Roger Corman knows how to get the most out of a movie. He turned the Russian Planeta Bur into both Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet and this movie. The former* has new scenes with Basil Rathbone and Faith Domergue, but the latter has one major reason to watch: Mamie Van Doren.

The pedigree of this movie is pretty wild, because it was adapted by Peter Bogdanovich, who chose not to have his name credited on the final film. And let’s not forget that this all ties back — since Corman loved to recycle what he recycled — into the early Francis Ford Coppola cheapy and Mill Creek box set favorite, Battle Beyond the Sun.

Five male astronauts and their robot John land on Venus and are attacked by a pterodactyl and then an entire culture of women, including Van Doren. Amongst their number are Verba (Mary Marr, who would go on to edit Rolfe Kanefsky’s softcore movies), Twyla (Paige Lee), Meriama (Irene Orton), Wearie (Pam Helton) and Mayaway (Margot Hartman, who in addition to being in this movie, would go on to be the chairman of the board of the First Stamford Corporation, one of the largest privately held commercial real estate companies in the State of Connecticut; she also wrote and starred in Violent Midnight, Descendant and The Curse of the Living Corpse).

Bogdonovich was asked by Corman to work on the film, as American-International Pictures wanted some girls in it, so he hired Mamie Van Doren and an entire cast of blondes, then went and filmed them for five days and did the narration.

Despite the fact that this had to be remixed together, you have to love the ending, where the robot left behind becomes the new god of Venus. Spoiler warning for a 52 year old film…

*Curtis Harrington adapted that movie.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Audrey (Sheila McCarthy) and Henry (Julian Richings) didn’t start out as Satanists*. But once their grandson Jackson dies, well, their lives have changed. They want him back no matter what it takes, no matter who gets hurt, even if their first rule is that the pregnant woman they have taken, Becker, is not to be harmed.

There’s no way this can end well for anyone.

Director Justin G. Dyck has somehow already figured out what older horror makers have gleaned, but at a much earlier age. He’s directing plenty of holiday movies like Christmas In the Rockies and Christmas Wedding Planner, movies that are full of innocence and joy, while also making a movie where a kindly older couple bakes cookies when they aren’t bringing animals back from the dead. I’d blame writer Keith Cooper for being a bad influence, but he’s also written several similar films like A Very Country Wedding (with Dyck directed) and My Dad Is Scrooge.

The closer the couple at the heart of this film gets to a reverse exorcism — putting Jackson’s soul into the place of an infant’s consciousness — the more people die in increasingly horrific, if not comedic ways. They also have a circle of black magic users, whose leader Ian may not have their best interests in mind. Imagine that.

This film seems like The House of the Devil, if we emphasized more with the Ulman’s than with Samantha. Sadly, where that movie picks up steam and blows you away with its ending, this one wildly shifts tone in the last few minutes and closes with an ambiguous ending that felt less like closure and more like filmmakers wondering how to finish things.

Imagine if Rosemary’s Baby didn’t end the way it did after all that build.

That’s why this is a pretty good movie — struggling for great — but the end just felt like a ton of monsters being thrown at the viewer and the focus being pulled from who we care about to someone who hasn’t been the protagonist. It’s hard to care about someone more than the people we’ve been told to care about, you know?

That said, this remains heads and shoulders above most of what passed for horror in 2020. I definitely think its worth a watch and you can check it out on Shudder.

*By this, we mean the kind of Satanists that this movie claims are Satanists. We all know The Church of Satan has nothing to do with this kind of thing, but would possibly appreciate the dark choices and black humor of this movie.

Somewhere in the North Atlantic, during the fading days of World War II, a life raft filled with the surviors of a destroyed hospital shop drift with no food or water until they come upon an abandoned German vessel, which seems to be salvation. If we’ve learned anything from movies like Death Ship, things are about to get much worse for all of them.

This Australian film, directed by Justin Dix (2012’s Crawlspace) and co-written by Dix and Jordan Prosser, is filled with style and substance, taking a story that may seem familiar and elevating it to a bloody, suspenseful and surprising film that you should take notice of.

After finding a little girl named Mya — clutching a doll that would fit right into a giallo or modern horror movie — it only takes a few moments before the survivors discover the patriarch and matriarch of a family of vampires that have already taken out every German on board. Their goal may have been smuggling their coffins — priceless artifacts — out of the country before the Allies made their way through Germany — but now, everyone must pay the price.

The film does a great job of setting up the mood in the first half, as it was shot in a legitmate vessel of that era, the HMAS Castlemaine, a WWII Bathurst Class corvette ship that is now an Australian museum.

If you can be patient for the first part of the movie, you’ll be rewarded with plenty of blood, bat-looking vampires who can psychically possess humans and a twist ending that perfectly  fits this film.

Unlike the majority of modern horror that is either all high budget gloss or low cost poorly shot digital video dreck, Blood Vessel was made by a team that understands that mood, lighting and even the color palette of your film go just as far as throwing blood and guts all over the place.

vessel of that era, the HMAS Castlemaine, a WWII Bathurst Class corvette ship that is now an Australian museum.

If you can be patient for the first part of the movie, you’ll be rewarded with plenty of blood, bat-looking vampires who can psychically possess humans and a twist ending that perfectly fits this film.

Unlike the majority of modern horror that is either all high budget gloss or low cost poorly shot digital video dreck, Blood Vessel was made by a team that understands that mood, lighting and even the color palette of your film go just as far as throwing blood and guts all over the place.

You can watch this on Shudder. For more information, check out the movie’s official Facebook page.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This Santo movie was first on our site on May 16. 2020. It’s yet another example of space women coming to Earth to take over. It’s also a totally awesome telling of that trope.

Santo has battled everyone from his fellow wrestlers to zombies, vampires, vampire women, the King of Crime, evil wax figures, a Hotel of Death, the Strangler, the Ghost of the Strangler and Satanic Power at this point. So yes, it was time to put Martians into the camel clutch.

Santo battles Wolf Ruvinskis, who also played Neutron, and who was also a luchador. He also goes up against Maura Monti, who played The Batwoman. Yes, Martian women have come here and they’re ready to take all our masked wrestlers.

The Martians have Astral Eyes on the top of their heads, which allow them to disintegrate human beings. Luckily, they can’t last long in our atmosphere. And even their most comely interstellar lasses can’t seduce El Enmascarado de Plata.

There’s also a bad guy named Hercules who unmasks Santo, played by Spanish wrestler Benny Galant, who for some reason acted as a Frenchman while in Mexico. Santo pulls a Mil Mascaras years before that was a thing and has another mask underneath, screwing over that red planet rudo. Hurricane Ramirez — a wrestler who started as a movie character before becoming the real thing played by Eduardo Bonada — is in this, if you’re interested in 1960’s luchadors.

I mean, Mexican wrestlers fight aliens. Life can be perfect, if you allow it to be.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We already posted this one, way back on March 3, 2020. That said, if you’re going to do a week of movies all about evil women taking over the Earth, you have to include this one, right?

Have you already watched this movie? Well, maybe.

Missile to the Moon is an even lower-budget remake — is that possible? — of the low-budget film 1953 film Cat-Women of the Moon.

That movie had 3D going for it, but this one has much younger men in the heroic roles and an army of international beauty contest winners playing the moon maidens. But the dreaded moon spider? Yep. That’s the very same prop from the original film. It was originally built for the movie Tarantula, so here’s to Hollywood for being green years before anyone knew what recycling was.

This film was shot in the Vasquez Rocks, where all cheap films decide to show what the moon or an alien planet looks like. A red gel over the lens of the camera was the attempt to make the sky look different, yet no science was given to the script. How do people explode into flames when there’s no oxygen, after all?

Anyways, two escaped convicts named Gary (Tommy Cook, who is also in High School Hellcats and would go on to write and produce Rollercoaster) and Lon (Gary Clarke, TV’s The Virginian) stowaway on a rocketship that Dirk Green is piloting back to his home satellite, the moon. He’s soon killed by a meteor storm, of course.

Also on board are hunky Steve Dayton and his fiancee June (Cathy Downs, The Amazing Colossal Man), who obviously had no idea what they were getting into. They all soon find themselves up against an underground empire of gorgeous moon women and their evil ruler, Lido (K. T. Stevens, who also shows up in They’re Playing With Fire).

Rock men. Giant spiders. Nina Bara, who was on TV’s Space Patrol. Leslie Parrish, who would go on to pretty much invent C-SPAN and remains an environmental activist. Laurie Mitchell, who plays a very similar role in Queen of Outer Space opposite Zsa Zsa Gabor. Marianne Gaba, the Playboy Playmate of the Month for September 1959, who also plays a robot in Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine. These are the menaces and maidens that our convicts must face on…the moon!

This was directed by Richard E. Cunha, whose Frankenstein’s Daughter made the other half of the double bill that this movie appeared on. It was written by H.E. Barrie, who was also behind She Demons and Girl in Room 13 (two other Cunha films), and Vincent Fotre, who wrote Baron Blood.

I have a weakness for movies where female societies have taken over the moon. I blame, of course, Amazon Women on the Moon.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime and Tubi. There’s also two different Rifftrax versions: One has Mike Nelson and Fred Willard (Amazon Prime and Tubi) and the other has the original crew (Tubi).

EDITOR’S NOTE: We’ve already posted two articles about this beloved film on February 23, 2019 and November 3, 2020, but what kind of female society week would we have if this one didn’t make the cut? 

To be perfectly honest, I could watch this movie every single day. Directed by five different people — Joe Dante, Carl Gottlieb, Peter Horton, John Landis and Robert K. Weiss — and starring tons of folks that I love, it’s the most perfect of all cinematic junk food.

Rather than give you a breakdown of everything that airs on WIDB-TV (channel 8) during its broadcasting day, I’ll just touch on the fact that this movie unites so many of my favorite people in one place.

There’s Russ Meyer as, well, Russ Meyer the video store owner, because what other place would have giant movie posters all over it for Supervixens? An assortment of comedians enacting a roast in the place of a funeral, with Charlie Callas, Rip Tayor, Jackie Vernon, Slappy White, Henny Youngman and Steve Allen being upstaged by Joe Dante favorite Belinda Balaski, who goes from sadness to anger to comedic force in one incredible performance. Ed Begley, Jr. as the Invisible Man. William “Blackula” Marshall as the leader of the Video Pirates. Henry Silva appearing in Unsolved Mysteries years before that show was a thing (it debuted in 1987, most of this film was shot in 1985). David Alan Grier as Don “No Soul” Simmons, something that never fails to make me smile. Andrew “Dice” Clay before anyone knew who he was, shooting Ken Wahl’s wife and getting Jimmy Olsen in trouble. And oh yeah — the main segment has Steve Forrest (the star of S.W.A.T. and Mommie Dearest‘s Greg Savitt), John Travolta’s older brother Joey, Lana Clarkson (Barbarian Queen and, sadly, a future Phil Spector victim), Sybil Danning and Forrest J. Ackerman as the President of the United States in a movie that should star Zsa Zsa Gabor. Stick around after the credits or you’ll miss a picture-perfect Kroger Babb riff starring Carrie Fisher and one of my favorite movie people to ever exist, Paul Bartel. Oh! I almost forgot Monique Gabrielle as Taryn Steele!

I have no idea who this movie was for other than for me. It’s a movie that speaks the language of the movie geek long before the internet existed and was doomed to bomb (or play HBO forever and find worshippers).

I’m so happy to have the new Kino Lorber blu ray of this. Beyond featuring a documentary with interviews with nearly everyone involved, it also has the deleted segments Peter Pan Theater, The Unknown Soldier and The French Ventriloquist’s Dummy. Plus, there are outtakes of every single routine from the roast of Harvey Pitnik and audio commentary from Kat Ellinger and Mike McPadden.

You can get the new blu ray from Kino Lorber, who were nice enough to send us a copy. This is one of those movies that I feel that everyone should have in their collection. There is no way that I can be unbiased on this one.

Released on a double bill with The Astonishing She-Monster, this Roger Corman-directed epic was the result of a pitch by a special effects company, believe it or not.

Corman was approached by special effects experts Irving Block (who wrote Forbidden Planet) and Jack Rabin (whose credits include everything from the effects for The Night of the Hunter to Humanoids from the Deep, The Norseman, Deathsport and the TV pilot for The Adventures of Superpup), with the duo making an oral presentation that won him over. Block and Rabin agreed to work for a small fee in exchange for a cut of the profits, with American-International Pictures putting up the financing.

With 1958’s The Vikings in theaters, Corman wanted to get this one out fast and cash in. That said, it was a lot of work, with nearly seventy camera set-ups a day. And the shooting was dangerous, too, with actors nearly drowning, almost riding horses off the cliffs of Bronson’s Canyon and getting hurt.

In the article “Wasps! Vikings! Sea Serpents!” in Fangoria 52, actor Richard Devon said that Viking Women was “a disastrous film to work on. It was as if Roger was really trying to shorten his skimpy shooting schedules even more than before. He didn’t waste a frame. Nor did he spare anyone’s feelings on the set. He was an absolute demon.”

It’s the tale of the Viking women — of course — who head out to rescue their missing men, led by Desir (Abby Dalton, Rock All Night; she replaced Kipp Hamilton*, who held out for more money).

Their husbands, brothers and sons have been taken by Stark (Devon) of the Grimaults and made to work in the mines. There’s also the matter of dealing with a sea serpent, which is dealt with thanks to the heroic sacrifice of Vedric (Brad Jackson, once billed as “The World’s Youngest Magician” whose career faded due to his obsession with reincarnation and the occult).

Also appearing are Susan Cabot (who was in plenty of Corman’s films, such as The Wasp Woman and War of the Satellites), June Kenney (the good girl gone bad in movies such as Sorority Girl and Teenage Doll), Betsy Jones-Moreland (who in one Corman movie literally played the Last Woman on Earth), Pittsburgh native Jonathan Haze (The Little Shop of Horrors), Playboy February 1957 Playmate of the Month Sally Todd (Frankenstein’s Daughter) and Gary Conway (who was on TV’s Lands of the Giants). Also, if you liked the dogs in Teenage Cave Man, they’re in this movie too.

In his book, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, Corman would confess that he learned “an important lesson from this movie: don’t fall for a sophisticated sales job about elaborate special effects.”

He went on to say, “I realized I had been had. (Block and Rabin) had simply promised something they could not deliver. A great sales pitch had distorted my judgment and AIPs.”

*Kipp is, of course, the singer who performs “The Words Get Stuck in My Throat” in War of the Gargantuas, a former Miss Optometry and the sister-in-law of Carol Burnett.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Based on the H. Rider Haggard novel, this Hammer feature — directed by Robert Day (The Initiation of Sarah) — takes Ursula Andress to the only logical place she can go after blowing minds as she rose from the beach in Dr. No. Now, she is a goddess.

Professor Holly (Peter Cushing), Leo Vincey (John Richardson, Torso, Black Sunday) and Job (Bernard Cribbins) have left the war behind and are their way to Africa when they discover a map of a secret land that is only rumored to exist. There, “She-Who-Waits” and “She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed ” Ayesha (Andress) rules eternally.

She believes that Leo is the reincarnation of the lover she killed 2,000 years ago for cheating on her and wants him to walk through the blue fire to become immortal by her side.

In the midst of that drama, Leo has fallen in love with Ustane (Rosenda Monteros, The Magnificent Seven) and Ayesha decides to kill her for such impudence. Her tribe, the Amahagger, attack Ayesha’s army, all while her most fanatical follower, Billali (Christopher Lee) attempts to walk through the blue flames himself.

Despite Ayesha dying at the end of this film, the character would return in Hammer’s The Vengeance of She, with Olga Schoberová taking over the role.

The first Hammer movie to be built around a female character — in spite of them hating the sound of Andress’ accent and having her dubbed by Nikki van der Zyl* — this is an intriguing while dated look at a female ruler subjugating her subjects while remaining eternally in love.

She has been made so many times, starting in 1899 with Georges Méliès’ The Pillar of Fire. It was remade in 1908, 1911, 1916, 1917, 1925 (with Haggard writing the cards that appeared between the silent action) and 1935 before this movie and in 2011. I guess you can consider the Sandahl Bergman film She is somewhat inspired by this, even if it’s just the title.

*She also dubbed Andress in Dr. No, as well as Eunice Gayson in From Russia with Love, Shirley Eaton and Nadja Regin in Goldfinger, Claudine Auger in Thunderball, Mie Hama in You Only Live Twice, Virginia North in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Denis Perrier in Diamonds Are Forever, Jane Seymour in Live and Let Die, Francoise Therry in The Man with the Golden Gun and was the voice of Corinne Cléry and Leila Shenna in Moonraker. She was also the voice for Monica Vitti in Modesty Blaise, Racquel Welch in  One Million Years B.C, Sylva Koscina in Deadlier than the Male and Lulu in The Cherry Picker.

Dinosaur Island has a great poster and let’s leave it at that.

Actually, I’m not going to get away with that, so let’s talk about this movie.

It seems like I set out to do a week about societies where women rule and I end up watching Jim Wynorski movies. Well, at least he has Fred Olen Ray along for this one, all about five pilots crashing in the jungle and coming up against not only dinosaurs, but a tribe of Amazonian women who include Michelle Bauer (Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama, Nightmare Sisters), Becky LeBeau (Joysticks), Deborah Dutch (Vice Academy 6) and Toni Naples (Deathstalker II).

Instead of the jungle, this tribe really is running part of David Carradine’s ranch and are battling footage taken from Carnosaur, here called the Great One.

Who can make sense of all of this? Captain Jason Briggs. And who is he? Russ Hagen from The Sidehackers. Oh shit, everyone is fucked.

Who can be blamed? Roger Corman, who wanted to cash in on Jurassic Park and hired Ray and Wynorski, who claimed in the book Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen and Candy Stripe Nurses – Roger Corman: King of the B Movie that this is more a cavegirl movie than a dinosaur flick.

I guess the nicest thing that I can say is that the soldiers seem to treat the women with respect, which they should, because they are the rules of Dinosaur Island, which is just down the beach from Dinosaur Valley.

When Theresa Chaney (Nicole Fancher, Unchained Love), a socially awkward woman, emerges from a time travel experiment, she soon learns that she is shifting through the timestream out of control. She tries to keep this malady a secret, but as she keeps shifting more and more, she has less control. Even worse, even her entire existence begins to unravel.

Shifter is written and directed by Jacob Leighton Burns, who has dreamed of making films since the third grade.

While this film does not have a huge budget, it does have plenty of ideas, as well as a non-heterosexual romance at its core without coming off like that was an idea just to get press. It all feels very natural, as natural as a movie about a woman dealing with grief misusing the ability to travel through time can be.

The final shots of this film are harrowing and bleak. It’s rare to be able to generate that type of emotion and this movie pulls that off with aplomb.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime. You can learn more on the official website and Facebook pages.