June 4: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Free Space! We’re excited to tackle a different genre every day, so check back and see what’s next.

I’m obsessed by the true fact movies that Sunn Classics and Schick Sunn Classics released in the 1970s. There’s Peter Graves telling the world about The Mysterious Monsters, Rod Serling narrating The Outer Space Connection, a movie about 70s hot topic The Bermuda Triangle, the religious strangeness of In Search of Noah’s Ark and In Search of Historic Jesus,  The Amazing World of Psychic Phenomena, near-death experiences in Beyond and Back and Beyond Death’s Door, the snuff disasters of Encounter With Disaster and two that I had never been able to find. One is pretty much lost, The President Must Die, and the other is today’s movie, The Lincoln Conspiracy.

“Ladies and gentlemen, everyone sitting in this audience has been exposed to the traditional story of the assassination of President Lincoln. For over a century history books have taught us that the murder was committed by a crazed actor named John Wilkes Booth. The history books go on to say a few southern rebels helped him and no one else. The motion picture you are about to see will shock you. Because the true story of President Lincoln’s assassination can not be found in any history book. It is a story of corruption, treachery and cover-up. It is a story every American has a right to know.”

With that opening, we’re off and running with this movie, which was based on the book of the same name by David W. Balsiger and Charles E. Sellier Jr. If that last name sounds familiar, he’s the man behind so many of these movies. He has a wild life story, starting as a Cajun Catholic, converting to Mormonism and then to evangelical Christianity. He also wrote The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams and founded Sunn with Rayland Jenson and Patrick Frawley. They were the kings of market research and four-walling, a process in which they bought space at a theater and did all the ads, then collected all the ticket money. They realized that there was a Christian audience that wanted G rated movies on one hand and paranormal ones on the other. Sunn was ahead of its time when it comes to what is on basic cable today.

It made the movie look better to be based on a book. Schick Sunn Classic Books started to put this out, which is a genius movie that exploitation masters since Kroger Babb have used to make money. The main idea of the book and the movie is that historians and have been part of a big cover-up. This all started when President Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, Union spy Lafayette C. Baker, Senator Benjamin F. Wade, Senator John Conness, other congressional Radical Republicansm and a cabal of Northern bankers and speculators all wanted to capture the President and keep him hidden until they cold impeach him. The reason? Lincoln wanted to unite the country after the Civil War and they were upset that they would lose money.

Baker found out that actor John Wilkes Booth wanted to kidnap Lincoln and was brought into the plan. After he failed several times, he was told to stop and instead, he decided on his own to kill Lincoln on April 14. He had a diary that incriminated several of the men who paid for him to do the plot and they were panicked. A Confederate double agent James William Boyd was killed and the trial that followed and the autopsy were altered to make it appear as if Booth was killed, while sympathetic people got him to England.

Maybe. You know how speculative history is.

The book and film’s theories and perhaps not all that well researched use of source material* made historians lose their minds. But weren’t they covering it up?

The movie casts Robert Middleton (Even Angels Eat Beans, amongst many other movies) as Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, John Dehner (who was an animator on Fantasia and was a radio actor before a long acting career in movies and TV) as Colonel Lafayette C. Baker, Bradford Dillman (Bug, Piranha, The Swarm) as John Wilkes Booth, Ted Henning as Robert Campbell, Whit Bissell (a scientist in Creature from the Black Lagoon and I Was a Teenage Werewolf), Ken Kercheval (Dallas), as John Surratt, James Green (One Hour to Live) as Capt. James William Boyd, Len Wayland as Ward H. Lamon, Edmund Lupinski as Edwin Henson, Greg Oliver (the killer in Scalpel) as Rep. George Julian, Frank Schuller as Lt. Everton Conger, Patrick Wright (Track of the Moon Beast) as Major Thomas Eckert), Sonny Shroyer (Enos from The Dukes of Hazzard) as Lewis Paine, Wallace Wilkinson (who was in Cannibals Apocalypse, Invasion U.S.A. and The Visitor) as Dr. Samuel Mudd, Mimi Honce (who was also in Scalpel and Asylum of Satan) as Mary Surratt, Ben Jones (yes, this movie has both Cooter and Enos in it) as Samuel Arnold, John Anderson (the car salesman in Psycho) as Lincoln and Sunn’s narrator in nearly every movie, Brad Crandall, who also was the voice of movies and shows like the “The Curse of Dracula” parts of Cliffhangers!, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and the Wizard on the early 80s Spider-Man cartoon.

Basically, it’s a Southern all-star low budget cast.

Director James L. Conway went from Sunn movies like their Classics Illustrated TV movies such as Last of the Mohicans to Beyond and Back, Hangar 18, The Boogens and episodes of shows from Hardcastle and McCormick, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Charmed to The Orville and The Magicians. He also produced Charmed and created the series Burke’s Law and University Hospital.

As always with Sunn, I loved every minute of this, no matter how fake the beards looked.

Want to watch it? It was just released by Kino Lorber.

*The movie ends with this: “The story you have just seen is true. It has been authenticated with the following documents: Lafayette Baker Papers; James William Boyd Papers; Chaffey Shipping Company Papers; Andrew Potter Papers; National Detective Papers; Rep. George Julian’s Diary; James V. Barnes Papers; Ray A. Nef Papers; Paine-Powell Papers; Michael O’Laughlin Testimony; Edwin M. Stanton Letters; John Wilkes Booth Letters; Richard D. Mudd Papers; Dr. Samuel Mudd Papers; Col. Julian Raymond Papers; Larry Mooney Papers; John Wilkes Booth Purported Missing Diary Papers; “Web of Conspiracy” by Theodore Roscoe; “Mask of Treason” by Vaughn Shelton; “Why Was Lincoln Murdered?” by Otto Eisenschiml; “In the Shadow of Lincoln’s Death” by Otto Eisenschiml.”