You have to admire a movie that was originally filmed five years earlier under the titles Armageddon 1975 and Doomsday Plus Seven before the money stopped rolling in. The rights got sold, a new ending was filmed with totally different actors and plenty of padding got thrown in to make this — along with NASA stock footage and special effects taken from other movies.

Hell, the Astra, the main ship in this, changes its look every few minutes.

Original director Herbert J. Leder also made Fiend Without a Face. The fixed up footage came from Lee Sholem, who directed more than 1,300 episodes of television, as well as the movie Superman and the Mole Men.

Ruta Lee, who was one of the Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, stars in this. She’s joined by Mala Powers (who ran the estate of acting teacher Michael Chekov after his death), Grant Williams (The Incredible Shrinking Man), Henry Wilcoxon (the bishop in Caddyshack), former Tarzan Denny Miller, M*A*S*H* star Mike Farrell and Bobby Van, who hosted eight-year-old Sam’s favorite game show, Make Me Laugh.

You think the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey didn’t make sense? At least it didn’t abruptly end after wiping out most of the cast off-screen and Venusians try to explain the entire movie away via a voice-over.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime or on Tubi, which has a Cinematic Titanic riffed version and another hosted by Elvira. It’s also available on the Internet Archive or you can just watch the YouTube link attached here.

After Superman, the Italian film industry did what it always does best: figure out how to make their own versions of a film. However, the danger of making superhero movies is that. the special effects — particularly after Star Wars and Superman, which was sold on the idea of believing that a man can fly — had to be perfect.

Alberto De Martino knew that Italian trend quite well. When sword and sandal movies were big, he directed The Triumph of Hercules. He made Ringo and Django clones in the spaghetti western craze. And when James Bond got hot, he made several Special Agent 077 movies. Giallo? De Martino turned out the New Mexico-shot The Man with the Icy Eyes, the Telly Savalas-starring The Killer Is On the Phone and the Dirty Harry meets Italian psychosexual horror in Canada romp Strange Shadows In an Empty Room. As The Exorcist and The Omen got hot, the director answered with The Antichrist and Holocaust 2000.

But superheroes? Superheroes nearly broke the man.

In Roberto Curti’s book Diabolika: Supercriminals, Superheroes and the Comic Book Universe in Italian Cinema, De Martino was quite candid about the failure of this movie. The Pumaman “was a production based on the trend of the moment. I had always done it that way and always done well. But regarding this genre of film, there was the audience’s diffidence toward Italian movies featuring special effects. They knew we were not up to the task, and didn’t take us seriously.”

He’d go on to say that it was “the only pic I did wrong in my whole career. When I saw it was a flop, I started asking myself questions. I had made a film I shouldn’t have. However it did well abroad and managed to get the guaranteed minimum back, otherwise I’d have had to sell my house. It did not even gross half a billion lire in Italy.”

Pumaman was played by Walter George Alton, his only film role before he became a medical malpractice attorney in New York City. He’s the ancestor of ancient aliens that gave birth to the Aztecs and entrusted a guardian armed with a golden mask. Ah — superheroes, Erich Von Daniken and Italian cinema? Bellisimo!

The mask is discovered by archaeologist — and the daughter of a Dutch ambassador — named Jane Dobson (Sydne Rome, who grew up near Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio before heading out to Italy to make movies like Man Called Amen and Sergio Martino’s Sex With a Smile). She learns that it can control minds, which pleases her boss Dr. Kobras (Donald Pleasence!) who takes over her brains instantly and then decides to start a Herrod-like campaign to kill Pumaman before the reincarnated hero becomes a threat.

Pumaman ends up being American paleontologist Tony Farms, who learns of his powers after the Native American named Vadinho throws him out a window and he survives the experience. How many people did Vandinho toss before he met the real Pumaman?

Of course, Tony and Jane are destined to fall in love and make the Pumababy, as foretold when the aliens visit Stonehenge and take the golden mask back. Of course.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime and Tubi with riffing from Mystery Science Theater 3000. You’re going to need it, because the man who never said no to a role, Donald Pleasence, stated that this was the worst movie he did in his entire career. Just imagine the depths of that statement.

When I was a kid, WKBN-TV 27 in Youngstown aired a daily movie. I remember that quite often, the aspect ratio — I had no idea what that meant when I was young — made the cowboys seem way too tall at the beginning of their movies. And I vividly remember this movie all about St. George and the dragon, even if I couldn’t recall the title for decades.

Well, it’s The Magic Sword. Or perhaps I saw it under one its many other titles, such as St. George and the Dragon, St. George and the Seven Curses or The Seven Curses of Lodac.

Gary Lockwood — first husband of Stephanie Powers and Frank Poole in 2001: A Space Odyssey (and star of the Mad Max rip, Survival Zone) — plays George, raised by an adoptive sorceress mother (Estelle Winwood, who lived nearly a century and had a career that went from the British stage to American television) and destined to battle not only the two-headed dragon, but the seven curses of the evil Lodac (Basil Rathbone).

He’s also in love with Princess Helene (Anne Helm, Nightmare In Wax) and has six magical knights with which to prove his heroism, which is tested in battles against an ogre, an old hag and a sorceress. The latter two are played by Maila Nurmi, who is much better known Vampira. There’s also the shady side of heroism, exemplified by Sir Branton, who keeps killing off his brother knights left and right.

You can download this movie from The Internet Archive. It’s also available on Amazon Prime. There’s also a Mystery Science Theater 3000 version on Amazon Prime and Tubi, as well as a Rifftrax commentary option on Tubi.

This is a rare movie, in that Tom Servo and Joel had to admit that it was pretty good — for a Bert I. Gordon film.

In 1966, thanks to the TV show, Bat-Mania was sweeping the country. So Jerry Warren decided to make his own movie, ignorant of things like copyright law and good taste. Soon enough, he’d be sued for copyright infringement and this movie got an even better title: She Was a Hippy Vampire. The funny thing is, Warren won the case and still re-released this movie with a different name.

Jerry reached out to one of his favorite leading ladies for the film, Katherine Victor.

She turned him down.

Yes, even the star of Mesa of Lost Women, Teenage Zombies, Creature of the Walking Dead, House of the Black Death, Frankenstein Island and The Cape Canaveral Monsters knew a turd when she saw one.

In Fred Olen Ray’s book The New Poverty Row: Independent Filmmakers as Distributors, Victor said that Warren promised her “large production values, color photography and her own Bat Boat.”

Of course, none of that came true.

She still played Bat Woman in this, even if she had to make her own costume.

Our heroine has several young and lithe Batgirls helping her battle the forces of Rat Fink over an atomic hearing aid. The weapon of Rat Fink’s choice? Bowls of soup with drugs in them.

That’s it. That’s the movie.

For the monsters, Warren just ripped off footage from The Mole People and the 1959 Swedish film No Time to Kill. No, really.

Bruno Ve Sota, who directed Female Jungle, The Brain Eaters and Invasion of the Star Creatures — he also shows up in around fifteen Roger Corman movies like Attack of the Giant Leeches — is in here. Plus, Bob Arbogast — who wrote the shortest-lived TV show ever, Turn-On, has a cameo.

You can watch the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version of this on Tubi. Trust me, you’re going to need the help.

Originally called Silent Place, this thriller is all about a family heading off to grandma’s house, only to soon discover that the entire town has been killed by an amphibious monster. Well, before you can say, “Hey wait, weren’t they nice in The Shape of Water?” the family is under attack, too.

Scott Jeffrey, who wrote and directed this movie, directed the recent Cupid that we reviewed, as well as acting as the producer of films like Witches of Amityville Academy (I’m never going to be free of these Amityville movies), Pet Graveyard and House On Elm Lake.

They keep making these movies. And by some whim of fate, I keep watching them. Do you like low budget horror where monsters wipe out families? Good news! The monster is not Gwen Stefani or Tony Kanal, despite the title.

Don’t Speak is available on demand and on DVD March 10 from Uncork’d Entertainment.

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

About the Author: Paul Andolina is back to write about a recent theme he’s been watching: puppet films. You can check out his sites Wrestling with Film and Is the Dad Alive?

Is there anything more associated with children and innocence than puppets? Sesame Street, The Muppets, and Fraggle Rock captured the imaginations of children but puppetry also has a flip side. Puppetry with adult themes has been a slowly widening medium over the past twenty years from Crank Yankers, Wonder Showzen, Avenue Q to the most recent, the film The Happy Time Murders which seems to take some heavy cues from 2014’s The Fuzz.

The Fuzz is a crime TV show about puppets and humans that ran for 5 episodes. It was a 2011 film that was turned into a miniseries for Yahoo! Screen in 2014 (it’s also available on Amazon Prime and Vimeo). It was created by Christopher Ford who later went on to write the screenplay for Spider-Man Homecoming. Herbie a puppet cop who along with his newly assigned human partner Sanchez takes on the jelly bean trafficking Rainbow Brown.

Movie watching should never feel like a chore but lately I’ve been having a rough go at actually being able to pay any semblance of attention to anything I have chosen to view. The trailer looked cool enough and once I hit play The Fuzz grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and beckoned, “Behold the puppety goodness we have laid before thee!” 

Herbie is a goody two shoes puppet who won’t even swear, his favorite interjection being, “scrambled eggs”, Sanchez is a down on his luck ex beat cop with an alcohol problem. After a drug deal goes wrong resulting in the death of an innocent puppet janitor, Herbie is thrust onto the new Puppet Crime Task Force along with Sanchez. He is super proud of this and aims to stop crime but the chief views it as nothing but a PR stunt and tells them to keep their noses clean.

Rainbow Brown is a jelly bean dealer who gets mixed up with Jake, a scummy mobster and Jake’s uncle, Sonny. Rainbow really knows how to get the jelly bean trade going and is taken in by Sonny. Rainbow gets hooked on jelly beans after a meeting with the Banana Brothers. Finding much success in the jelly bean game, he finally finds the courage to move in on Sonny’s girl, Roxy. This angers Sonny and Rainbow murders him and starts a war with the human “skinsects” and Jake.

Herbie goes undercover as Flerbie sporting a mustache that hides a wire when he and Sanchez are taken off the case due to an unauthorized stake out of Sonny’s mansion. He ingratiates himself into Rainbow’s gang and gets a little too deep when he starts abusing jelly beans. Herbie, Rainbow, and Jake are on a collision course of epic proportions that concludes with the end of the film.

The Fuzz toes the line extremely well between comedy and crime. I didn’t think that a crime procedural about humans, puppets, and drugs would be super entertaining but this proved my worries were baseless.  The puppets are amazing. I loved the humor and I was drawn into this world where puppets and humans live side by side. It has a bit of crassness but nothing that really goes overboard. It gets close though with Strokey Zooms, a camera puppet who is obsessed with voyeurism. There is a small sex scene as well between Rainbow and Roxy but it’s not done distastefully. 

Some of my favorite supporting characters were Wizo, Rainbow’s yellow right hand man, and an unnamed drug addict puppet near the beginning of the film, who shows up again when he is accused of killing the puppets in the botched jelly bean deal. Sasha, a puppet with a horn on its face is also funny and only communicates with honks.

If you’re a fan of puppetry and crime dramas you should really give this one a shot, I haven’t been able to enjoy a movie for a while but The Fuzz may be the one that finally ends my funk. Don’t be a fluff-head, go to Amazon and check it out now!

Plenty of people know the Mia Farrow movie Rosemary’s Baby, but few know this film, which was based on the book Julia by Peter Straub. It was originally released in the UK as Full Circle, where it bombed before doing poorly in the U.S.

It was directed by Richard Loncraine, who helped make Band of Brothers on HBO and the incredible music film — and another bomb that has been recognized as a great movie years later — Slade In Flame.

Julia Lofting’s (Farrow) life changes in a second: her daughter chokes on breakfast and an emergnecy tracheotomy causes her to bleed to death. This causes her to leave her husband (Keir Dullea) and move into a flat that’s filled with toys which once belonged to a girl named Olivia, a young woman with such a power over the other children that she could make them kill one another.

The movie sat unreleased in the United States until it was discovered, along with the Richard Burton movie Absolution, by a movie fan who worked to get both movies into theaters.

This was on Shudder for a few weeks, but is no longer on the service. It’s not a great film, but it’s interesting. I got my copy at a convention years ago and don’t regret the purchase.

Also known as The Young and the Damned, this is the story of two drifters: Danny (Lowell Brown, High School Caesar), a rich kid who has run away from home, and “Big Stupid” Bix (Brett Halsey, Touch of Death, The Devil’s Honey), a long-time hobo who is mentoring the former.

Bix begins to make lovey eyes with an innocent waitress named Carrie (Joyce Meadows, I Saw What You Did), who’s already dealing with the creepy affections of Jesse (Jack Elam). Yeah, so creepy that he eventually murders her.

This film’s writer, Jo Heims, would later write Double Trouble for Elvis, the story for Dirty Harry and Play Misty for Me. Its director, Charles R. Rondeau, also made The Devil’s Partner and the fact that I can remember than without the internet both makes me happy and somewhat sad that I know this much about junk movies instead of something important that can actually help the world.

You can watch this — as riffed by Mystery Science Theater 3000 — on Tubi. You can also download it on the Internet Archive.

Man, Jack Hill rules. Sorceress? Switchblade Sisters? Coffy? The Big Doll House? That’s why Tarantino referred to him as “the Howard Hawks of exploitation.”

Of all his movies, I love Spider Baby most of all. It’s the most perfect of all films, packed with menace, sweetness and madness all in equal measure. Who else would let Lon Chaney Jr. sing the theme song to their movie other than Hill?

This $65,000 movie — shot in The Smith estate house that was originally occupied by Judge David Patterson Hatch, who wrote books on the occult after he retired — pretty much disappeared upon release and numerous title changes didn’t help it find an audience. Yeah, titles like The Liver Eaters, Attack of the Liver Eaters, Cannibal Orgy and The Maddest Story Ever Told didn’t work.

But it found the right people when it was all over. People like Johnny Legend, who made sure that this movie wouldn’t die.

Spider Baby is all about the Merrye family. The end of the family, that is, as the last three children all live in a mansion that’s falling apart and are protected by their chauffeur Bruno (Chaney, absolutely perfect). They all suffer from a disease called Merrye Syndrome that only impacts members of their family, hence the name, and causes them to regress down the evolutionary ladder as they grow older.

Two relatives visit with their lawyer to try and get whatever money is left, but the kids have lost all control and Bruno can no longer stop them from doing what they do best: kill, baby, kill.

Virginia (Jill Banner, The Stranger Returns) is known as Spider Baby because she loves trapping people in makeshift webs, climbing around the house and eating bugs when she isn’t murdering delivery people like Mantan Moreland (who is also in Lucky Ghost and nearly replaced Shemp in the Three Stooges).

Ralph (Sid Haig!) loves the ladies and has completely lost his mind. He can barely communicate now and uses the dumb waiter to silently get around the mansion.

Finally, Elizabeth (Beverly Washburn, Old Yeller) may look normal, but she’s just as demented as her siblings.

Meanwhile, Clara, Martha and Ned have regressed even further and live in the basement, where they must constantly be fed human bodies. And oh yeah — the skeleton of the children’s father gets kissed good night by Virginia before bed every single evening.

Of course, the arrival of new people can only mean one thing: everyone must die in a dynamite explosion. That’s how these things go.

Carol Ohmart from The House on Haunted Hill plays one of those interlopers as does Quinn Redeker, the only person I know that wrote the story for The Deer Hunter and appeared in a movie with the Three Stooges.

Sid Haig avoided Lon Chaney Jr. for the first two days of filming because he had no idea how to interact with him. One day, he was needed for a scene and the future Captain Spaulding went to the former Larry Talbot’s trailer. He knocked on the door and said, “Excuse me, Mr. Chaney. You’re needed on set.” Chaney told Haig, without skipping a beat, “Stop that. I’m not Mr. Chaney. I’m Lon. You’re Sid. Let’s leave it at that.”

Haig also related that in the scene where Chaney discusses the toy, the crew broke down into tears and gave him a standing ovation. He deserved it.

This movie makes me incredibly emotional. Maybe it’s the fact that the children are doomed to never fit in. Perhaps it’s because Chaney realized that he’d never have — or even had — a role this good. Or maybe I just really torn up by movies.

Spider Baby is available for free download on The Internet Archive and you can stream it for free on Tubi and Amazon Prime. 

Four best friends from boarding school — rich kids, of course, the kind you most want to die — are headed to Block Island for the kind of graduation party that only exists in movies. But oh no — they miss the last ferry and get the trip from hell thanks to a crew that has no intention of letting them live, much less make the party.

Jeff Kober, who was in the remake of The Hills Have Eyes 2, as well as Tank Girl, The First Power and the TV series Kindred: The Embraced plays the main villain. Matty Cardarople, who plays Keith the video store guy on Stranger Things, and Brett Azar, who was a T-800 in the Terminator: Dark Fate, also show up.

It also has the based on a true story tag, so…you knew I had to watch it.

Dead Sound is available on demand and on DVD March 3 from Uncork’d Entertainment.

DISCLAIMER: This movie was sent to us by its PR team.