The effects for The Evil Dead were created by Tom Sullivan. He’d been friends since college with Sam Raimi,  Bruce Campbell and Rob Tapert. This movie tells the story, including Super 8mm film footage, Hi8, VHS and vintage audio tapes and photographs. Beyond all this behind the scenes footage, you also get location visits and interviews with Campbell, Ted Raimi, Josh Becker, Danny Hicks, Hal Delrich, Ellen Sandweiss, Betsy Baker, Theresa Tilly and more.

Beyond his work on that movie, Sullivan also worked on the Call of Cthulu games and shows off plenty of his incredible art. The tours — what is left of the original cabin, the cellar, the home where everyone lived and the theater where it premiered — are also really great.

The Synapse blu ray release of this movie also has Other Men’s Careers, which is about Josh Becker, a vintage Tom Savini interview, two of Ryan Meade’s short movies Bong Fly and Cosmos Lovos, extended interviews and new slipcover art by Joel Robinson. You can get it from MVD.

The original Spanish title of this movie is  La noche del terror ciego (The Night of the Blind Terror) but it is better known as Tombs of the Blind Dead). Director and writer Amando de Ossorio was inspired by El monte de las ánimas by Spanish romantic writer Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and Night of the Living Dead to make this. Instead of zombies, these knights from the Easts would come to be known as the Templars, based on the Knights Templar, a Catholic military order who were  the most skilled fighting units during the Crusades. The Knights Templar innovated banking and had a form of basic credit which King Philip IV of France took advantage of. Once he was deeply in debt, he began to spread rumors that the Templars spat on the cross, denied Jesus, worshipped either Baphomet or the head of John the Baptist and engaged in homosexual relationships. There was no evidence of this yet the Templars were still tortured, gave enforced confessions and were burnt at the stake.

Their Grand Master Jacques de Molay recanted his confession and when he was burned at the stake, he asked to be turned so he could face the Notre Dame Cathedral and hold his hands together in prayer. As he perished, he said, “Dieu sait qui a tort et a péché. Il va bientôt arriver malheur à ceux qui nous ont condamnés à mort.” which means “God knows who is wrong and has sinned. Soon a calamity will occur to those who have condemned us to death.” His accusers King Philip and Pope Clement would be dead within the year.

In the abandoned medieval town of Berzano, at the border between Spain and Portugal, the Templars were hung and birds pecked their eyes out. Now, they emerge from their graves seeking blood to remain alive now and forever.

Why would you come to such a place, Betty Turner (Lone Fleming)? Why would you bring your new lover Roger Whelan (César Burner), a fact that upsets your college girlfriend Virginia (María Elena Arpón) so much that she leaps from a train and ends up dead at the dusty hands of the Templars? What will it take you to realize that nothing stops the slow moving Templars and that they will destroy everyone that you love and leave you ruined by what you have witnessed?

As much as I adore this movie, I love even more that it was released in the U.S. as Revenge from Planet Ape, removing the Templar flashback and changing the movie to be about a post-apocalyptic future in which the undead are deceased intelligent apes.

The Synapse blu ray release has the original uncut version of the movie in Spanish and hybrid English and Spanish, as well as the U.S. The Blind Dead version. It also has multiple audio commentaries with one by Troy Howarth, one by star Lone Fleming and another by Rod Barnett and Troy Guinn of NaschyCast, a documentary about Spanish zombie movies, the Revenge from Planet Ape opening, a music video, a featurette on Spanish horror, a trailer and an image gallery. You can get it from MVD.

SPOILER WARNING: You can probably consider this review a bit unobjective seeing as how I love this movie so much and contributed to the commentary and liner notes for the blu ray release.

You should totally buy it from MVD because it comes with a limited edition slipcase New Hampshire Forest Scent air freshener, commentary with director Rob Roy, another commentary with Bill Van Ryn of Drive-In Asylum and me, an interview with Rob Roy, the Rifftrax version of the movie, a music video, bloopers, a trailer, liner notes, a mini-poster, a sticker set and a reversible blu ray sleeve.

Director and writer Rob Roy has had a strong connection to wolves his entire life. It started after he first saw Balto, which inspired him to create his own wolf film. The film you’re about to reach about. The film during which he attempted to contact Balto star Kevin Bacon for a cameo before being somewhat ironically chased off the actor’s property by dogs.

He told the Nashua Telegraph, “Let me say first of all that I am an animal lover. No werewolves were hurt during the making of Lycan Colony. I’ve always loved werewolf movies, but I’m tired of seeing the same storyline over and over again. The werewolf is always a sick tormented beast. He’s always the bad guy. In Lycan Colony, we filled a whole town with them. Some are good, some are bad. None of them are these simple monsters that show up for five minutes at the end of the movie. They’re the life and blood of a modern town, and much closer to us than we’re used to seeing in these movies.”

Roy is self-taught and learned every aspect of filmmaking – from make-up effects to building his own camera dollies, animatronic heads and blood sprayers as well as building his own blue-screen shooting area in his garage – while making this movie. 

Dr. Daniel Solomon (Bill Sykes), a disgraced alcoholic surgeon, and his family move to a small town in the wake of one of his surgeries under the influence costing a patient their life. He has an AA sponsor so bad that he takes him to a bar afterward, a bar where he meets a brother and sister who are ex-military and looking for their adventurer father. Seconds after they explain the inscription on their father’s watch, the bartender ends up dropping it on their table, which is like Chekov’s gun going off before you even see it. This leads to a werewolf attack within the bar, the military brother getting killed and Daniel falling through what can only be a warp zone to escape.

Meanwhile, Daniel’s son Stewart (Ryan O Roy) has fallen for Sarah (Libby Collins), who comes ot his room late at night and brings him to a graveyard where she bites his chest and makes him one of the cursed under the full moon.

Who can save the day? Maybe it’s Athena, the witch played by Kristi Lynn, who loaned all of her exotic animals to this movie which still doesn’t explain why a spider monkey randomly shows up at the end. She licks everything with sight and then explains the history of werewolves in animation that I am not even remotely sure can be referred to as animation. Speaking of animation, the military guy has a neck tattoo that was added in post and it flickers. It’s the most disconcerting take-you-out-of-the-movie thing I’ve ever seen and yes, it is awesome.

Made in Hudson, Bedford, Goffstown, Merrimack and Manchester, New Hampshire — which is why this had the tagline “Welcome to New Hampshire…Live free or die!” — you’ll perhaps struggle with some of the accents. These towns are the homes of stars like Seth Meyers, Sarah Silverman, Jane Balder from V, Grace Metalious who wrote Peyton Place and Adam Sandler. Perhaps most relevant to this film are the facts that GG Allin was born there as well as The Howling star Christopher Stone.

Keeping it local, the movie premiere at Chunky’s Cinema Pub in Pelham on Sunday, Oct. 23, 2005 with a concert/film screening/Halloween costume contest extravaganza. At Chunky’s you can order a Caesar Romero Salad, Wizard of Ozzarella Sticks, Reservoir Dogs (yes hot dogs), the Parmageddon Chicken Sandwich, a Kevin Bacon Burger, a Carrie Cosmo, the Catalina Wine Mixer Sangria, Jurassic Pork Tacos, Rum Forrest Rum or a Jabba the Hot Fudge Sundae.

If you ask Rob Roy, he says that this movie is about “The sensual underbelly of animalistic human beings and what happens when we surrender to that.” He’s expanded the universe of the film in Rage of the Theriomorphs, a book in which Dr. Dan, Dave, Russ, Stew, and Sarah are back and getting accustomed to their new lives and new rules. A new mysterious death has caused an uproar and a new threat to the entire town has arrived. This needs to be a movie, right?

Lycan Colony is the kind of movie that shuts off my brain and lets someone else drive. I never really recovered.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Hostage was first on Chiller Theater on Saturday, February 5, 1977 at 11:30 p.m. It also aired on the show on August 18, 1979, January 31, 1981 and February 27, 1982.

Lots of Henry Farrell’s stories got turned into movies. Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte, Such A Gorgeous Kid Like Me, How Awful About Allan, The House That Would Not Die, What’s the Matter with Helen?, The Eyes of Charles Sand and, most famously, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

His first book, The Hostage, was turned into this low budget Crown International film, which was directed by Russell S. Doughten Jr., who would go on to executive produce the entire A Thief In the Night series of Christian pre-millennial madness. God bless you, Mr. Doughten, for all you have given to me.

A kid named Davey Cleaves sneaks onto a moving truck driven by the bonkers man named  Bull (Don Kelly, a TV star who died young as this is his final movie) and his partner Eddie (a very young Harry Dean Stanton).

John Carradine shows up, as he does at least seventeen times a week in movies that I watch, as does Ann Doran, whose career started in the silent era.

This was the first movie ever shot in Iowa. What a joy for the state when a drunken John Carradine was arrested in Des Moines, as he was disturbing the peace by loudly acting out various Shakespeare plays.

You can watch this on Tubi. Or You Tube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Till Death was first on Chiller Theater on Saturday, January, 1981 at 1 a.m. It also aired on December 25, 1982 at 1 a.m.

Directed by Walter Stocker — the only movie he directed, he was usually an actor — and written by his son Gregory Dana, Till Death starts with Paul Ryan (Keith Atkinson) dreaming that he’s picked up a woman on a foggy road, then is trapped in a crypt — with his name on it — with her dead body. He wakes just in time to get married to Anne (Belinda Balaski!) and after some making out in the fog, there’s a car crash and she dies on the way to the honeymoon.

Yes, this one is dark.

Once healed, Paul goes to Eden Glen Cemetery and the Eternity mausoleum where his wife is buried. The shock is too much and he passes out, waking inside her tomb. And as you can imagine, he’s not alone.

Filmed in 1972 and having a 1974 copyright, this was not released until 1978 but as other reviewers have pointed out, it didn’t really show up until some UHF horror hosts played it in the early 80s. Like Chiller Theater in Pittsburgh, which even chose it for a Christmas night airing.

This is a love story with horror slightly getting involved. It’s nearly elevated horror — well, if early 70s can be — but knows to stay in the mood and deliver an actual ending. It predates The Iron Rose, but I doubt Jean Rollin ever saw this. So many lovers can get locked in the cemetery, don’t you know.

Charlie (Kathleen Kenny) is a remote helpline volunteer who comes into the grip of The Gentleman, a sinister being that uses the sound of a crying baby to lure people into his destructive embrace. One night, while home alone, she realizes that she is anything but when she hears an infant outside her home.

Directed by Colton Tran and written by Luke Genton — who also worked on the horror film Snow Falls together — Sorry, Charlie was based on a true story of a man who used recordings of children to get women to leave their houses.

Nearly nine months ago, Charlie was raped by someone — on Halloween — who left her pregnant. Now, she tries to help others from her home, a place she rarely leaves if only to go to the doctor and to tend to her garden. As for the house, it was her grandmother’s and her pregnancy doesn’t leave her much energy to fix it up any further than she got before the attack. But for now, she’s surviving. Then the calls start, calls that sound so much like the man who assaulted her. And then, The Gentleman shows up.

Sorry, Charlie may seem to be made in the cloak of the slasher, but it’s more about grief, adjusting after a horrific event and trying to move past it. We don’t all get to so violently deal with our trauma, but Charlie sure does.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Caltiki – The Immortal Monster was first on Chiller Theater on Sunday, February 23, 1964 at 11:10 PM. It also aired on August 22, 1964.

After the success of Hercules, Galatea Film began production on films made for the international market. They hired Riccardo Freda to make this movie, but he left before it was done, supposed to allow Mario Bava — the cinematographer and special effects artist on this — the opportunity to direct and earn more money. This same situation — Freda leaving and Bava finishing the movie — also happened during I Vampiri (The Devil’s Commandment). 

There are different stories over who did what. Freda told Luigi Cozzi that he “left it when there were just two days of shooting left. I did shoot it yes, but it’s Bava’s type of film. I don’t enclose it in my body of work. The only thing I remember with pleasure about it are the statues that decorated the sets: I sculpted them myself,” while Bava referred to this as his first film and claimed that Freda left the movie” because everything was falling to pieces. I managed to carry it out, patching it up here and there.”

Cozzi would come back to this interview thirty years later, setting the record straight by stating that “the director of Calitiki il mostro immortale is Riccardo Freda, full stop. Mario Bava did take care of the cinematography, the special effects and directed the scenes with the miniatures (that is, mostly the tanks….) and in addition to that he filmed some shots of soldiers with flame throwers. That’s all, and of course it cannot be enough to say that Bava directed that movie.” That said, in the last two or three weeks of filming, Bava directed and shot over 100 special effects shots.

Honestly, the answer depends on who you ask and when you ask them.

A group of archaeologists discovers a large statue of Caltiki, a supposed Mayan goddess who demanded human sacrifices. When one of them descends into a pool, he finds skeletons covered in gold and jewels. He keeps going back for more before he’s melted into a skeleton himself.

Now, Caltiki is a made-up deity. But man, who cares, because soon a blob-like creature emerges and tries to devour everyone. The monster was created from cloth and tripe, which is the stomach of a cow. It made a horrific smell, so no one wanted to be around it.

Anyhow, the blob-like organism attaches itself to one man’s arm and, of course, replicates and feeds on radiation. It’s about to have a buffet, because a radioactive comet that last appeared in our orbit during the time of the Mayans is about to come back and every little blob will become gigantic unless the smart brains in this can figure something out. How do you destroy a blob in the world of this movie? Flamethrowers. It’s that simple.

You can watch this on Tubi.