Category: Movies and Television

The Fiendish Pit of Dr. Fug Manpoo

Hack has long been a fan of English author Sax Rohmer’s supervillain Dr. Fu Manchu, a stalwart role of horror actors like Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee (Karloff’s 1932 film The Mask of Fu Manchu is particularly fun, with a pre-Thin Man Myrna Loy as the doctor’s evil daughter Fah Lo See). The character’s popularity has fallen out of favor in recent years (last being seen as a leading role in Peter Sellers’ film farewell The Fiendish Plot of Fu Manchu in 1979, although Nicolas Cage revived it for a section of the 2007 cult classic Grindhouse) due to its racist attitudes and “yellowface” casting.

That didn’t stop Hack from adapting Fu Manchu into a Korean pug supervillain named Dr. Pug Manpoo who craps into a massive pit in his castle and tortures his enemies by suspending them over it with the threat of dropping them in. Variety reports that Nicolas Cage is in talks to play the role in a film version.

Ass’s Milk

Happy heavenly birthday to Claudette Colbert!

Colbert is one of our favorite movie stars from the 1930s and 1940s, winning an Oscar for It Happened One Night and starring in such classics as Cleopatra, The Egg and I and Since You Went Away. But our favorite Colbert film is the infamous 1932 camp classic The Sign of the Cross, which features an outrageously wonderful performance by Charles Laughton as Nero and perhaps the sexiest character of 1930s cinema in the form of Colbert’s Empress Poppaea. She was immortalized in one of the most famous nude scenes of the era when Poppaea takes a milk bath attended by her gaggle of slaves, a sight so deeply planted in Hack’s psyche that he wrote this novel about it.

Police Chick

Hack was blind drunk through most of the 1970s so he has only a hazy recollection of the Angie Dickinson TV series Police Woman. But he has a vague memory of one episode where Angie is captured by a baddie and he orders her to take off her bra so he can check for concealed weapons. Angie is saved from the horrors of having to expose her boobage to the fiend at the last second but Hack decided to base an entire novel on the scenario.