CULTPIX MONTH: Aroused (1966)

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New York City in the mid-1960s is a gritty, gray, neon-lit concrete jungle and someone is making it a lot emptier. A brutal serial killer is stalking the rain-slicked streets of Manhattan, specifically targeting sex workers. Enter Detective Innes (Steve Hollister), a world-weary cop who looks like he’s fueled entirely by stale coffee and cheap cigarettes. He’s assigned to the case, diving headfirst into the city’s seedy underbelly to catch the psycho before the body count rises.

Meanwhile, we follow Mandy (Janine Lenon, who is great in this, but it’s her only acting role), a woman caught up in the life who becomes our emotional anchor. As Innes tracks the clues, the film shifts between a hardboiled police procedural and a voyeuristic, psychological look into the mind of a twisted killer with deep-seated mommy issues. It all builds to a tense, shadowy climax in a dingy apartment that feels entirely too close for comfort.

If you stumbled upon Aroused expecting a standard, sleazy exploitation flick based on the title alone, you’re in for a massive surprise. This is a fascinating missing link in American independent cinema. It’s a bridge that connects the classic film noir of the 1940s and 50s with the grimy, proto-slasher, and American giallo films of the 70s.

Director Anton Holden (Teenage Tramp) captures 1960s Manhattan with a documentary-like realism. There’s no Hollywood glamor here. The streets look cold, the apartments look cramped, and you can practically smell the exhaust fumes and cloying perfume. The black-and-white cinematography by Dejan Georgevitich is gorgeous, utilizing sharp contrasts, deep shadows, and tight framing that make the city feel like a claustrophobic trap.

While budget constraints are evident in some of the pacing and looping audio, the film elevates itself through sheer atmosphere. The jazz score keeps things moving with a restless, anxious energy. It’s a bleak, cynical, yet strangely artistic piece of grindhouse history that deserves a lot more respect than its title implies.

While director Holden worked in the sound department on many movies and TV shows, co-writer Richard B. Shull went on to have a massive career as a character actor. You’ve probably seen him in similar but higher-budget Klute, as well as Splash and Housesitter. 

The killer even has mannequin heads all over his apartment, a full decade before Maniac.

You can watch this on Cultpix.

Tales from the Darkside S2 E22: The Unhappy Medium (1986)

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Reverend Farley Bright is dead. Or, at the very least, he’s finished with his earthly tenure of shaking down the elderly for seed money in the name of the Lord to his Church of a Better Tomorrow. He’s the kind of larger-than-life charlatan that would make Jimmy Swaggart look like a wallflower.

His family — a collection of archetypes that feel like they wandered off a Tennessee Williams set and took a wrong turn into a George Romero production, which is exactly what they are — has gathered for the reading of the will. They’re all expecting a piece of the golden pie, but Grady isn’t done performing. He returns via a séance (or perhaps just some high-end spiritual stagecraft) to run one last long-con from the Great Beyond.

Between Connie Stevens (playing the sister), Carolyn Ann Clark (as the niece who exposed the con), Richard Kuhlman (as the heir to the Electronic Church) and Peter Miller (as Farley), everyone in this episode understands the assignment. It’s loud and gloriously over-the-top. The Reverend Grady is a masterpiece of grotesque charm, a man who treated faith like a financial instrument and continues to cook the books even when he doesn’t have a pulse. He was a man who spent his life selling tickets to a Heaven he didn’t believe in and warning against a Hell he didn’t fear. The twist, that neither side wants his paperwork processed, leaving him stuck in a metaphysical limbo in his own church, is the kind of justice that would make the Crypt Keeper cackle.

This was directed by Dusty Nelson, who brought us one of the best movies ever made on making movies, Effects. It was written by Edithe Swensen, a TV vet who wrote episodes for this show and Monsters. I love this episode, because it uses the short format of Tales to tell a moral story, not simply a scary one.

B & S About Movies podcast Episode 139: Donald Pleasence

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I’m a huge fan of Donald Pleasence and this episode, I’ll be talking about Night Creature, Tales That Witness Madness, You Only Live Twice and Double Target.

You can listen to the show on Spotify.

The show is also available on Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Amazon Podcasts, Podchaser and Google Podcasts

Important links:

Theme song: Strip Search by Neal Gardner

Closing song: Botany 500 by Dawn Davenport and the Window Breakers

Donate to our ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ko-fi page⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

CULTPIX MONTH: Dr. Cyclops (1940)

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If you love The Incredible Shrinking Man or Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, you need to pay your respects to the granddaddy of them all. Directed by Ernest B. Schoedsack, the same absolute legend who gave us King Kong, this movie is a landmark for a massive reason: it is the very first American horror film shot in glorious, full three-strip Technicolor.

Before this, we had two-color freakouts like Doctor X and Mystery of the Wax Museum, but Dr. Cyclops brings the vivid, saturated, comic-book-pulp look right into your eyeballs.

We head deep into the Peruvian jungle, where Albert Dekker plays Dr. Alexander Thorkel, a bald, nearsighted mad scientist rocking some seriously thick glasses (hence the “Cyclops” nickname). Thorkel has discovered a rich uranium ore deposit and figured out a way to use cosmic radiation to shrink living things. Why? Because he wants to shrink all of humanity to reduce our carbon footprint! Is he really the hero?

Because his eyesight is shot, he invites a team of American biologists down to Peru just to look at a microscope slide for him. They point out some iron crystal contamination. He says, “Cool, thanks, now get out,” and tries to pack them home. Naturally, the biologists are pissed that they traveled thousands of miles to be the Geek Squad for a five-minute tech support gig, so they camp out to spy on him. Big mistake. Thorkel lures them into his radiation chamber and zaps ’em down to a mere twelve inches tall!

What follows is a wild jungle-survival game where our tiny heroes have to fight off giant house cats, hide in specimen boxes and plot to murder their giant tormentor by smashing his glasses and rigging his own shotgun against him.

Variety hated it at the time, calling it dull, but honestly? They missed the fun. It’s got that beautiful, dreamlike, pale Technicolor look that makes it feel like an ancient fairy tale come to life. It’s so gorgeous! Plus, looking back with 21st-century eyes, the movie is weirdly prophetic. Thorkel is mining uranium to power a weapon of mass alteration, and with his shaved head and thick glasses, he accidentally predated the wartime imagery of the era. 

You can watch it on Cultpix.

CULTPIX MONTH: Criminally Insane (1975)

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Filmed in San Francisco for what looks like the cost of a couple of cases of cheap beer and a trip to the butcher shop and clocking in at just over an hour, Nick Imllard’s Criminally Insane is the opposite of its alt title, Crazy Fat Ethel. It’s lean, mean and ready to pounce.

Meet Ethel Janowski (Priscilla Alden). She’s just been released from an asylum into the care of her long-suffering grandmother. The doctors think Ethel is cured. The doctors are wrong.

Ethel doesn’t want to reintegrate into society; she just wants to eat. Constant, non-stop, uninterrupted consumption. Soft-boiled eggs, whole loaves of bread, chocolate syrup straight from the bottle — if it fits on a plate, Ethel is shoving it down her throat.

The conflict arises when Grandma, concerned for both Ethel’s health and her own mounting grocery bills, decides to put a padlock on the refrigerator door. Big mistake. Huge. You don’t get between Ethel and her snacks. What follows is a slow-motion, butcher-knife-wielding rampage where Grandma (Jane Lambert), a local delivery boy and anyone else who dares step into the kitchen gets brutally, systematically eliminated.

Ethel isn’t just killing people; she’s hiding the bodies in the bedrooms, leading to a house full of flies, stench and the absolute peak of mid-70s drive-in atmosphere. With her heavy breathing, intense glares, and total commitment to the bit, Priscilla Alden created an unforgettable slasher icon before the slasher genre even had its official rules written. She doesn’t need a hockey mask or a dream world. She just needs a sharp object and an empty stomach.

This movie is ugly, poorly lit and has a music score that sounds like someone dropping a synthesizer down a flight of stairs. In short — I love it. Plus, you get George “Buck” Flower as a detective, blood with no wounds and the material that Millard would recycle into the sequel and the films Cemetery Sisters, Death Nurse and Death Nurse 2. 

You can watch this on Cultpix.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Penitentiary (1979)

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Every now and then, you run into a movie that doesn’t just want to tell you a story. It wants to grab you by the balls, kick your dick in the dirt and make you watch every single second of grit, sweat and survival it can muster.

Jamaa Fanaka didn’t just make a prison film with Penitentiary. He made an independent powerhouse that feels like a cross between an exploitation masterpiece, a Rocky-style sports melodrama and a hyper-real slice of late-70s street life.

If you’re looking for high-art subtlety, look elsewhere. But if you want pure, unfiltered cinematic adrenaline? Step right up to the cellblock.

Leon Isaac Kennedy stars as Martel “Too Sweet” Gordone, a hitchhiker who finds himself in the wrong place at the worst possible time. After getting mixed up in a diner brawl that ends in a fatality, Too Sweet gets railroaded by the system and thrown into the state pen.

Now, we’ve all seen prison flicks. But Fanaka, who shot large portions of this at the Lincoln Heights Jail in L.A., infuses the scenery with an exhausting, authentic claustrophobia. Too Sweet isn’t a hardened criminal. He’s just a guy who likes sugar in his coffee and wants to keep his head down. But the prison ecosystem doesn’t let anyone just exist.

Enter Half Dead, played with terrifying, scenery-chewing brilliance by Badja Djola. Half Dead is the cellblock kingpin, a mountain of a man who decides Too Sweet is his next target. The first third of this movie is an escalating, tension-filled nightmare as Too Sweet realizes he has exactly two options: submit or fight back with everything he has.

When the inevitable explosion happens, it’s brutal. Too Sweet stands his ground, uses his fists and catches the eye of the prison’s boxing coach, Ernie (Floyd Chatman). From there, the movie shifts gears into an underground boxing tournament where the ultimate prize isn’t just a trophy. It’s an early parole.

What elevates Penitentiary above standard grindhouse fare is Fanaka’s direction. As a graduate of the UCLA Film School (and part of the L.A. Rebellion movement), he doesn’t just shoot violence for the sake of a cheap thrill. He treats the boxing matches like gladiatorial theater. The camera gets right in the middle of the sweat, the flying spit and the thud of leather against ribs. Kennedy puts everything he has into the performance, looking genuinely exhausted and driven by pure survival instinct. The fight scenes took three days to film with no stunt doubles. Kennedy broke two of his ribs and lost two teeth.

It’s got that raw, independent edge where the budget might be low, but the ambition is scraping the ceiling. The soundtrack bumps with a gritty, funk-laden soul that keeps the energy moving even when the plot takes a breather to look at the institutional corruption keeping these men caged.

Somehow, the sequels are even better.

You can watch this on Tubi.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Parents (1989)

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Directed by Bob Balaban (yes, the guy from Christopher Guest comedies) and written by Christopher Hawthorne. Parents finds the Laemle family — Nick (Randy Quaid), Lily (Mary Beth Hurt) and Michael (Bryan Madorsky) moving into the California suburbs. Between seeing his parents making love and watching his father do an autopsy, Michael is a bit screwed up. His dreams are horrible and he believes his parents are cannibals. But what if he’s right?

But what can you do when your parents want to feed you the meat of your guidance counselor, Millie Dew (Sandy Dennis)?

The film’s most unsettling quality is its visual obsession with food. Director Bob Balaban utilized macro photography and heightened sound design to make the sound of a knife hitting a plate or the sight of a pot roast look like a crime scene. To make the mystery meat look particularly unappetizing and gelatinous, the production used a mix of brisket, food coloring and heavy amounts of glaze.

Siskel and Ebert disagreed on this; a big surprise was that Gene loved it and Roger didn’t. However, Ken Russell compared it to Blue Velvet and claimed that it was better than Lynch’s movie.

While Randy Quaid has certainly moved into legitimately weird territory in real life over the last decade, his performance in Parents is often cited by critics as a masterclass in repressed 1950s aggression. He isn’t playing crazy. He’s playing a man who is desperately trying to appear normal, which is much scarier.

You can watch this on Tubi.

GET WILD WITH DIA

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This Saturday, watch the show on the Groovy Doom Facebook and YouTube channels at 8 PM EDT.

Want to know what we’ve shown before? Check out this list.

Have a request? Make it here.

Want to see one of the drink recipes from a past show? We have you covered.

Our first movie is Impulse, which you can watch on Tubi.

Here’s the cocktail for the first movie!

The Tampa Car Wash: Grindhouse directors loved shooting in Florida back then because the cheap tax breaks and blazing sun created a amazing contrast with sleazy, dark subject matter. To honor that garish, sun-drenched coastal look, you need a drink that looks like a swimming pool but punches like a con man. Let’s pour a Blue Lagoon—but we are changing the name to The Tampa Car Wash in honor of the movie’s infamous, bizarre automotive execution scene.

  • 1.5 oz. orange flavored vodka
  • .5 oz. blue curaçao
  • .75 oz. lemon juice
  • 4 oz. club soda
  1. Fill a tall highball or Collins glass to the brim with crushed or cubed ice. In a cocktail shaker filled with ice, combine the vodka, blue curaçao and fresh lemon juice. Shake hard for 10 seconds until ice-cold.
  2. Strain the electric blue mixture over the fresh ice into your glass. Top it off with club soda and watch the bubbles swirl.

The second movie is Black Roses, which is on Tubi.

The Stage Diver: To truly pay homage to the sleazy, loud, smoky energy of thios movie, we need to pull the Jägermeister right to the front of the stage. Jäger has cemented its status as the official liquid fuel of the American heavy metal scene, thanks to aggressive marketing targeting rock clubs and metal bands. This is a heavy, carbonated drink that flips the classic Jäger Bomb into a legitimate, dark, aromatic highball. It pairs the herbal bitterness of Jäger with the dark, spicy bite of cola and a sharp hit of fresh citrus to keep it loud.

  • 2 oz. Jägermeister
  • .5 oz. lime juice
  • 5 oz. cola
  • 2 dashes, Angostura bitters
  1. Take a heavy pint glass or a tall Collins glass and pack it completely with large, solid ice cubes. Pour the Jägermeister and fresh lime juice directly over the ice.
  2. Add 2 heavy dashes of Angostura bitters right onto the liquor. Slowly top the glass off with the dark cola. Let it fizz up violently to create a thick, tan, aromatic head at the top of the glass. Give it one quick, gentle stir from the bottom just to integrate the lime.

Can’t wait for Saturday!

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Paranoia (1969)

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Umberto Lenzi, come on down! We’re eager for you to shock us, titillate us, and perhaps even thrill us a bit. Oh, and you’ve brought Carroll Baker with you! Please, show us the tale you’ve crafted!

Released in Italy as Orgasmo, it was one of the first X-rated movies in the U.S., and the ads definitely played it up, especially because it featured Baker. She had left America as a single mother with two children, and her prospects in Hollywood weren’t great. In Italy, despite making movies that she said “What they think is wonderful is not what we might,” she found a career. Later, she would admit that it showed her an entirely different world and brought her back to feeling alive again.

What’s confusing is that Lenzi’s next movie was released as Paranoia in Italy and A Quiet Place to Kill in America.

I love this interview that she did with Tank Magazine, answering if she ever did any avant-garde projects: “Some of the films in Europe, of course, but a lot of them I haven’t even seen. The one I’m curious about is called Baba Yaga; it was a really far-out, wild, cartoonish sort of thing. I play the title character, a 1,500-year-old witch, and all my sisters were witches, too. I didn’t have to be completely naked, but in every Italian film, there was a scene where you had to show your breasts. Usually, I was talking on the telephone or reading a book. One day, they announced a nude scene – I couldn’t believe it. But the make-up artist and hairdresser were already there, dying the other girls’ pubic hair to match the hair on their heads.”

Baker plays Kathryn West, a glamorous American widow who retreats to a palatial Italian villa just weeks after her wealthy husband’s passing. She is the picture of fragile elegance, drowning in luxury and boredom until a handsome drifter named Peter (Lou Castel) breaks down at her gates.

The villa’s isolation quickly turns from a sanctuary into a playground for predators. Peter moves in, followed shortly by his sister, Eva (Colette Descombes). The dynamic is electric and immediately suspicious. As the siblings weave a web of sexual manipulation, the truth emerges: they aren’t related, and Kathryn isn’t their host—she’s their mark.

The film descends into a harrowing depiction of gaslighting, which is a term that gets used a lot these days. Trust me. This movie has real gaslighting. Peter and Eva keep Kathryn in a drug-induced stupor, fueling her with pills and booze while playing a haunting, discordant song on a loop to shatter her psyche. It is a proto-slasher psychological thriller where the weapon isn’t a knife, but the systematic erosion of a woman’s reality. But don’t worry. In the world of Lenzi, every sin eventually demands a receipt.

Caroll Baker started off as a Hollywood sex symbol before retreating to Europe, where she’d make Baba Yaga, So Sweet… So Perverse and The Sweet Body of Deborah, amongst others. Eventually, she’d move back to America and become a mature actress. As for Lenzi, he’d go on to make Eaten Alive, Cannibal Ferox, Nightmare City and more.

If you appreciate melodramatic twists, layered narratives, and visually striking sex scenes, then it’s time to indulge in this film.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: The Other Hell (1981)

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If you think you’ve seen it all because you sat through The Devils or owned a bootleg of Killer Nun, Bruno Mattei is here to grab your rosary beads and yank you straight into the abyss. The Other Hell (originally L’altro inferno) isn’t just a movie; it’s a 90-minute assault on every Sunday School lesson you ever endured.

Get ready for a movie overflowing with blasphemy, shot at the Convento di Santa Priscilla in Rome (once owned by FIAT but now by the Secret Service). Then again, the print that Severin used for the Blu-ray was found behind a false wall in a Bologna nunnery! I sum up this movie with these three words: Not fucking around.

Written by Claudio Fragasso (Rats: The Night of Terror) and directed by Bruno Mattei (Seven Magnificent Gladiators, Robowar), this is a pull-no-punches nunsploitation shockfest. You think mother! was bad?  Then you are by no means ready for this one. A baby gets boiled alive, and that’s the very least of the shocks in store. And if you’re Catholic, well, get ready to go to confession.

Boasting a Goblin score stolen from Beyond the Darkness (actually from their albums Roller and Il fantastico viaggio del bagarozzo Mark; Fragasso said they had the band in the movie “as they were fashionable and asked them to write music for the film, but they asked for a lot of money, leading to the production to use stock music with a few modifications.” Mattei claimed that he was friends with their publisher, Carlo Bixio, who gave him the music he wanted.

The plot kicks off with Sister Cristina getting lost in the catacombs — never a good move in an Italian movie — where she finds Sister Assunta (Paola Montenero, Sylvie from A Bay of Blood) in a morgue laboratory. Assunta is busy embalming corpses and casually dropping lore about nuns fornicating with Satan and the mysterious murder of the previous Mother Superior, Sister Florence. Before you can say “Hail Mary,” Assunta goes into a supernatural trance, murders Cristina and then drops dead herself.

Mother Vincenza (Franca Stoppi, who was also in Beyond the Darkness) tries to play it off as an accident to Father Inardo (Andrea Aureli), but the gig is up when Sister Rosaria (Susanna Forgione) starts spraying blood from her mouth during communion and develops a case of terminal stigmata.

Enter Father Valerio (Carlo De Mejo, who survived City of the Living Dead only to end up here). He’s a scientific priest sent to investigate, but he spends most of his time clashing with Vincenza, who runs the convent like a fascist boot camp.

It turns out the convent’s basement isn’t just for storing communion wine. It’s housing Elisa (Francesca Carmeno), Vincenza’s illegitimate, horribly disfigured daughter, who was tossed into boiling water at birth by the former Mother Superior. Elisa didn’t die, though; she just developed Carrie-esque telekinetic powers, like making people strangle themselves with their own rosaries.

By the time we get to the finale, Vincenza has dropped the act, admitted she made a pact with the Devil and claimed Elisa is the literal daughter of Satan. It all ends in the morgue with resurrected corpses, psychic battles, and Father Valerio losing his mind. The final kicker? The Bishop shows up to investigate the earthquake and gets a face full of rotting nun corpse falling out of a coffin.

Oh yeah — between priests being set on fire and a nun’s severed head in the sacristy, this movie is every nightmare you had in CCD class. When Mother Vincenza yells, “The genitals are the door to evil! The vagina, the uterus, the womb; the labyrinth that leads to hell; the devil’s tools!” you’ll either cheer or recoil in terror, depending on whether or not you ever sat through a five-hour Good Friday mass.

Seriously. This movie tested even my resolve of how far is too far. Which is just another way to tell you that I loved it.

This was shot at the same time as The True Story of the Nun of Monza with most of the same cast and crew. Fragasso says that he shot The Other Hell downstairs and Mattei shot the other upstairs, helping each other as needed. As for Mattei, he would always say that Fragrasso was just an assistant director. They did the same two movies for the price of one on Women’s Prison Massacre and Violence In a Women’s Prison, as well as Scalps and White Apache.

Mattei was interviewed by European Trash Cinema and said, “Let’s say that he has influenced almost everyone. For example, L’altro Inferno/The Other Hell utilized Argento’s concepts, but wasn’t an absolute copy of Inferno, the title was dictated by the distributor. He makes movies wilh lots of blood, I’m not adverse to it but in some countries, like Germany, gory movies aren’t distributed.”

While it premiered in Italy in 1981, it didn’t reach American theaters until 1984, where it was renamed Guardian of Hell. It was unleashed on VHS by Vestron Video, finding its true home in the wood-paneled basements of horror nerds who wanted something a little more European.

I can’t believe that you could have walked into a multiplex and watched this.