Author Archives: bandsaboutmovies

THE DIA IS BACK WITH COMA WHITE!

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Join Bill, Sam and our guest the luscious Coma White at 8 PM EDT this Saturday on the Groovy Doom Facebook and YouTube channels. We have two absolutely crazy movies!

Up first, Necropolis! You can watch it on Fawsome.

Here’s the first cocktail.

Banshee

  • 3 oz. 99 Bananas
  • 1 oz. Creme De Cacao
  • 2 oz. Milk
  1. Shake it all up like you have three breasts in your cocktail shaker (with ice).
  2. Pour it out, lick it up.

The second movie is Poor Pretty Eddie which you can find on Daily Motion.

Here’s the second cocktail.

Pretty Eddie

  • 1 oz. Malibu rum
  • 1 oz. peach liqeur
  • 2 oz. orange juice
  1. Pour everything in a glass with ice.
  2. Hide in a dirty Southern bar and stir before drinking.

See you Saturday!

MILL CREEK LEGENDS OF HORROR: The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman (1971)

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La Noche de Walpurgis (released in the United States as The Werewolf vs. The Vampire Woman and in the UK as both Shadow of the Werewolf and Werewolf Shadow) was the fifth time that Paul Naschy played the doomed lycanthrope Waldemar Daninsky.

Written by Naschy and directed by Leon Klimovsky (The People Who Own the Dark, The Dracula Saga), this film seems to come from another planet, perhaps because so much of it is in slow motion. It also kicked off a horror craze in Spain that maniacs like me are still enjoying to this day.

After the last film — The Fury of the Wolf Man — Waldemar Daninsky is brought back to life during his autopsy. After all, you don’t remove silver bullets from a werewolf’s heart and expect him to treat you nicely. He kills both for their trouble and runs into the night.

Meanwhile, Elvira and her friend Genevieve are looking for the tomb of Countess Wandessa de Nadasdy. Coincidentally, as these things happen, her grave is near Daninsky’s castle, so our dashing werewolf friend invites them to stay. Within hours, Elvira has bled all over the corpse of the Countess (Patty Shepard, Hannah, Queen of the Vampires), who soon rises and turns both girls into her slaves.

But what of the werewolf, you ask? Don’t worry — he shows up too, after we get our fill of the ladies slowly murdering people in the forest. Also, as these things happen, Waldemar must fight the Countess before the only woman who ever loved him, Elvira (Yelena Samarina, The House of 1,000 Dolls), finally kills him again.

There’s also a scene where our furry friend battles a skeleton wearing the robes of a monk in the graveyard. Some claim that this scene inspired Spanish director Amando de Ossorio to write Tombs of the Blind Dead just a few months later.

Daninsky’s lycanthropy is not explained in this one. Was it the bite of a yeti that made him howl at the moon? Is he a college professor or a count? Who cares!

MILL CREEK LEGENDS OF HORROR: The Ticket of Leave Man (1937)

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Based on The Ticket-of-Leave Man, an 1863 play by Tom Taylor that introduced the character Hawkshaw the Detective, a popular figure in Victorian literature known for his cunning and relentless pursuit of justice, the name of this movie is a reference to the ticket of leave issued to convicts upon release.

Robert Brierly (John Warwick) and the notorious criminal, The Tiger (Tod Slaughter), both find themselves entangled in a love triangle with May Edwards (Marjorie Taylor). The Tiger, in a bid to separate Brierly from his beloved, orchestrates a cunning plan. He manipulates the situation to send Brierly to jail for passing bad checks, and then attempts to frame him for a heinous crime.

Another film that teams up Slaughter with director George King, this also has Hawkshaw the detective (Robert Adair) as the hero, stalking beer gardens for info on The Tiger and his henchmen. Soon, The Tiger has become Purvis, CEO of The Good Samaritan Help Society, presiding over this charity but really committing villainous deeds. I mean, the dude sets his office on fire and watches as one of his men burns inside, laughing like a lunatic. 

And of course, what’s a Tod Slaughter movie without his signature performance? His over-the-top cackling and scene-stealing antics are what you’re here for.

You can watch this on YouTube.

MILL CREEK LEGENDS OF HORROR: End of the World (1977)

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Bill from Groovy Doom and Drive-In Asylum always jokes about movies where nothing happens as being his favorite movies. If that’s true, he must absolutely adore this movie.

Christopher Lee, the main selling point of this movie, said, “Some of the films I’ve been in I regret making. I got conned into making these pictures in almost every case by people who lied to me. Some years ago, I got a call from my producers saying that they were sending me a script and that five very distinguished American actors were also going to be in the film. Actors like José Ferrer, Dean Jagger, and John Carradine. So I thought “Well, that’s all right by me”. But it turned out it was a complete lie. Appropriately the film was called End Of The World.”

The film opens with a shaken Lee as a Catholic priest trying to get to a phone call. All hell breaks loose and a diner is destroyed, with the owner blinded by coffee before being killed and the pay phone being blown up. Turns out that Father Pergado is due to be replaced by the alien Zindar. Good start. And it was the trailer, filled with science fiction machines and evil nuns that got me interested in this picture!

Professor Andrew Boran discovers radio signals that predict natural disasters.   He and his wife investigate, discovering that they come from a convent where aliens have taken over. The aliens want him to join them, as the Earth is too diseased to exist.

The leads are wooden and only seem to want to have sex with one another, yet there are no love scenes. They’re utter failures at being heroic and simply move the plot along to its conclusion, where we learn that the Earth is filled with glitter. It blows up real good!

There are some ridiculous moments, such as Lee’s true form and seeing nuns operate supercomputers. Seriously, if I just read the description of this movie, it’d sound like everything I love. But seeing the execution leaves a lot to be desired.

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1971)

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Dracula vs. Frankenstein feels like the most Independent-International movie there is. I have no other way to explain why this movie seems like it came from another reality. It has Dr. Durea (J. Carrol Naish, in his last film), the last descendant of Dr. Frankenstein, killing women with his assistant Groton (Lon Chaney Jr., in his next-to-last movie) to try to concoct an elixir that will fix his legs and his henchman’s simple brain. They’re visited by Dracula (Zandor Vorkov, really Raphael Peter Engel, given that name by Forrest J. Ackerman and someone who once ran record stores; according to this interview in Fangoria, he’s wearing a rental cape that was once used by Bela Lugosi) who wants them to finish their cocktail so that it can allow him to walk in the daytime which he feels will make him finally able to take over the world.

The doctor and his assistant decide to set up their lab — using the Kenneth Strickfaden equipment from the Universal films — in a haunted house known as the Creature Emporium. They keep killing women while Dracula is sent after the man who put the doctor in a wheelchair, Beaumont (Forrest J. Ackerman). A biker named Rico (Russ Tamblyn) gets involved, and Dracula gets his blood hot over a showgirl by the name of Judith Fontaine (Regina Carroll).

I nearly forgot! Dracula also has the corpse of the Frankenstein Monster, which he took from Oakmoor Cemetery. He’s played by both John Bloom and Shelley Weiss. The goal is to bring that creature back to life as well. Graydon Clark is in here as The Strange, a hippie leader, and of course, the kids all drop acid.

Judith also learns that the doctor has kept her sister Joanie (Maria Lease) and her friend Samantha (Anne Morrell) nude and trapped between life and death. He’s using a special enzyme in their plasma that comes from the fear before death to create his magical elixir so that he can heal his leg, fix his quiet friend and help Dracula. His hypothesis is that if Judith watches Mike (Anthony Eisley), a hippie who has fallen for her and she for him, die, then the enzyme in her blood will be strong enough to complete his work. He sends Grazbo the dwarf (Angelo Rossitto) and Groton after them, but the little guy falls through a trapdoor and onto an axe, Groton gets shot by the cops, and he himself falls onto a guillotine, which cuts his head off.

But oh, Mike, you aren’t safe. Dracula attempts to take Judith, and when our hero tries to save her, the vampire blasts him with his ring and turns him into ashes. Now, the fanged Frank Zappa lookalike tries to drink her blood in a desecrated church, but the Frankenstein Monster falls in love, too and fights Dracula. This sounds like the kind of story an elementary student would make up in class when they should be studying, and that’s why I love it. Dracula rips off the creature’s arms and head, but gets burned by the sunlight.

Lon Chaney Jr. was in bad shape during this, lying down between takes and barely able to speak, as he could be heard. He would speak to Adamson’s father and say things like, “You and I are the only two left. They’re all gone. I want to die now. There’s nothing left for me; I just want to die.”

What makes me love this even more is the theory that this was a sequel to Satan’s Sadists, with Russ Tamblyn and the other bikers from that film coming back. Sam Sherman decided to turn it into a horror film and much of the biker footage was cut as a result. Not all of the biker footage could be cut, which is why Tamblyn and his biker gang wander in and out of the movie.

This movie has one of my favorite lines of all time, as Dracula hypnotizes Forrest and takes him to his doom. He gives him directions as he speaks, and I wonder, why doesn’t he just have him drive, as he’s already taken over his will? He says, “I am known as the Count of Darkness, the Lord of the Manor of Carpathia. Turn here.”

WEIRD WEDNESDAY: Don’t Go In the House! (1979)

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If any film earned being a video nasty, it would be this one, a movie that has a man who was abused as a child growing up to be a serial killer obsessed with burning people alive. There is no one to root for or cheer for, only mayhem, malice and murder.

In short, the kind of movie that Gene Siskel would have a conniption over.

When Donald (Dan Grimaldi, a math professor who also played Philly and Patsy Parisi on The Sopranos) was a kid, his mother would use a stove to burn the evil out of him. Now fully grown, he seeks out women that remind him of her and kills them with a flamethrower in relentlessly graphic detail.

While the killer tries to confess his sins, he can’t stop. Even a simple double date ends with him smashing a candle over a woman’s head. And get this, it even has an ending very similar to Maniac, another movie that offers no easy answers or way out.

This is also a definite disco slasher. A truly mean spirited blast of sheer degeneracy — and therefore everything wonderful about the slasher form — Don’t Go In the House has songs like “Boogie Lightning,” “Dancin’ Close to You,” “Straight Ahead” and “Late Night Surrender” playing in between moments of women being set ablaze and a mother rotting somewhere in a house that has an impossibly huge torture chamber in the basement.

You can watch this on Tubi or buy the blu ray from Severin.

MILL CREEK LEGENDS OF HORROR: The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973)

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Man, what a title. Better than the original one, Dracula is Dead…and Well and Living in London, which upset Christoper Lee so much that he was outspoken at the press conference that introduced the movie: “I’m doing it under protest… I think it is fatuous. I can think of twenty adjectives — fatuous, pointless, absurd. It’s not a comedy, but it’s got a comic title. I don’t see the point.”

The eighth Hammer Dracula movie, the seventh and final to star Lee (John Forbes-Robertson played Dracula with David de Keyser as the voice in The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires) and the third and last to put Lee’s vampire against Cushing’s Van Helsing (they would appear in only one more movie together, House of the Long Shadows), this is pretty much the end of an era.

Every time I think of this movie, I remember Bill Van Ryn of Drive-In Asylum excitedly saying to me — after we saw the trailer at a drive-in — “It’s not enough that Dracula is a vampire. Now he has an entire army of Satanists and he wants to rule the world and he has a plague!”

It turns out there’s a government occult conspiracy that only Van Helsing can stop, and he’s bringing along his granddaughter, Patsy Stone, err, Jessica Van Helsing.

As the cabal prepares for the Sabbath of the Undead, their mysterious fifth member is revealed to be, of course, Dracula, using the identity of reclusive property developer D. D. Denham and operating out of the very same churchyard where he died in Dracula A.D. 1972.

Somehow, this is more of an Eurospy science-fiction movie than a traditional horror film, and that’s kind of the beauty of the whole thing.

Somehow, this fell into the public domain in the U.S. That’s why it’s on so many Mill Creek sets under this title and the edited TV version Count Dracula and his Vampire Bride.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Attend Erasing the Lines in the Sand: Child Death in Film and the Taboo That Won’t Die Online!

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Next Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2025, from 2:00 to 4:00 pm EST, Erica Shultz will be drawing from her book The Sweetest Taboo: An Unapologetic Guide to Child Kills in Film to take a sharp-witted, irreverent approach to a subject that has made critics and censors clutch their pearls for decades.

Through film clips, historical context, and a healthy dose of gallows humor, this talk will dissect the genre biases, cultural contexts, and hypocrisies that dictate what is considered too far. Different cultures and historical moments have shaped how filmmakers portray child mortality, from the transgressive violence of Italy’s “Years of Lead”-era cinema to the reactionary moral panics of 1980s America. In Hong Kong cinema, shifting political landscapes before and after the Handover influenced the framing of youthful innocence—and its destruction.

Meanwhile, Hollywood’s unwritten rules dictate when a child’s death serves as tragedy, retribution, or exploitation. Mainstream, critically acclaimed films have long used child mortality as an emotional weapon, while horror films are branded exploitative for doing the same. Violent child deaths in action movies may remain PG-13, while horror films with similar content are punished with an R or NC-17. This conversation will also explore the difference between “Killer Kids” and “Killing Kids,” examining why a murderous child’s death in Pet Sematary, Mikey, or Who Can Kill a Child? is more palatable than the death of an innocent.

Beyond genre and censorship, the internet’s ever-growing influence has reshaped audience reactions, amplifying social media outrage and recontextualizing past films through contemporary lenses. Expect a lively discussion, controversial examples, and an unapologetic look at one of cinema’s most enduring taboos. If you’ve ever laughed, gasped, or cringed at an onscreen child kill, this is the class for you.

Erica Shultz is the co-host of the Unsung Horrors podcast, which focuses on horror films with fewer than 1000 views on Letterboxd. She has contributed booklet essays, visual essays, and commentary tracks for various boutique Blu-ray labels such as Vinegar Syndrome, Severin, Terror Vision, Fun City Editions, and Cinephobia releasing. Her 2024 self-published book The Sweetest Taboo: An Unapologetic Guide to Child Kills in Film categorizes and reviews nearly 1200 films that depict a child death. She is currently working on a second volume, and living blissfully child-free in Austin, Texas.

You can learn more here.

Help fund It Came from Texas!

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It Came From Texas is a feature-length documentary that dives headfirst into this untold story. Through interviews with filmmakers, actors, critics, and fans, plus rare footage and behind-the-scenes treasures, we’ll celebrate the creators who proved that you don’t need Hollywood to make movie magic — just grit, guts, and maybe a bucket of fake blood.

Texas is home to some of the strangest, most unforgettable B-movies ever unleashed on late-night TV, drive-in screens, and straight-to-VHS shelves. From the cult catastrophe of Manos: The Hands of Fate to gems like Blood Suckers From Outer Space, The Nail Gun Massacre, and Don’t Look in the Basement — the Lone Star State has carved its own wild legacy in the world of cult cinema.

To learn more, click here.

Fans of Despiser and Phil Cook films now comes Echoes of Dread

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I just got this in my email and wanted to share it with you!

“We’ve embarked on our latest film adventure — Echoes — a new story that revisits the dark and imaginative world first glimpsed in Despiser. Our modest Kickstarter campaign is now live, and we’d love for you to be part of bringing it to life.

Your support can help us finish the film — and you can even claim a few Despiser props before they’re gone, or see your name appear in the credits!

Echoes of Dread introduces a new heroine, Samantha Rainer, a social media “View-Tuber” with a devoted following. In her quest to explore the macabre, she stumbles into a nightmare world…and accidentally unleashes it. Now, Samantha must find a way to put the genie back in the bottle — with the help (and hindrance) of old and new allies — as she fights for her life.

Our Kickstarter campaign runs for only a few more weeks, so please check it out today and consider joining us on this next cinematic journey.”

Cook says that this film is “peripherally connected to Despiser. It’s not a gonzo car-chase shoot ’em up, but rather a darkly quirky dip into some of Despiser’s themes—and a few of its surviving characters.”

Get on that Kickstarter now, there’s just a few days to go!