We’re back ten years after we first got to Blood Island. Eddie Romero and Gerardo de Leon have returned in the directing chair, and this time, they’ve brought even more blood, beasts and boobs than they did in their last effort, Brides of Blood.

This film was syndicated to TV as Tomb of the Living Dead and is also known as The Mad Doctor of Crimson Island because, in some states, like Rhode Island, the word “blood” wasn’t allowed in movie advertising.

After Brides of Blood, John Ashley discovered that the film was so well-received that distributors asked him to make more. He moved to the Philippines and got to work.

The film starts with an initiation, as at some theaters, you are given a packet of green liquid and asked to recite the oath of green blood so that you can watch the unnatural green-blooded ones without fear of contamination. Years later, Sam Sherman said that he came up with this idea, and he got incredibly sick when he drank one of the packets. The film’s other gimmick is rapidly zoomed in and out, like Fulci on speed, whenever a monster appears. That was to cover the harmful special effects, but it made plenty of theatergoers sick. Man — destructive green liquid and frequent pans and zooms. It’s as if they wanted kids to puke!

A woman runs naked through a jungle before a green-skinned monster kills her. Yes, that’s how you start a movie!

Then we meet our heroes, like pathologist Dr. Bill Foster (Ashley), Sheila Willard (Angelique Pettyjohn, who was famously in the Star Trek episode “The Gamesters of Triskelion” and early 80s hardcore films like Titillation, Stalag 69 and Body Talk) and Carlos Lopez (Ronaldo Valdez, who would become the first Filipino Kentucky Fried Chicken Colonel).

The ship’s captain, who got them there, tells them how the island is cursed and how its people bleed green blood. Everything falls apart — Sheila’s dad, who she hoped to take home, is now a drunk. And Carlos’ mother refuses to leave, even after the mysterious death of her husband.

It turns out that Dr. Lorca has been experimenting on the natives, who just want to be healthy. Instead, they’re becoming green beasts that murder everything they can. Look out, everyone! I hope you’ve drunk your green blood before this all began!

Angelique Pettyjohn claimed that the love scene with John Ashley was not simulated. Seeing how Severin finally found the uncut film, and I haven’t seen any penetration, I think she’s full of it. But who am I to doubt her?

To make this even better, the American trailer of this is narrated by Brother Theodore!

Call it Blood Creature, Creature from Blood Island, The Gory Creatures, Island of Terror, Gore Creature, or its most well-known title, Terror Is a Man, but what you should really call it is the first of the Blood Island films. These movies, produced by Eddie Romero and Kane W. Lynn, include Brides of Blood, The Mad Doctor of Blood Island and Beast of Blood.  You can also consider The Blood Drinkers a Blood Island movie.

This movie was in theaters for nearly ten years—until 1969, when distributor Sam Sherman re-released it as Blood Creature with a warning bell that alerted the audience to impending gore.

William Fitzgerald (Richard Derr, who was almost The Shadow in a TV pilot that was turned into a movie called The Invisible Avenger) is the lone survivor of a ship that has crashed on Blood Island. Also, there are Dr. Girard (Francis Lederer, whose Simi Hills home is considered a landmark residence), his frustrated wife Frances (Greta Thyssen, who was in three of the Three Stooges shorts and Cottonpickin’ Chickenpickers) and his assistant Walter Perrera.

Much like The Island of Dr. Moreau, Girard is making half-man, half-animals like the panther he’s been experimenting on that tends to attack villagers. Of course, the doctor’s wife falls in love with the protagonist, and the beast gets loose and kills all sorts of people, including his creator. But hey — that mummy-like cat-eyed fiend seems to survive at the end, as a small island boy sends him away on a rowboat.

Gorgeous natives. Strong men. Crazy doctors. Werecats in bandages. Blood Island. Indeed, this one has it all.

Former test pilot Will Zens found himself a maker of hicksploitation movies, thanks to movies like this, The Road to Nashville, Hell on Wheels and Hot Summer in Barefoot County. It was originally called Truckin’ Man until the producers thought a woman’s name would draw more money.

This movie was acquired in 1983 by Troma, who released it to home video. They have nothing to do with it. Thank God.

Shot in Florence and Society Hill, South Carolina, this movie isn’t about anything that’s on the poster. Instead, it’s all about a middle-aged man who drops out of college — maybe he was a non-traditional student — to go undercover as a truck driver so that he can solve the mysterious murder of his trucker father. I’ve noticed in so many trucker movies that the mob has killed dads, which seems like their chief job in this reality.

Michael Hawkins plays that trucker. He’d go on to play in plenty of soap operas, like Ryan’s Hope, where he was Frank Ryan for 272 episodes. He’s also a state trooper in The Amityville Horror and a Pepsi executive in Mommie Dearest — he’s literally one of the people Joan screams “You drove Al Steele to his grave and now you’re trying to stab me in the back? Forget it! I fought worse monsters than you for years in Hollywood. I know how to win the hard way! Don’t fuck with me, fellas! This ain’t my first time at the rodeo” to — but he may be best known for being Christian Slater’s dad.

Larry Drake, who would later play Durant in Darkman (and eventually turned up as a detective in the direct-to-cable thriller Power 98), is Diesel Joe here. Comedian Doodles Weaver also shows up. If you haven’t seen his near-manic performance in The Zodiac Killer, I urge you to do so at the first opportunity. Actually, I shared it in our review of Bigfoot, so just click over there. Screenwriters Joseph Alvarez and W. Henry Smith also penned the hicksploitation-centric romps Preacherman and Redneck Miller.

Perhaps most strangely, at around the one-hour eight-minute mark of this movie, trucker Mike Kelley goes to the back of his rig and reaches for his break line. For a split second, an image of a pepperoni pizza flashes on the screen. Due to the vignetting effect which was applied to it, several people believe that the insertion of this frame was not accidental, but instead a subliminal message to suggest o drive-in audiences that they should get up and go buy some pizza.

Man, I’m hungry for some pizza.

You can watch this with Rifftrax commentary on Tubi.

Curtis Harrington had the thread of magic running through all of his films. One of the leaders of New Queer Cinema, he also directed Queen of Blood, Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet, What’s the Matter with Helen?, Who Slew Auntie Roo?, the Sylvia Kristel-starring Mata Hari, tons of episodic television shows and the TV movies Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell, The Dead Don’t Die, Killer Bees, The Cat Creature and How Awful About Allen.

His links to the occult, include the study of Thelema with his close associates Kenneth Anger (he played Cesare, the somnambulist in the magician/filmmaker/author’s movie Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome), Marjorie Cameron — who is pretty much the nexus point of twentieth-century occult doings and appears in his film Night Tide — and avant-garde film pioneer Maya Deren, an initiated voodoo priestess.

Harrington was also the driving force in rediscovering the original James Whale production of The Old Dark House and — as a friend of Whale near the end of his life — advised the making of the movie Gods and Monsters.

His final film was Usher, based on a high school film he made of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the Hosue of Usher. He cast Nikolas and Zeena Schreck — the daughter of Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey — who financed the movie by brokering the sale of Harrington’s signed copy of Crowley’s The Book of Thoth. Perhaps even more interesting is the theory that singer Taylor Swift is a clone of Zeena. No, really.

But hey — we’re here today to discuss 1977’s Ruby, a movie that brings Piper Laurie from Carrie into a story about possession and flashbacks.

In 1935, a lowlife mobster named Nicky Rocco is betrayed and executed in the swamps as his pregnant girl Ruby (Laurie) watches. The moment he dies, she goes into labor. Fast-forward sixteen years and she’s living with a mute daughter named Leslie (Janit Baldwin, Gatorbait, Phantom of the Paradise, Born Innocent, Humongous) and running a drive-in with several ex-mobsters like Ruby’s lover Vince (Stuart Whitman!) and Jake (Western actor Fred Kohler Jr.), a wheelchair-ridden man whose eyes were once cut out.

Ruby misses her days as a lounge singer, but the present has some nasty surprises. A poltergeist begins killing people at the theater, including the projectionist and a creepy guy who runs the concession stand (Paul Kent, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, Pray for the Wildcats and the founder of the Melrose Theater). Before long, our heroine — such as it is — believes that Nicky’s spirit has returned and believes that she caused his death.

Vince is visited by Dr. Keller (Roger Davis, Dark Shadows, Nashville Girl and the first husband of Jaclyn Smith), who helped him get out of jail early. He’s a clairvoyant who believes that there’s something in the drive-in, which is true, because Nicky starts speaking Ruby’s name over the speakers at the drive-in. Before long, Ruby’s daughter is speaking with the voice of her dead father and showing the wounds he endured before his death.

The producer chose to change the ending, and both Curtis Harrington and Piper Laurie refused to be involved in the re-shoot. It was allegedly shot by Stephanie Rothman (the director of The Student Nurses and the writer of Starhops). This ending, where Nicky comes back from the grave and drags Ruby into the swamp, was part of the TV commercials for the film.

Keep an eye out for Len Lesser in this — he was Uncle Leo on Seinfeld — as well as Crystin Sinclaire, who appeared in Eaten Alive and Caged Heat.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime. There’s also a Rifftrax version on Tubi.

Leon Klimovsky — The People Who Own the Dark, The Dracula Saga, The Vampires Night Orgy — teams with Spain’s resident horror movie bad guy, Paul Naschy, to deliver some medieval torture and Satanic slaughter which is in no small way influenced by Ken Russell’s The Devils.

Written by Naschy himself, here the actor plays Baron Gilles de Lancre, who has returned from war only to be mistreated by his king. So he does what you or I would naturally do — search for the Philosopher’s Stone and kill anyone who gets in his way.

Gilles might have started out just trying to be a good guy, but Lady Georgelle and the alchemist Braqueville get him thinking that he could be King of France if he just starts sacrificing one virgin every Saturday for seven weeks, then doing that all over again. Only old war friend Gaston de Malebranche can stop the insanity.

Known as Marshall of Hell in its native Spain, this movie plays more like a historical drama than an outright occult film. That said, there are some fun psychedelic sacrifice scenes.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime and Tubi.

This is Filippo Walter Ratti’s last movie, but man, just from the opening, where a couple hides and strange faces show up amongst flames while a woman screams a James Bond-like song? This makes me want to stay up even later than 3:14 AM, which I figure is probably the best time to watch Satan-themed Italian horror movies.

When this was released in France as Les Nuits Sexuelles, it had plenty more sex and skin. Just a warning, if you find that version.

Jean (Pierre Brice, who played Winnetou in a series of spaghetti westerns) and Danielle Duprey (Patrizia Viotti, Amuck) love solving mysteries. Well, they get one right away, as Jean get a letter from Guillaume de Saint Lambert that arrives in the form of a riddle that references the book Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire. This leads them to the prince’s castle, where Jean’s old friend is dying from a disease that impacts everyone in his family over the age of thirty-five. It’s lasted for three generations and the doctors can’t help him.

Then there’s a painting of a man dying at the stake and Danielle starts dreaming about it. And oh yeah — it turns out that the prince’s wife is a witch that his family had burned at the stake. It’s not worth falling in love in an Italian gothic horror romance.

I was wondering — how can a movie called Night Of The Sexual Demons be this slow? Then I saw a review that said to try and hang on past the first thirty minutes. And then I thought, well, this does have a pretty great poster, so I held on for a little more. Luckily, I was rewarded with exactly the kind of movie I was hoping for, complete with a killer that has razor-sharp claws that he or she uses to eviscerate nude victims, as well as an attempted sacrifice. Thank, well, whomever in the nine circles who made that finally happen.

With a title like that, you might be forgiven if you expect The Devil Within Her or The Devil In Ms. Jones style antics here. Instead, this is a slightly erotic gothic romance.

In his book Italian Gothic Horror Films, 1970-1979, Roger Curti spoke to the cast and they really can’t get any of their facts straight. Rosalba Neri (Lady Frankenstein herself!) claimed that director Paolo Lombardo “couldn’t stay awake for more than two hours” and “looked as if he was near his end, from the way he walked and moved around. I think he must have been very ill…” That said, Lombardo was only 31 at the time that he made this movie.

To top that, Robert Woods (Kill the Poker Player) — who plays Helmuth in this film — claims that he was hired to finish the film and received no credit. While assistant director Marco Masi was adamant that Woods didn’t direct any of the film, he can’t remember anything about making it.

Edmund Purdom (Pieces) is also in here — as Satan — so if you’re trying to fill out your Edmund Purdom Letterboxd list like I am, you’re in luck.