Photo: 2003 Cadillac hearse for sale on EBay. Bidding starts at $10,000.

Queen of the Dead – dateline August 22, 2011

• The godfather of Mondo Cinema, Gualtiero Jacopetti, died at 92 on August 17. The director of the silly, can’t-look-away shockumentary Mondo Cane (1962), he influenced everything from John Waters to all those Faces of Death videos to cable’s “Shit Blows Up” shows to one of my own favorite films, The Wild, Wild World of Jayne Mansfield. Jacopetti’s own mondo was kind of scioccante, too: in 1961 he was in a car accident that killed his girlfriend, gorgeous British actress Belinda Lee; Italian papers say he will be buried next to her.

• Albert Brown, a survivor of the Bataan Death March, died on August 14, at the age of 105—if that’s not a middle finger to the Japanese army, I don’t know what is. Brown was already 36 in April 1942 when he and some 76,000 other POWs were marched some 70 miles through the mountains and jungles of Bataan in the Philippines, six days through 100° heat. About 11,000 died—or were killed—along the way. Then, Brown spent two more years in prison camps, till the end of the war. Calling this guy “tough” is like calling the Grand Canyon “a nice little slice.”

• Akiko Futaba, a 96-year-old Japanese pop singer, died on August 16. Doesn’t the phrase “96-year-old Japanese pop singer” make you sit up and go “whu-huh?” It did me. She was born in Hiroshima (and narrowly avoided dying there, being on a train in a tunnel on that certain day). She became a sensation in the late 1930s singing ryūkōka, a style that incorporated Western jazz and crooning. Futaba appeared in several movies, made more than 700 records, and was still performing at the age of 90. Go YouTube her, she had a lovely voice (though it deepened to Dietrich levels in later years).

• Burger’s King’s new ad agency, McGarryBowen (note the hip and artsy shunning of word separation) announced that it is killing off the wonderfully creepy, nightmare-inducing, bemasked Burger King character in its TV spots. I for one will miss him: for TV horror, he is right up there with those terrifying Jell-O Pudding Face people, the plastic battery family from a few years back, and that old dancing Six Flags man who looks like the reanimated zombie corpse of Swifty Lazar.

—Eve Golden