Based on the novel Sworn to Silence by Linda Castillo, this movie was a backdoor pilot for further movies that was never picked up by the Lifetime Channel. And oh yeah — that leads me to the newest streaming service that we subscribe to: the Lifetime Movie Club. And you know my opinion on Lifetime: it’s all giallo without the boobs and neon blood. This one even has a black gloved killer scene!
Originally airing January 6, 2013, this movie is all about Painters Mill, Ohio — not a real Ohio town as they often discuss things happening in Cincinnati, Youngstown and Dayton, all areas of the state that are far apart at the very least — where there’s always been a divide between the townspeople and the Amish.
Katie Burkholder (Neve Campbell) knows all about it. Sixteen years ago, she survived the Slaughterhouse Murders that tore her town apart. As a result, she left her people and became a cop. Now, she’s back in town as the chief of police, just in time for a copycat series of murders to begin. Yet Katie has secrets of her own that could destroy both her life and her lost family.
I watched this entire movie with recognizing Pony Boy himself, C. Thomas Howell. What a bad 80’s kid I have grown up to be. Noam Jenkins from the Saw movies is in this as a big city cop, too. So is Linda Kash from Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show.
You won’t see many — if any — Amish giallo. The end of this is pretty solid, with some real tension once the real killer is revealed. Check it out for yourself on Lifetime or on Amazon Prime.
Also known as The Cursed Medallion, this Italian ripoff was directed by Massimo Dallamano (What Have You Done to Solange?).
Richard Johnson (The Hauntingand Dr. Menard from Zombi 2) is a BBC filmmaker working on a documentary about demonic images in paintings. His daughter Emily (Nicoletta Elmi, Who Saw Her Die?, Deep Red) is having nightmares about how her mother died in a fire.
Edmund Purdom (2019: After the Fall of New York) advises him to bring his daughter along to Italy for some bonding time, along with their governess Jill, who is love with her boss. But then so is Joanna (Joanna Cassidy, The Glove), the producer of his movie. It also seems like Emily is in love, like real love, with her dad too. Was everyone incestual in 1970’s horror?
Michael meets Contessa Cappelli, an expert on satanic paintings. She warns him not to use a painting in his work. It depicts a child — wearing a medallion just like the one his daughter has been wearing — watching her mother burn. Is it any wonder that demonic possession soon follows?
This movie looks gorgeous. You can see the difference when a real director takes on a ripoff and decides to make it his own movie instead of aping The Exorcist directly.
I’m shocked that more people don’t discuss this film. It really fits into the genre of 70’s occult film quite well. You should check it out for yourself on Amazon Prime or buy the Code Red version at Amazon or the Arrow Video reissue at Diabolik DVD.
Originally airing on Wednesday, October 10, 1973 — and also known as Nightmare in Europe — 45 years have done nothing to hide to hide the weirdness and ability to frighten that this TV movie possesses.
Sally Farnum (Kim Darby, who started her career in True Grit and has appeared in memorable roles in Better Off Dead and Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers) and her husband Alex (Jim Hutton, Psychic Killer) have just inherited an old mansion from Sally’s grandmother.
There’s this great fireplace that’s all bricked in and Sally wants to do something with it. However, the handyman, Mr. Harris (William Demarest, Uncle Charley from TV’s My Three Sons) refuses as Sally’s grandmother had him seal it after her grandfather died. It’s just better to leave things the way they are. Sally doesn’t listen and uses the tools the old man leaves behind to pry open a small side door. This isn’t a fireplace at all — it’s gigantic basement. Sally leaves without hearing the voices calling her name, happy that she has set them free.
Of course, those voices can only get louder. Soon, they are constantly whispering her name and all manner of things are being broken in the house. At a dinner party for her always way too busy husband, she sees a small creature under the dining room table. Then, three of them try to attack her in the shower with razors!
The creatures are played by Tamara De Treaux, who was one of three actors who played E.T.; Felix Silla, who was Cousin Itt on TV’s The Addams Family and Twika on Buck Rogers in the 25th Century; and Patty Maloney, Lumpy from theStar Wars Holiday Special. They are uniformly unsettling in apperance. Go ahead. Just take a look.
Alex goes away on business again and tells Sally to stay with her friend Joan (Barbara Anderson, Eve from TV’s Ironside). But before she can go, the creatures trip Sally down the stairs and kill her interior decorator! That’s when our heroine confronts them and asks what they want. The answer? They want her soul as payment for freeing them.
Sally’s doctor prescribes sleeping pills while Joan stays with her, slowly believing her tales. Alex, however, is a grump and unconvinced untol he speaks with the handyman. Sally is lured into slumber as the creatures have spiked her coffee and they cut the power (“What do you mean they cut the power? How could they cut the power, man? They’re animals!”).
The creatures drag Sally into the basement before she can be saved and the next time we hear her voice, she is one of them, waiting for the next people to move into the house.
A horror force no less than director Guillermo del Toro loves this film, going as far to produce and co-write the film’s remake. He claims that he and his brothers would follow one another around the house mimicking the creatures.
Directed by John Newland, who created and hosted TV’s One Step Beyond anthology and written by Nigel McKeand, who worked on TV’s Family and The Waltons, this movie still influences and frightens. Why? Maybe because Sally is stuck between the pre and post worlds of feminism and this movie was at the right time and place to comment on that. She wants to belong, whether to marriage or as someone who makes something, but in the end, these roles feel empty and shallow. The only thing she ends up belonging to is the house that causes her doom.
Regardless, the real testament here is that the film was created — including script approval by Lorimar, casting, special effects, voice-over and exterior shots — in two weeks, thanks to a looming writers’ strike.
I searched and searched for a copy of this movie and am happy to have it in my collection. You should do the same.
We’re on day 2 of the Scarecrow Video Psychotronic Challenge! The rules for today? DAY 2: SHE BITES: Scientists should not fool with mother nature but they do and bad things happen.
I’ve always wanted to watch Phase IV, the lone directorial effort of famed graphic designer and Academy Award-winning filmmaker Saul Bass. Bass was best known for his title sequences, including the animated cut-outs Otto Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm and his groundbreaking graphic design work on Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and Psycho. He also designed some of the most iconic logos in history, including AT&T, Warner Brothers and United Airlines.
Starting in the 1960’s, Bass moved beyond creating title sequences for films to visualizing, storyboarding and even directing key scenes and sequences. He’d get a strange credit for this: visual or pictorial consultant. On some films (like Spartacus, where he designed the gladiator school and storyboarded the final battle) he simply set things up for the director. On others, like West Side Story, where he filmed the prologue, storyboarded the opening dance and created the end titles, he set up the full direction the film would take. And on Psycho, Bass was integrally involved in that films shower murder sequence, going so far to create the boards and test footage that convinced Hitchcock how the scene should be shot.
This leads us to the only movie that Bass would direct on his own, 1974’s Phase IV. A failure upon release, it finally found an audience via television and video. It’s also the first film to depict a geometric crop circle, predating the first crop circles that were found in the UK.
A cosmic event has caused ants to undergo rapid evolution and a hive mind that scientists are struggling to investigate. Within the desert, those ants have created large towers and geometrically perfect designs that force the locals to abandon the area, except for one family.
Scientists James Lesko (frequent Robert Altman actor Michael Murphy) and Ernest Hubbs (Nigel Davenport, the original voice of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey) have set up a sealed dome to study the ants, as well as house the aforementioned family that has not left. Soon, they are at war with the much more organized and effective ants.
After the ants invade the lab, one of the townspeople, Kendra (Peter Sellers’ widow Lynne Frederick, who also appears in Schizo and Four of the Apocalypse) becomes convinced that the ants are angry at her. Bass was obsessed with ensuring that Frederick had no trace of her British accent in this film, making her run her lines over and over again. She also had to wear a tight corset so that she could appear sixteen years old instead of her real age, twenty. Also of note, Linda Blair was almost cast in the film but the budget couldn’t afford her.
Kendra abandons the lab, sacrificing herself to save everyone else as Hubbs and Lesko argue over how to best deal with the ants. Lesko wants to communicate with them while Hubbs wants to destroy them before being stung to death and falling into a hole. Lesko decides to follow Hubbs plan and destroy the queen, but instead, he finds Kendra alive. He decides that the ants don’t want to destroy the human race, but instead make their two worlds work together.
Originally, Bass filmed a four-minute long montage sequence that ended the film, showing what life on new Earth would be like and how evolution would change Lesko and Kendra. This was cut by the distributor and would not be seen until 2012.
This is the kind of movie that could only be made in 1974. This is a pre-blockbuster big movie unafraid to suddenly have long moments of gorgeous music and long elegiac shots of insects going about their daily lives. The moments of human interaction feel boring by comparison. From the posters for the film, audiences were probably expecting a Bert I. Gordon style film and were rewarded with a trippy meditation about mankind’s place in the cosmic consciousness.
Obviously, this film is a major influence on Panos Cosmatos’ first film, Beyond the Black Rainbow. It was also one of the first movies featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000 during the KTMA era.
Deep Family Secrets isn’t just a strange movie. It’s a strange movie based on the true story of Gaylynn Morris, who eventually pleaded guilty to the murder of his wife Ruby. In this film, the names were changed to Clay and Renee Chadway. This may have originally aired on CBS, but it feels like a Lifetime film. And we all know that Lifetime movies are giallo minus the neon red blood and nudity.
Originally airing on April 15, 1997, this made for TV movie is packed with talent. The leads are Richard Crenna (the Rambo series of films) and Angie Dickinson (Dressed to Kill). Along for the ride are dependable actors like Meg Foster (Stepfather 2, They Live), Craig Wasson (Schizoid) and Tony Musante (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage).
Everything seems normal in the Chadway family until daughter JoAnne uncovers decades of lies, adultery, paternal fraud, criminal activities and so much more. She’s also a country singer who sounds a lot like Elliot Smith and no one comments that her insanely sad songs completely blow the mood.
Come for the true crime. Stay for Angie Dickinson having visions of white wolves. Seek it out on, well, YouTube.
Jerry Warren made plenty of movies, like The Incredible Petrified World, The Wild World of Batwoman and Face of the Screaming Werewolf. This was the last one he’d make before his death.
Four balloonists and their dog Melvin crash onto a remote island. Yes, I just wrote that sentence. They’re captured by pirates who takes them to meet Sheila Frankenstein (Katherine Victor, who played Batwoman in the previously mentioned film), who is turning shipwrecked sailors into zombies that have to wear sunglasses. Yes, I just wrote that sentence, too. You read it. It doesn’t have to make sense.
Meanwhile, Sheila brainwashes Dr. Hadley (Robert Clark, The Hideous Sun Demon) to help her revive her 200-year-old husband Dr. Von Helsing using the blood of Cameron Mitchell and the bodies of Amazon jungle girls who are the descendants of aliens! Mitchell is great in this, as all he does is quote Edgar Allan Poe.
But let’s not forget the ghost of Dr. Frankenstein, played by John Carradine, that powers all of her experiments from Heaven. Or Hell. Or somewhere else. He keeps yelling and ranting while his monster waits in an underground cave waiting to escape!
Andrew Duggan (It’s Alive) and Steve Brodie (Donovan’s Brain) are also on hand for this mixtape of mind jolting horror. It’s a piece of shit, but it’s a short and somewhat entertaining piece of shit.
You can check it out on Amazon Prime, if you dare!
On March 7, 1983, ABC presented this slasher movie of sorts that’s packed with plenty of great talent and enough twists to get you from commercial break to commercial break.
Stephanie Aggiston (Diane Franklin, Better Off Dead, Amityville II: The Possession) is spending the summer at Starkweather Hall, a rich girl’s boarding school. She’s a simple young lady, so she doesn’t fit in at first, but soon makes friends with Marita (Ally Sheedy), Calli and Shama, her Saudi princess roommate.
Everything seems to be going well until the murders start. Detective Russ Kemper comes to investigate and you know he’s a cop, because Larry Wilcox (Jon from CHiPs) plays him. Instead of waiting to learn who the killer is, Stephanie decides to play investigator with the help of stable boy Eddie Fox (Bill Paxton).
This movie is packed with red herrings, like the school janitor who thinks that Marita’s mother was his daughter. But the truth? It’s the cop! His mother, headmistress Miss Wade (Donna Reed!) abandoned him as a child. Therefore, he’s going to take away the lives of these girls that she loves and ruin her school.
Written by Jennifer Miller (who brought The Dark Secret of Harvest Home to TV) and directed by TV movie master William Wiard (This House Possessed, Fantasies), this is a fine way to pass some time and play spot the future star.
It’s not available on DVD, so visit YouTube or your favorite gray market source.
The first challenge on the list: 1. THE LADY AUTEUR: Pioneering women directors in psychotronic cinema. Now see who’s wearing the pants in Hellywood.
I’ve gone with Doris Wishman, who produced and directed at least thirty films over four decades, mostly in the usually male-dominated genres of sexploitation and pornography. Her film career began as a hobby after the death of her husband in 1958, with her feature debut being 1960’s Hideout in the Sun.
She’d already had experience in the film industry, as she worked for her cousin Max Rosenberg as a film booker for his art and exploitation films. The 1957 New York appeals court that allowed nudism to be shown in movie theaters inspired her to make that first film, which she followed in 1961 with Nude on the Moon, a film that was banned in New York because nudist colonies were legally permissible but nudism on the moon was not. She also worked with the legendary burlesque dancer Blaze Starr but as the nudie cutie genre started losing money, she moved into sexploitation.
That’s when some of her most famous — well, amongst lovers of ridiculous cinema like me — films got made, like Bad Girls Go to Hell and the Chesty Morgan vehicles Deadly Weapons and Double Agent 73, films in which Morgan kills people with her monstrous 73-inch breasts.
Wishman also produced 1972’s Keyholes Are for Peeping, which starred comedian Sammy Petrillo, a Brooklyn nightclub performer who eventually made Pittsburgh his hometown in the 1990’s. He’s probably better known for his teaming up with singer Duke Mitchell (yes, the guy who made Massacre Mafia Style and Gone with the Pope) as the poor man’s Martin and Lewis. They teamed up for Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla, which also somehow rips off Abbott and Costello monster films at the same time.
As the industry moved from softcore to hardcore, Wishman directed two Annie Sprinkle features, Satan Was a Lady and Come With Me, My Love. She wasn’t really excited about the shift and denied working on these films. As the 70’s were coming to a close, she released a film she’d been working on since 1971, Let Me Die a Woman, a groundbreaking semidocumentary on transgender issues filtered through the lens of exploitation.
That brings us to today’s movie, A Night to Dismember, which she started filming in 1978 to cash in on the slasher craze begun by Halloween. Wishman was ready to direct and produce the film from a screenplay by Judith J. Kushner. Most of the shoot took place in 1979 in New York at Wishman’s home.
From there, things get weird. Wishman claimed that multiple reels were destroyed in the photo processing lab, resulting in her having to reshoot several scenes and use stock footage to make a releasable final film. After four years (!) of post-production, the film would remain unreleased until MPI Media Group put it out in 1989.
There’s also an entirely different version of this film that was released in August 2018 on YouTube by the film’s cinematographer, C. Davis Smith. This version features actress Diana Cummings in the lead role and an entirely different plot, as adult film actress Samantha Fox replaced Cummings after the destruction of Wishman’s film.
According to Smith, Fox paid Wishman $2,000 to get the starring role of Vicki Kent. He said he doesn’t know for sure, but he believes that Wishman faked the story that the original print was destroyed in a fire and reshot the film with Fox. You can read more about that story here.
Whew! That’s a lot of history to cover, but this is a film that has plenty of it. Let’s get into what it’s really all about!
The Kent family suffers from an ancestral curse that has caused nearly all of them to be murdered, often by one another. Bonnie was first, hacked to pieces by her sister Susan, who was upset that her father favored her sister. After the murder, she slipped on the blood and was killed by the very same axe.
Broderick Kent’s wife Lola is next, murdered in the bathtub. While Kent tries to proclain his innocence, he eventually hangs himself.
That’s when we get to Vicki Kent (Samantha Fox), who has just ben released from an insane asylum after killing two boys. Her brother and sister, Billy and Mary, want her to be committed again.
Despite wanting to rekindle her relationship with her ex-boyfriend, she struggles to make it in the real world, constantly hallucinating. Then again, with Frankie getting decapitated and his head burned in a fireplace, that relationship seems doomed.
Vicki tries to visit some relatives who turn her away before they’re all killed by hatchet and by car. Even a trip to the lake is fraught with horror, as a zombie chases her around, only to be revealed to be her brother Billy who has been trying to frighten her back into the sanitarium.
This is the kind of movie that rewards your lack of attention with shifts in characters, hairstyles and clothing all within the same scene. It doesn’t help that there is next to no voiced dialogue and only a narrorator’s voice to carry us through every scene and change in tone. We go from Vicki performing a sexy dance and trying to seduce a detective to Vicki’s sister Mary actually being the one behind all the killings.
The detective makes his way to the house where he finds a confused Vicki holding a hatchet. Despite hitting him several times with it, he manages to strangle her to death. That’s when we get the voice over from the detective, telling us that Mary was the real guilty party, but she’s escaped after killing a cab driver. And that’s the movie, I guess.
To put it bluntly, A Night to Dismember is a mess. It’s got songs that stop and start, horrible acting, bad gore and footage that appears to be the quality of a 1970’s super 8 home movie. It’s the kind of movie that if I watched it with a roomful of normal folks, they’d scoff and laugh. And that’s why I woke up at 4 AM so that I could enjoy it all by myself, away from the insults of people not ready to cheerful enjoy a movie that combines the insane and the inane. There’s also plenty of 1970’s fashion and an unhinged voiceover to love, which continues over the credits, making me adore this piece of film even more.
Back to Wishmasn. Before her death in 2002, she was finally honored for her groundbreaking work, with John Waters featured a clips from her films in Serial Mom, appearances on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, appearances at the New York and Chicago Underground Film Festivals and a showing of her films at Los Angeles’s Nuart Theatre entitled “Doris Wishman: Queen of Sexploitation.”
The goal is to watch one film every day that fits the 31 entries on the list provided by Scarecrow Video. Here’s the list below. If you’re reading this and love movies, you should take the challenge, too!
Originally airing on March 6, 1983 on NBC, The Demon Murder Case was based on the trial or Arne Cheyenne Johnson, better known as the Devil Made Me Do It Case. It was the first court case in the United State in which the defense sought to prove innocence based on the defendant’s claim of demonic possession.
The story starts on November 24, 1981 in Brookfield, Connecticut when Johnson was convicted for the first-degree manslaughter of his landlord. The Glatzel family claimed that their 11-year-old son David was possessed and after the aid of Ed and Lorraine Warren (you knew they’d get involved here), as well as some Catholic priests, the demon was cast from their child’s body. Unbeknownst to them, it went into the body of their daughter’s boyfriend — Johnson — before caused him to kill said landlord after an argument.
The day after, Lorraine Warren informed the Brookfield Police that Johnson was indeed possessed when the crime was committed. Soon, the media got involved — fueled by the Warrens — who began working on a book, lectures and movie deals.
The major motion picture never happened, but Gerald Brittle, with the assistance of Lorraine Warren, published The Devil in Connecticut. While Lorraine Warren stated that profits from the book were shared with the family, it’s claimed that they only got $2,000 for the book.
Members of the family claim that the possession story was a hoax concocted by the Warrens to exploit a mental illness. The famous demonologists also claimed that the story would make the family millionaires and would help get Johnson out of jail.
For what it’s worth, Johnson and Debbie got married and still support the Warrens’ account of demonic possession and have stated that her family is just out for money.
I told you all that so that I can tell you about this.
You have to love a movie where a demon is described as looking like a cloven-footed man burnt from head to toes, wearing ripped jeans and a flannel. You also have to love this cast! Eddie Albert as an exorcist delivering priest? Cloris Leachman? Ken Kercheval? Kevin Bacon as the killer? Andy Griffith and Beverlee McKinsey as Warren stand-ins Guy and Charlotte Harris? And who is that doing the voice of the demon? Harvey Fierstein in his first screen role, just using his normal indoor voice!
For being a TV movie, this one has some pretty great VHS box art.
This also has good direction from William Hale, who was behind several Night Gallery episodes and the two Lace mini-series.
It’s not going to be the best demonic possession movie you’ve ever seen, but for a TV movie, it’s pretty fun. No one spits nails or anything. But it has some fun scares. I found it on YouTube, seeing as how it’s never been released on DVD or streaming. Come on — why are these great TV movies being withheld?
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