Based on The Forbidden Garden by Ursula Curtiss, this movie was produced by Robert Aldrich, America’s finest purveyor of hagsploitation. After all, this is the same man who made What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte. 

This time, your crazy older women are played by Geraldine Page and Ruth Gordon, despite Page only being 43 at the time of filming.

Claire Marrable (Page) is the widow of a prominent businessman who died in debt, giving her only a briefcase and his collections of butterflies and stamps in death. Upon moving to Tucson to be closer to her nephew George, Claire begins her career of serially killing housekeepers.

Soon, she begins a cold war with both her newest housekeeper Alice Dimmock (Gordon) and Harriet Vaughn, a much younger widow. Peter Bonerz, who was Dr. Jerry on the original Bob Newhart Show is in this, too.

Lee H. Katzin — who directed the first episodes of Man from Atlantis and Automan — replaced Bernard Girard (Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round) as the director of this movie after only one month of filming.

At one point, Aldrich announced that he would make a third What Ever Happened to… film. What Ever Happened to Dear Elva?, based on the novel Goodbye, Dear Elva by Elizabeth Fenwick, was planned but never made.

About the Author: Paul Andolina is back on our site. You can check out his blogs Wrestling with Film and Is the Dad Alive? for more.

Guns Akimbo is about Miles Harris (Daniel Radcliffe), a loser coder who spends his off time trolling comment sections and being an asshole. He learns his lesson when he sets his sights on Skizm, an online video stream that showcases deathmatches in real-time. The people behind the channel break into his house, beat the shit out of him and bolt guns to his hands and tell him to kill Nix (Samara Weaving), a female Skizm competitor with the longest killstreak in the history of the program. 

This movie doesn’t give you much time to get your bearings, much like it’s lead character, before it plunges you into total insanity. This movie is pretty much non stop violence for almost an entire hour and a half. You’re going to have fun if you seek this out because you watch these types of films for that very reason, it’s pure pornography, the gunfights and murderous killing sprees culminating in the ultimate money shot; death twitches, and superbly photographed bloodshed. I live for these types of movies that are frenetic blurs of bullets and bodies, peppered with crazy plots, foul language, and music video quality stylishness.

I’d like to imagine the creator of this film outta his fucking skull on crank, viciously gritting his teeth, and sweating profusely in front of a typewriter while writing this script. This is the work of a madman. Jason Lei Howden created a publicity nightmare by attacking minorities and women on twitter and it’s a damn shame he couldn’t keep his hateful rhetoric to himself. If he had I think this would have massive levels of hype, this could have been the next great action franchise, or at least led to a sequel. I can’t imagine that happens now but let’s face it Hollywood is synonymous with scum rising to the top.

Daniel Radcliffe and Samara Weaving breathe life into their roles that have no parallels in the acting world. I can’t imagine any one else playing Miles and Nix. It’s oddly satisfying and terrifying to see the man who was made famous by Harry Potter films, running around in his boxers and fuzzy oversized paw slippers, waving around pistols to flag down cops for help. Miles goes from a lackadaisical nondescript male, into an internet sensation, within the runtime of the movie, and it’s invigorating to watch. Equally impressive is Samara as Nix, a cocaine addled killer with a mysterious past and serious fear of fire and explosions. Seeing her wield a number of different weapons in the film is a treat, and she is a total brilliant mess of a character.

If you enjoy mayhem in your movies, you will not be disappointed by this film. It’s crass, it’s loud (it has a crazy soundtrack), it’s lit like a red-light district on the night of the purge and it will make you want to load up a first-person shooter video game and go on a rampage. You’ll want to do this because you can’t legally have an actual deathmatch in your city. This film is a pure adrenaline rush and there wasn’t a second that I thought was dull. There are few lulls in the film though, serving to further the plot and they pass by just as fast as Nix killing her opponents and anyone else dumb enough to stand her in way, and they are as nutty as the rest of the movie. Guns Akimbo is a hard-hitting no bullshit actioner and I am totally here for this level of crazy. You can see this in select theaters currently or rent it through video on demand services which is what I had to do because no theater around me from here to Cleveland seems to be playing this film which is a total shame, this begs to be seen on a large screen with Dolby sound pounding throughout the room.

A covert desert base manned by an elite group of commandos and weaponized dinosaurs are all that stand between us and World War III. You have no idea how much I loved every single second of this ridiculous movie. If I was 7, I would be driving my family insane talking about it incessantly. As it is, I’m 47 and plan on doing the same.

This movie comes from Milko Davis and Thomas Martwick, who were also behind the films The Jurassic Dead and Tsunambee. Davis made his debut with Raiders of the Damned.

Between an opening joke that refers to their audio as ZHX — Zombie instead of the T in THX — and a comic book opening that makes fun of probably everyone that’s watching this movie, this is a down and dirty blast of fun. Go Team Milko!

Jurassic Thunder is available on demand and on DVD March 10, 2020 from High Octane Pictures. Since its VOD debut on Amazon, you can now watch it as a free-with-ads stream on Tubi.

DISCLAIMER: We were sent this movie by its PR team, which has no bearing on our review.

Update: Do you want to be a part of a Milko flick? In November 2021, Team Milko launched a Kickstarter campaign for the production and release of his next film, Phantom Patrol.

Jim McCullough Sr. produced Where the Red Fern Grows and Creature from Black Lake before he started directing his own movies like Charge of the Model T’s, The Aurora Encounter and Video Massacre. He also acted in The Love Bug and Teenage Monster years before all of that.

Initially a regional movie that plated Louisiana and Mississippi under the titles Mountaintop Motel and Horrors at Mountaintop Motel, it was picked up by New World three years later and retitled before playing in New York City and coming out on home video.

Evelyn has been recently released from a psychiatric institution and loses her mind all over again when she catches her daughter Lorie doing a witchcraft ritual. So she does what any of us would do and kills her daughter. She gets away with it. And then she runs a motel called, you guessed it, the Mountaintop Motel.

That’s when the victims show up, like wanna-be record producer Al, two girls he’s trying to do the horizontal lambada with, some newlyweds and a preacher named Reverend Bill McWiley (Bill Thurman, ‘Gator Bait). Much like Shakespeare, just about everyone dies.

The folks at Vinegar Syndrome have sought fit to rescue this movie from the moldy fate of hiding around on the shelves of the few remaining mom and pop video stores in the country by doing a 2K scan from the original 35mm film and putting this out on blu ray. They really are doing the Lord’s work.

You can also watch it on Amazon Prime and Tubi.

Richard Stanley, welcome back. Ever since the debacle which was The Island of Dr. Moreau — and brief visitations which gave us the Stanley-written Replace and the documentary The Otherworld — this genius was mostly silent. Just watch Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau to find out why.

That time is over. Now, the first of three proposed H.P Lovecraft films by Stanley has arrived and it’s everything I ever wanted it to be.

Nathan Gardner’s (Nicolas Cage, Mandy; of course, nature made for a movie with Stanley) life is in transition. His wife Theresa (Joely Richardson, sister of Natasha, daughter of Vanessa Redgrave and stepdaughter of Franco Nero; she’s astounding in this) feels mutilated after her recent mastectomy and is losing clients because their internet is so fragile out in the country. His daughter Lavinia (Madeleine Arthur, Big Eyes) has turned to Wicca to heal her mother and escape her life. His son Jack is withdrawn and only takes to the dog. Another son, Benny, years to escape with the drugs he smokes with a hermit named Ezra (Tommy Chong). And he keeps failing as he attempts to raise alpacas and tomatoes.

That’s when a meteor crashes and changes everything for the worse.

Ward, a scientist, tries to warn them not to drink the water that the meteor has contaminated. But it’s too late. Too late for the alpacas, which have become hairless monsters. Too late for the wife and young son, who are fused into one being. Too late for his other son. Too late for Nathan, who is driven insane by the color itself. Too late for even the young hero, Ward, to save the girl who has scarred symbols all over herself as she collapses into ash in his hands, but not before sharing a vision of the world that this color has come from, a place that destroys minds.

This was obviously a personal film for the director. His mother as a huge Lovecraft fan and read the story to Stanley when he was 12 or 13. He claims that the story has “always been a part of [his] psychological makeup.” As his mother died from cancer, he would often read the author’s stories to her. And if rumors are to be believed, Stanley and Swedish filmmaker Henrik Möller performed a ritual to the Lovecraftian god Yog-Sothoth to get the film made.

Every frame of this film shows that Stanley is a master. In a world of people creating content for the machine, he remains a unique artist. Whenever I am worried about our place in this universe, I remember that it still creates artists like him — and Cage — unafraid to howl in the dark, unworried and uncaring what others may think.

UPDATE: “Nic Cage Bitch” is our Nicolas Cage blowout written by Paul Andolina of Wrestling with Film. It’s a must read for all fans of the Cage, so check it out and learn about some Cage films you may have missed, such as A Score to Settle, Between Worlds, Kill Chain, Outcast, Rage, and Seeking Justice.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jim LaMotta is one of Pittsburgh’s premiere wrestling announcers, as well as a great writer. This article originally appeared on Steel City Underground. You can follow Jim on Twitter.

After I penned an article about the Robert De Niro directed, “A Bronx Tale” and received some positive feedback from it, I thought I’d take the opportunity to write about the horror genre, the film category that has a lot of coverage on this site. The decision for this was partially a coincidence, as for whatever reason, the Showtime channels on Comcast have shown this franchise on a semi-regular basis for the past few months, and I found myself finding different layers within the film, as random viewings accompanied recent insomnia.

However, the decision to actually write this analysis was made because the film was based upon a spoof of the cliches that littered horror films of that era. Directed by Wes Craven, Scream’s 1996 release mocked and outright defied the rules of the previous generations. While Wes Craven will always be famously linked to the Nightmare on Elm Street series, his work spanned decades, as he wrote and/or directed projects as far back as the 1970s with the original Last House on The Left and The Hill Have Eyes or something as recent as the latest installment of the Scream franchise. Point being, Craven knew the horror playbook and also knew how to manipulate the perceived cliches of the genre.

Wes Craven had his status solidified before Scream was ever green-lit for production by Dimension Films, but writer Kevin Williamson, who later went on to write for the WB’s Dawson’s Creek and more recently a TV Scream spinoff, got his break with the teen slasher production. Williamson was able to weave an unpredictable tale of suspense that hadn’t been seen in quite some time for horror films when Scream hit the big screen, and Craven’s flare to build tense moments made for a successful combination.

Despite Scream’s intention to spoof the stale cliches of horror flicks, the opening scene was key because it told the audience immediately that regardless of its ability to mock the overused tactics of previous eras, this was definitely not a comedy. As is often seen in teen slashers, the typical beginning of the film found Casey Becker, played by Drew Barrymore, watching TV as she made popcorn on a Saturday night while her parents had plans for the evening. The phone rings, a foreshadow of sorts for what becomes a red flag later and when Becker answers, an almost distorted voice seemingly tries to charm her with a series of questions, including the famous, “what’s your favorite scary movie” inquiry that becomes a theme of the film. As the unknown caller continues to prod away at the teen, who forgets the popcorn on the stove, the conversation escalates to become more aggressive. Eventually, the teen is shocked to see her boyfriend duct taped to a chair on the patio as the mysterious voice insist she play a game to save his life. When she incorrectly guesses Jason as the original killer in the Friday films instead of Mrs. Vorhees, the athlete bound on the patio is gutted. In typical horror fashion, a struggle ensues as the Ghost Face killer stalks Barrymore’s character. After Becker makes it outside, the place where the audience usually tells intended victims to run to escape, she’s stabbed and strangled before a well-placed kick gives her a final chance of survival. As Becker’s parents return home, she’s within distance of them, but can’t scream for help because of the damage to her neck. The emphasis on the brutality of her death reinforces that this movie isn’t designed to be a comedy. As the flames from the stove rise and smoke surrounds the living room, the Beckers frantically try to find their daughter in the house. When Mrs. Becker picks up the phone to call for help, she can hear the final moments of her daughter, who still clutched the cordless phone prior to her murder.

That opening scene implied that the known star, Barrymore was one of the main characters of the movie, but the death of a familiar face in the opening scene sent the message that none of the cast was guaranteed survival.

In contrast, the next scene finds Sydney Prescott, played by Canadian actress Neve Campbell, who worked on the Party of Five series both before and after Scream’s success, pecking away at the keyboard in front of a very-90s clunky computer screen as she finishes her homework. How Sydney is presented in this scene really sets the tone for her character and how it evolves throughout the narrative. She’s dressed in a white nightgown with a ponytail that almost emphasizes her innocence and naive nature. She hears a noise outside her window and background music makes it appear that she might be the next victim, but instead, her boyfriend, Billy Loomis springs up into the window to visit her. Syd’s father, who planned to take a business trip that week, nearly catches this impromptu meeting before Sydney deflects him. Loomis is a rebellious type because his mom left the family quite some time ago, and his edgy nature somewhat conflicts with Sydney’s concern for his visit. Loomis is an obsessed horror fan and mentions the lack of excitement of movies edited for television before he implies that he wants to get physical with Sydney. Loomis’ comparisons create a rather odd vibe around his character, but Syd trusts him and agrees to a kiss with a sense of enthusiasm. As the teens land on her bed surrounded with stuffed animals, another aspect of her innocence, Loomis quickly progresses from kissing to an attempt to put his hand up her nightgown before she halts the interaction. As the two kiss again, Billy plans to scale back down from the window before Syd quickly opens her top for brief flash and a short laugh, as it was her way to express intimacy.

The following day when Sydney makes her way to school, the fictional town of Woodsboro is buzzing with the news of the two slain teens. News cameras and reporters surround the school as Syd and her friends discuss the gory incident. This conversation introduces the viewers to a portion of the main cast, which automatically translates to possible victims for the killer. Loomis is there with Syd, his best friend and fellow horror enthusiast, Stu sat next to Tatum, Syd’s best friend, and finally, Randy, the film buff that works at the local video store. Remember those? Upon Stu and Randy’s speculation on the grisly details, Sydney leaves after she became uncomfortable with the situation, and Loomis looks at his pal in disgust.

When Sydney makes her way home and confirms her plans with Tatum that night, which will see her spend the night at her friend’s house so as not to be alone during her dad’s business trip, she tunes into news coverage of the murders. This scene reveals that her mom, Maureen Prescott was murdered nearly a year earlier after an affair with Cotton Weary, played by Liev Schreiber, who is known for his work in the lead role of Ray Donovan. Sydney saw someone leave her house the night of the murder and her testimony led to Weary’s conviction in what was assumed to be a closed case. When the phone rings, Syd is greeted by the same voice that called Casey Becker and the conversation lures her onto the porch, again the place the audience typical tells a possible victim to run to safety. The voice on the phone claims to know details about her mom’s death, and the infuriated teen slams the front door in a rage as she returns to the house, locking the door behind her. The irony of what transpires next is that while she was outside, she actually allowed the killer to sneak in and her only option when confronted with the knife-wielding manic is to run upstairs to her bedroom, where she successful barricades the door and send a message for help using the previously mentioned clunky computer. The killer disappears from view and almost instantly, Billy Loomis jumps into view through her window again. There wasn’t enough time for him to ditch the costume and get up to the window, right? But, a cell phone, also a bulky device at the time, drops from his pocket, making it at least possible that he was the one on the phone a few minutes earlier.

Sydney is so shaken that she doesn’t know what to believe so she bolts to the front door and when she opens it she finds local officer, Dewey Riley startled with the evidence of the Ghost Face mask he found outside. Loomis is detained and questioned, proclaiming his innocence, as Dewey tells Syd that there’s no record of her dad checking into his hotel for the business trip. Before she and Tatum can leave the police station, “cut-throat” tabloid reporter, Gale Weathers storms Sydney for an exclusive quote. Weathers received a right hook for her troubles after an offer to send the teen a copy of her upcoming book, which doubted if Cotton Weary actually committed the murder of Maureen Prescott. Dewey is Tatum’s brother and escorts them home, where she commends Syd for her right hook. A call for Sydney takes her to the phone where the ominous voice informs her that not only was Loomis not responsible for the earlier struggle, but also that Weary was the wrong suspect. With Loomis still detained at the police station, he couldn’t have made the call so who was the voice on the phone?

Sydney was terrified with the revelation and hangs up, prompting the lovable dork, Dewey to storm into the hallway in his underwear with his gun to protect the family. After Loomis’ cell phone revealed that he didn’t make the call to Sydney, news of the attack made the rounds at her school and some students were running around the halls with the Ghost Face costume. This outraged principal Henry Winkler, who threatened to expel the students, cutting up the mask in the process of his verbal reprimand. Sadly, the same scissors were used to murder the principal when The Fonze had an encounter with the Ghost Face killer later that day.

As Courtney Cox’s Gale Weathers tries to flirt with Officer Dewey for possible information on the murders, Randy is visited at the video store by Stu and the two discuss the status of the case. Randy rants about the rules of horror and how those in Woodsboro are ignoring the patterns that have emerged in the case. Stu defends Loomis, asking why he would want to murder his own girlfriend, and suggests that Neil Prescott could be responsible since his location is unknown. Randy is confronted by Billy and the cleared suspect lists the reasons that the film buff might be the killer, creating his own scenarios based on the movies that he’s a fan of at the video store. In yet another example of foreshadowing, this scene was referenced toward the conclusion of the movie.

The unsolved murders cause the police to enforce a curfew and with the students’ earlier exit from school, Stu plans a party for his friends. The house party brings a few dozen friends together to watch Halloween, and Gale stakes outside in her news van, hoping to get a tip so that she can be the first to report the story. With Tatum there with Stu, Sydney attempts to enjoy some time with her friends and Dewey parked outside the party to guard her. During the viewing of the John Carpenter classic, Randy (Jamie Kennedy) rants again about the rules of horror, including that sex can make someone a target as it eliminates a character’s purity. In the middle of his public service announcement, the phone rings and Randy receives the news that principal Fonze was hanging from a goal post at the school stadium. Most of the party rushes from the house to witness the gory spectacle, leaving only the main group of friends still there. In the commotion of the group exit, Tatum is murdered by the killer in the garage, hanging from the dog door in the garage door. Unaware of this, Randy continues to watch the film as Stu tells his guests goodbye at the door. Almost on cue, Billy shows up at the door and asked to talked to Syd since the two haven’t spoken more than a brief conversation at school since her accusation landed him in the interrogation office at the police station. The two go upstairs to talk and Syd feels bad about wrongly accusing her boyfriend of the previous attack.

Up in the room, Loomis comforts Sydney as she expresses her frustration with the circumstances of her mom’s death. Eventually, Syd tells Billy she wants to be intimate with him and as the two undress, Sydney is wearing a white bra, a final sign of her innocence. After she sheds the bra, perhaps her only shield against becoming a target, Dewey and Gale find Neil Prescott’s car abandon down the street from the house. After Syd’s intimate encounter with Loomis, it’s almost as if her naive nature was relinquished, as she questioned who he called when he was at the police station, prompting him to claim that he called his dad, but Sydney explains that she saw the sheriff call his dad. Billy backpedals to explain that he didn’t get an answer when he called, but for the first time throughout the film, Loomis looks thrown off by the unexpected line of questioning. As the two finish getting dressed, the Ghost Face killer emerges and stabs Billy, who collapses in a heap on the floor.

Without the wall of virginity to protect her, Sydney is fair game for the killer and a chase ensues through the house and down the street. When she escapes a close call with the blade, she finds herself back in front of the house, with both Randy and Stu claiming that the other is the murderer. She slams the front door, leaving both of her friends outside as they both plead for her help. In the chaos, Dewey is injured, and Gale crashes her news van. Billy, who was thought to be dead just minutes earlier, stumbles down the stairs and takes the gun from Sydney to protect her from the possible killer outside. Loomis lets Randy in before he shoots him, sending the movie aficionado crashing through a table in the entryway. Loomis then reveals that his injuries from the earlier attack are phony and quotes a famous line, “We all go a little mad sometimes” from the Hitchcock classic, Psycho.

Stu went through the side entrance of the kitchen and as Sydney asks for help, Stu uses the voice altering device to tell her about the surprise. In the final scenes, Loomis explains that his mom left his family because Maureen Prescott had an affair with his father. As a part of a plan for revenge, Billy and Stu murdered her and framed Cotton Weary, who she also had an affair with after Mrs. Loomis left the family.

These scenes reveal just how cleaver Williamson’s writing had to be to plant enough seeds along the way for the revelation of the killers to be a surprise and this conclusion also logically ties together the events of the movie. There had to be two killers because it allowed for the Ghost Face to be in the same place as Billy, and created questions about what a motive would be for each character. In that early scene when Syd thought she heard a noise and it was Billy at the window, she was unknowingly letting danger in the house. When Stu suggested Sydney’s father as the killer at the video store, it was because that was his plan, as the pair of psychotic teens plotted to frame Neil Prescott the same way they framed Cotton Weary. While Billy was motivated by revenge, Stu simply wanted to play out the scenarios in the films he idolized, further stirring up the question, do films cause violence?

Stu brings Neil Prescott in the kitchen where he’s duct tapped and plans evidence in his pocket. Billy and Stu begin stabbing each other to stage their story of unintended survival, but they become too focused on their demented plan to realize that Gale survived the news van crash and was back to attempt to help. After her rescue was halted, another struggle takes place with Loomis trying to strangle Syd, who eliminated Stu just minutes earlier when she dropped a TV on him. With Billy as the only one left to finish his plan, he raises the knife to kill Sydney, but he’s intercepted by a bullet from Gale Weathers, as the reporter remembered to take the safety off this time. Ironically, the reporter was the one to save Sydney, who tends to her father still duct tapped and the wounded Randy on the floor. As the sun rises, Gale is back to her job, on location of another blood bath, while Dewey is wheeled to an ambulance. Sydney and the majority of the main cast survived despite a film that manipulated the perceived rules of horror.

As much as Scream mocked the stale cliches that saw the decline of the genre in the previous era, it also rejuvenated slash films as well, earning $173 million at the box office to become the most successful slasher movie at the time with just a $14 million budget. Ironically, similar to the franchises it mocked, Scream had its share of sequels, with the latest installment of Scream 4 in 2011. There’s news of an eventual Scream 5 release, and the argument could be made that the Ghost Face killer carved its own niche alongside other horror icons like Jason, Michael Meyers, etc. While ironic, it probably shouldn’t be all that surprising that Scream, the movie that was meant to point out the recycled storylines of horror, became somewhat of the things it mocked, as the franchise still plans to release a film nearly 25 years after the original. One of the most interesting things to note is that horror sequels are often panned by the critics for flimsy and unoriginal plots, but the audience still flocks to the box office. The 2018 release of Halloween didn’t offer much in furthering the story of the deranged Michael Meyers, but it raked in nearly nearly $255 million dollars. So, the horror genre might find itself lacking the depth of a Humphrey Bogart performance, but from a business perspective, it’s still successful.

Abbey Bell is a distraught mother (Melinda Page Hamilton) who lives in fear of her teenage son Jacob (Bailey Edwards). And while he doesn’t fit the profile of a serial killer, she remains convinced that her son is a serial killer in the making. However, she may be insane. Only a series of spy cameras and plenty of found footage can tell us the truth.

Abbey believes that Jacob is planning a school shooting. What’s her evidence, other than the fact that her son plays way too many video games and has a pet named Adolph? Well, eventually, she gets some evidence thanks to those omnipresent video cameras.

What’s better? A mother’s love or a mother’s innate knowledge that her son may be a killer? However, Jacob has a deep and buried family secret that he’s ready to use against his mother, who may not survive this experience.

How did they get Ed Asner to show up in this? Well, there he is, playing Dr. Howard Arden, who is trying to help get to the bottom of this.

M.O.M. Mother of Monsters has its world premiere on Friday the 13th at the Arena Cinelounge in Los Angeles with its digital rollout to soon follow.

DISCLAIMER: We were sent this movie by its PR team.

UPDATE: This is now available as a free-with-ads stream on TubiTV through Indie Rights Movies.

Will to Die? Blood Legacy? Legacy of Blood?

Whatever you call it, this 1971 film has a plot as old as movies themselves — a patriarch gathers his family to hear his will. Carl Monson, who wrote The Acid Eaters and also directed Please Don’t Eat My Mother was behind this.

This is the last movie for Rodolfo Acosta, who either played Mexicans or Native Americans in Westerns usually. John Carradine is also in this — of course, this movie was made for him — and Richard Davalos (Blind Dick from Cool Hand Luke and the cover image for The Smiths albums “Strangeways, Here We Come” and two of their greatest hits collections), Faith Domergue (Perversion Story), former pro wrestler Buck Kartalian, Jeff Morrow (The Creature Walks Among Us) and John Russell, who replaced James Doogan on the second season of Jason of Star Command.

Yes, the outside of the house is also the same mansion that was used for Wayne Manor. You haven’t gone completely bats yet.

You can watch this on Tubi with riffs from either Elvira or Cinematic Titanic.

Made for $38,000, this film beat The Horror of Party Beach as the first monster musical by just a few months. It was the brainchild of the man known as Sven Christian, Sven Hellstrom, Harry Nixon, Wolfgang Schmidt, Cindy Lou Steckler, R.D. Steckler, Michael J. Rogers, Michel J. Rogers, Ray Steckler, Cindy Lou Sutters and, of course, Ray Dennis Steckler.

Before he became a B movie director, supposedly Steckler worked at Universal, where he bumped into an A-frame and dropped it onto Alfred Hitchcock. This ignominious exit would soon lead him to a world where he’d make baffling films like The Thrill Killers, Rat Pfink a Boo Boo and The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher. His adult film titles read like the kind of movies that exist only in my dreams, such as Sexual Satanic Awareness and Sexorcist Devil.

Jerry (Cash Flagg, another name for Steckler, auteuring it up by starring in his own movie), Angela and Harold decide to head out to the carnival, where they watch Marge (Carolyn Brandt, Steckler’s wife; their station wagon is also in the film) dance.

Marge is spooked by a black cat, which leads her to consult with Estrella, a fortune-teller who is throwing acid in peoples’ faces and making them zombies under her control. She predicts death for Marge, as well as a death near water for someone Angela knows.

Jerry falls in with the carnies because Estrella’s sister Carmelita stares him down and does her bad girl dancing to hypnotize him into acts of murder. You know how it goes. Of course, the zombies soon break loose, nearly everyone dies and Jerry is shot on the beach in front of his one true love, making that earlier prediction come true.

Also — dance numbers!

Steckler was a real showman, taking this movie on the road and constantly retitling it with outlandish names like The Incredibly Mixed-Up Zombie, Diabolical Dr. Voodoo and The Teenage Psycho Meets Bloody Mary. The posters proclaimed that the movie was made in Hallucinogenic Hypnovision, which really meant that at some point, maniacs in rubber masks would run around the theater. If you guessed that Steckler was one of those maniacs, you’d be right.

It was shot at The Film Center Studios, a former Masonic lodge owned by Rock Hudson — yes, I realize that this sounds like the start of a conspiracy story.

Perhaps most strangely — incredible strangely? — the cinematography and camera operating crew included three men who would go on to become major figures in the field.

Joseph V. Mascelli, who also worked on The Thrill Killers and Wild Guitar, wrote The Five Cs of Cinematography. Laszlo Kovacs would work on movies as disparate as A Smell of Honey, a Swallow of Brine and Easy Rider; he was considered a guiding light in the American New Wave. And then there’s Vilmos Zsigmond, whose work on Close Encounters of the Third Kind would win an Oscar (he also worked on The Deer Hunter and Heaven’s Gate).

In his 1987 book Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, Lester Bangs wrote an essay called “The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, or, The Day The Airwaves Erupted.” Within, he’d state, “…this flick doesn’t just rebel against, or even disregard, standards of taste and art. In the universe inhabited by The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, such things as standards and responsibility have never been heard of. It is this lunar purity which largely imparts to the film its classic stature. Like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and a very few others, it will remain as an artifact in years to come to which scholars and searchers for truth can turn and say, “This was trash!”

Even more astounding, Columbia Pictures threatened to sue over this movie’s original title, The Incredibly Strange Creature: Or Why I Stopped Living and Became a Mixed-up Zombie. Supposedly the title was too close to the Kubrick film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Steckler called the studio and demanded to speak to Kubrick, a crazy move, and of course, Kubrick answered and agreed to the new title and the lawsuit was dropped. This whole story feels so insane that it has to be true.