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2023 Scarecrow Psychotronic Challenge Day 3: Un orso chiamato Arturo (1992)

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3. TWILIGHT YEARS IN THEIR CAREERS: An aging American actor in an overseas production.

In the interview with Sergio Martino on the All the Colors of Giallo blu ray from Severin, he mentions that he only lost money on one movie.

This is that movie.

I watched Un orso chiamato Arturo as it was meant to be seen. On a YouTube link with a Rai Movie HD logo in the upper right corner, in Italian with no English subtitles and with someone else yelling translated Russian dialogue over the existing soundtrack.

George Segal was a big star from when he was in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1966 until the mid 70s. He was so popular that he would show up on The Tonight Show and The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour playing banjo and singing. That led to two albums, the solo The Yama Yama Man and A Touch of Ragtime with The Imperial Jazz Band.

Notable films of his A-list years include Where’s Poppa?,  A Touch of Class, No Way to Treat a Lady, The Owl and the Pussycat and Fun With Dick and Jane. Segal even hosted the Oscars in 1974 along with Gene Kelly, Goldie Hawn, Walter Matthau and Robert Shaw.

Then things went downhill.

He told the Chicago Tribune: “In the first 10 years, I was playing all different kinds of things. I loved the variety, and never had the sense of being a leading man but a character actor. Then I got frozen into this “urban” character. About the time of The Last Married Couple in America, I remember Natalie Wood saying to me … “It’s one typed role after another, and pretty soon you forget everything. You forget why you’re here, why you’re doing it.” Then my marriage started to fall apart … I was disenchanted, I was turning in on myself, I was doing a lot of self-destructive things … there were drugs … I’m also sure I was guilty of spoiled behavior. I think it’s impossible when that star rush comes not to get a little full of yourself, which is what I was.”

By the 90s, he was a character actor. And for audiences today, well, he may be better known for his work on sitcoms like Just Shoot Me and The Goldbergs.

But for some time…he was a star. A big one.

At this point in his career, Segal was in movies like Look Who’s Talking, All’s Fair, For the Boys, Me, Myself & I and the Dolph Lundgren action movie Joshua Tree.

And this brings him to Italy.

Sergio Martino is a director I celebrate. His five-picture run from The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh to Torso may be the most consistent work of any Italian genre director. But by 1992, he was mostly making TV miniseries like Delitti privati in addition to direct-to-video action like After the Condor and erotic thrillers such as Craving Desire and Foxy Lady.

Martino would direct and co-write this movie with Nino Martino, who also wrote The Throne of Fire and Razza Violenta. It was produced by his regular partner, his brother Luciano and shot by cinematographer Giancarlo Ferrando. He was behind the camera for a lot of Sergio’s work all the way back to All the Colors of the Dark, as well as working on Detective School Dropouts, Cop Target (a Umberto Lenzi movie with Robert Ginty in it. How did I miss this?), Ironmaster and Devilfish, He directed one of his own movies, La ragazza di Cortina, under the name Maurizio Vanni.

Segal plays Billy, a composer on a tight deadline. He soon meets Alice, who claims that she’s his biggest fan, but she’s really a spy. She’s played by Carol Alt, who took her supermodel career to Italy where she first worked in movies like Via Montenapoleone, I miei primi 40 anni (based on the life of Marina Ripa Di Meana), Bye Bye Baby (opposite Brigitte Neilsen!), Duccio Tessari’s Beyond Justice, Treno di Panna, Mortacci, La più bella del reame, La più bella del reame (with Bud Spencer and Jean Sorel!), Miliardi (a loaded cast including Donald Pleasence, Billy Zane, Lauren Hutton, Florinda Balkan, Alexandra Paul — the virgin Connie Swail! — and Sorel), a TV series named Il principe del deserto (Rutger Hauer, Omar Shariff, Elliot Gould, Brett Halsey; Italy was rich in 1991 at least for TV projects!) and a TV movie named Due vite, un destino with Michael Nouri, Rod Steiger, Fabio Tesi and Burt Young, not to mention a script by Dardano Sacchetti!

I’m saying that Carol Alt might be a supermodel but she worked with some of the bigger names of Italian genre and American action film.

The cast also includes Stefano Masciarelli (the mayor in Cemetery Man), Hal Yamanouchi (the only actor I know who can be in a Joe D’Amato movie — Endgame — and a Wes Anderson movie — The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou), David Brandon (Peter from Stagefright, Ariel from Jubilee), Christina Englehardt (Demonia, Skinner) and when Segal wins the Oscar at the end of the movie — only The Lonely Lady and The Howling III: The Marsupials have cheaper looking award shows — it’s presented to him by Edmund Purdom. Of course.

This is supposedly a spy movie and, yes, Alt dressed like a geisha and clubs Yamanouchi with an oar at one point. There’s also a teddy bear named Arthur that is like a Teddy Ruxbin and holds a secret that everyone wants. At one point, the teddy bear is smoking a huge cigar and talking. It was basically shouting in Italian while someone translated it into shouting Russian and all the whole, poor George Segal is mugging for the camera, hoping that someone somewhere loves him.

UNSUNG HORRORS HORROR GIVES BACK 2023: El fantasma del convento (1934)

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Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which is working to save the lives of cats and dogs all across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.

Today’s theme: Mexico

The Ghost of the Convent (released in the U.S. as The Phantom of the Convent) starts with sin: Cristina (Marta Roel), the wife of Eduardo (Carlos Villatoro), decides to try to lure Alfonso (Enrique del Campo) into her arms as they explore a forest together. However, a mysterious stranger guides them to an abandoned monastery.

Father Superior (Paco Martinez) reveals to them that one of the monks tried to seduce a friend’s wife once. Even in death, the monk couldn’t find peace and he remains today, a fact that Alfonos sees for himself. Imagine how he feels, ready to take his friend’s wife, and he sees the mummified monk, a book filled with blood and the body of Eduardo.

But is it all a dream? All three wake up at the holy place, which is now a tourist attraction.

Director Fernando de Fuentes was mainly known for his Revolution Trilogy — El prisionero trece, El compadre Mendoza and Vámonos con Pancho Villa — and was a pioneer in filmmaking. He also contributed to the script by Juan Bastillo Oro and Jorge Pezet.

The monastery says “When the soil harbors no impure desire, there is nothing to fear in the house of God.” Yet this trio is pulled in and may not be able to leave and they aren’t the only group of people pulled into this shadow world where ghostly monks repeat the same actions eternally and the sinful monk wails in his cell forever. This film also takes its time, yet it demand watching, as its spectral fingers are intertwined in so much of the horror that we love all these decades after.

You can watch this on YouTube.

CHILLER THEATER MONTH: The Bat (1959)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: The Bat was first on Chiller Theater on Sunday, November 17, 1963 at 11:10 PM. It also aired on February 8, 1964 and December 25, 1965.

The 1959 version of The Bat is the fourth version* of the story, all based on the 1908 novel The Circular Staircase. This played a double bill with the Hammer version of The Mummy.

Agnes Moorehead plays Cornelia Van Gorder, a mystery author who gets involved with a bank president and his physical (Vincent Price) who are trying to scam $1 million dollars ($8.9 million adjusted for inflation) when a forest fire breaks out.

Meanwhile, a giallo-esque masked villain named The Bat is tearing out the tender throats of young women with his steel claws. He learns of the scam and terrorizes an entire house full of women, among them Darla Hood. Yes, the very same Darla from Our Gang in her last role.

Crane Wilbur, who directed this, started his career as an actor. He was also a screenwriter and wrote House of Wax.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime and Tubi or download it from the Internet Archive.

*The other versions are the 1926 silent film The Bat, as well as the 1930 movie The Bat Returns and a 1920 stage play.

CHILLER THEATER MONTH: Queen of Outer Space (1958)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Queen of Outer Space was first on Chiller Theater on Sunday, November 10, 1963 at 11:10 PM. It also aired on June 20, 1964; January 23, 1965 and September 28, 1968.

It’s amazing just how much Amazon Women on the Moon got the parody of this movie right, all the way down to the uniforms.

What’s even more astounding is that this movie was written by Charles Beaumont, who wrote “Number Twelve Looks a Lot Like You” for the Twilight Zone, as well as 7 Faces of Dr. Lao, The Intruder and one of my favorite movies of all time, The Masque of the Red Death.

Oh man, this movie.

Edward Bernds is mostly known for Three Stooges and Bowery Boys shorts, but he also made Return of the Fly, High School Hellcats and Reform School Girl, which are three movies that I absolutely love. He was hired by producer Walter Wanger, who had just got out of prison for shooting agent Jennings Lang when he caught him making time with his wife Joan Bennett.

Exiled to Allied Artists, he bought this movie, which wasn’t made for a decade and by which time others at the studio were looking for properties that had already been paid for. Throw in some recycling of Abbott and Costello Go to Mars, Cat-Women of the Moon and Fire Maidens from Outer Space, as well as actual recycling — Queen of Outer Space uses sets and ships from World Without End, footage from Flight to Mars, another ship from the Bowery Boys movie Paris Playboy and costumes from Forbidden Planet — and you have a movie.

The far-flung future world of 1985 is when Captain Patterson (Eric Fleming, Rawhide) and his crew of Lt. Mike Cruze (Dave Willock, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?), Lt. Larry Turner (Patrick Waltz, The Silencers) and Professor Konrad (Paul Birch, Day the World Ended) are attacked by a laser beam that crashes their ship on Venus, where they run afoul of Queen Yllana (Laurie Mitchell, who is also in the very similar Missile to the Moon). This masked matriarch presides over a society of all women, having killed all men after her face was scarred ten years ago. Well, not all the men — some of the scientists have been kept on a prison colony on one of the planet’s moons*.

Luckily, the all-white crew of JR “Bob” Dobbs lookalikes is helped by Talleah (Zsa Zsa Gabor, perfectly cast as the only Hungarian beauty queen in space) and her female comrades Motiya (Lisa Davis, the voice of Anita, the female owner of the 101 Dalmatians), Kaeel (The Monster That Challenged The World) and Odeena (Marilyn Buferd, the only actress I can think of who was in Les Belles de nuit, won Miss America and was also in The Unearthly).

For all my attempts at assembling a week of movies about matriarchies, Talleah and her friends long for the love of men, which means that this women-run planet cannot survive. It all falls apart when the queen decides to destroy Earth and the disintegrator backfires, killing her and putting Talleah in power.

Even though their ship is fixed, Earth’s leaders demand that they remain on Venus for a year, which is exactly what they wanted anyway. Everyone begins to embrace and hug one another and…well, let’s leave it up to your imagination.

You know who wasn’t happy? One of the crew left behind his girlfriend, who was played by Joi Lansing (Hillbillys in a Haunted House, Bigfoot).

The strangest thing about this movie, however, is that it predates Star Trek by eight years and the uniforms that the queen’s guard wear are in the same red, blue and gold colors.

*Strange, because Venus has no moon.

CHILLER THEATER MONTH: From Hell It Came (1957)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: From Hell It Came was first on Chiller Theater on Sunday, October 20, 1963 at 11:10 PM. It also aired on April 11, 1964; January 16 and June 26, 1965 and July 9, 1966.

Sure, Paul Blaisdell created the effects for The She-Creature, Invasion of the Saucer Men, Not of This Earth and It! The Terror from Beyond Space, but this is the only movie in which he made a tree person.

Yes, this film is about the prince of a South Seas island wrongly executed by a witch doctor who hated the fact that the prince became friends with Americans. Well, those foreigners pay him back by irradiating the island and reanimating the royal victim, who has been buried inside a tree. Now he is known as Tabonga, an angry tree stump that demands bloody retribution.

This movie is one of the many reasons why quicksand concerned me as a child, as the tree man throws his unfaithful widow into the sinking muck and then tosses the witch doctor down a hill. He can only be stopped by white men and their guns, which hasn’t really changed for so many since this was made sixty some years ago.

Written by Richard Bernstein (Terrified!) and Jack Milner, this was directed by Jack’s brother Dan, who worked as an editor on the Bozo the Clown TV show (he also made The Fighting Coward and The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues).

Look, it’s not great, but the tree man reveal is better than most entire movies. It has that going for it at least.

You can watch this on Tubi.

THE IMPORTANT CINEMA CLUB’S SUPER SCARY MOVIE CHALLENGE DAY 2: House of Forbidden Secrets (2013)

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2: A Horror Film Directed by Todd Sheets

When I talked to Todd Sheets a few months ago, this movie came up and how much he wanted it to be a tribute to Lucio Fulci.

“When I made House of Secrets, it was made it as a tribute to him. I got to work with Fabio Frizzi who did so many of those great soundtracks. That turned out to be a fantastic time. I just wanted him to do the theme song and he said, “Send me the script and send me the rough cut.”

And then I didn’t hear anything back.

I’m like, “Oh, God, he hates that. He’s not gonna do it.”

All of a sudden I hear back. He says, “Okay, I’m gonna do the whole movie for that same cost.”

He said that Fulci would be so proud of this movie and well, it was my homage to the Maestro and my big comeback after my heart attack and everything.

I almost died and that was my comeback movie. And I wanted it to be special. So I wanted Fabio to do the theme song and it turned out to be one of the best experiences of my life. He was fantastic.”

Jacon Hunt (Antwoine Steele) has had some bad luck in life but now it looks like things are looking up. After all, he has a new job doing security at ShadowView Manor. The bad news? His first night is the anniversary of a great tragedy.

Working for building manager Cane (George Hardy, a welcome face even when he tightens his belt), Jacon and maintenance man Jackson (Bryan David) walk through the building, meeting the residents, who include Cassie (Nicole Santorella) and Hanna (Michaela Paxton Tarbell). These young psychics have been hired by Dorothy Fremont (Iris Runyon) to reach her husband from beyond the grave. As you can imagine, on this evening of such great terror, the spirits of those killed in a brothel massacre many decades ago come back, including Madame Greta (Dyanne Thorne!) and an insane priest named Elias Solomon (Lew Temple).

You know what happens when real Enochian Keys are used during the seance? The dead come to our world and want to kill the living. As always, Sheets moves fast and isn’t afraid to get gory. And look out for First Jason Ari Lehman as a guy working in the building and Allan Kayser from Mama’s Family and Night of the Creeps.

The only thing that took this down was that it ends with a Lloyd Kaufman cameo that isn’t just pointless, it destroyed the end of the film. After all that gore and so many great moments, I hate that this ends with such a goofy and inane moment.

You can watch this on Tubi.

2023 Scarecrow Psychotronic Challenge Day 2: Critters 3 (1991)

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2. THEY WERE IN THAT?: One with a then unknown actor who is now very known.

Did you see Critters 2: The Main Course?

Charlie MacFadden (Don Keith Opper) from that movie is looking for the last of the Critters and meets a family that includes Annie (Aimee Brooks), Clifford (John Calvin) and Johnny (Christian Cousins).  Charlie warns them all about the Critters — they think he’s a maniac — and the eggs from one of the creatures hitches a ride to their new home, a rundown Los Angeles apartment complex run by Frank (Geoffrey Blake) and his stepson Josh, who is played by Leonardo DiCaprio in his first movie role as what he described as “your average, no-depth, standard kid with blond hair.”

Before you know it, Critters are all over the place, space bounty hunter Ug (Terrence Mann) is back to fight them — well, for a little, and he leads into an ending which goes right into the fourth movie, which was shot at the same time — and the humans barely make it out alive.

The real stars are the Chiodo Brothers, as always making magic from these little hairy aliens. Critters 3 was directed by Kristine Peterson, who was second unit on Tremors and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure before directing this and Deadly Dreams, Body Chemistry, The Redemption: Kickboxer 5 and Slaves to the Underground. The script was written by David J. Schow, who also wrote Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III and The Crow.

UNSUNG HORRORS HORROR GIVES BACK 2023: Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice (1992)

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Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which is working to save the lives of cats and dogs all across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.

Today’s theme: Sequel

Directed by David Price — the son of studio boss Frank Price — and written by A. L. Katz and Gilbert Adler (they both also worked on Bordello of Blood), Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice is anything but, as it’s the first of what would be nine sequels. Two of them were reboots.

Hemingford, Nebraska isn’t Gatlin but it’s close enough. Two days after the events of Children of the Corn, the people of this town adopt the orphans of Gatlin and one of them, Micah (Ryan Bollman), starts talking to He Who Walks Behind the Rows and yes, the sequel is ready.

John Garrett (Terence Knox) is in town reporting on the children and his son Danny (Terence Knox) has come along for the ride. John’s career is bad, but not as bad as his life, as he’s going through a divorce and Danny hates him for it, so he fits right into all these creepy children.

After some lighting wipes out some reporters John knew from back when life was better, he gets down to business and starts sleeping with bed-and-breakfast owner Angela Casual (Rosaline Allen) and no, I won’t go for the easy joke and say that she lives up to her name. Danny might, because he’s mad that his dad is getting it on so quickly, but he also meets the creeptastic Lacey Hellerstat (Christie Clark) who drops some knowledge on him about her hometown.

While all that drama is happening, Micah and his child gang get to work dropping houses on people and using voodoo dolls to kill people while they’re in church. They even throw an old woman and her mechanized wheelchair through a window. I am a strange person, I realize this, but I laughed like a lunatic during this.

Somewhere in all of this, there’s a Native American professor named Dr. Frank Red Bear (Ned Romero) who throws some exposition on this sequel fire and claims that this has happened before but good news, there’s a prophecy that there’s a good spirit and not a bad spirit. Or maybe it’s people selling bad corn which has a green gas that comes out of it.

Dr. Frank Red Bear gets some great dialogue.

Dr. Frank Red Bear: Koyaanisqatsi. It means life out of balance. My ancestors would have told you that man should be at one with the earth, the skies, and water. But the white man has never understood this. He only knows how to take. And after a while, there’s nothing left to take. So, everything’s out of balance. And we all fall down.

John Garrett: Wait a minute… so that’s what happened here in Gatlin?

Dr. Frank Red Bear: No… what happened in Gatlin was, those kids went ape-shit and killed everyone.

As if they’re been challenged to go as hard as they can, the children lock every adult in a building and set it on fire, killing almost every character in the movie before kidnapping Angela and Lacey, taking them into the cornfields and trying to get Danny to sacrifice them.

Now, as you sit there, you may ask yourself, “Do I want to watch a child get pulled into a harvester, but not before he has a demon face?”

Of course you do. This movie delivers.

He Who Walks Behind the Rows is now a good spirit by the end as Dr. Frank heals from being dead after shot with an arrow as his ghost paints some rocks.

The director claims that a local Christian group protested the movie and left a dead rodent for him as a warning, so they made their own church for the movie.

You can blame former New World exec Larry Kuppin for this. After there hadn’t been a sequel for years, he picked up the filming rights and formed Trans Atlantic Entertainment. This studio existed just to make sequels to several New World Pictures films, including this movie, Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest, Hellraiser III and Avenging Angel. They also announced sequels to Wanted Dead or Alive and Crimes of Passion which didn’t get made.

Trans Atlantic also produced Female Perversions, Death Ring, The Vineyard, Rage and Honor II, Plughead Rewired: Circuitry Man II, Tollbooth, Cirio Santiago’s Vulcan, ’68, I Shot a Man In Vegas and The Tale of Tillie’s Dragon.

In fact, the same crew shot this and Hellraiser III back to back to save money.

CHILLER THEATER MONTH: Mothra (1961)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Mothra was first on Chiller Theater on Saturday, October 16, 1965 at 11:20 PM. It also was on September 30, 1967.

Godzilla may be the most popular kaiju there is, but at least when it comes to Toho’s stable, Mothra is number two, appearing in thirteen of Godzilla’s movies and her own trilogy in the Heisei era.

She got her start when producer Tomoyuki Tanaka hired author Shin’ichirō Nakamura to write an original kaiju story. Working with Takehiko Fukunaga and Zenei Hotta, their story The Glowing Fairies and Mothra was serialized in Weekly Asahi Extra magazine. To play the fairies, the idol singing group The Peanuts were hired, bringing a new audience to kaiju movies.

They are just two of the many odd inhabitants of Infant Island, a place whose juice can heal radiation sickness, vampire plants nearly eat trespassers and gigantic lavra can grow into fantastic moth creatures.

Let me say this again. One of the main plot points of this movie involves singing miniature women called the Shobijin who can speak directly to giant monsters.

Much like so many kaiju films, a shady businessman kidnaps them and attempts to make money off them. That plan has failed every time it’s been tried, dating all the way back to King Kong. So they call out to be rescued, singing to the egg god of their island which hatches to become a gigantic silk-spinning worm that cocoons itself until it becomes a gigantic butterfly, saving the women and taking them home.

Columbia Pictures had the rights to this movie in America and they went full William Castle selling it. They came up with a press book that told theater owners to put up signs on construction sites saying “Mothra was here” and to hire cute girls and make them walk around with signs that read “Mothra, the world’s most fantastic love story!”

They even wanted theaters to have radioactive material and geiger counters for audiences to play with. Anything to sell a monster movie, I guess.

CHILLER THEATER MONTH: Beast from Haunted Cave (1959)

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Beast from Haunted Cave first played on Chiller Theater on the second week of the show when it still aired on Sundays. It was on the September 22, 1963 show at 11:10 PM. It also played on the show on Saturday, April 4, 1964 at 4 PM.

Filmed at the same time as Ski Troop Attack and released on a double bill with The Wasp Woman, this Monte Hellman movie would mark the first of his many projects with Roger Corman.

Hellman would say, “What interested me about it was that it really wasn’t a monster movie. Roger liked Key Largo very much. I think that was one of his favorite movies. He kept making Key Largo just different versions of it. In this case he added a monster to it.

As for the titular beast, Hellman would say, “They literally spent two dollars at the dime store. It was mostly angel hair and paper mache monster.” The crew nicknamed the beast Humphrass. It was created and operated by Chris Robinson, who would go on to play the lead in William Grefé’s Stanley.

Basically, a gang gets together and tries to steal some gold, but ends up waking this monster and, well, bad things happen.

Linné Ahlstrand, who plays the doomed barmaid Natalie, was Playboy’s Playmate of the Month for July 1958 and Richard Sinatra, who plays Marty, was a cousin of Ol’ Blue Eyes. It’s things like that that sell a movie, you know.

There was a sequel planned — that’s why this ends like it does — but it never happened. However, Corman would pretty much make the movie all over again in 1961 and call it Creature from Haunted Sea.

You can watch this on Tubi.