Purificata (Daliah Lavi, The Whip and the Body, Some Girls Do) is a young girl in Southern Italy who is obsessed with Antonion (Frank Wolff, Once Upon a Time In the West, Death Walks on High Heels) to the point that she gets him to drink her blood and nearly murders a cat outside his home as he attempts to consummate his marriage. That night, she’s bound and assaulted by a shepherd and the first person that finds her, a young boy, soon dies after being near her.

Purificata is on record saying that she is a witch who speaks to Satan, so her family tries to heal her by having Zio Giuseppe exorcise her. He also assaults her, after which she finds Antonio plowing his fields. She begs for him to save her and he violently throws her to the ground. After, she begins to become possessed and the villagers try to set her ablaze. Her family rescues her for a time by burying her underground, but she escapes and is found by nuns as she hugs a tree.

The nuns seem to calm her until one says, “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” and Purificata strangles her. All manner of welts appear on Antonio’s body, who is told to burn an old tree in the middle of the village. He is met by Purificata and the two make love in the dirt. As the sun rises, he stabs her.

Directed by Brunello Rondi, who also made Black Emmanuelle, White Emmanuelle, and written by Luciano Martino and Ugo Guerra, who followed this with The Whip and the Body, this folk horror film feels brutally able to happen in the world we live in today. It shocked me numerous times and it’s one I’ve thought about several times since I watched it. It’s on the Severin All the Haunts Be Ours box set.

You can watch this on Tubi.

I mean, if you made a movie just for me, this would be it.

This had to be sent to the Italian censorship board twice, as they said that the film “consists of a rambling series of sadistic sequences, meant to urge, through extreme cruelty mixed with degenerate eroticism, the lowest sexual instincts.”

Also called Riti, magie nere e segrete orge nel Trecento…(Rites, Black Magic and Secret Orgies in the Fourteenth Century…) and The Reincarnation of Isabel, this was written and directed by Renato Polselli, who also made Delirio Caldo, The Vampire and the Ballerina and Revelations of a Psychiatrist on the World of Sexual Perversion.

Hundreds of years ago, Isabella (Rita Calderoni, Nude for Satan) was tortured and burned for being a witch as her lover swore revenge. Then we meet Jack Nelson (Mickey Hargitay, making some wild movies as always) and his stepdaughter Laureen (also Calderoni) who are celebrating her engagement in a castle without knowing that the cellar is host to the black magic rites of the title. And if they get seven sets of eyes and the blood of virgins, they can bring back Isabella.

Any time this movie feels like it’s getting boring or starting to make sense, it cuts to either sex scenes or murder or Satanic rituals and you know, more movies could learn from what it was all about. I can only imagine the kind of parties that Polselli used to host.

There are also vampires, because this movie is also known as The Ghastly Orgies of Count Dracula.

You know, I never dated many girls who wore makeup before my wife. But there was one that was taking her time putting on makeup and she was putting on false eyelashes and I was trying to say that she didn’t need all that makeup and lashes and she said, “I’m doing it for me. And you. So let me get hot for you.” I wish I had seen this movie before I dated her, because man, the fake eyelashes in this are doing something to me.

I find it incredibly humorous that after Alan Moore, Stephen Bisette and John Totleben reinvented comic books with Saga of the Swamp Thing, director Jim Wynorski and writers Neil Cuthbert and Grant Morris were making this sequel to the original Swamp Thing and went nearly full camp.

After her mother’s mysterious death, Abigail Arcane (Heather Locklear) has come to confront her wicked stepfather Dr. Arcane (the returning Louis Jordan) who has somehow come back from the grave and is working to stop the aging proccess with Dr. Lana Zurrell (Sarah Douglas). Oh yeah, he’s also making an army of monsters.

Luckily, Swamp Thing is around and still played by stuntman Dick Durock, who wore a seventy plus pound suit in the humid swams so we’d have a movie to watch. This being a Wynorski movie, Monique Gabrielle shows up as well.

I love that in the midst of this wackiness — I mean, Swamp Thing drives a jeep at one point sending me into fits of laughter — the movie takes the time to recreate the love scene between its hero and Abby from “Rite of Spring,” which appeared in Swamp Thing #34. In the hands of the comic creative team, it’s poetic, gorgeous and full of deep meanings about man’s spiritual place in nature. In the hands of Wynorski, it’s Heather Locklear eating a cucumber out of a swamp person.

In my youth, I used to look down on the director’s movies as fluff. As I’ve grown older, I appreciate them for their entertainment value and how well made they are. Not everything has to be so deadly droll all the time.

You can watch this on Tubi.

As London was assaulted by the Blitz, writer John Wyndham was who witnessed the destruction of the city from the rooftops of Bloomsbury. Many of the scenes and incidents he saw, including a quiet Sunday morning after the bombs fell, were sent in letters to his long-term partner Grace Wilson and they are in his novel The Day of the Triffids. The book also suggests that while the plant-like triffids came from space, their ability to destroy our planet came from an over-reliance on technology.

Albert R. Broccoli and Irving Allen had purchased the film rights and hired Jimmy Sangster to write the script, which intimidated the screenwriter. He didn’t think that his script was good, but that version was never made. This version, written by Bernard Gordon, who had been blacklisted due to the testimony of producer William Alland. Through his friendship with Philip Yordan — and yes, Night Train to Terror does connect to everything — the writer found regular work as a writer and producer for Samuel Bronston Productions in Madrid, even if through the goodness of his heart Yordan received full credit on movies like Circus World, Battle of the Bulge, Custer of the West, The Thin Red Line, Cry of Battle and Horror Express.

Gordon was under FBI surveillance for twenty years and we wouldn’t know that he’d written many movies if it wasn’t for journalist Ted Newsom, who discovered that Gordon was the real name behind the kayfabe author credit Raymond T. Marcus. Gordon led all blacklisted creatives when the Writers Guild of America correctly credited pseudonymous screenwriters from this era.

As for Yordan, he once told his friend Gordon, “It’s Jews like you who ruined the motion picture industry with this anti-hero shit.”

As for Day of the Triffids, it’s loosely based on the book and doesn’t really get across the apocalyptic menace within its inspiration’s pages. It does, however, have giant plants spitting poison that kills at Janette Scott, so there’s that.

Directed by Steve Sekely and Freddie Francis*, it prefigures the way that zombies keep coming in waves that trap humans within increasingly smaller places to hide. Indeed, the hospital scenes in the book inspired 28 Days Later. The goofy inspiration is that the plants are turned back by seawater, a plot twist that would be used to ridiculous effect decades later in Signs.

*Kieron Moore and Janette Scott weren’t in the original cut of the film. It turns out that there were only 57 minutes of good usable footage available, so Francis directed the entire lighthouse sequence to pad the movie.

At the Explorers’ Club in London — yes, it’s all rich white dudes — Dr. Moran (George Coulouris) tells everyone that he’s going to the Amazon to get “a miracle-working JuJu that can bring the dead back to life.” While there, he watches Marpessa Dawn, a year removed from being in Black Orpheus — get eaten by a tree. Then he gets jungle fever and it takes five years for him to recover.

Dr. Moran has brought the tree and the drummer who controls it, Tanga (Jimmy Vaughan), to keep on working on bringing life to death, which starts with feeding Susan Curtis to the tree. I’m amused that Sara Leighton, who played the role, became a famous lady of British society known for her portrait painting.

Meanwhile, Sally Norton (Vera Day) is working at a sideshow dancing the hula-hula, because Hawaii was all mondo to British people in the late 50s. A local favorite named Jack Venner (Peter Wayn) ends up getting her fired and then hired by Moran, who must love Tanya Donelly because he can’t stop feeding that tree. And he starts falling for Sally, even strangling the woman who has loved him nearly forever, Margaret Santor (Joyce Gregg), all so she can start working in his lab.

The end of this movie gets all nihilist, as the drummer refuses to teach the secret of how to keep the brain alive after death and Moran realizes he loved Margaret and tries to bring her back to life, only to have her as a brainless zombie. Tanga tries to feed Sally to the tree, Moran sets it on fire and then gets killed by the drummer’s knife before Tanga kneels before the tree and lets it set him on fire.

What!?!

Director Charles Saunders and writer Brandon Fleming stopped making movies after 1963. That’s a shame because this movie is just…something.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Based on The Ruins by Scott Smith, who also wrote the screenplay and is not related to the director, Carter Smith.

Jeff (Jonathan Tucker), Amy (Jena Malone) Eric (Shawn Ashmore) and Stacy (Laura Ramsey) are on vacation in Mexico when they meet Mathias (Joe Anderson) who last saw his brither Heinrich at a Mayan temple dig. As they follow him and his friend Dmitri, they end up accidentally stepping on some vines that cause the locals to grow insane at come at them with knives and guns, killing Dmitri.

It turns out that those vines, when touched, cause the natives to leave them alone. Those same vines also start to grow within their bodies, taking them over and consuming them. The vine FX are great, the scene where Stacy tries to slice herself apart to free her body of them is good but as for the rest of the movie, it’s just fine. They shot a ton of endings to this and seemingly picked the safest one. Oh well.

After being drafted into the army for a two year tour, John Russo came back to Pittsburgh and started working with The Latent Image, making commercial films but always planning a feature someday. Russo crafted a rough idea about a young man stumbling upon a host of ghouls feeding off human corpses, then George Romero wrote forty pages of a story based on that rough concept.

When Russo and George A. Romero parted ways after the movie that ensured — Night of the Living Dead — Russo retained the rights to any titles featuring Living Dead while Romero was free to create his own series of sequels. Russo’s book Return of the Living Dead became the movie. And before that he was already making his own films like Midnight, The Booby Hatch, Heartstopper and The Majorettes, which was directed by Bill Hinzman, the Cemetery Zombie in Night who also directed FleshEater.

Directed by Russo and co-written with Robert Lucas, this film can at least claim that while Russo may not be the father of the modern American flesheater movie, he’s definitely at least an uncle. Or Uncle John, the somewhat still-human undead main character of the film, a zombie who becomes a celebrity in a world that now treats the undead like a different ethnic group.

Shot in the same Evans City cemetery as Night, as well as locations in Clairton, West Mifflin and Braddock, this takes place a half-decade after the canon real events of the first film and now, Uncle John is a horny old man protected by his niece Cy-Fi (using her real name, she’s also in Crucifvixen and the documentary Pola in she plays herself as a rave DJ) and nephew Oscar (Gary Lee Vincent, the 2020 remake of Midnight). Meanwhile, zombie hunter Reverend Hotchkiss (Russell Streiner, the man who once said, “Barbara, they’re coming to get you.”) is hunting him down and a cop named Jane Smart (Sarah French, Art of the Dead) wants to know how he stays alive if he isn’t eating people.

There’s also a right wing hunting camp that wants to protect the Second Amendment and also kill as many zombies as possible. Also, if you love commercial breaks within the film, this has them. It also has Debbie Rochon, Tiffany Shepis, Felissa Rose and Lloyd Kaufman with the Toxic Avenger and Sgt. Kabukiman, which was enough to make me want to shut this off but I got through it.

Jizmak the Gusha from Gwar is in this, out of makeup, as is George Kosana, who played Sheriff McClelland in Night and who is finally called to task for shooting more black zombies than white ghouls. I mean, this film has John Russo in zombie makeup on a sex swing somewhere at a rave party in Braddock along with social commentary and if you’re willing to take that ride, it’s here.

You can watch this on Tubi.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: A.C. Nicholas, who has a sketchy background and hails from parts unknown in Western Pennsylvania, was once a drive-in theater projectionist and disk jockey, Currently, in addition to being a writer, editor, podcaster, and voice-over artist, he contributes to Drive-In Asylum. His first article, “Grindhouse Memories Across the U.S.A.,” was published in issue #23. He’s also written “I Was a Teenage Drive-in Projectionist” and “Emanuelle in Disney World and Other Weird Tales of a Trash Film Lover” for upcoming issues.

The explosion of the horror genre in the 80s gave us lots of slasher films and films loaded to the brim with gore. Every once and a while though, there was something different, something special, a small gem. Lady Beware (1987) sports a title that sounds like a Lifetime movie of the week and a visual aesthetic that sometimes looks good, but mostly looks like a TV movie. But it’s an endlessly fascinating film that straddles the line between art film and exploitation film. It’s not your typical woman-in-peril film. Director Karen Arthur with this, her passion project, is much too intelligent and sophisticated to make a simple young woman vs. stalker thriller. Instead, she gives us a smart, though flawed, film with a nice feminist slant that doesn’t beat you over the head with its gender politics, like so many current arthouse horror films.

Katya, played by a young Diane Lane, rides the bus from boondocks Pennsylvania to the big city–Pittsburgh, that is–to seek a career as a window dresser at Joseph Horne’s, one of Pittsburgh’s once-iconic department stores (the other was Kaufmann’s). She’s ambitious and aggressively convinces the store manager to hire her. Then she makes friends with co-workers, including dated 80s movie token gay guy and black woman, and designs some windows with lots of sexual content. (Arthur’s a good director, so you suspend your disbelief about these store windows that feature partially clad mannequins posed in “interesting” positions—and then there’s that use of aerosol-can whipped cream to top things off.) Soon, she’s attracted not only the attention of Cotter Smith, a Pittsburgh magazine reporter, but also a radiology technician from a building across the street, who has a family and is a closet stalker. He’s played by Michael Woods in a low-keyed, creepy performance.

Soon the expected stalking starts. Woods makes obscene phone calls, leaves messages, steals Lane’s mail, and even rappels down the side of her locked building in broad daylight to break into her apartment. (More suspension of disbelief on that scene.) Once inside, he does as many awful things as you can imagine from taking a bath in her tub, to writhing around naked on her bed, to using her toothbrush (Yuck!). This unhinges Lane to the point of a near nervous breakdown, but in the end. she finds her inner feminist strength, plays mind games with Woods, and eventually turns the tables on him. This leads to a memorable final shot, where the stalker symbolically becomes trapped in his own perverted fantasy. 

Unfortunately, the Scotti Brothers, successful record producers who had recently moved into movie production, took the final cut away from director Arthur and drastically reduced the film’s running time. Viveca Lindfors’ part as Lane’s mother was eliminated, and Smith’s ineffectual boyfriend was watered down even more. (I’m not sure either of those decisions was a bad thing; they strengthen Lane’s lone stand against her stalker.) Also, to make the movie more exploitable, the producers added repeated shots of a naked, nubile Lane, defeating the point of the film by objectifying its lead character. Arthur was unhappy and thought about taking her name off the film. She didn’t, and I’m glad she didn’t. Even in its bastardized form, it’s a film to be proud of. In addition to being a solid thriller with good ideas, it’s a beautiful travelogue of Pittsburgh in the late 80s. And those of us from the area who grew up during that era will enjoy spotting local actors in small parts, such as Don Brockett from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood; Bingo O’Malley, who was in just about everything filmed in the city from Dominick and Eugene to Creepshow, Two Evil Eyes and Bob Roberts; and even Ray Laine, the star of George Romero’s There’s Always Vanilla.

Lady Beware was clearly made on a low budget with an eye on home video. It didn’t have much theatrical play but became a staple of pay-cable in the late 80s. Then after a VHS release, it disappeared. It has never had an official DVD release in the U.S., and you can find a soft-looking rip of the VHS tape on the Internet Archive, where the poster noted that the film is in the public domain. I don’t know about that, but I do know that this film doesn’t deserve its obscurity. It’s striking in tone with an atypical handling of some fairly pat material. I liked it a lot. And I think you will too.