I keep saying to myself, “Don’t get confused.”

This is not 1950’s Prehistoric Women nor is it the 1967 movie Prehistoric Women not is it Voyage to the Planet of the Prehistoric Women.

When Roger Corman bought the Russian movie Planet of Storms (Planeta Bur), he used that footage to make Peter Bogdanovich’s Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women and this film, which had to confuse filmgoers. And me, as you can tell, even today.

Corman doubled down on that mind-altering sensation that audiences who thought that they had seen this a;; before by shooting new scenes at the same time that Harrington was making Queen of Blood, as Basil Rathbone and Faith Domergue shot their scenes in half a day using the same costumes from that movie.

While Harrington considered Queen of Blood good enough to keep his name on, he used the name John Sebastian, inspired by Johann Sebastian Bach, from this remix. He told Psychotronic Video that the movie “was not even a film.”

Rathbone plays Professor Hartman and Domergue is Dr. Marsha Evans. They’re the only English speaking actors that show up, as everything else is dubbed from the Russian movie. Even the soundtrack is recycled from Dinosaurus! Even crazier, most of the credits were fake so that no one would realize this was made in Russia as it was released during the Cold War.

Roger Corman knows how to get the most out of a movie. He turned the Russian Planeta Bur into both Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet and this movie. The former* has new scenes with Basil Rathbone and Faith Domergue, but the latter has one major reason to watch: Mamie Van Doren.

The pedigree of this movie is pretty wild, because it was adapted by Peter Bogdanovich, who chose not to have his name credited on the final film. And let’s not forget that this all ties back — since Corman loved to recycle what he recycled — into the early Francis Ford Coppola cheapy and Mill Creek box set favorite, Battle Beyond the Sun.

Five male astronauts and their robot John land on Venus and are attacked by a pterodactyl and then an entire culture of women, including Van Doren. Amongst their number are Verba (Mary Marr, who would go on to edit Rolfe Kanefsky’s softcore movies), Twyla (Paige Lee), Meriama (Irene Orton), Wearie (Pam Helton) and Mayaway (Margot Hartman, who in addition to being in this movie, would go on to be the chairman of the board of the First Stamford Corporation, one of the largest privately held commercial real estate companies in the State of Connecticut; she also wrote and starred in Violent Midnight, Descendant and The Curse of the Living Corpse).

Bogdonovich was asked by Corman to work on the film, as American-International Pictures wanted some girls in it, so he hired Mamie Van Doren and an entire cast of blondes, then went and filmed them for five days and did the narration.

Despite the fact that this had to be remixed together, you have to love the ending, where the robot left behind becomes the new god of Venus. Spoiler warning for a 52-year-old film…

*Curtis Harrington adapted that movie.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Unknown World was made by two Hollywood special effects men, Jack Rabin and Irving Block, who are two of the film’s three producers. It was directed by Terry O. Morse, who shot the American scene in Godzilla, and written by Millard Kaufman, who also wrote Bad Day at Black Rock and The Klansman.

Victor Kilian, who plays Dr. Jeremiah Morley, lost an eye in a fight scene with John Wayne and was blacklisted for decades due to his political views, which is why he is uncredited in this. He’s invented a big tank that can drill into the center of the world, the Cyclotram, and has taken a crew of scientists through Carlsbad Caverns, Bronson Caves, Nichols Canyon and finally Pismo Beach to find a place where the human race can survive a nuclear war. Sadly, that unknown world makes everyone sterile.

Let me tell you, people were obsessed by the center of the Earth in 1951.

Have you ever heard of the Shavers?

Richard Shaver first encountered these creatures from Lemuria when the tools at his factory job started playing other peoples’ thoughts into his brain. He could also hear the Shavers torturing people underground. Now, you may say that he was mentally ill, but he also was writing to the pulp magazine Amazing Stories. He claimed to have discovered an ancient language he called Mantong. Editor Ray Palmer (the namesake of DC Comics’ Silver Age version of The Atom) thought that Shaver was onto something. He helped him write A Warning to Future Man,” where Shaver discussed cities within the Earth, populated by the good Teros and the evil Deros. This was turned into “I Remember Lemuria!” which appeared in the March 1945 issue of Amazing Stories. That issue instantly sold out and then something really odd began: thousands of letters began appearing saying that they’d had the same experiences as Shaver.

Amazing Stories‘ readership either loved or hated the Shaver stories. According to Wikipedia, “Palmer would later claim the magazine was pressured by sinister outside forces to make the change: science fiction fans would credit their boycott and letter-writing campaigns for the change. The magazine’s owners said later that the Shaver Mystery had simply run its course and sales were decreasing.”

That didn’t end the Shaver stories. Palmer credits these tales with the public fascination with UFOs. John Keel’s 1983 Fortean Times piece “The Man Who Invented Flying Saucers” claims that “a considerable number of people — millions — were exposed to the flying saucer concept before the national news media were even aware of it. Anyone who glanced at the magazines on a newsstand and caught a glimpse of the saucer-emblazoned Amazing Stories cover had the image implanted in his subconscious.” Indeed, Palmer was quick to defend the Shaver stories and claim that “flying saucers” were their validation.

Palmer’s newsletter after The Shavers were forced out of Amazing Stories? The Hidden World.

Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on Tubi.

In Italy, this was called Anthar l’invincibile but it was also released as Devil of the Desert Against the Son of Hercules in the U.S. when Embassy Pictures released it to American TV stations as part of their Sons of Hercules package. It also has the AKA titles Anthar the Invincible and Soraya, Queen of the Desert.

It’s directed by Antonio Margheriti and written by Guido Malatesta (Maciste Contro i Cacciatori di Teste), Arturo Rígel and André Tabet. It starts with the evil Ganor, Devil of the Desert (Mario Feliciani) murdering the sultan, nearly doing the same to his son Daikor (Manuel Gallardo) and forcing Princess Soraya (Michèle Girardon) into marriage.

She’s so upset that she jumps out a window, only to be saved by Anthar (Kirk Morris), who just as soon nearly loses her to slavery. Anthar is the level of another shirtless hero in a Margheriti movie, Yor Hunter from the Future, as he gets captured or screws up more often than any other peplum good guy.

The end is amazing, because Margheriti rips off — pays tribute to? — The Lady from Shanghai, which is pretty wild when you think about this movie’s budget and that it was a film that was following the peplum trend and it still has the energy to pull something from Orson Welles.

There’s also a battle between Anthar and a rhino. I mean, where else are you getting that?

Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on Tubi.

This played double bills with — The Terrornauts. And much like that movie, this one has a great poster that advertises a movie I want to see more than the one that I actually watched.

Based on Joseph Millard’s The Gods Hate Kansas, this was directed by Freddie Francis for Amicus. He claimed that the studio spent all of the budget for this on the aforementioned The Terrornauts, leading to an inferior film.

This one is about the Master of the Moon (Michael Gough!) spreading a “Crimson Plague” that wipes out a whole bunch of humanity so that the government will send the bodies of the victims to the moon to hide what really happened to them, at which point he will bring them back to life and use them to fix his spaceship.

It’s a really complicated plan that gets torn apart at the end by hero Dr. Curtis Temple, who basically tells the Master that if he’d just asked for help, humanity would have done it. This causes one of the most powerful beings in the galaxy to just start crying.

Supposedly this was Anwar Sadat’s favorite movie. I only have IMDB as a source for this, but I find that absolutely hilarious and have decided that it must be true.

Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on Tubi.

“We are the angel mutants
The streets for us seduction
Our cause unjust and ancient
In this B film born invasion”

The Misfits “Teenagers from Mars”

Teenagers from Outer Space was written, produced and directed* by its star Tom Graeff, who sold the movie to Warner Brothers and made no money from it. It did play a double bill with Gigantis the Fire Monster, which is really Godzilla Raids Again.

Shortly after making this movie, Graeff decided to change his name to Jesus Christ II, saying that God had shown him truth and love. In his second — His second? — ad in the Los Angeles Times, Graeff even listed sermons at churches. However, when he applied to have his name legally changed, the Christian Defense League fought to keep that from happening. He also took out an ad in Variety in 1968 claiming that he’d sold a screenplay for more than anyone in the history of movies. After the ad appeared, he was publicly attacked by LA Times columnist Joyce Haber. Graeff claimed that Robert Wise and Carl Reiner were part of this movie, so Haber outed him as Jesus Christ II. Graeff’s career was over and a few years later, he would kill himself by carbon monoxide poisoning.

It also turned out that Graeff and David Love, who played Derek the alien in this, were lovers in a time where that could destroy careers.

This is somehow a movie about Thor — producer Bryan Grant, who had to sue to get his money for this film — searching for Gargons, a lobster creature that’s a delicacy across the galaxy. He also likes to shoot lasers at dogs. Meanwhile, the alien teen Derek, a member of the underground, escapes and runs wild on Earth.

This is the very definition of a movie made on a budget. Masking tape is used as costume decorations on surplus military uniforms for the aliens, while stock footage takes the place of special effects. The same skeleton is used for every dead body, a toy laser gun and a sound mixer — clearly labeled as a multichannel mixer — shows up as alien equipment and all of the music used comes from library cues. You’ll recognize it from other low budget films like Red Zone Cuba, The Killer Shrews and Night of the Living Dead.

Yet Graeff was kind of a genius, as he invented a process called Cinemagraph that allowed him to pre-record some of the film’s dialog for several scenes and synch it with the actors reading their lines later.

Sadly, the stress of making this film, its failure and the dissolution of his friendship with the producer caused his decline.

*He also did the cinematography, special effects, and music coordination.

In Italy, this movie was called I Diafanoidi Vengono da Marte (The Diaphanoids Come From Mars) and is part of the Gamma-One series. It follows Wild, Wild Planet (I Criminali della Galassia or Criminals of the Galaxy) and is followed by War Between the Planets (Il Pianeta Errante or Planet on the Prowl) and Snow Devils (La Morte Viene dal Pianeta Aytin or Death Comes From The Planet Aytin).

They still have New Year’s Eve in the future. That’s when space station Alpha-Two reports an issue and loses contact with headquarters. When a rescue squad arrives, they find green glowing energy monsters attacking and the entire Alpha-Two disappears.

Gamma-One Commander Halstead (Tony Russel) sends spaceships to investigate while on Earth, those same green aliens have possessed Captain Dubois. These aliens are Diaphanoids from the Andromeda Galaxy and need humans to exist.

Do you know how we deal with aliens like that? We blow them up real good and then reward Halstead with a private suite to have some zero gravity lovemaking with Lieutenant Connie Gomez (Lisa Gastoni, who was Maddalena).

Antonio Margheriti directed all of these movies and he’s doing what he can with the budget he’s given. Franco Nero shows up as one of the astronauts, Lieutenant Jake Jacowitz. The characters played by him, Russel, Gastoni and Carlo Guistini play the same characters from Wild, Wild Planet while Fiermonte replaces Umberto Raho as General Halstead.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Bill Van Ryn is the master of all things Groovy Doom and Drive-In Asylum. This is a movie that he loves and it’s so awesome to read what he has to say about why he feels the way that he does.

A popular vacation spot, desperate for tourist dollars, is suddenly beset by a beast that kills people. This coincides with the big breadwinning season of the vacation spot, leading the people in charge to hush up the deaths and avoid spooking the tourists into bolting. In the post-Jaws 1970s, there was no limit to the number of movies that came along with this exact same plot. One of the most successful imitators was William Girdler’s 1976 flick Grizzly, which placed the action in a park and substituted a bear for a shark. 1977 TV movie Snowbeast distills this formula even further, making the park a Colorado ski resort and changing the grizzly to a bigfoot monster.

Robert Logan and Sylvia Sidney play a grandson and grandmother who find their winter carnival interrupted by a monster that starts attacking and eating isolated people on the slopes — at one point, Logan says he can identify a victim’s body by looking at her face, and another character says “She doesn’t have it anymore.”  Sidney, of course, doesn’t want to admit that there is a problem at all, and advises Logan to keep it a secret. Bo Svenson is a former Olympic ski champion who has fallen on hard times and picks the wrong time to come to his old friend Logan for a job; I’m pretty sure entering into combat with a murderous bigfoot was not what he signed on for. Svenson’s wife, played by Yvette Mimieux, happens to be a former flame of Logan’s adding a love triangle to the story. Anyone who read the novel Jaws knows there was a love triangle in that story too, although it was not retained for the film version, so maybe nobody realized at the time just how deeply the screenwriter Joseph Stefano plunder the depths of Peter Benchley’s story.

Although the violence is subdued enough for a TV movie, there are some moments of dread to be found here, like when one character is trapped in a wrecked RV and can’t escape the oncoming monster, which just comes right for him and slaughters him immediately. There’s also a very silly moment when the creature shows up to interrupt a rehearsal for a pageant. It smashes a window, causes a little hysterical panic (including a hilarious reaction shot from Sylvia Sidney), and then proceeds back to where it came, stopping along the way to kill a helpless parent who was just waiting to pick up her daughter from the rehearsal.

Ultimately, camp is king in Snowbeast, and there is enough of that on hand to entertain this jaded viewer. Also, I enjoyed the outdoor photography, including some impressive tracking shots of characters skiing.

BONUS: Here’s the drink to go with it!

Snowballbeast

• .25 oz. blue curaçao
• 2 oz. vodka
• 2 oz. vanilla rum
• 2 oz. cream of coconut

1. Shake with ice in your shaker, then pour into a chilled glass. Enjoy!