Bleeding Skull’s Top 50 (July 7 – 13) The middle-brow champions of low-brow horror, Bleeding Skull has picked out some of their favorites from the SWV catalog. They neglected to put I Drink Your Blood or EEGAH! on the list, but I think I can forgive them since they included Ship of Monsters. 

In 1965, director Massey Cramer and writer Bob Corley made The Legend of Blood Mountain. It’s a comedy about reporter Bestoink Dooley (George Ellis), who comes to Blood Mountain to learn about the legend — see what I did there? — of the creature who is said to rise when a drop of blood is spilled. Everyone else thinks there’s a serial killer, even if we didn’t know what that word meant, as Robert Ressler first used it in a presentation in 1974.

In 1975. Donn Davison — the manager of the Dragon Art Theatre in Gainesville, FL, as well as the director of the “Asylum of the Insane” inserts in She-Freak, Honey Britches and Moonshiner’s Woman, plus the producer of Secrets of the Gods and The Force Beyond; even more, he was a hype man for Film Ventures International and played a folklore expert in Crypt of Dark Secrets and the antiquities expert in Mardi Gras Massacre — must have seen how much money that The Legend of Boggy Creek was making. So he took that aforementioned movie — now ten years old — and added on some “real people” and himself up front as an expert. Then, he shared it with the world.

When he refers to himself as a “World Traveler, Lecturer and Psychic Investigator” who are we to say he isn’t?

If you’re wondering who Bestoink Dooley is, he was the host of the Big Movie Shocker, which aired on Fridays at 11:30 p.m. on Altanta’s WAGA-TV Channel 5. Played by George Ellis, he was also in the movies Swamp Country, Honey Britches (which was renamed and re-released as both Shantytown Honeymoon and later Demented Death Farm Massacre) and Moonrunners, as the villain Jake Rainey. That movie kind of disappeared, but would return when its director Gy Waldron took the concept and narrator Waylon Jennings and went to Hollywood to sell it as The Dukes of Hazzard. Ellis never got to play Boss Hogg.

According to this amazing article in Oxford American, “The Bestoink Dooley Fan Club,” Ellis also bought a theater known as the Festival Cinema. Atlanta magazine described it as a venue where “patrons would often come as much as 30 minutes before the show started to sit in the plush lobby in white sculptured chairs and leaf through copies of Sight and Sound or talk in muted voices and sip the complimentary Viennese coffee.” Despite introducing the city to the French New Wave and New German Cinema, Ellis was broke. So he started showing porn and got arrested for obscenity. Years later, he’d open other theaters — the Film Forum at Ansley Mall, the Film Forum on Peachtree and the Bijou Cinema — all places where “You can trace the roots of Atlanta’s film culture through these theaters.”

As if this movie doesn’t have enough nexus points, the bikini-clad daughter of a town doctor who falls for Dooley by the name of Phyllis Stinson is played by Erin Fleming. She’s also in Hercules in New York, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) and Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York but is best-known as the secretary and manager of Groucho Marx. While many of the actor’s friends admitted that she did much to revive his popularity and getting him an honorary Academy Award Marx, many also believed that she psychologically and physically abused him. After his death, she was ordered to repay $472,000 which she had taken from his estate. She’s gorgeous in this movie, yet sher life went so wrong over the last few decades she was in this plane of reality. She was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, arrested for carrying a concealed and loaded gun and lived out the rest of those dark years homeless and delusional before shooting herself at the age of 61.

Nearly everyone in this is either overacting, reading off cue cards — Davison is wearing sunglasses so you can’t tell that he is doing exactly that — or repeating lines because they think that someone is going to edit this movie.

Well, there is editing ten years later, as the strange original monster has been replaced with fog and a sasquatch.

“BIG FOOT” is more than a legend… They swear to God it’s true!” That’s the kind of words that get people in theaters and drive-ins. You know what else helps? Having your own theme song.

“The Ballad of McCullough Mountain” by Tim York is the kind of theme kind of demanded after Boggy Creek. As for three year old me, this movie may have terrified me as much as the frozen Bigfoot that came to the parking lot of my K-Mart. My aunt went to see it and brought back pictures. I remember yelling at her, because now Bigfoot knew that I knew he was here.

You can watch this on YouTube.