Spotted a cool, but wildly overpriced London After Midnight (1990) vinyl model kit at the antique mall recently, and had to snap a few pix of it for everyone. Yes sir, Screamin' did a superb sculpt job here, capturing Lon Chaney's "Man in the Beaver Hat" to petrifyin' perfection-- now if only the person who put it together and painted it could have been bothered to apply just a little more effort and life into it too. Ahhh well, this is also just another reminder that hopefully one day this "lost" film will finally surface, (even if it isn't that great), so those of us who grew up droolin' over Famous Monster mag pix of Professor / Inspector Edward C. Burke can finally see this freak in all of his snarling, ghastly, Golden Age of Cinema glory!
7 comments:
Screamin' did put out some good models in the 90's. I remember drooling over them at my local comic shop. But then they kicked me out. Comic shop owners don't like drooling around valuable comics.
Supposedly all the make-up effects Chaney used were really painful, but I don't know how true that story was, just something I read in monster mags as a kid.
This is a really nice sculpt. The hands are great, it's instantly recognizable, and I love the pose. I'm no good at painting so while it's not a great job it's certainly a better job than I could do!
Surprised it's overprices for something from the 90s but that's the antique market right now.
A nice find and I understand that, when assembled, it stood a massive 18" tall. Simply because of its size I can't imagine the inflated price they were asking, especially with a sub-standard paint job.
Maybe I am alone in thinking this, but I don't think the paint job is so awful, it looks like Chaney has risen from his tomb, is covered in graveyard dust and is out for revenge. The paint job is similar to some of the less than stellar printing jobs found in some 50's horror comics, a weird mix of menace and off kilter appearance.
You’ll change your opinion when you google it and see what some pro model kit painters have expertly done with it.
It's certainly been roughed up by thirty years of handling. Like JMR, I feel like the smudgy kitty hairy grime adds something. I imagine this paint job pristine and new and think that would not look as interesting. Sure it was inexpertly done originally. As it is now, it looks like every soft rubber bendy I've ever seen, rotting away on its card, and I like that better than some ringer's perfect model craftsmanship.
I probably wouldn't buy either thing, though. I don't know what that price tag says, but living where I live, it's beyond me why anyone would pay anything for any used model. I know you can dip that in paint remover and start again, but I expect expensive stuff to still be unpainted and unassembled. Unique fixer-upper opportunities are not worth a ton of money.
I'm so glad you got pictures. Man, that thing is huge!
Well, maybe my HD pix are making this look better for some reason, but I assure you all, in person it's a freakin' garbage paint job.
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