CANNON MONTH 2: South of Hell Mountain (1971)

William Sachs told Hidden Films — an incredible site devoted to obscure/rare movies not available for streaming — of this movie: “They fired the director (Louis Leahman). They didn’t know what to do with the footage. It was a meandering thing, there were so many things missing, nothing made sense. So I came up with a spine (for the movie), where the girl is in a mental hospital, and the guy comes to try to get her memory back, and that’s what I shot. I used flashbacks out of what was already shot. I shot it at Welfare Island — it’s now Roosevelt Island — at an old mental hospital. There were labs there with jars of fetuses and body parts that were 100 years old. They put my name on as co-director, though I really didn’t want them to.”

Yes, a movie originally about an outlaw and his two sons massacring the men working at a gold mine and then stopping at a cabin in the woods where a woman (Elsa Raven, Mrs. Townsend from The Amityville Horror) and her stepdaughter Sally (Anna Stuart, who was Donna Love for 976 episodes of Another World) live now became one told through the flashbacks of Sally as she attempts to come back to sanity.

And if you’re pondering why Helen looks familiar, that’s because she’s played by an uncredited Candace Hilligoss from Carnival of Souls.

That said — this movie is impossible to find and has even eluded me.