Based on the novel by David Fisher, The Pack was directed and written by Robert Clouse, whose career found him making everything from Enter the Dragon and Game of Death to Gymkata and China O’Brien. Oh yes, he also made Deadly Eyes, a film that has giant rats played by dachshunds in fur suits.

There are two moments of nature at the beginning of this film. A horse is menaced by unseen predators while a family leaves the dog they adopted for the summer on Seal Island, thinking that a life of being homeless is better than a life in the city. That dog is accepted by the pack and becomes part of the growing army of dogs that has finally had it with mankind.

Jerry (Joe Don Baker) has just moved with his family to this tourist spot and nearly loses his dog to one of the feral pack. He’s keeping his eyes open for that dog, not realizing how many of them there are. That’s how things get started and they get to the point where the dogs are cosplaying Romero zombies, the humans forced to board themselves into a house while all those pups bark their heads off and threaten to come inside and tear them to bloody chunks.

As with all eco-horror, there is only way to stop these dogs. You have to blow them up. They had gotten to the point that they started killing domesticated dogs, but good news. The vacation dog from the opening hasn’t fully turned to evil and Jerry plans on domesticating him.

That’s a happy ending to most humans, but as I looked at my five pound long haired chihuahua practically frothing at the mouth next to me, I knew that he would someday join the pack and murder me. Such is the way of nature.

At some point in the 70s, movies about people having an unusual affinity for animals, despite being unable to connect with other people, were big. There’s Willard and Stanley, for example. Or The Killer Snakes, a movie that — because it’s made in Hong Kong — goes harder on the idea.

Gwan Fu-Cheng (Chow Gat) has one of those restaurants that could never exist in the U.S., a place where snakes are kept and used for their different body parts to benefit people, like Hu Bao-Chun (Richard Chen Chun), who wants the gall bladder of a cobra in a drink to make his date swoon. She does not seem very impressed.

The snake is kept alive until another customer has a use for another body part, as many snakes are clinging to life. But the cobra escapes through his prison inside a wall to find Chen Chih-Hung (Kam Kwok-Leung), a young man who has been disturbed by a childhood filled with abuse by both of his parents. Chen Chih-Hung has no fear of this snake with a giant hole in its body and its innards exposed, as he picks it up bare-handed and stitches it up, naming it Lu Pao and giving it a home.

Chen Chih-Hung gets some good fortune, as he gets a new job and starts romancing Xiao Chuan (Maggie Li Lin-Lin). And oh yeah — he and Lu Pao help the rest of the snakes in Gwan Fu-Cheng’s business escape through the wall.

If all seems good, it can’t last. Our protagonist is mugged and ruins one of his delivery jobs, then Xiao Chuan’s father gets sick. She misses their standing date and he responds by trashing her booth in the shopping area. Again, all he has is Lu Pao.

Giving up on true love, he visits sex worker Zhang Jin-Yang (Helen Ko Ti-Han) and she decides to get more money out of him by sending the same men who beat him up before — they end up being her security — and they’re all surprised by the fact that Chen Chih-Hung walks around with a cobra. And that’s when our protagonist goes to an antagonist, as he kidnaps Zhang Jin-Yang. Now tied up in his snake lair, he plans on using her for the pleasure of himself and several of his snake friends. At the same time, Gwan Fu-Cheng figures out where his snakes have gone — to Chen Chih-Hung’s secret room — and he has to be killed as well. Chen Chih-Hung leaves the body of the sex worker and shopkeeper together and it seems like that’ll keep the cops off him.

As if things can’t get any worse, Xiao Chuan’s father dies and she can’t pay for anywhere to live. Her friend Fang Fang (Terry Lau Wei-Yue) works at a hostess bar where she turns tricks, so she gets her a job, but poor Xiao Chuan is a virginal innocent, which is what the man who drank Lu Pao’s gall bladder, Hu Bao-Chun, is ready to pay to destroy. You can only imagine how our snake loving murdering rapist feels about his one true love working in the sex industry.

“First he taught one snake, then hundreds more…then he trained them all the kill!” While major labels like Arrow Video and Shout! Factory release Shaw Brothers box sets, there are several of the movies that the studio put out that may never see the legitimate light of those big budget releases. This would be one of them.

Directed by Chih-Hung Kuei (Corpse Mania, Curse of Evil, The Boxer’s Omen) and written by Kuang Ni, this is a sleazy, filth-infested and often disgusting affair. Would you be surprised that I liked it?

Cat lady Henrietta Winslow (Cecilia Loftus) lives in what looks like a haunted house. But that’s where he family must go to hear the reading of her will. She plans on leaving half of her money to her niece Myrna (Gladys Cooper),  the other half to her granddaughter Margaret (Claire Dodd) and the estate to her granddaughter Elaine (Anne Gwynne).  Meanwhile, Myrna’s husband Montague (Basil Rathbone) has invited realtor Gil Smith (Broderick Crawford) and antiques dealer Mr. Penny (Hugh Herbert) to help him creak up the estate.

Smith saves Henrietta’s life by keeping her from poisoned milk — this has already been added to my poisoned milk Letterboxd list — but she’s later killed when she is cremated one of her murdered cats. Her money is not to be given to anyone until her faithful maid Abigail dies (Gale Sondergaard) and she tries to throw everyone out, but they won’t leave.

Meanwhile, Montague’s son Richard (Alan Ladd) catches his father with Margaret and threatens to tell Myrna, just in time for Abigail to be murdered. The killer is using secret tunnels in the house to pull off their scheme, but one of the surviving black cats solves the case by setting them on fire.

An attempt to cash in on the success of The Cat and the Canary, this was directed by Albert S. Rogell. The original script by Eric Taylor and Robert Neville was rewritten by Robert Lees and Frederic I. Rinaldo.

Connie Hayward (Virginia Maynor) and Trevor Hudson (Lloyd Nelson) have gone to the Himalayas and hired a guide named Steve (Tom Maruzzi) and brought along Dr. Erickson (George Wells Lewis) to locate Connie’s missing brother. When they find her brother’s camp, they find it abandoned except for a native guide named Varga (George Skaff).

That’s when the yeti attacks and it turns out that Varga is a fifth-generation relative of the creatures, who have been mating with human women to wipe out the wildness in their DNA and become human themselves. He tries to assault Connie, but Steve — in love — saves her. Varga falls to his death and now the two have the wildest meet cute story of all time.

This was directed by Jerry Warren — oh man, Jerry Warren — and written by B. Arthur Cassidy. It’s actually Warren’s first film, one he made because the Yeti had been in the news a lot in 1956. He got the suit from White Pongo to be the Man Beast, took some footage from a Mexican movie and shot the rest at Keywest Studio and Bronson Canyon.

For some of the shots, that’s Warren’s future wife — like days later, because they left the set to go straight o Vegas —  Brianne Murphy in the costume. She handled props, makeup, hair, wardrobe, script and stills for this movie and later in her life she was the first female director of photography for a major studio film — 1980’s Fatso –– and the first woman to be a member of the American Society of Cinematographers Guild.

She also was the first female executive board member of her local union branch, but only after one union officer told her: “My wife doesn’t drive a car, and you’re not going to operate a camera. You’ll get in over my dead body.” She waited until that guy died and came back to be accepted.

As for Jerry, eventually he realized that making movies took a long time and that he could just remix foreign movies. The first he tried this out on was Space Invasion of Lapland, which he remixed and released under the title Invasion of the Animal People. Others that went through the Warren process included Bullet for Billy the Kid, The Violent and the Damned, No Time to Kill, Attack of the Mayan Mummy (AKA La Momia Azteca), Face of the Screaming Werewolf (La Casa del Terror), Creature of the Walking Dead (La Marca del Muerto) and Curse of the Stone Hand, which features footage from the Chilean movies La casa está vacía and La dama de la muerte. He also said screw copyrights and made The Wild World of Batwoman and his last movie, Frankenstein Island.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Damian Lee is a Canadian filmmaker responsible for Ski School and Abraxas, Guardian of the Universe, as well as writing Watchers. H.G. Welles may not have made a sequel to his book, but that didn’t stop Lee or writers Richard Bennett and Mike Werb.

Bobby could never grow, so he was given an experimental serum from Dr. Kate Travis (Jackie Burroughs) that instantly made him a full grown and super violent adult. Travis’ student Dr. Neil Hamilton (Paul Coufos)  is trying to find a cure, all while animal activists that include his girlfriend Alex Reed (Lisa Schrage, Mary Lou Maloney herself!) and Mark Hales (Réal Andrews) are protesting Prof. Edmund Delhurst (Colin Fox), who is trying to cure baldness with animal experiments.

Of course the rats get huge just in time for protestors to unleash them on the world. Dean White (David B. Nichols) has his Amity Island moment and refuses to shut down the college, all while big rats are just straight up gnawing — yes, this was also called Gnaw — humans.  “But the swim competition,” you hear him yell and yes, you knew it, the rats descend on the swimmers and have a smorgasbord.

The end of this movie is amazing, as they use a rat in heat to lure all the male rats into the open and kill them in the least original way ever: machine guns. But what of Bobby? He’s even bigger and angrier. He kills Dr. Travis and escapes, setting up…well, nothing. There’s no Food of the Gods III.

Eww, look — that rat has a woman in its mouth,

Man, what a poster.

Directed and written by Bert I. Gordon, The Food of the Gods was ever so loosely based on H. G. Wells’ novel The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth.

The food of the gods does indeed appear to Mr. and Mrs. Skinner (John McLiam and Ida Lupino), who feed it to their chickens. Bok bok, those things grow bigger than a person, but so do the rats, wasps and even worms that eat it, so soon enough their island near British Columbia is filled with dangerous human-sized creatures.,

Meanwhile, professional football player Morgan (Marjoe Gortner) — wait a second here, what position does Marjoe Gortner, no offense, play in American football? Punter? — is hunting with his friends when one of them is killed by a giant wasp. He’s so into this that he comes back to see even more, meeting up with a dog food CEO named Jack Bensington (Ralph Meeker) who wants to sell these gigantic animals for food, his assistant Lorna (Pamela Franklin) and the pregnant Rita (Belinda Balaski) and her husband Thomas (Tom Stovall).

Giant rats killed almost everyone, but then Marjoe drowns them all because they’ve become too big to swim, which is the most BS science ever, but sure, why not Bert I. Gordon. Of course, man screws up again and lets cows use the formula and they get huge and so do the kids, eventually but not in this, that drink their milk. Doesn’t pasteurization take care of giant drugs?

This did so well for American-International Pictures that they decided to make H.G. Welles movies, such as Empire of the Ants and The Island of Dr. Moreau. They were lucky Welles was dead, because if he were alive, they’d also have to pay for using a lot of his book Mysterious Island in this, not just the source book of the same title.

Thank you Keith Li for reminding me that I still can get physically sick while watching a movie. I thought that I had become numb to such a thing and then i watched your 1982 blast of insanity, Centipede Horror.

Centipedes may not get much love — well, they did get a video game back in 1980 — but they’re pretty horrifying. All centipedes are venomous, most are carnivorous and they can inflict painful bites that inject poison through their pincers. And they don’t just have a hundred legs. Nope, they can have anywhere from 30 to 382 legs.

A rich young woman named Kay goes to Thailand, despite her grandfather warning her to never visit there. Of course, as you can guess from the title of this movie, she’s assaulted by hundreds of centipedes, which causes her wounds to fester and bubble as only a category III would can become. She dies, which brings her brother Wai Lun to Thailand to watch her die and then get on the case of who did this to her.

If only she had worn the ugly necklace that was to protect her from centipedes! Yet as we all know, fashion can be dangerous.

Wai Lun brings his friend Yeuk-Chee along to figure out how they can make up for the crimes of his grandfather and stop a wizard’s curse. A wizard who curses and uses ghost children in his nefarious plans! This movie has it all and by all, I mean thousands of centipedes, including Margaret Li — who plays Yeuk-Chee — being an absolute trooper by sitting there with a mouthful of live centipedes crawling around her mouth waiting for Keith Li to say action so she can throw them up all over the place.

So yes, the pace is slow, it even drags until we get to the sorcerer battle at the end. But a reanimated chicken skeleton shows up and, yes, we have the heroine blowing centipede chunks and how can you ask the filmmakers to give us more than that?