EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on November 13, 2018.

Also known as Bakterion, Nightmare Killing and even Zombie 4 in Greece, this film was directed by Tonino Ricci, Fulci’s assistant director on White Fang and Challenge to White Fang.

It all starts with lab rats going nuts and killing one another, which was not what I was planning on watching while I ate my breakfast while watching this. What was I thinking?

Professor Adams has gone missing — maybe it was a fishing trip — but we all know that he’s behind all of the random killings. The government literally sends Captain Kirk (David Warbeck from The Beyond) to figure out what’s going on. He starts working with Jane (Janet Agren, Eaten Alive!, Hands of Steel) to figure out how to stop the infection and save not just the town, but soon the entire world. Yep, there’s plenty of talk about how this mutant virus could end life as we know it, yet all we see is one rotting meatloaf looking doctor.

Will the military nuke the town? Can Captain Kirk stop the worst special effect you’ve ever seen this side of Curse of Bigfoot? Will Jane feel bad for the professor, whose face looks like the inside of a stuffed pepper? Did I laugh out loud at this end credit copy?

William Beaudine made movies in almost every genre and not only that, he made tons of them. His career started in 1909 and ended in 1966 with Billy the Kid Versus Dracula and Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter. He made 75 movies in the forties and Emergency Landing also known as Robot Pilot is one of seven he made in 1941. His nickname? “One Shot” because that’s all he ever used, hurrying to get movies finished and out of the way.

“Doc” Williams (Emmett Vogan) has invented a wireless remote control airplane, but he and his pilot friend Jerry Barton (Forrest Tucker) have difficulty selling it, even to Jerry’s aircraft industry boss George Lambert (William Halligan). Meanwhile, two enemy agents plan on stealing that invention and oh yeah, don’t forget the screwball comedy with George’s spoiled daughter Betty (Carol Hughes, who plays Dale Arden in the Flash Gordon serials).

There’s also a role for Billy Curtis as Judge Gildersleeve. Curtis was the Muchkin city father in The Wizard of Oz, as well as roles in Gorilla at Large, Gog, High Plains Drifter and Eating Raoul over his fifty year career.

This played on TV as early as 1945, making it one of the first films to play on that new at the time invention.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on August 31, 2017. If you want to know more about Night Train to Terror just read this.

Have you ever seen Night Train to Terror and wondered — what would one of that film’s portmanteau sequences be like if they were expanded to an entire movie? Good news! Well, maybe. Your wishes have come true.

The final story of Night Train, “The Case of Claire Hansen”, was really a film called The Nightmare Never Ends (alternatively known as Cataclysm and Satan’s Supper). It boasts three directors. Amazingly, it was written by Philip Yordan, who not only won the Academy Award for Broken Lance in 1954, but also provided a front for blacklisted Hollywood writers (he was Bernard Gordon’s front for The Day of the Triffids)!

This is my favorite of all kinds of movies — a film I discover at 5 AM when the rest of the world is asleep and wonder if it can really be true and if I am not still asleep. To say that this is a batshit insane film is to do a disservice to the phrase batshit insane. I feel ill-prepared to share its wonder with you, but I’m sure going to try.

There are two stories going on here:

Nobel Prize-winning author James Hansen (Richard Moll of TV’s Night Court and House) and his devoutly Catholic wife Claire (who is a surgeon, which totally comes into play later) decide to go to Vegas to both celebrate James’ new book and to get away from Claire’s nightmares. Wondering what James won the Nobel Prize for? He wrote a book that proved that God is dead. Now, he’s planning a TV special to tell the whole story to the whole world (he’s preaching the bad news!). Well, alright. And that Claire — seems that she’s been dreaming about volcanoes. They decide to go see a magician, who puts Claire into a trance in seconds.

That’s when we learn the real secret of what has been bothering Claire — Nazis! She dreams of a handsome young officer who kills a room of other officers and an all-female string orchestra. After the show, Claire invites him to dinner after he tells her that a demon is after her. He never makes it — he is killed and a 666 tattoo is left on his scalp.

Remember when I said there was a second story?

Mr. Weiss is super old and out of it, but totally recognizes a Nazi when he sees one. Pretty and rich Olivier is being interviewed during the intermission of the New York Ballet and he looks exactly like the Nazi officer who killed Weiss’ parents at Auschwitz (and he’s also the Nazi from Claire’s dream). Weiss is a Nazi hunter, believe it or not, and he calls in his neighbor Lieutenant Stern (Cameron Mitchell, who has been in more movies than there have been movies, but let’s call out Blood and Black Lace as one of the best of his films). They go to the ballet and follow Olivier to his extravagant mansion, all the while Stern tries to convince the old man that this cannot be the man who tormented his childhood. Weiss grabs his Luger and goes to kill Olivier, but an unseen demon kills him and leaves a 666 on his body.

Oh yeah, there’s also a priest named Papini who is a homeless man that tries to protect James and Claire, even telling her how to kill Olivier.

There are also numerous characters who show up and just die, like Stern’s partner and Claire’s nephew. Even better, there are numerous disco scenes, which feature some wonderfully horrid songs and Olivier seducing Claire’s nephew’s fiancee (so many degrees of separation) until he takes off his shoe to reveal a furry hoof!

As to not skip any exploitation genre — we’ve already had Nazis, tough cops, disco and the occult — Claire goes to visit a black spiritualist who unexpectedly goes off on a ramp, pushing the film toward blaxploitation!  “I am a black man–a (N WORD) in your country. You are a rich woman, I’m sure you have many powerful friends…but they couldn’t help you! You had to seek the help of a (N WORD)!” It’s so insane and doesn’t fit into the movie at all.

Neither does the scene where Papini is killed by Ishtar, Olivier’s assistant (who is only in this one scene). It’s the chance to add some skin to the film and even more blasphemy.

Seriously — this film has blasphemy in spades. If you’re in a metal band that needs samples about religion and the devil, you should totally give this a watch. You’re going to find tons of samples.

Every single actor in this film either reads their lines in monotone or screams them as loudly as possible — sometimes within the same sentence. The lone exceptions are Richard Moll, who is the best actor in here and Mitchell, who is the gruffest cop of all time.

Nearly everyone in this movie (and the related Night Train to Terror) was somehow also involved with another movie that destroyed my brain cells, Cry Wilderness — which was featured on the latest season of Mystery Science Theater. A Bigfoot meets E.T. epic of pure maniacal weirdness, it was also written by Yordan and was directed by Jay Schlossberg-Cohen, who created the wraparound story for Night Train to Terror. Seems that Visto International Inc., a small theatrical motion picture production and distribution company, produced these films in the early 80s magical era of cheaply made independent films. Plus, both films (or all three, if we can cross-over between Night Train, Nightmare and Wilderness) feature the acting skills, if you will, of Tony Giorgio, Maurice Grandmaison and Faith Clift.

Let me see if I can summarize the ending of this — after Oliver kills everyone else, Claire hits him with her car. She throws the body in the trunk and takes him to surgery, where she and her nephew’s girlfriend give him open heart surgery, complete with blood spraying and puking. Oh yeah, there’s also stabbing and slapping and screaming. And the bad guy wins!

Holy fuck — this is certainly a slice of cinematic goofball awesome that I won’t soon forget. Make no mistake — it’s a horrible film. But at the same time, it’s also a great one!

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was first on the site on March 28, 2021.

Despite playing college students, nearly everyone in this movie is pushing forty. If you can get past that, well, there’s a lot more wrong with this movie, but it’s just weird enough that it’s worth watching.

Medical student Lewis Moffitt (George E. Mather, who was 42 when this would made* and would go on to supervise the miniatures and optical effects for Star Wars) is afraid of the dark, ever since he saw a dead body when he was a little kid. Now that he’s in college — he must be a non-traditional freshman — the fraternity he’s trying to rush makes him steal a ring — a Ring of Terror? — from a dead man.

Clark Paylow, who directed this, was the second unit guy on so many beach movies and the production manager for The Conversation and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

*Actually, he was 35, as this was shot in 1955 and not released for several years after it was finished.

You can watch the Mystery Science Theater version of this movie on Tubi. You can also download the original cut of this movie on the Internet Archive.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on February 6, 2020.

This Universal movie serial — told in twelve parts — shares some similarities with the earlier serial The Vanishing Shadow, including the inventions of an invisibility belt and a remote-control robot.

That makes sense — at the time, Universal was all about recycling. This movie contains stock footage from The Invisible Ray and The Vanishing Shadow, as well as music from the Flash Gordon serials and Frankenstein movies, plus car chase footage that had been used in several other serials and newsreel footage taken from the Hindenburg disaster.

Eight years after his star turn in Dracula, Bela Lugosi’s career was in decline. He had been typecast as a horror star and was not seen as talented as his co-star — and possible rival — Boris Karloff.

This career downturn had many factors behind it. Universal changed management in 1936 and due to a British ban on horror films, they dropped the once popular films from their production schedule. Lugosi found himself consigned to Universal’s non-horror B-film unit — such as the team that made serials like this. And while the actor was busy with stage work, he had to borrow money from the Actors Fund  to pay the hospital bills for the birth of his son Bela George Lugosi in 1938.

However, that year brought Bela back. California theater owner Emil Umann revived Dracula and Frankenstein as a special double feature, a bill so successful that it played to sellout crowds and Lugosi himself came to host the movies. The actor would say, “I was dead, and he brought me back to life.” Universal took notice of the tremendous business and launched its own national re-release, as well as hiring Lugosi to star in new films.

The Phantom Creeps — yes, we’ll get back to this movie in a minute — was the last of the five serials that the actor would make, shot right after he returned from making Dead Eyes of London. It was released a week before his comeback vehicle, Son of Frankenstein.

Sadly, by 1948, the parts dwindled again and severe sciatica from Lugosi’s military service was treated with opiates, causing a downward spiral that the actor would never really emerge from. He appeared in movies like Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla and Ed Wood’s Bride of the Monster. After making that movie, he checked himself into rehab, one of the first celebrities to publically do so. According to Kitty Kelley’s His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra, “Old Blue Eyes” helped with expenses, despite never meeting Lugosi before and visited him at the hospital.

The actor died of a heart attack in 1956, having just married his fifth wife. And yes, he was buried in his Dracula cape.

In this film, he plays Dr. Zorka, a man who loves to make weapons and refuses to sell them to anyone or any country. This upsets all manner of people, like Dr. Fred Mallory, his former partner, and government man Captain Bob West.

Dorothy Arnold, who plays love interest Jean Drew, was the first wife of baseball star Joe DiMaggio. Look for Edward Van Sloan, who always played the doctor battling the supernatural in Universal films. He’s Van Helsing in Dracula, Dr. Muller in The Mummy and Dr. Waldman in Frankenstein. In fact, that movie begins by him warning the audience that they can leave now if they’re too frightened. And Ed Wolff, the seven foot, four inch actor who played the robot, was also in Invaders from Mars and The Return of the Fly.

Speaking of the robot, you may have seen him in Rob Zombie’s work. The song “Meet the Creeper” is based on the movie and the robot often appears in the singer’s music videos and stage shows.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime or The Internet Archive. It’s also on Tubiwith Rifftrax commentary.

Bernard Knowles shot five of Hitchcock’s early movies before becoming a director himself. He’s probably best known for The Beatles film Magical Mystery Tour, but he also directed this movie which concerns freezing chimpanzees and then thawing them out for space travel because hey, it’s 1964 and  we were spending apes to the moon.

World Health Organisation’s Low Temperature Unit doctors Dr. Frank Overton (Mark Stevens) and Dr. Helen Wieland (Marianne Koch, who was an internal medicine specialist after she finished her acting career) have not only frozen these monkees for months, they’ve also fallen in love. The problem? Frank is still married to Joan (Delphi Lawrence), a fashion journalist who is also schtupping crime reporter Tony Stein (Joachim Hansen).

Frank gets $25,000 for his work and offers to buy a house in the country for Joan where they can have children. She argues with him about Helen, basically shoving him into her embrace. As she goes off to argue with her other man, Helen and Frank go against God and freeze him, but not before Joan threatens them with a gun and later shoots herself.

That said, in his book The Biology of Science Fiction Cinema, Mark C. Glassy wrote that the science was pretty much correct: “The level of accuracy in the science throughout this film was refreshingly high, and I have nothing but praise for Elizabeth Frazer, the writer of the film. She did a marvelous job and certainly did her homework.”