Written, directed and produced by Robert Clarke — the only movie he’d write and direct, sadly, after a career of acting in movies like The Astounding She-Monster — this movie was inspired by the success of that film. After all, Clarke got five percent of She-Monster’s profits in addition to his salary. Although Clarke later admitted that the film was awful, it was a financial success for him and enabled this movie to happen.

With a crew that was made up of University of Southern California film students and a cast of friends and unknowns, this movie was made over twelve weekends with three cinematographers.

An unauthorized sequel, Don Glut’s Wrath of the Sun Demon (which features the real Sun Demon mask from Bob Burns’ collection) was produced in 1965. Two redubbed versions of the original film havealso  been released: Hideous Sun Demon: Special Edition and What’s Up, Hideous Sun Demon (AKA Revenge of the Sun Demon), the latter of which had Clarke’s blessing. Both Susan Tyrel and Jay Leno were involved with that movie.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this film is the claim that its amongst the first movies to use practical locations, which is common practice today.

Dr. Gilbert “Gil” McKenna (Clarke) falls unconscious after accidentally being exposed to radiation yet he has no burns nor damage to his body. However, when he’s in the sun, he transforms into a prehistoric reptile man, destroying all notions of both scientific evolution and religious Creationism.

Once he realizes that he can never go into the sun again, he does what you or I would do. He drinks himself blind drunk and gets involved with a girl at a bar and battles some toughs over her.

In the scene where the radio announcer is warning the public that the Sun Demon is loose, he then says, “I return to music by the King Sister.” Clarke was married to Alyce King of the singing King Sisters and Marilyn King wrote and performed “Strange Pursuit”, the song in the bar scene.

A $50,000 budget, helped by weekend camera rentals which were more affordable, and a $500 rubber suit has never gone so far as it does in this film.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime and Tubi. You can also enjoy Rifftrax commentary over the film on Tubi.

Lindsey Shotneff may have been born in Canada, but he made the majority of his films in the UK. Most famously, he co-wrote and directed the James Bond ripoff License To Kill in 1965, which was released in the U.S. as The Second Best Secret Agent in the Whole Wide World.

In 1977, when there was a publicity battle between who owned James Bond — Albert R. Broccoli (The Spy Who Loved Me) vs. Kevin McClory (the projected James Bond of the Secret Service) — Shonteff made No. 1 of the Secret Service (AKA 008 of the Secret Service), Licensed to Love and Kill and Number One Gun.

He also made the horror film Night After Night After Night about a killer transvestite judge, the groupie film Permissive (it has the Collinson twins from Twins of Evil in it), The Yes Girls and The Big Zapper as well as its sequel, The Swordsman.

This movie got an X rating when it first came out, if you can believe that. Its original director was going to be Sidney J. Furie, who went on to make Iron Eagle and The Entity.

The Great Vorelli and his dummy Hugo perform before packed audiences in London, despite the strange tension between the two of them. Yes, more tension than is usually present in a dummy and performer relationship. Vorelli is played by Bryant Halliday, who did acting as pretty much a hobby, as his true job was running the 55th Street Playhouse in New York and using it as the primary location for exhibiting films distributed by the company he co-owned, Janus. Those films included works by Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa and Michelangelo Antonioni.

American reporter Mark English (William Sylvester, Dr. Floyd in 2001 A Space Odyssey) wants to know more, so he gets his girl Marianne (Yvonne Romain, The Curse of the Werewolf) to go to another show with him. Of course, Vorelli hypnotizes her and makes her dance the Twist. He’s a Svengali who wants to hypnotize her and make her his. And oh yes — Hugo is pretty much alive.

This movie is based on a tale that Frederick E. Smith wrote for London Mystery Magazine in 1951, earning ten pounds for its sale and giving up any rights. Then again, it’s also ripped off from the segment in Dead of Night, that has a killer doll named, you guessed it, Hugo.

You can watch the Mystery Science Theater version of this movie on Amazon Prime and Tubi.

In the early 1970s, Fredric Hobbs pioneered an art form that he called ART ECO, a combination of environmental technology, fine art, solar/nomadic architecture and interactive communications with an ecologically balanced lifestyle.

But more important to our studies, Hobbs also wrote and produced four films, the missing potentially forever Troika, Roseland, the incredibly strange Godmonster of Indian Flats and this movie. I am pleased to report that in the first minute of this movie, it somehow outweirds even the Godmonster. How is this even possible?

“Whilst storm clouds gathered over Europe in the years before the war, Hitler’s most brilliant and renowned young scientist, Dr. Kirsten Caligula, vanished suddenly from her laboratory in Berlin.

World press received unconfirmed reports that Dr. Caligula — an expert in robot technology — had been dispatched to Calcutta, India, on a top secret mission for the Fuhrer himself.

Her orders: to interview the world-famed magician and spiritualist Carter the Great at his Mountain retreat near Calcutta. There to study his most recent discovery a rare super-substance known as Raw-Zeta.

It was rumored amongst scientists of the time that Carter’s substance resembled a highly potent form of hashish known as Cartoon-Khaki. Other authoritative sources in the Far East reported that Raw-Zeta, when refined electronically, could result in the formation of Deadly-Zeta.

Carter — in ghost form — was introduced into a human body by Chinese acupuncture techniques. In his last public statement, Carter warned that any mortal wired to Deadly-Zeta could be used as a broadcasting catalyst to enslave all humans with the sound of his voice, thus becoming an unwitting tool for the most diabolical forces of evil known to man.

Soon afterward, Carter vanished forever whilst visiting his sister in San Francisco, perhaps a victim of his own prophecy.

Seven years later, when Carter was pronounced legally, dead his admirers held a spirit funeral over an empty black coffin.”

These words — originally transcribed by the site Taliesin Meets the Vampires — start the film and then we’re instantly slammed into a Dixieland band playing a song called “Alabama’s Ghost” that spoils most of the movie. That’s when we meet our hero, Alabama, who crashes a forklift into a room that is filled with the magical tools of Carter the Great. He decides to visit the magician’s sister in San Francisco and learn more about how he can become a great magician.

Alabama is played by Christopher Brooks, who also played Hieronymous Bosch in Roseland and Jesus Christ in The Mack. He also shows up in Godmonster of Indian Flats. He’s incredible in this movie, to the point that you could have really told me he really was the character and that they just filmed his crazy life and didn’t tell him that this was a narrative film.

She agrees to allow him to keep the Raw-Zeta, which he believes is hashish, and Zoerae — her granddaughter — will travel with Alabama, teaching him more of the ways of magic. However, when our protagonist leaves, we learn that the old woman is a man. And a vampire. And soon, we also discover that Zoerae is also a vampire, part of a coven that still follows Dr. Caligula and will use the media airwaves of a man named Gaunt to speak through Alabama, transforming the Raw-Zeta to Deadly Zeta and take over the world.

If you make it this far without wondering what the hell is going on, I’d be amazed. This movie is quite literally insane on every single level and I love it for whatever it is.

Meanwhile, Alabama is being managed by Otto Max, a rock and roll promoter, and learns that being a big star isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be. Oh yeah — he’s also mentored by the ghost of Carter the Great, who is trying to help him battle the vampires and become King of the Cosmos. But dude, those vampires have whole factories where they use young hippy girls as fuel.

Carter’s ghost is played by E. Kerrigan Prescott, who was also Prof. Clemens in Godmonster of Indian Flats and the lead character, Adam Wainwright the Black Bandit, in Roseland.

In 1973, $50,000, an elephant and possibly no small amount of drugs could create something this baffling and wonderous. It also has Turk Murphy, Dixieland jazz trombonist who ran the club Earthquake McGoons in San Francisco and also lent his voice to cartoons on Sesame Street.

There’s also a robotic version of Alabama, vampire bikers, the aforementioned elephant, lots of hippy freakout dancing, German undead scientists obsessed with marijuana and no small amount of musical numbers. I can’t even begin to explain how much I love Hobbs’ films and how much nearly everyone else will probably hate them. Nothing and everything happens all at once.

There’s a battle between Carter’s ghost and Alabama over the nature of magic. A real magician never reveals how they perform their magic and Otto demands that our hero reveal how an elephant can vanish.

This is a movie where the end credits come in at the beginning and a hippy singalong can bring a man back from the brink of death. The copy that I watched was beat up and appeared to be a VHS dub of a print that had run through every drive-in and grindhouse in the country, watched at 9 AM on a peaceful Sunday morning when most of the rest of the normal world was asleep. I can’t think of a better way to watch this movie.

I hope that when you watch this film, you feel the same magic and joy that I felt.

Yes, at one time, Vestron actually released movies into theaters, like this late 80’s occult offering, directed by Cuban-born Camilo Vila and starring his roommate at the time, UK actor English Ben Cross (Chariots of Fire). It’s all about priests in New Orleans being confronted by quite literally a scarlet woman who leads them all to damnation. Oh yeah — it also has a great set up for the ending ruined by a very puppet-like final monster. As much as we love practical effects, we realize when they fail, too.

There used to be a priest named Father Dennis who was killed by that demonic woman. Now, Father Michael (Cross) is taking over for him. On one of his first nights in New Orleans, he’s launched out a window and survives.

Turns out that there’s this S&M club — look it was 1988, alright? — and the owner Luke is pretty much the devil, owning the souls of the women who work there like Millie, who confessed to Father Dennis right before his death.

It all leads up to all manner of demons attacking a church and attempting to kill our hero, who somehow has the power to send them all to Hell. There’s also a blind priest straight out of The Sentinel, Ned Beatty (contracturally obliged to be in any movie set in the American South), the kind off full frontal nudity that upsets your wife, Hal Holbrook as a priest in a movie with plenty of fog that isn’t The Fog and a Virgin Mary statue that weeps tears of blood.

This is the kind of movie that wants so desperately to be art, as director Vila claimed in interviews that it was not a horror film. Guess what? It’s totally a horror film.

It was written by Philip Yordan. Yes, the same Philip Yordan who won an Oscar for writing the movie Broken Lance, a movie that was actually written by the blacklisted Joseph L. Mankiewicz. He also wrote two of the most bonkers films I’ve ever seen, Cry Wilderness and Night Train to Terror. 

Trust me when I say that this movie is no Night Train to Terror.

You can get the Vestron Video collector blu ray at Diabolik DVD.

Shot between 1968 and 1970 in the Santa Ynez, California area, Touch of Satan was a regionally released drive-in and grindhouse film that wasn’t well-known until it appeared on a 1998 episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

There was a rumor that this movie was directed by Tom Laughlin, who made the Billy Jack filmns and used the pseudonym Don Henderson as the producer of The Born Losers and the editor of Like Father, Like Son. The director of this movie really as Don Henderson, who only made two other films: The Babysitter and Weekend with the Babysitter. While not actually connected, the second film is a spiritual sequel to the first. George E. Carey wrote, produced, and starred in both films — but played different characters. Yet they both share the idea of an older man having a fling with the babysitter of his children, named Candy Wilson in both movies, but played by two different actresses, Patricia Wymer and Susan Romen.

This movie begins with a farmer being repeatedly pitchforked by an elderly woman who has a burned up face. She goes scorched earth and sets his barn on fire too, while she’s at it. As she literally falls through the screen door when she gets back home, an older couple and a young woman begin arguing about how to handle things, adding that she’s done things like this in the past. Please note: this family lives on a walnut ranch.

Meanwhile, Jodie Thompson comes to town, as part of his vision quest as he decides whether or not he wants to be a lawyer like his father. He falls for Melissa, the girl we’ve just met with the insane grandmother, who is really her sister because our girl Melissa is a witch.

Cue the Mercyful Fate!
“Melissa, you were mine
Melissa, you were the light
She was a witch
Why did they take you away?”

Believe it or not, this movie takes plenty of dialogue from the H.P. Lovecraft story “The Horror at Red Hook.”

While this was originally going to be called Pitchfork, it has an amazing Italian title: L’Ossessa: i raccapriccianti delitti di Monroe Park, which translates as The Obsession: The Horrific Crimes of Monroe Park. That said — there’s no location named Monroe Park in the film. There is, however, that one amazing bit of dialogue when Melissa says, “This is where the fish lives.”

You can watch this on Amazon Prime with and without commentary from Mystery Science Theater 3000. The riffed version is also on Tubi.

Hungarian born director Tibor Takacs was the recording engineer behind Toronto punk bands The Viletones and the Cardboard Brains before he became a director. He’s probably best known for the 1987 movie The Gate, of course, which leads us to today’s film. He also made the pilot movie for the original Sabrina the Teenage Witch, which makes some sense somehow.

This was written — as was the original — by Michael Nankin. His first film was Midnight Madness, but he’s since moved on to directing, working on TV shows like American Gothic, Life Goes On, CSI, Battlestar Galactica, Caprica, Defiance, Van Helsing and more.

Five years after the events of the first movie, Terrence has had to say goodbye to Glen, who moved away. His own family has gotten much worse, as his father’s drinking has gotten out of control after the death of his mother. That means that the lure of the gate — and its power — is now stronger than ever.

Terrence breaks into Glen’s old house and begins the ritual all over again with the hopes of getting his father’s life together. Meanwhile, three teens — John (James Villemaire, who was in another movie I watched this week, Zombi 5: Killing Birds), Moe and Liz (Pamela Adlon, who in addition to being in Grease 2 was the voice of Bobby Hill on King of the Hill) — break in.

Liz is super down with demonology, so she convinces the others to help Terrance with his ritual. One of the minions from the last film comes through the Gate and John freaks out and shoots it. Luckily — or unluckily — it survives and Terrance keeps it as a pet.

The next day, Terrance’s wish comes true as his father gets a job flying for a major carrier. However, all of the wishes literally turn into, well, excrement. The food that John and Moe devour and the car that Liz wishes for turn into giant cow pies while the plane Terrance’s dad is flying crashes, critically injuring him.

Soon, the two boys are demons after the minion gets loose and turns them. They want to sacrifice Liz to Satan, as you do, but Terrence stops them with his mother’s jewelry box, which he’s transformed into a vessel of light.

Despite dying, Terrance is able to escape his coffin, followed by the human forms of John and Moe. Our hero gets the girl and even his hamster returns from the dead.

The Gate II is in no way as good as the original, but it’s still plenty of fun. It also boasts some great non-CGI effects from Randall William Cook, who started at Disney and also worked with  Takacs on the original film and I, Madman (he’s actually the title character, in addition to doing the effects). Since then, he’s been the Animation Director for all of Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth films, as well as working on Fright Night and numerous Full Moon films.

You can get this from Shout! Factory or watch it on Amazon Prime.

And be sure to join us as we examine Tibor’s career and films with our “Drive-In Friday” featurette.

Somewhat inspired by the “Co-ed Killer” Edmund Kemper — who shows up on Netflix’s Mindhunter and now reads books on tape — Hitchhike to Hell is all about Howard (Robert Gribbon, Trip with the Teacher), a mild-mannered momma’s boy whose delivery job gives him plenty of time to pick up runaways and punish them for their transgressions. Can the cops stop him before he kills again?

Irv Berwick also directed Malibu High and The Monster of Piedras Blancas, so you know he’s coming from a place of pure sleaze. This movie comes from the vaults of the legendary — or infamous — Harry Novak and is one of the last movies that his Boxoffice International Pictures released. You may know them from other films like Axe (AKA Lisa Lisa or California Axe Massacre), The Child, Rattlers, Wham! Bam! Thank You, Spaceman!, The Sinful Dwarf, Dr. Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks, Toys Are Not for Children and so many more fine efforts.

At one point, Captain J.W. Shaw (Russell Johnson, the Professor from Gilligan’s Island and Dr. Steve Carlson from This Island Earth) mentions several real serial killers, like the Zodiac Killer, the Skid Row Slasher and “that nut down in Houston,” which refers to Dean Corll, who abducted, assaulted, tortured, and murdered at least 28 teenage boys and young men between 1970 and 1973 in Houston, Texas.

Why is Howard so nutty? Is it because of his way too close relationship with his mama? Or because his older sister ran away from home as a teenager and was never heard of again? Did his sister really have it coming, like his mother mutters to herself? Your guess is as good as mine, because this movie never reveals the answers. It does, however, have teenage runaways killed with coathangers, so there’s that.

Basically, don’t hitchhike. You kids don’t have to worry about that. You’ve got Uber now.

The Arrow Video blu ray of this movie features a brand new 2K restoration from original film elements, as well as a newly-filmed appreciation by Nightmare USA author Stephen Thrower, a video essay by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas exploring the dark side of hitch-hiking in the real world and on the screen and the original trailers for the movie. You can get it from Arrow here.

DISCLAIMER: We were sent this movie by Arrow Video.

Tony Gilroy has written some pretty interesting films, including The Cutting Edge, Dolores Claiborne, The Devil’s Advocate, Armageddon, the Jason Bourne films, Michael Clayton (which he also directed) and Star Wars: Rogue One.

Duplicity is all about the relationship between M16 agent Ray Koval (Clive Owen) and CIA agent Claire Stenwick (Julia Roberts), whose first meeting ended with her drugging him and stealing classified documents.

Years later, Ray and Claire spend several days together at a posh hotel and discuss leaving their government jobs for work in corporate espionage, specifically cosmetics and personal hygiene. Throughout the movie, the couple remains wary of one another since they’re both experts in deception.

The film moves back and forth through time, often showing the same conversation multiple ways, all to share motivations that weren’t known the first time you heard the same dialogue.

Beyond Roberts and Owen, Tom Wilkinson (Michael Clayton), Paul Giamatti, Christopher Denham (Argo) and Happy Anderson (Bright, Mindhunter) all appear.

If you like twists and turns, as well as inter-company intrigue, this is the movie for you.

You can buy the new blu ray re-release of this movie from Mill Creek Entertainment.

DISCLAIMER: This movie was sent to us by Mill Creek.