EDITOR’S NOTE: The Great Alligator was on the CBS Late Movie on May 26, 1982; June 17 and December 28, 1983; and June 13 and August 30, 1984.

Sergio Martino directed some of my favorite films of all time, such as The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, All the Colors of the Dark, 2019: After the Fall of New York, Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key as well other completely out there films like Hands of Steel, Torso, American Tiger, The Mountain of the Cannibal God and The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail. Throw in a script co-written by one of my favorite Italian scuzzfest actors and directors — George Eastman — and you have the recipe for a movie that should blow my mind.

The Great Alligator should be, well, great. And there are moments where it feels like it’s going to be, as it attempts to be a mash-up of Jaws and Cannibal Holocaust, which again, seems like a great idea. Throw in the gorgeous Barbara Bach before she married Ringo Starr, Claudio Cassinelli (Murder Rock) and Mel Ferrer — who went from the A-list and marrying Audrey Hepburn to appearing in some of the most crazed films, like The Visitor, Nightmare City and Eaten Alive! to name but three — and you have a cast ready to make it happen. And the central theme of the movie — tourists anger the god of a resort island who then becomes a giant alligator and eats them all — is great, too.

Turns out that Kuma, that river god, doesn’t like how Mel Ferrer runs Paradise House and wants none of his native people to work with the whites any longer. The natives then wipe out anyone that works there, no matter where they come from and Cassinelli and Bach must climb the waterfall that Stacy Keach fell off of in The Mountain of the Cannibal God to find the only person who may be able to save them, Prophet Jameson (Dr. Menard from Zombi 2).

That said, once the face painted natives and a giant alligator attack everyone, burning down Paradise House and menacing screaming tourists, who survives and what will be left of them is up for grabs. Look for appearances by Bobby Rhodes (the pimp from Demons), Romano Puppo (Trash’s father from Escape from the Bronx) and Sylvia Collatina (Mae Freudenstein, the ghost girl of The House by the Cemetery)!

The huge body count, numerous alligator attacks and attempts at being something more than a Spielberg clone — outside of the way the attacks are filmed and that Ferrer keeps everything a secret so tourists keep coming — make this a movie that I enjoyed on some level. But much like Martino’s post-giallo efforts, I keep wishing for him to go from simply good to flat out amazing. The ideas are there. The execution, however, is not.

You can get this from Severin.

• EDITOR’S NOTE: Patrick was on the CBS Late Movie on August 26, 1983 and March 2 and August 9, 1984.

Directed by Richard Franklin (Psycho II, Road Games) and written by Everett De Roche (Race for the Yankee Zephyr, Harlequin), Patrick opened the world to the genre of Ozploitation. While the Australian score was by Brian May, the Italian cut was scored by Goblin. In fact, it did better internationally than in Australia, even if the U.S. version dubbed over all of the accents.

Patrick (Robert Thompson) hasn’t left his hospital bed or closed his eyes in three years. After killing his parents, he’s been in a coma in a private hospital, never keeping the same nurse for long. Now, Kathy Jacquard (Susan Penhaligon) has taken the job, hoping that it will help her finally divorce her husband Ed (Rod Mullinar).

According to Dr. Roget (Robert Helpmann), Patrick is being kept in his care to explore life and death. Never mind that other patients have seen him fly out of his window. He can also kill people from afar, like when he tries to drown Dr. Brian Wright (Bruce Barry) when he tires to pick up Kathy, who he has been communicating with via spitting and spirit typewriting. Strangely, her only ally end up being Matron Cassidy (Julia Blake), the same woman who was tough on her at the beginning of the movie.

Yes, Quentin Tarantino admits that he took the paralyzed in bed spitting scene in Kill Bill Vol. 1 from this movie. He has also said that “Hitchcock was overrated but you know who was better? Richard Franklin.” and stated that Road Games is his favorite Australian movie.

Soon, Patrick is showing her that he can still feel — his erection is how he does it — and that the hospital is trying to kill him with electroshock therapy. By the end of the movie, he’s making her choose between her ex-husband or him as she injects him with potassium chloride and is linked to his mind as he passes on.

Maybe not. After all, he leaps from the bed while dead — a scene that the filmmakers started with and worked backward from, unlike the modern horror movie creators who have no idea how to close their stories — and his eyes reopen after his death.

Two years after this, the Italians made Patrick Still Lives, a truly baffling sequel that took the basic ideas of this movie — the same story, I can admit it — and infused it with near pornographic levels of sex and violence. It’s just as incredible as that sentence makes it sound. There was a remake in 2013 that I need to see but what I wish was filmed was Franklin and De Rouche’s sequel idea, Patrick II: The Man Who Wasn’t There. A religious cult would dig up Patrick and he would be in a coma, at which point he’d start being obsessed about another young lady.

The poster has a great tagline: ”I saw a man upon the stair, I looked again, he wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today, I wish that man would go away.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: The People Next Door was on the CBS Late Movie on December 28, 1976.

David Greene was behind a lot of my favorite TV movies, like Roots; Rich Man, Poor Man; Madame Sin and the remake of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? He also made I Start Counting and The Shuttered Room.

Arthur and Gerrie Mason (Eli Wallach and Julie Harris) realize that their marriage isn’t perfect and struggle to fix it as their daughter Maxie fights drug addiction. Arthur catches her in bed with a biker, high on cocaine, and immediately believes that his rock star son Artie (Stephen McHattie) who gave her the drugs, but it turns out that its the nerd next door.

Roger Ebert said that The People Next Door was “the best movie so far about parents, kids and drugs, and probably the best we’re likely to get (considering Hollywood’s recent tendency to exploit the drug culture for “youth movies”).”

This has a decent cast, with Hal Holbrook, Cloris Leachman and Rue McClanahan all showing up, along with Rutanya Alda as a nurse.

It didn’t make me want to stop doing drugs, but your viewing may change your habits.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Just Before Dawn was on the CBS Late Movie on October 10, 1988.

Man, if all Jeff Lieberman did was make Squirm and Blue Sunshine, he’d already be way ahead of the horror game. But no, he also made this contribution to the slasher genre, which owes a major debt to Deliverance (it was called Survivance in France).

Shot in the Silver Falls State Park in Sublimity, Oregon as Mt. St. Helens erupted, this film reminds you of one very important fact: if George Kennedy tells you to stay away from the woods, you better listen.

After that encounter — and seeing the survivor of the movie’s first attack by the mountain family saying that he’s seen demons — a fivesome of teens still head into the woods for what they hope will be a fun time away from the rest of the world. Chris Lemmon — yes, Hulk Hogan’s Thunder In Paradise co-star — is in this, as is Gregg Henry from Body Double.

There’s more than just a killer in the woods — there’s a set of identical twins and an inbred girl and a strange church and crickets that seem to know how to get quiet every time a character shows up.

While the original script’s heavily religious themes were cut out — it was to end with the family forcing the final girl to handle snakes in a ritual — it’s still a pretty great take on a slasher, one more based in something that could happen, with little to none of the supernatural getting in the way of all that murder. And the way that the last bad guy is taken out — wow. Talk about visceral.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Night of Dark Shadows was on the CBS Late Movie on June 13, 1977.

After the success of 1970’s House of Dark Shadows, MGM wanted a sequel. The show was off the air and Curtis thought that this would be the perfect time to bring back Barnabas Collins, but Johnathan Frid was fearful of being typecast.

To his credit, Curtis didn’t recast the role and worked on an all-new story, originally called Curse of Dark Shadows. They even hired spiritualist Hans Holzer — yes, the guy who wrote one of the Amityville books — to be on set and loosely followed the parallel world sequence of the show, focusing on the popular Quentin Collins.

With just 24 hours notice, MGM forced Curtis to cut over 35 minutes from the movie, which makes it pretty incoherent. The film that was to be was much darker and more intense.

While this movie did fine, it didn’t have the magic or box office of the last one. Which is a real shame, because I love it.

Quentin Collins (David Selby, also of the Dark Shadows TV show) has arrived at Collinwood with his wife Tracy (Kate Jackson) and is mesmerized by the portrait of Angelique (Lara Parker, also reprising her role from the show).

John Karlen and Nancy Barrett show up as Alex and Claire Jenkins, two horror novelists who have moved into one of the guest houses. They’re about to learn just how crazy Collinwood can get, what with the housekeeper Carlotta (Grayson Hall, who played several Dark Shadows characters, but foremost amongst them Dr. Julia Hoffman) revealing that nearly everyone here is reincarnated from the past of the house, with herself as Sarah Castle and Quentin as Charles Collins, who once was the love of, yes, Angelique, who was hung as a witch. Seeing as how Charles was having an affair with her — the wife of his brother, no less — he was buried alive next to her corpse.

Hijinks, as they say, ensue. Hijinks like murder, possession, women hung in the trees and a girl holding a doll.

You also get Dark Shadows regulars Jim Storm as Gerard Stiles, Diana Millay (whose role as the phoenix-like Laura Collins was the first supernatural character on the show), Christopher Pennock as Gabriel Collins, Thayer David (who again, played many characters on the show) and Clarice Blackburn, who missed the last Dark Shadows film.

I spent years hunting this down on DVD and it was worth the effort. Perhaps the best viewing I’ve enjoyed of this film was in a rainy and foggy drive-in, late into the night. Does life get any better than that?