This is based on a true story, as The Red Barn Murder refers to an 1827 murder in Polstead, Suffolk, England. There, a young woman named Maria Marten was shot dead by her lover, William Corder, at the Red Barn, which was a local landmark. The two were going to elope, and afterward, Corder sent letters to Marten’s family claiming they were married and living on the Isle of Wight, but that she was not well. Maria’s stepmother had a dream that Maria had been murdered, and soon, her body was discovered in the barn. 

Corder wanted to keep his relationship with Marten a secret, but she gave birth to their child in 1827 and wanted to be his wife. He may have killed the child, but still agreed to the wedding. The murder was investigated by James Lea, who was one of the police officers who tried to find the legendary Spring-Heeled Jack later. 

In this, Tod Slaughter is Corder, who murders the pregnant Maria (Sophie Stewart) and buries her beneath the barn. She had another lover, Carlos (Eric Portman), who found and brought Corder to the law.

Slaughter debuted on screen in this at the age of 49!

The honest Maria Marten already had two children out of wedlock and “was notoriously free with her affections.” Carlos isn’t a real person; as for the stepmother’s dream, research today believes that she was an accomplice to the murder. As for how old Corder is, that’s also made up, as well as his being a rich man.

You can watch this on Tubi.

A series of murders happens with a face appearing at each victim’s window, the image of what people begin to call the Wolf Man. A bank clerk named Lucien Cortier (John Warwick) is blamed, which pleases Chevalier Lucio del Gardo (Tod Slaughter), as he’s the real killer. 

According to Wikipedia, “Slaughter’s blood-and-thunder films were too British in theme, too old-fashioned and broadly played for mainstream audiences, and thus they were not released by any of the major film companies. Instead, they were handled by independent distributors in New York (usually Select Attractions or Arthur Ziehm, Inc.), and they did attract a specialized following among horror fans.”

The fourth time this story had been filmed — it started as a play by F. Brooke Warren and was also made in 1919, 1920 and 1932 — it did play on TV in the U.S. American Broadcasting Company’s short-lived First Nighter Theatre aired it in New York City on November 15, 1950, while it also played Cleveland, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Philadelphia on the Friday TV Thriller. 

There’s also a scientist, Professor LeBlanc (Wallace Evennett), who wants to use electricity to stop the murders and even uses a zap of the juice to bring a dead person back to life! Obviously, none of this movie is based on reality and that’s how I like it.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Daphne Du Maurier wrote the books that Hitchcock based Rebecca and The Birds, as well as this, his last British movie. Those two are way better, trust me. 

Mary Yellan (Maureen O’Hara), with her Aunt Patience (Marie Ney) and Uncle Joss (Leslie Banks), works at the Jamaica Inn, which kind of does what Antonio Bay did to ships full of lepers: lure them to the rocks, shipwreck them and take whatever they have. Sir Humphrey Pengallan (Charles Laughton) is the one making it happen, and Mary soon learns that her family is involved. Only lawman Jem Trehearne (Robert Newton) can help.

This is an entire movie of Laughton mugging and being out of control. If you like that, good news! Everyone else is in a different film, a more serious one! It looks great, though. The ships are gorgeous and, well, O’Hara is beautiful.

Hitchcock said he felt caught between Laughton and the actor’s business partners; he stated that he didn’t direct this movie as referee, but as a director. Laughton also asked to be filmed only in close-ups, as he had not yet learned how his character should walk. Ten days into filming, he started to waltz.  

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Il mostro dell’isola (The Monster of the Island) brought Boris Karloff to Cinecitta Studios to play Don Gaetano, who may speak softly but is also the leader of a gang of black market thieves and drug dealers who have kidnapped Fiorella (Patrizia Remiddi), the daughter of Detective Mario Andreani (Renato Vicario), who has come from America to Ischia, a small island off the Italian coast. Yes, that same undercover man’s wife, Giulia (Jole Fierro), has come along as well, jealous over her man and putting everyone in danger.

If his wife had stayed home, Mario would be romancing Gloria D’Auro (Franca Marzi), a member of the gang who sings at a nightclub. Don Gaetano may seem like a kindly man who runs a home for sick children, but he has no worries about straight-up kidnapping the little girl, even if she’s dubbed by an adult and it sounds like she’s related to Bob from The House by the Cemetery. For some reason—a lack of synced sound—Karloff is also dubbed, and it’s the most low-level impression of him ever.

Director Roberto Bianchi Montero would go on to make Una donna per 7 bastardi and The Slasher…Is the Sex Maniac!, as well as Caligula’s Hot Nights, Savana: Violenza carnale and Le notti segrete di Lucrezia Borgia. He wrote it with Carlo Lombardo and Alberto Vecchietti. There’s no monster, but you already figured that out.

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Jerry Warren sat on this movie for two years before playing it with Teenage Zombies. Shot in Colossal Cave in Tucson, Arizona, the monster costume looked so bad that Warren didn’t use it. Let’s think about that for a minute. An effect so bad that Jerry Warren wouldn’t use it.

Professor Millard Wyman (John Carradine) has sent Paul Whitmore (Allen Windsor), Craig Randall (Robert Clarke), Lauri Talbott (Sheila Noonan) and Dale Marshall (Phyllis Coates) to the bottom of the ocean, but their vehicle becomes lost. They swim — in scuba suits at crushing depths — into a cave where only Matheny (George Skaff), an old sailor, is still alive.

Professor Wyman’s brother, Jim (Joe Maierhauser), has luckily built another vehicle, because Matheny is looking at the ladies like a man who has been in a cave for more than a decade and suddenly has a gypsy girl from” Beast from the Haunted Cave” and Lois Lane right within staring distance. Before he can say, “You know, I killed a man,” a volcano goes live, he dies under some rocks, and all the white scientists celebrate their good fortune above the surface, and no one gets the bends.

Warren sold this with “A Nightmare of Terror in the Center of the Earth with Forgotten Men, Monsters, Earthquakes and Boiling Volcanoes!” I mean, yes, it has those things, but it’s…maybe not as exciting as the ads make it sound. The petrified world is the movie itself.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Professor Sir Alexander Saxton — or is that Sir Professor, anyway, he’s played by Christopher Lee — is a British anthropologist taking the Trans-Siberian Express from Shanghai to Moscow. He’s not alone. He has the frozen remains of a caveman he found in Manchuria, which he believes are the missing link. Peter Cushing plays his rival, Dr. Wells, who is also on board, as is Count Marion Petrovski (George Rigaud), his wife, Countess Irina (Silvia Tortosa), their spiritual advisor, Father Pujardov (Alberto de Mendoza), and Inspector Mirov (Julio Peña). 

What no one knows is that the caveman also has an evil alien inside him, one that starts moving from person to person. While it’s been on Earth for millions of years, the monster wants to repair its ship and go back home. Captain Kazan (Telly Savalas) is able to stop it for some time, but Pujardov believes that the alien is Satan and pledges his soul to it, allowing himself to be possessed. Then, it raises all of the past victims as zombies.

Phillip Yordan supposedly made this movie because he had bought the miniature train from the film Nicholas and Alexandra. Director Eugenio Martín said,  “He came up with the idea of writing a script just so he would be able to use this prop. Now, at that time, Phil was in the habit of buying up loads of short stories to adapt into screenplays, and the story for Horror Express was originally based on a tale written by a little-known American scriptwriter and playwright.”

However, producer Bernard Gordon, who also worked with Martin and Savalas on Pancho Villa, claimed that the train was made for that movie.

Lee and Cushing were the big draw for this movie, but Cushing nearly quit, as this was made during the first holiday season since the loss of his wife, Helen. According to an article by Ted Newsome, “Hollywood Exile: Bernard Gordon, Sci Fi’s Secret Screenwriter,” Lee fixed this by placing Cushing at ease, “talking to his old friend about some of their previous work together; Cushing changed his mind and stayed on.” It’s also said that he suffered from night terrors, so Lee would sleep in the same bed as him.

Strangely, when the U.S. rights were sold to Scotia International, the proceeds were $50,000 short of the budget. This led to the original camera negative being impounded. The theatrical prints show in America had to be struck from the workprint, which is why 70s TV and 80s VHS prints looked so dark.

Of all the great things about this movie, the fact that they can look inside a caveman’s mind and see dinosaurs is the most charming.

Also: As we all know, Phillip Yordan also made the best train movie of all time, Night Train to Terror.

You can watch this on YouTube.

An Italian horror remake of 1955’s Les Diaboliques, I’ll give you one reason to watch this movie: Barbara Steele. Otherwise, it’s a brooding take on murder and gaslighting. And while this is directed by Riccardo Freda, stars Steele and has a character named Dr. Hichcock, it is not the same movie as The Horrible Dr. Hichcock. While this movie was shot right around the same time, it is also not a sequel per se. There are some people who care about these kind of things. Like me.

The ailing Dr. Hichcock and his housekeeper Catherine are engaged in a seance whole his wife Margaret (Steele) is having a love affair with Dr. Livingstone (Peter Baldwin, who in addition to acting in this movie and I Married a Monster from Outer Space, went on to become a director, being behind the camera for TV movies such as the aborted Revenge of the Nerds TV show pilot, The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island, The Brady Girls Get Married and The Brady Brides series follow-up).

Soon, the doctor is dead and Catherine, Margaret and Livingstone get none of the money. And the key to his safe? Well, he’s literally taken it to the grave. Every time they think they get close or find the money, they’re thwarted. And soon, Catherine the maid is possessed and throws shade on the lovers, convincing Margaret that she should kill the not so good doctor.

The close is where this movie turns the screw. Hichcock has been alive and well the entire time and he murders Catherine, his co-conspirator, and incriminates Margaret. She had been planning suicide and poured a glass of poison, which Hichcock thinks is poison. He begs for the antidote, but she walks away to be arrested for Catherine’s murder. As the movie closes, Hichcock seals himself away inside his castle to die.

Directed by Riccardo Freda and written by Oreste Biancoli, this is another movie that reminds me of how much I love Italian Gothic horror.

You can watch this on YouTube.

La Furia del Hombre Lobo is a 1970 Spanish horror film that is the fourth in the saga of werewolf Count Waldemar Daninsky, played as always by Paul Naschy. It was not theatrically released in Europe until 1975, yet an edited U.S. version played on television as early as 1974 as part of the Avco Embassy’s “Nightmare Theater” package, along with Naschy’s Horror from the Tomb and The Mummy’s Revenge.

For those that care about these things — like me — the other films were Marta, Death Smiles on a Murderer, Night of the Sorcerers, Hatchet for the Honeymoon, Dear Dead Delilah, Doomwatch, Bell from Hell, Witches Mountain, Maniac Mansion and The Witch.

This time, Daninsky is a professor who travels to Tibet, only to be bitten by a yeti which seems like not the werewolf origin that you’d expect. He then catches his wife cheating on him, so in a fit of passion, he murders them both before being killed himself. But this being a Spanish horror movie, that’s just the start of the trials that El Hombre Lobo must struggle through.

Daninsky is revived by Dr. Ilona Ellmann (Perla Cristal, The Corruption of Chris Miller), who wants to use him for mind control experiments. Soon, however, our hero learns that she has a basement filled with the corpses of her failed experiments. To make matters even worse, she brings back his ex-wife from the dead and turns her into a werewolf too!

There’s a great alternate title to this movie: Wolfman Never Sleeps. How evocative! That’s the Swedish version that has all of the sex that Franco’s Spain would never allow.

Naschy claimed that director José María Zabalza was a drunk, which may explain how this movie wound up padded with repeat footage from Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror and some stunt double continuity antics that nearly derail this furry film.