readings. The shows finally ended in August 1959.