A Few Schnapps

Here's a few more schnapps of our Spring city break in Cologne, a place I can really recommend.

Have you been on a great city break readers?

Easter Greetings from New Jersey

Wishing all a ZOGG-TASTIC Easter from Monster Base! -

 BrianF NJ USA

ITS A GOOD FRIDAY!

Yum!

European Moments

After a month away our continental capers are rapidly coming to a close.

Here are some more glimpses of the life Teutonic.

Jimmy Hendrix signed autographs in Cologne back in his heyday. This photo was on the hoarding near the Dom.

Similarly Sixties shaman Moondog was resident in Recklinghausen for years.

Tin plate train carriages and Zeppelin's for sale in a Cologne shop window.

A million padlocks hung on a bridge in Cologne.

A small wooden game, one of many scattered about our friend's house.

Die-casts turned into keyrings. Around £8 a go.

Free books in outdoor book cabinets. How I love these things. Ideally you would take one or two and replace them with others. You may be able to see Stephen King's It and The Shining. I checked them, both mint hardbacks with dustjackets and completely unused! I left them for to the native speakers though.

You got cabinets like these?

THE MONORACER

This is an unusual vehicle kit, the Monoracer by BPT.

Seems to be zip-line type toy, the sort of thing Airfix had done with Flight Deck.

I wouldn't have minded Monoracer as a kid.

You?

THREE BIRD

 

I think I saw this fine snap of the JR21 Thunderbird 3 on Ebay a while back.

A toy I had I had as a kid, we've been apart far too long. The box art is just superb I think too. With prices that would make Alan Tracy run off, I enjoy this and the other JR21 Thunderbirds from a safe distance these days.

Are you lucky enough to own one of these beauties?

Boo Bahns

Waiting for an underground in Koln - the ubiquitous U Bahn - it reminded me of an old horror movie I caught in 2004, Creep.

Creep starred rising German starlet Franke Potente (famously Jason Bourne's fraulien in the first film) and after checking Creep was indeed partly filmed in Cologne's vast underground train network.

Essentially Creep involved the teenage Franke missing the last London tube and therein began her descent into the dark and monstrous underbelly of an abandoned line. 

The monster in Creep is truly appalling, a deranged throwback left over from a defunct and hidden government lab when he was just a child. Now adult the eponymous Creep kidnaps lone commuters to continue the insanities of the lab experiments he himself endured and twisted even further in his disintegrating mind. 

I was never sure if the Creep was a cannibal but the creatures in the first London Underground film I ever saw certainly were, the legendary Death Line.

Death Line is much older. Made in 1972 it would have been a shocker back then. It starred Donald Pleasance and Christopher Lee. The damsel was played by Sharon Gurney, a relative of Hammer Horror stalwart Michael Gough. 

Basically Death Line revolves around an aging couple trapped years before in the old Victorian lines. Sustaining themselves on marooned passengers the couple ascend further into the modern underground, now completely cannibalistic and eventually attracting the attention of both the police and MI5!

The third and final film in my tour of the murderous London underground is American Werewolf in London, John Landis's classic about two unfortunate American teenagers who stray from the path on our dark British moors. 

Only a short sequence plays out in the tube but it's one that stayed with me as the helpless businessman is stalked by an unseen growling beast through the platforms and eventually leading to it's horrible emergence on screen, a huge snarling thing slowly advancing on all fours towards the panic-stricken man on the escalator, from where he utters the terrible phrase Good Lord!

Amazingly all three of these films were partly filmed in the same London tube station, the old Aldwych underground.

Have you seen any tube monsters readers? Got any toys or models?

JEREMY YOUNG R.I.P.

Sorry to read that actor, Jeremy Young, who appeared in the two part Space:1999 episode,  Bringers of Wonder  passed away on April 10th. 

Our sincere condolences to his family.